Big Brother is looking Right Through you:

A guy was stopped at airport security, one of those fancy new scanning machines detected something weaponlike on his person. He insisted he had nothing, agents found nothing patting him down, but the item was right there on the scanner’s screen. Turns out the guy had an operation last March, the surgeon left a tool inside him. “It never felt right,” he said. “I always felt a twinge when I bent over.” Try this link for more details: More Info.
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Well,
If you tried the link, you know it’s broken. When this story inevitably happens – I don’t think it has happened yet -- I hope to fix the link to point to the real thing. The possibility is real, and so is this link: Forgotten Surgical Tools 'Uncommon but Dangerous'.

Chasing Rainbows:

Now that I’m I telling you they exist, you might occasionally see two unusual kinds of rainbows. The sun can be surrounded by a circular rainbow when it is high in the sky, rather washed out. Be VERY careful not to stare directly at it, your eyes are too precious to ruin with this rare sight. (If you want to know how I looked at it – well I was nineteen and should have been old enough to know better.) Circular rainbows also occur around a full moon high in the sky, almost entirely pale white. When I saw this rainbow, I thought the moon was surrounded by clouds, until I realized how perfectly circular and banded the “clouds” were. The moon rainbow was considerably wider than the moon.

It's an Alogous:

A simile without a woman is like a tractor without a fish.

A brief quote from the owner of a so-called "genuine" Faux-Suede Couch:

"The world is full of oxymorons and morons."
- Dr. Susan Fisher, October 2003

Today, a few Twisted Sayings, mostly original:

Nothing Ventured, nothing pained.
Hope springs into eternity. (last 29 July, to be precise)
Don’t let the bastards grind your coffee.
Fact is stranger than the internet.
The grass is always greener on someone else's CRT.
Hell hath no fury like a troller flamed.
Waste not, want another closet.
A stitch in time would come loose, there’s nothing to attach it to.
If you see five troubles coming down the road toward you, chances are there are another seventeen you haven’t even noticed yet.

How Old is That Web Page?

I’ll bet there’ve been times when you needed to know if a web page is up to date. There are many accessible “dead corpse” web pages on the Internet. When you’re looking for contact data, tourist info, restaurants and hotels, the latest news in a niche area, conference schedules, ground rules, you can go crazy trying to figure out if a web page is still accurate. Or you can waste time sending a nice email to the support address on a ghost website, email that no one will ever answer. EVERY WEB SITE AND WEB PAGE SHOULD HAVE A “MODIFIED” DATE ON IT! EVERY SINGLE ONE! THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW! There, I’ve said it. Thanks for listening. In ten years or so let’s talk about web page Garbage Collection, if we haven’t already drowned in the stuff.

Pistachio Nut Vengeance:

Here’s one of the special things about pistachios in the shell: most of them are easy to open with the fingers, but a few of them just seem to be glued shut. What do you do when you come across those frustrating pistachios? Here’s an idea: collect them until you have a nice bagfull, then make of gift of this bag to someone you hate.

GPS Without Hardware, Poetry Only:

…

You are where you are,

Because that is where you were,

When you got lost.

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-“Handbook of Correct Answers”, from Bones & Hair by Paul C. Howell

Brake hard, Accelerate gently:

Carsley recently brought up the subject of those oldsters who confound their auto pedals and plow through a crowd. Why can’t a little invention solve this problem? When I’m eighty, I’m sure I will never need to floor the accelerator. If I push the accelerator down hard, one of the car’s many computers (whichever one happens to be listening to my foot) should just ignore me and sound some sort of raspberry sound. In fact if I floor ANY pedal when the car is moving slowly, the car’s computer should figure out what I meant to do and stop the car. Doesn’t that make sense? Let’s call this invention: Imprecision Braking.

Tiger Man Misses Big Cat:

I’m deeply disturbed by this story about Antoine Yates and his tiger; I hope he was misquoted, and didn’t really say “He was like my brother. He was my best friend. He's my only friend, really." If he did say that awful thing about the tiger, then How is the alligator supposed to feel?


