alliteration

"sweet sixteen"
"final four"

i'm sorry, but "elite eight" is not an alliteration, and it sounds forced and a little clumsy. either make it actually alliterative ("able eight"?) or just make it better without the alliteration ("great eight").

unless we're going to carry it all the way down ("terrific two"? "wonderful one"?), feel free to break out of the literary device.

amazing true stories of the Blizzard of 2011

i know they're true, because i saw them on the TV.

1. this evening, the local ABC news reported on a woman who would NOT BE STOPPED as she needed to get her child to a doctor's appointment. the anchors spoke of her ingenuity and great spirit, as she put her child on a plastic sled and dragged her TWO ENTIRE BLOCKS to a COMPLETELY FUNCTIONAL CTA RAIL SYSTEM which took her to the hospital. amazing!

2. last night, the local NBC news introduced a new Storm Tracker Technology, praised several times by the anchors while saying "Storm Tracker Technology" in obvious initial caps. this new technology allowed us at-home viewers to experience what it would be like to travel the local expressways in this storm. They accomplished this by driving a news van on the expressway and POINTING A VIDEO CAMERA OUT THE FRONT WINDSHIELD. amazing!

i am continually amazed by the human spirit.

NFL rules i learned today

1. in the final 2 minutes of a half, a fumble cannot be advanced by the offense
2. if the 3rd QB is put into the game before the 4th quarter, the #1 and #2 QBs cannot re-enter the game

i disagree with both, especially the second. where's the harm in freely subbing in your QBs? How does this recent flurry of wildcat formations factor into this? are there any other positions where you have to declare your depthchart at the start of the game? what rules apply to those positions?

will the Heat have a better record than the '95-'96 bulls?

all the pre-season hype about the Heat had them besting the Bulls 72-10 record that season. i really enjoy pre-season hype, especially that by the Dallas Cowboys and their "first superbowl homegame" predictions.

the Cowboys are at a stunningly delightful 1-7.

the Heat are 5-4, just 6 losses away from *not* getting their 73-9 season.

love it.

automotive FAIL

i've seen coupe-types turned into convertibles, but never the reverse. wtf were you thinking, woman?

wtf is a Downers Grove?

for a 2-day training seminar, I recently found myself in the suburban hell known as Downers Grove, IL. (as the joke at work went, "I can't recall the name, something like Upper's Meadow").

Chicago is one of those cities that, given a feature limiting its expansion (specifically, a giant lake), has grown on a hub and spoke system. this has given rise to a number of communities that sprang up along railroad stops. though it's not exactly my style, downtowns like Arlington Heights have a certain charm to them, especially given a fairly-recent rejuvenation of pedestrian and bike traffic in some suburbs centered around the trainstop. Keeping with my example, one can detrain in Arlington Heights and have quick walking access to a number of new shops, restaurants, and condos, in a semi-dense area with a mixture of new construction, rehab, and new-cum-olde.

this makes it all the more distressing to end up in a Downers Grove. maybe there's a nice downtown i just didn't come across (and let's not pretend that all of Arlington Heights is pedestrian/bicycle friendly), but what I did see is a travesty: networks of high-capacity expressways and thoroughfares, small clusters of mini-skyscrapers adorned with company names (Microsoft, SAP), with all other areas filled in by malls, stripmalls, box stores, parking lots, and only one neighborhood that i happened to stumble into (read as: i got lost).

had i been plopped down into this area without context, i would have had a very difficult time naming it as a Chicago suburb, or even taking an educated guess on which state I was in. my first guess probably would have been southern California.

stuck in traffic on Butterfield Road, headed to meet some co-workers for dinner (in a stripmall, naturally), I surveyed the stores and read off the chains: Chili's, Best Buy, Toys R Us, etc etc. Like catalog shopping that you get to do in person, and all the parking lots are connected. And that's what Butterfield felt like to me, with its 6 lanes, not including the double-turn lanes, and lights designed to funnel traffic in and out of parking lots: just a way of shuttling you between the places where you make the money and where to stop off to spend the money.

certainly, there must be more to DG than what i saw, because the alternative is that the 50,000 some people who live there find comfort in all their box stores.

happily, it's a convenient 1 hour and 20 minutes from where i live (unless there's a Cubs game, then add 40 minutes to my return trip), and kind of in the middle of friggin' nowhere. Even the flown-in trainer had to rent a car, as DG is nowhere near an airport or downtown Chicago, both of which I can reasonably access from my house without a car.

though i understand the reasons how a place like DG came to be, including the homeowner's desire to "get away from the city", the village's desire to attract commerce, and the corporations desire for tax breaks and their logo on their own building, i am stunned that anyone would wake up, take a serious look at what's out their window, and proclaim, "yes, this is what i've always wanted."

