- People using self-checkout lines.
Maybe I missed my calling as a checkout operator, but I can manage to scan, bag, and pay for my entire order while most people are still irretrievably flummoxed by the indecipherable gibberish emitting from some unknown fount of mystery. What mysterious incantations send them into a whirl of befuddlement? “Please put the item in the bag”.
Why is this hard? Why do people stand, heads cocked like the RCA Victor dog, as the machine plainitively begs, “please put the item in the bag”? What is the incomprehensible element here? PUT THE ITEM IN THE DAMNED BAG. Some move the items in slow-motion, like they’re bagging priceless crystal; others, thinking the machine must yearn for a closer connection to the products they’re buying, forcefully mash the product into the scanner without actually moving the UPC in relation to it.
Why. WHY? If I were the poor bastard tasked with the UI focus groups on those things, I would have been committed by now. Almost all the users stab indiscriminately at the screen, not reading, not listening, in a sort of doe-eyed daze, before being rescued by the supervisor who now has to run four lines instead of one.
- Autism conspiracy nutballs.
Is the 9/11 “truth” movement too mundane for you? Are you incapable of dealing with mountains of clinical research that says childhood vaccines have precisely dick-all to do with autism? Do you fail to recognize that a chemical compound *made* from a element is *not the same* as that element by itself, demonstrating a lack of even middle-school level science understanding? (God help them when they find out that table salt has chlorine in it.) Do you think Jenny Mccarthy is a deep fountain of scientific knowledge? Then you might be the idiot that left a card in my shopping cart, advertising DVDs that propose to tell me all about how vaccines are evil. Yeah. Good luck with that one. Oh, and good luck dying of measles. Dumbass. I’m not including the link – I’m not sending her stupid, pre-fab MLM site any more ad revenue.
Couple photos of MileMeter Southern Command…
The Food Motivation series between Rineysoft and Science of Discontent continues. Round 1 started with Battle Mustard Sammich, a categorically harrowing experience; but then I fired back by proposing, and winning, Battle Toaster Scramble. See Rachel fight valiantly against maybe the worst thing to come out of a toaster ever here:
I’m not sure which part is my favorite:
- “This seems awfully complicated for a piece of shit pastry.”
- Jean-Luc the cat’s laser-like focus on said pastry
- “I am your doom”
But it’s all awesome. I am so in fear of what’s in store for me in Round 2.
On programming, beauty, and stating the obvious:
riney: C# though… i dunno, i’ve always disliked it for aesthetic reasons
beeland: eh, my only formal programming training was about a decade ago in ANSI C
beeland: so it made a good starting point
riney: yeah… there’s nothing monstrously wrong with it… it’s just hard to write really slick, elegant code in it
riney: same thing i feel when i read Objective C code
beeland: I can agree with that, its focused on “solutions” rather than real freestanding monolithic structures
riney it’s fifty billion DelegateThingybobInterfaceReceiverControllers…. very verbose feeling
riney: Java has that problem too but you can avoid it with a degree of care
beeland: hehe, i had the same reaction when i first was it
beeland: OhMyGodWhatTheFuckIsThisMethodDoing(ToThisOtherThing, WhenDoesItEverEnd);
riney: i am rather in love with Ruby at the moment, just for the free-flowyness of it
riney: i’m really sounding like a code snob at this point
beeland: might have to check that out. for my “hack around” stuff I have stuck to perl for the last 4 or 5 years
beeland: mostly just data transformation stuff
riney: but it has so many nice things… the string functions alone are tear-jerking. and blocks…..sigh
beeland: Riney
beeland: You need to get laid.
riney: lol
riney: yeah……that’s going on my blog
My command-line knowledge is pretty passable, but sometimes I screw up in hilarious ways.
imogen:~ riney$ mkdir flonk
imogen:~ riney$ echo "I am the first file" > flonk/1.txt
imogen:~ riney$ echo "I am the second file" > flonk/2.txt
imogen:~ riney$ echo "I am the third file" > flonk/3.txt
imogen:~ riney$ cd flonk
imogen:flonk riney$ ls
1.txt 2.txt 3.txt
imogen:flonk riney$ tar czvf * foo.tgz
2.txt
3.txt
tar: foo.tgz: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
imogen:flonk riney$ mkdir 1 2 3
imogen:flonk riney$ mv 1.txt 1
imogen:flonk riney$ mv 2.txt 2
imogen:flonk riney$ mv 3.txt 3
imogen:flonk riney$ cd 1
imogen:1 riney$ tar xzvf 1.txt
2.txt
3.txt
imogen:1 riney$ cat 2.txt
I am the second file
imogen:1 riney$ cd ..
imogen:flonk riney$ cd 2
imogen:2 riney$ tar xzvf 2.txt
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
imogen:2 riney$ cat 2.txt
I am the second file
Local radio has been getting progressively worse. One of the three remaining decent stations, 100.5, recently converted to a contemporary Christian format. Unfortunately, I can’t stand contemporary Christian music.