By the way, check out this wonderful news storyat kuro5hin about Bertelsmann suing hardware manufacturers for including the shift key on their keyboards.

AT&T War Stories (1985) #2, Rare Boards:

In 1985, the first year people say AT&T lost a billion in the computer business, I was managing an AT&T demo for a trade show. We were using special AT&T-built (that is, nonstandard) PCs, and we needed six high resolution graphics boards for our demo. These boards were new and rare as hens’ teeth. I was given the name of the AT&T guy doling them out and warned it would be nearly impossible to get some. I went to see him. Like most AT&T employees he was on the phone, a long call. I sat in his office and studied a big poster on his wall displaying part of the orchestral score (chorus and orchestra) for an AT&T advertisement. I can read music scores, so I did. When he got off the phone we talked about the score. It was part of an ad he had developed for AT&T; he was very proud of it and delighted by my interest. Then I braced myself and asked him for his rare graphics boards, preparing to justify my need as strongly as I could. But he immediately answered “sure” and I walked out of his office carrying my boards. This is unfair, I said to myself. These boards have to be carefully apportioned according to each project’s value to AT&T. I don’t deserve these six boards. But I sure didn’t give them back.

It’s so addictive you’ll never do anything else ever again:

I’m an inveterate browser of new games for the Palm PDA. Game developers routinely claim their games are addictive, very addictive, extremely addictive. Why? Painkillers and foods are not advertised as addictive. I’d rather try out a game that claims it will fascinate me for a few dozen hours at most.

Close your eyes and click your mouse...

We share the blogosphere with many bloggers who delight in asking us to click on links about which we know nothing whatsoever. Look at this, they say, with nary a word about what "this" is. There are many strange and time-wasting sorts of links in this universe; I'd just as soon know what a ink is about before I click on it. Thanks for listening!

For example, look at this!

For example:


















Look at this.

Waitress Rants:

bitterwaitress (it’s on my blogroll) has got to be one of the most offbeat sites on the web. It’s a collection of anecdotes about restaurants and waitressing, bad tips, celebrity stories, horror stories, nice stories, and just plenty of views of the restaurant world from an angle most of us never see. My next post will probably be Tuesday morning the 7th.

No Hero at the New York Times:

There was some excitement in the October 5, 2003 New York Times real estate section. (Great thanks to my wife for noticing this!) I couldn't find the story online, but I've typed it in for your reading pleasure. There's a story bylined Christopher Gray, about: An 1892 Limestone-Fronted Building That Endures. In the story we find this paragraph: "On a recent weekday morning, almost all the classrooms were full. In the spare, white-painted basement sculpture studio where Alexander Stirling Calder (the father of Alexander Calder) once taught, [great photo supplied, will be first nude in RE section, somebody be a hero and use it], seven students were carving chunks of stone, sending chips flying. Some were just starting, others were almost done, such as a woman finishing an abstract seated figure in white marble." Alas, the picture referred to was not in evidence.

Do you ever recycle the tops of containers?

Maybe once in my life I’ve seen a recycle “1” or “2” symbol on the top of a plastic container. The county I live in is pretty choosy about what we can recycle. It’s depressing to imagine every last one of those plastic tops piling up in landfills. Why not have recyclable tops?

Quickies Today (1):

+ When you’re horribly late for some sort of commitment or event, you’ll think about whether to skip it altogether. Try saying this to yourself: “Better never than late.” If that sounds wrong to you, then go.

+ When I realized I had left the inside light of my car on all night, I was afraid the battery would be dead. It wasn’t; but the light bulb has burnt out.

+ Don’t ask for permission, you may never get it; act first and apologize afterward. And take care to notice those situations in life for which this dictum is horribly wrong. And if you're one of those people who will say "What situations?" then I don't even want to talk to you.