i'm really trying to put aside my own biases and imagine myself as someone who would want to live in place like Downers Grove. and i'm failing.

it costs me more to come home than it does to go to work

what's up, CTA, with your silly fare structure?

like the Oyster Card, i do appreciate the simplicity of my Chicago Card Plus. but i thought the advantage of buying into the low-personnel-involvement solution was savings passed on to the rider. perhaps not. looking at the fare structure, it's minimal.

further, it costs me $2.25 to get to work, taking a bus first and then a train. the reverse, with the train first, costs me $2.50. i don't understand why the order matters.

the station near my work is next to a bus depot. if i were so inclined, i could leave work, card into a bus, immediately leave the bus and get on the train. my last transfer would be free, so this would save me 25 cents.

how counter-intuitive is that?

that's how they get you

many of the crosswalks in Chicago have timers, conveniently letting you know how much time you have until the yellow light.

only it's not so convenient, as the countdown isn't, in fact, expressed in seconds. It's insidious, somewhere around 7-8 tenths of a second.

i know this, but can't get used to it. it's so ingrained for me to think of that "14" to mean 14 seconds.

it does not.

who do they hire to make these decisions? no one walking to work, i'll assume.

hey, makers of automated voice systems

how about starting off like this:

our offices are now closed, but we offer a number of automated options you can access now. to hear our hours, press 1. for automated access, press 2.

i'd like that better than spending 5 minutes navigating your system, hearing all kinds of automated payment information, and then being told your offices are closed when i'm finally presented with an option to speak to someone.

end rant.

a little back patting

i'm about one month away from my first year of Eating Better. labels are always a bit tough here, as the Food Plan doesn't really fall neatly into any already-named category, but loosely what started as something like South Beach has become something like Primal.

i can't argue with any of the results, the standouts being weight and some other lab-measured values.

as a side note, Google docs to the rescue when i needed to convert some spreadsheet data into a chart. after struggling for longer than i care to admit with an ancient copy of Excel (nice chart, but it wouldn't let me scale the y-axis) and AppleWorks (nice min/max on the y-axis, but it kept running the dates along that axis), i spent about 5 minutes in google docs uploading the file and generating a satisfactory chart. huzzah.

update: i uploaded a new chart with all my historical weight data, but due to 1) lack of early data points, 2) a consistent weight for two consecutive days counting as one data point, and 3) not finding any way to tell the chart-generator that the x-axis is time and it should examine the dates and draw the chart accordingly, it's still a bit skewed. maybe the 22nd century will have better software...

finally, i left off the first data point (april 8 2009) as it was a whole month until my next data point, and that may 8 one was an actual weigh-in (the april was a guesstimate).

not watching TV = immortality?

some fantastic reporting in this CNN article called "Too much TV may mean earlier death":

Compared to those who watched less than two hours of TV per day, people who watched four hours or more were 80 percent more likely to die from heart disease and 46 percent more likely to die from any cause. [...]
Each additional hour spent in front of the TV increased the risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent and the overall risk of death by 11 percent, according to the study,

got that? Too much TV watching and your risk of death from anything goes from 100% to... 100%. An increase of either 46% or 11%, depending on how you're looking at the data.

So if I watch fewer than 2 hours TV / day, does that mean my risk of dying from any cause is less than 100%? Say, 90%? Would that give me a 10% chance of immortality?

I shall assume this error originated with the author of the article, and the study text wasn't so badly worried. Or so I hope.

how hard is it to program a microwave oven?

i don't mean as an end-user, i mean as a developer.

What I want, as an end-user, is that if i program it for 2 minutes @ power level 5, for it to run at half-power for 2 minutes. No microwave oven I know of does that, so I suspect there may be an issue with running at less than full power. Let's take that as a given.

Thinking as a developer, I now have the task of running the oven for 2 minutes, but applying full power for 1 minute. I'm probably also looking at a minimum time of "engagement", i.e. the hardware guys tell me that the MTBF plummets if the engagement time is anything less than, say, 15 seconds.

Okay, now I have my parameters. Engage for 15 seconds, disengage for 15 seconds for 2 minutes. But I quickly -- and by quickly I'm comparing 5 minutes vs 30 years -- realize that for those last 15 seconds, the oven will not be engaged. Just spinning uselessly with the light on, but no heating taking place.

I then think to myself, "hey, as a developer, I could probably write a simple algorithm whereby the oven is always engaged when the timer starts, and when the timer ends."

And that may be a thought that has never occurred to any programmer of microwave ovens, ever, at any point.

so what gives? are there no "real" programmers programming these devices? is it all forestry majors and electrical engineers? (sorry, i think traditional-discipline engineers make crap programmers). Perhaps there are, ultimately, just one or two manufacturers of microwave oven control chips, and all the logic is built into there?

what gives? why is this so hard?

bowl games!

currently on: Penn State (10-2) v LSU (9-3) in the Capital One Bowl. Gator Bowl features West Virginia (9-3) v Florida State (6-6).

