Other: Facebook's New Privacy Controls

I don't care what it says, this is what it boils down to:

News: More Stuff Than You Can Shake a Stick At, Part II

Geeky:

It goes without saying, the bearded guy is me. Except, well, for what should be obvious reasons, I have no beard.

• The Unix bash(1) shell has now added associative arrays, but I can't help but read the title of this article, "Bash Associative Arrays," and want to start insulting them. "You're just a perl wannabe! And you're just making your interactive shell a memory-sucking hog!"
• Further proof that PowerPoint is e-vil: the Time Square terror suspect lists it on his resume.
• FAQ, complete with totally unbelievable (as in, I don't believe a word they say) official quotes from the company, on deleting Facebook accounts.
• Louisiana is considering a law that would make it a misdemeanor to put anything on the net to embarrass minors. You might say that almost everything teenagers post embarrasses themselves, but fortunately the law was written in such a way that malicious intent is necessary. Or something.

Getting from here to there:

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The WTF list:

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  I lived in Sioux City a couple years when I was growing up. I must say, they had the most excellent sledding in the winter. But seriously, they couldn't get a band together to play the song's music instead of (badly) overdubbing the lyrics on top of the actual song? That song which still evokes memories of the worst of 80s music and music videos in my brain?
• 
  
  see more Lolcats and funny pictures
  Vengeance is a dish best served... icky.
• A psychological study says that listening to people on their cell phone is annoying because our brains have to work overtime to fill in the unheard half of the conversation. Yeah, because I'm sure I really would have enjoyed listening to that teenage girl on the bus whining to her mother if I had been hearing both sides of the conversation. "But, Mooooooom, why couldn't you pick us uuuuuuuup so we wouldn't have to take the buuuuuuuuus?" Mom: "Because the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side!"
• Just... WTF polling results.
• Cracked.com does the RIAA's math and finds that your 8Gb music player, fully loaded, is worth over $764 million dollars! Whoa!
• A condominium is proposing taking DNA-fingerprints of all resident dogs to use in finding out which residents aren't scooping their dog's pooping.

And last, but not least, Kristin Hersh's upcoming studio album Crooked is finally winging its way to Strange Angels like me. (What's a Strange Angel? As an artist with no major label backing her financially, Hersh and her manager/husband put together a new business model to fund new music. You can read about it at CASH Music.)

News: More Stuff Than You Can Shake a Stick At, Part I

Geeky:

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• The Floating-Point Guide: Because .2 + .2 != .3999999999998
• Apple's App Store may have a Federal anti-trust bull's-eye on it. And I still really, really hate my Mac, so I can't say I'm feeling bad about that.
• US Air Force considering strike on Sony after PlayStation 3 support for alternate operating systems disabled... (Well, I'm sure someone there at least joked about it... a little...)

see more

Getting from here to there:

• Gainesville, Florida, recently celebrated a record-setting rate of 52% of automobiles yielding to pedestrians! How do we know this? They have a sign that keeps track!
• The author of Carjacked discusses automotive withdrawal.

Just... wow. (And probably not in a good way.)

• A study shows that Republicans are not only less likely to adhere to voluntary energy conservation standards, but when given feedback on their usage, are more likely to increase their consumption! Seriously, WTF?
• I guess one of my favorite things to say, "The most dangerous people are those who think they know more than they really do," is a corollary of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
• A Canadian woman is suing her (I assume, former) wireless phone company, saying that its combined bills for all accounts at one residence led her husband to find out about her affair. Next thing you know, she'll be suing her (now ex-)husband for marrying an idiot. (You get a post office box for that sort of thing, dumbass!)
• Well, finally, a story about a total nutjob not from Florida: a Wisconsin woman was arrested for shooting people with a blow gun because she "liked to hear people say ouch."

And misc lolcat:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures
(I believe my last place of employ had one of these, in addition to the manager of scapegoat herders, and some others with job titles I could never decipher.)

Other: This'n'That

• I've gotten so used to the automatic sinks at work that I keep putting my hands under my faucet at home and waving them around, wondering why the sensor hasn't picked it up... oh.
• Yesterday my co-workers were talking about an application that needed to "BP" itself. "Um, what's BP?" "Boot straP." "Um, wouldn't 'BS' be a more obvious acronym for that? Oh, wait. Um, nevermind." Of course, at this point, "BS" probably would be the more politically-correct acronym over "BP."
• The other day Dipity was on the computer desk when a bird flew past the window. She ran straight for the storage bins under the window... forgetting that there's about an 18" gap between the desk and the bins. She was so intent on those birds, though, that as soon as she hit the ground, she was jumping up on the bins. Still, not the brightest cat.
• I still really hate Macs.

Other: Bitching and Moaning

I'm tired. I haven't been sleeping well lately. And it's making me cranky. Here are some of those things that are just working that last good nerve.