Truth in Advertising:

This is a common experience: we learn a word by reading it, and eventually we discover that we’ve been pronouncing it horribly wrong. So there’s this company Wachovia, ready to handle finances for you. I’ve seen its ads in the papers and I thought what a great name, this is a company that wants to “Watch ovuh ya,” big brother in the nicest sense. Only it turns out they’re a little more, well, you decide: I saw their ad on TV last night, and the company name is actually “Walk ovuh ya.” Oh well…

George W., The Lionhearted:

Well things certainly aren’t going well, are they? What this country needs, and what I think our president might really enjoy, is a few crusades. Well-selected crusades against terrorism will dramatically improve the US economy and balance the budget. Here are the first few crusades:
- Crusade of the Medicare-elegible to Afghanistan. Take that, Al Qaida.
- Crusade of the Homeless to Iraq. Even if they don’t get all the way there, they’ll find homes along the way.
- Crusade of the public school dropouts to the Caribbean Islands. (Don’t confuse this crusade with the Crusade of the Children, we won’t let them go until they’re at least sixteen.) The goal of this crusade is to put terrific financial pressure on the countries that provide tax dodges to our richest people and corporations, without inconveniencing those people and corps too directly.
- Crusade of the Lawyers to ... Oh for goodness sakes, I apologize for this really cheap shot.

The Ketchup Rule (‘Catsup’ if you prefer):

If someone prepares food for you, and you know they will approve, you may put ketchup on it. But if you prepare food for yourself, you may always add all the ketchup you want. If you’re not sure which foods this dictum applies to, you don’t really understand ketchup.. Some (but not I) would apply the same rule to peanut butter.

What's the name of that left turn?

Tonight I'd like to ask for some help. There's a certain type of left turn; I don't know what to call it. Sooner or later, giving instructions, I'll want a clear descriptive name for this thing. So: you're driving on a road, approaching an intersection with a traffic light. You want to turn left, but you're not allowed to just go left at the intersection. Instead, you have to go past the light, curve sharply right on a short access lane until you are briefly on the cross road, and then go straight through the traffic light (again) to cross the road you started on. I'd call this an "allemande right/turn left" except that even the few remaining square dancers probably wouldn't guess what I was talking about. It's not a "post light jughandle" either. What's it called?

Take two and run half the distance to first base:

A feller hit four home runs in a baseball game last night, and: that's a record. Of course people have hit four homers in a game before, but never so close to the end of the season; that's why this is a new record. We fans of this statistics-oriented, data-mining sport are obsessed with records, and fortunately the concept of what constitutes a record is infintely extensible. So let's listen to an imaginary sports announcer wrapping up a dull baseball week somewhere in the doldrums of August: "Well folks, no new records were set in baseball today. In fact, this is the fourth straight day without any records being set, and, would you believe it? That's a record!"

Should User Interfaces all be like Games?

In the early years of Word Processing on the PC, a magazine reporter interviewed the president of Atari (remember Atari?) and asked him for suggestions on making PC programs easier to use. His answer: Games are easy to use; make office program like games. He even suggested making a bomb-explosion sound when a person deletes a file. The reporter swallowed his ideas whole, which I think was pitiful. Today most games still enable you to just jump in and start to play; many of them have almost no user documentation or help at all. (Let’s leave the computer games that require many hours of study before you can use them to the masochists who appreciate them.). So why not make “productivity” software more like games? The answer is simple: the point of most games is to figure out what the documentation really is! The game’s features are mostly hidden at first, or can only be understood and mastered after much gaming experience. When we play computer games, we like to have the challenge of figuring this stuff out. But when we use “serious” software we have a task to complete. We have no patience for the idea that we might have to play around with, say, Microsoft Word for 250 hours before we can figure out its features. Just imagine that you bring up Word, and as you use it skillfully, your score increases onscreen. You need 80,000 points to be allowed to print a memo, 250,000 points to make a table of contents and so on. Or imagine that you must to spend hours learning the precise muscular control and reflexes needed to change a font size. Game software is different.

Loud, Loud, Loud Music:

Nothing changes faster than wedding customs, but for many years it has been indispensable to blow people’s ears out with loud music at the reception. Some band members wear earplugs, others sustain permanent damage (after which they play even louder, or it sounds too soft to them). Frequent guests can damage their ears also. I hope you’re listening to me! So when I go to a wedding, I usually bring ear plugs. I can still hear the music, AND I can still converse while wearing them. But for every wedding I attend, there’s a small quandary: Should I bring a pair of plugs, or should I bring a dozen pairs and sell them?