What? 6 and 6 gets you a bowl bid these days?

Granted, I don't really follow college ball, nor am I familiar with the agreements in place for determining who will play in which bowl. Heck, maybe Fl State did so well in their division with 6-6 that they got an automatic bid. I didn't even check.

or maybe they got a bid because their coach, Bobby Bowden, is retiring. Hey, I'm just some guy, but if a team got an undeserved bid because of off-field factors, meaning a more deserving team is at home watching TV today, i think that stinks.

Fox's Dr. Oz

i've never seen his show, but i was "treated" to this quick-spot just now, with him dressed in scrubs and holding a football:

Why do we need all those electrolytes in sports drinks? Because without those delicious charged ions, your muscles wouldn't contract.

so there we have it. drink Gatorade or risk collapsing to the pavement, unable to move your pathetic bag of bones to an upright position.

i wonder who sponsors his show.

headline: "NFL Defensive Backs Prevent Single Reception Entire Season"

i just watched an Eagles defensive back turn to the ref to signal "no catch", while a Giants receiver, untouched, picked himself up off the ground and ran past him.

it seems that anymore, with no regard to what happened on the field or how bloody obviously a catch was made, the defense frantically turns to the refs to plead the case that there was no reception.

you would think that no receiver ever caught the ball, ever, according to the defense.

so why bother, defensive backs? when receivers and running backs complain to the refs that they've been facemasked, they typically have a case.

i say give it a rest.

raw milk sting

link

The above description is a dramatization of real events that happened recently in Springfield, Missouri, where the state has decided to spend considerable taxpayer resources running a sting operating against a family that was caught dealing -- gulp! -- raw milk in a parking lot.

Yes, both the Missouri Dept. of Health and the state Attorney General (Chris Koster) have decided that prosecuting a farm family for illegally "trafficking" raw milk should be at the top of their list of priorities. The family being targeted by state officials is the Bechard family, of Armand and Teddi Bechard, and their children Joseph, Hananiah, Kazia and Katie.

The name of the cow offering the milk is reportedly "Misty."

Not the best-written article, but worth a read. along with the Illinois law prohibiting farmers from selling non-frozen meat at farmers' markets (in addition to the IL law prohibiting the sale of raw milk), I have to wonder if there isn't some lobbying pressure being applied by the factory farming industry.

call me a conspiracist...

onside kicks

i am not digging the new (not sure how new) NFL rule that, when kicking off, you cannot have fewer than 4 players lined up on either side of the kicker.

i like seeing all 10 guys bunched together, or 9 guys on one side then kicking it towards the lone guy.

was this a competitive advantage to the kicking team? who cares? onside kicks / recoveries are exciting. i say encourage it.

in rather bad taste

Verizon just started running a new Droid commercial with stealth fighters. here is a link, though i'm not certain for how long it will be good.

i must say, in this post-bush era, the image of US stealth fighters dropping payloads onto american soil is a little disturbing to me. and maybe it's simply my cold-war era sensitivities, but seeing missile streak through the skies while people watch from the ground, confused and concerned, does put me off.

but to do this just a couple days after the Fort Hood shootings? that seems to be in pretty bad taste. i don't know if there are a lot of people making such associations, but i doubt that's what Verizon wants in our heads.

another "wtf is wrong with healthcare" data point

on her last doctor's visit, i had the gf request some additional bloodwork, including 25(OH)D, TSH, T4, T3 and HbA1c. (if i'm dosing her with fish oil, vit D, kelp et. al., i want to make sure i'm not off base). she called today to get the results and, basically, was told by the nurse to f*** off.

initially, the nurse was unwilling to say more than "your cholesterol is good," and the gf had to pry out of her the separate HDL, LDL and tri levels. once she started requesting the 25(OH)D, the nurse said she was too busy to tell her all those numbers and she should come in and talk to the doctor.

she refused to fax them, mail them, or provide them at a later date.

what. the. f***.

the death of the service industry

from the other day, on the phone:

me: i'd like to order a pizza for carryout.
her: pickup or delivery?
me: carryout.
her (very uncertain): uhhhh.... delivery?
me: okayyyy, pickup.
her (back to normal): okay!

maybe i'm being naive, but i'm rather under the impression that a pizza phone answering job 1) isn't terribly complex, and 2) has a rather limited jargon set. there are really only four terms for describing three options for accessing the pizza: dine in, carryout, pickup, delivery. MAYBE takeout, for those used to ordering Chinese.

this isn't even a training issue! and i will cite not-a-language-barrior, as the order-taker was a white teenager from the chicago suburbs.

these are the people who will be running the country when i'm retired. egads.