• There are two things about dealing with Unix that I have always considered voodoo: NFS and printing. We have had NFS issues at work which are a nightmare, and at home I have more or less retired my old WinXP box which had my printer hanging off it. Thus, I've had to move the printer to my FreeBSD box. First it kept failing because it didn't have permission to write to the device file. CUPS, you're running as root. Either fix it yourself or tell me that's the problem and prompt me to fix it. Dumbass. It spews so much garbage to its error log file that it took me forever to figure out what it was complaining about.
• Thunderbird. All of a sudden it starts prompting me constantly for my Kerberos credentials. Dude, if the server isn't asking for Kerberos credentials (and it's not), why are you? Piece of crap. It still gets my mail from the server, but the Kerberos window will "hide" and then prevent Thunderbird from exiting without telling me. I got home tonight and it turns out my laptop had been sleeping on the bus because when I thought it was shutting down before I left work, it wasn't.
• That crappy Marmaduke movie. I only learned about it today when there was a commercial for it. While I'm sure the whole script was written by a committee in about 10 minutes, why does the CGI have to look unbelievably crappy? I mean, offensively, rubbing-my-last-good-nerve crappy?
• The major record labels. I'm having trouble finding good music I like. Anything I do find is pretty much on a dinky label. These bigwigs produce lowest-common-denominator music where talent takes a backseat to looks, and then they wonder why people don't want to shell out money to buy the crap. They blame that on illegal downloads, but they'd either have to be idiots or beyond disingenuous actually to believe that themselves. 99.9% of what they put out isn't even worth stealing.
• And why the hell are there practically no self-striping yarns which (a) do not contain wool and/or acrylic and (b) come in something lighter than worsted weight?
• Not having a dishwasher (or a place to hook one up, even). I'm starting to remember some of why my previous forays into cooking died out. Cooking generates a lot of dirty dishes to wash.
• Whatever bug bit me on the shin and made it itch like crazy. Ugh.
• Nickel bra hooks. I have an itch between my shoulder blades now, too.
• Excessively cute cats that just make me want to hug them and squeeze them and love them and call them George, except they really get upset with the squeezing thing, so that just spoils my fun.

Other: Adventures in Cooking

When pouring hot polenta, try not to cover one of the handles!

As I mentioned previously, I've recently started cooking stuff from scratch. Here are some things I've learned thus far:

• When making rice pudding, make sure you actually have enough milk before cooking the rice, because you probably don't know how much 3 cups is supposed to weigh when you pick up the carton. Otherwise you end up with rice clumps, which, while edible, just aren't as satisfying.
• If you're going to try flipping your frittata onto a plate and inverting back into the frying pan, make sure your plate is bigger than the pan first.
• If you accidentally spill some of your unset frittata eggs on the burner when flipping because your plate is smaller than your frying pan, make sure you clean it up before the next time you cook with that burner or you'll wonder why your cooking polenta smells like burning eggs.
• Polenta takes a lot of stirring and is not for the lazy. Alternate hands for even muscle workout.
• Make sure Dipity doesn't make one of her excursions on the kitchen counter when you've left a bunch of chopped tomatoes on the cutting board up there.

At least I can say that I haven't set fire to anything, burned anything (except for some toast I was using to try to make bread crumbs that didn't get toasted enough the first go-round), or made anything totally inedible.

Whiteboard Jungle: Printer Angst

Whiteboard Jungle: What I Did At Work Today

Poor little printer...

And that was BEFORE I drank the beer at the company Cinco de Mayo party.

News: Just... WTF

Just... speechless.

• cnn.com headline: "Neighbor: Times Square suspect 'didn't like sunlight'" This is the most... what, informative? Insightful? Interesting? No, I believe the word is "idiotic" quote to put up about the guy. Seriously, WTF?
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  Aw, man, and I thought I was figuring out this whole cooking thing, and now they throw that at me! WTF!
• What? You can't copyright the idea of putting vegetables in kids' food? There goes my get-rich-quick scheme. WTF?
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  Well, I guess that's one way to cut down on people needlessly printing out emails. Make them scared of causing toner critical mass. WTF?
• The crochet WTF of the week. Trust me, don't look at it on a full stomach.
• I can't read German, but I'm wondering if the title of this magazine translates to "Computers, Programmers, and the Swinging Lifestyle." WTF?
• And the dumbass of the week: The Florida state senator caught looking at naughty photos on his laptop on the Senate floor. I realize that whole job thing, the one which you went out of your way to get by running for election, is boring, but seriously, WTF?

And the lolcat of the week:

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

News: DIY Week!

This week's sampling focuses on you! Now get off yer butt!

First, some links to awesome images you MUST SEE (but I don't want to hotlink or copy the images):

• READ THIS: Nerds, Geeks, and Dorks explained!
• A public transportation rider's group in Toronto has made these amazing posters!

DIY! (via Lifehacker)

• Here's what I'm going to be doing this coming week at work! Making a pencil-and-rubber-band crossbow! Because the week after that will be my first week on-call and I need to be prepared!
• My late tri-colors Pandora and Clio would have loved these hacked bookcases, as they couldn't resist a place to put their fuzzy butt on display (Pandora) or a vertical structure to climb (Clio). But Spoon is, well, lazy, and Dipity will just have to make do for now with the current landscape, because I don't have enough bookshelves for my books at the moment, let alone for cats.
• I like this idea for keeping your passwords safe in your pocket but virtually uncrackable.
• I've actually started cooking a little, and I'm eying this recipe for pop-tarts.

Random ebilness:

• This graph summarizes how much time Americans spend in or waiting for elevators. So, where's the accompanying graph showing how much time they'd spend in stairwells instead?
• Another neat illustration from the Infrastructurist showing total and per capita gas consumption by state.
• We Have Met The Enemy and He Is PowerPoint. (However, the guy who made the what-was-scheduled-to-be-1-hour-but-turned-into-90+-minutes-where-I-don't-know-what-the-plus-is-because-that's-when-I-left-so-I-could-bang-my-head-against-the-wall presentation solely out of traversing the source code repository in his web browser actually made me long for useless PowerPoint slides this week...)
• Over at EFF, the funny-'cause-it's-true article on Facebook's "Evil Interfaces". (For those of you who don't know what EFF is, it's not only not ebil, it's the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you hate the digital rights management that breaks your DVD or MP3 players, pointless web censorship, or the fact that your ISP wants to throttle your completely legal bittorrent download of your favorite Linux distribution, you should be nice to them.)
• In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Steve "You're Not Going To Run Anything On Your iPhone That I Don't Want You To" Jobs attacked Adobe's Flash because it's a closed, proprietary system.