The Weather Pixie and Tierra del Fuego:

The “Weather Pixie” is a website that will add, to the webpage of your choice, a little picture of a young woman, in which her clothes and the background indicate the current weather. You can choose your own place, or you can view another city’s weather vicariously. In my case, that other city would be in Tierra del Fuego. I have often made unkind jokes about this place (but not in this blog), the southern tip of Argentina, in Patagonia, beautiful but one of the least hospitable climates in the world; and yet people live there. Well, Tierra del Fuego is on the web! At the Weather Pixie site, choose South America, Argentina, and Ushuaia, to get the HTML code you need to link the pixie for Tierra del Fuego. Then Google Ushuaia to find out more fascinating info about this southernmost of cities.

Pouring Water on it would Just Make it Worse:

In the 1950's my father was getting a haircut at his favorite barbershop. Making conversation he said, "You know those plastic shampoo bottles you have; they say they're unbreakable but I just read in the New York Times that they actually break very easily." "Nonsense!" replied the barber, "those are unbreakable plastic bottles." "No they aren't," said my pa. "I'll show you" said the barber, picking up a big greenish bottle of shampoo. "DON'T!" cried my father, but the barber dropped it. It broke and shampoo flooded the floor. It's not easy to clean up a big shampoo spill; just think about it. We're all students of human nature here, so it will not surprise you to know that the barber was very angry with my father.

Let's make the US National Weather Service Self-supporting:

We owe a great debt to the weather service. First: for its (ahem) incredibly accurate weather forecasts. Second: because for many years it drove IBM to increase computer power so that it could model weather more accurately, and we've all benefited from more powerful machines. So here's the idea: Let the NOAA auction off the right to name each hurricane after a major company. Oh of course I realize a company won't name a dangerous hurricane after itself! What's it worth to Sun to name a hurricane after Microsoft? (Headline: Microsoft comes inland, causes $6 billion damages.) And what's it worth to Microsoft NOT to have a hurricane named after it? We're talking big dollar auctions here; should cause a material reduction in federal taxes.

AT&T War Story #1 (1986) – Lady on the Phone:

In 1986 I consulted at AT&T as a product manager. At one point I needed some information, and I was given the name of a woman at AT&T in Morristown, the only person, I was assured, who could help me. I phoned her and she was busy. I phoned her many times and she was busy. (I did not email my question to her, because in those days, after you emailed an AT&T employee, you had to phone them to tell them to check their email.) After a few days it occurred to me that she was only 12 miles away; why didn’t I just drive to Morristown and go to her office? So I did that. 25 minutes later I was wandering through a maze of cubicles, looking for her. I decided that when I found her cube, if she were not there, or not on the phone, I would feel like a total idiot. But there she was: on the phone. I sat down in her office. After a while she took a piece of paper and scribbled: “I’m on a four hour conference call.” I took the paper and scribbled my question. After a while, she scribbled an excellent two word answer. I left, and never saw her again.

Proz and Conz:

Some of us take antidepressants, such as Prozac. Others require prodepressants, such as Antizac. The Precision Blogger will be on vacation, and on Antizac until about September 19th, after which blogging this blog shall resume. Meanwhile, here’s a little advice to tide you over: when you look at a bunch of trees, do you have trouble seeing the forest? If so, try looking at a forest that has only one tree.

On the road to Zreidor:

The folks who provide us with the very best in spam have decided that nonsense subject will lines help their messages get through. I’m a sucker for emails with this subject line: “Mail delivery system: mail undeliverable”, but I would never open an Email with a subject like “gdg hfjl retkl ptslv”. However I do enjoy reading half-gibberish. Here are a few genuine spams that have come my way:
Dispelling simple way to avoid Zreidor.
I found your addie.
Rejuvinate your Sexlife Instant.
Largest Loan Program iqpcocjfd nozp.
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Stop that popups forever vflehyhtj.
Introducing GRlfhb1q9dstx1cX2 Pills. GRnjg9sf37623sbX2 will Expand…
Animal Magnetism t p th wpux.