Dear God,
The new radio station here in Charleston is called His Radio, so I figured you’d be the one to speak to about it. Why is your radio station, and, by extension, most modern music that bears your name, so terrible?
Sincerely,
John Riney, music-loving heathern
So I figured I’d cough up the extra tenner a month for a music-only XM subscription. My car has the receiver in it and all, so it took five minutes to sign up and get it activated. “It will take 2-3 hours for your subscription to be updated.” Okay! So I did this last night and went to bed.
I awoke this morning, went out to the car to drive to work, and cranked up the satellite. Well, where I previously had one channel, “Preview”, I now had ten. And one of them was all Elvis. So I had nine. I paid for seventy-something. I didn’t want to unlock my house again, so I pulled out my iPhone, logged into their site, and saw a button for “Transmit Update”. I mashed that. It said to leave the radio on, it would take a few minutes. I grumbled a bit. “I gave these tools TEN DOLLARS. And I have to wait for their stupid service to kick on?”
Then I thought about what I had just done. I used my pocket-sized Internet access terminal to make an encrypted connection over a nearly-ubiquitous wireless communications network to a company, who, in turn, routed my request to a ground station, up to a pair of SATELLITES IN GEOSTATIONARY ORBIT, who then beamed a signal down to THE SATELLITE RECEIVER IN MY CAR. I shut up and quit grumbling then, because I realized I LIVED IN THE FUCKING FUTURE.
After about ten minutes, the audio hitched for a second and resumed, all seventy-odd channels enabled. The first song? “Don’t Worry, Baby”, one of my very favorites.
Sigh… must not avoid blog. Spent too much time getting it working! The last couple weeks have mostly been a heavily caffeinated fog of work. I’ve been in a pretty lousy mood about things that *aren’t* work, but I am getting a bunch of stuff done.
Discovery went up today. That was really pretty, although I didn’t get to go out to the beach to watch it. The weather was way too crappy.
Went to see Flood Empty Lakes at the Tavern Friday night. They’re a new local band, with a guy I used to work with at CSU on bass. Really good – instrumental, progressive synth-heavy space-rock, with a nice heavy edge that shines through from time to time.
Oh, this was funny. Saturday night, I went out to Wild Wing Mt. Pleasant with Jason and Brian for a St. Patrick’s Day pint. Jason had brought a surplus of holiday-themed trinkets; green beads, a knit hat with shamrocks on it, and my personal favorite, his “beer goggles” – actual glasses with little beer mugs that go over your eyes. A blonde girl approached us, well into her celebratory cups, and struck up conversation. She quickly asked for, and was granted, the wearing of the beer goggles. Attempting to play off the obvious pun, I asked her, “Well? Do they work? Do I look any better?”
“No,” she said, matter-of-factly.
I’ve had the worst luck with blondes lately. Non-blondes as well.
Listened to my dad’s copy of Rubber Soul, which sounds *great* after a bit of cleaning. I’d heard that the original mono mixes were superior to the CD re-releases… yep. Definitely true. When the sitar kicks in on “Norweigian Wood”, I audibly gasped. Yep! Vinyl from 1966 demolishes the nice clean CD. I’m also running through “Rapper’s Delight” from Sugarhill Gang, which I found at a antique store for a buck or two. Outstanding…
I also think the people on the Interwebsnets were right about the Ortofon 2M cartridge needing several hours of break-in time. I think the sound is starting to smooth out a bit. (I’m on “Adore” from the Pumpkins now – a mono mix, rare for modern albums. “Ava Adore” is full of new things to listen to that weren’t obvious on the CD mix…)
Going back a few more years, I was pleased to learn that the date of the earliest replayable recorded sound has been pushed back a few decades. Some folks at the Laurence Berkeley National Labs analyzed an image created by a gentleman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention, a device known as a phonautograph, etched sound waves onto paper, coated in lampblack and wrapped around a ceramic cylinder. Scott de Martinville did not conceive of the notion that the squiggles in the fine carbon could be played back – rather, he considered the device strictly for the purpose of converting sound into imagery for later study. Somehow, amazingly, one of his smoke-covered “phonautograms” survived, and was scanned and converted into a usable waveform by the LBNL scientists, resulting in 10 comprehensible seconds of Au Clair de la Lune, sung by a girl in 1860. I find the existence of such a recording simultaneously heartwarming and terrifying.
