Month: January 2007

Sir, youre going to have to remove your monkeys diaper for inspection

TSA: Service Animals

When the handler and monkey go through the WTMD and the WTMD alarms, both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening.

BoingBoing posted this today, but they didn’t quote this rule, which is quite possibly the funniest.  I mean, the nerve of the American public, thinking that they can set off alarms and allow their monkey to get off scot free.

“Sir, your monkey is going to have to step over here for further screening.”

It’s worth becoming disabled and getting a helper monkey just for the airport hilarity that this could cause.  Even better than wearing an “enemy combatant” t-shirt through the security line.

Restaurant week in DC

Wife and I are off to a fancy dinner tonight at Mendocino, booked through OpenTable. Can’t wait for some nice fish, maybe some organic wine . . .

I know you all are jealous.

Edit: Totally worth it. I’d highly recommend Mendocino. Dinner was great. Nice, small restaurant, good service, right in the heart of super-trendy Georgetown. Georgetown is actually so trendy that I don’t think it’s trendy anymore – it’s gone totally back around to only semi-cool.  The wife says, “Great company.  But I guess I can get that anywhere.  I would recommend the goat cheese cheesecake”.

Tag abuse

Some of you may know that I love Flickr.  I have about 1800 pictures up there.  Recently, I posted some pictures of Barb’s family watching a video on YouTube, and tagged it “youtube”, among other things.  It currently has 107 views, up from the normal 5-10 views on most of my pictures.

That got me thinking.  Is it “ethical” to drive traffic to your website by adding tags and search terms that don’t really apply?  The “youtube” tag was relevant to the picture, but I could have tagged it with all sorts of popular tags that don’t really apply.  Similarly, I could tag this blog post with “sex” or “hate Republicans” or whatever the kids are searching for these days, and drive more traffic.

Or, alternatively to adding tags that don’t really fit, what if I actually wrote about stuff based on current top Google searches?  It wouldn’t be hard to find out what  the week’s popular search terms are, and then I could write about those things.

Usually, I post about whatever I feel like posting about.  Sometimes that’s current events.  For example, I got some random traffic when I posted about Zidane’s head butt, and I got random traffic when I posted about the Enviga tea that some marketing guy sent me.  But often it’s not, like when I post about my stupid cat.

Anyway, I have no point, here.  I’m just wondering where the line is between offering content that people might find interesting and then trying to promote it, and prostituting one’s self for traffic.

Social shopping app?

Cribcandy – the household shopping blog. Daily picks of the best designed or most unusual finds, for your home link via BoingBoing This site probably requires a little more browsing before I understand where they’re going, but they seem to be trying to create a social web app for shopping. I’m not sure what value they expect to add, but the stuff they find for around the house is awesome. And it doesn’t seem to be all super expensive, unlike many sites that aggregate cool stuff.

Nice job, Cal

Baltimore Orioles : News : Baltimore Orioles News

“He proved that a tall man could play shortstop, enabling players like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez to follow.”

Cal Ripken was just inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the first time he was on the ballot, with the third highest vote percentage ever.  Growing up in Maryland, following the Orioles ever since I was ten, it was a long time before I saw a live baseball game that he didn’t play in.  Well, not including my rec league games.  He got an honorary degree when my sister graduated from Johns Hopkins, and I walked past him at Preakness last summer.

I still remember coming home from work on September 6th, 1995, and watching him do his victory lap as he broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak.  I hadn’t really realized how much of a big deal it was until I saw that on tv.

I know that the exploits of a man who played a game for a living are pretty unimportant in a lot of ways, but in some other ways, they make a big difference to a lot of people.  There’s nothing quite like sitting in the bleachers on a sunny day, throwing peanut shells on the ground and watching a baseball game.  It doesn’t match the intensity of a lot of other sports, but there’s some magic there (I know, I’m being a little cheesy, sue me).

So, congratulations to Cal, and to also-deserving Tony Gwynn.

Id like a new layout

I’m tired of the way Complaint Hub looks.  I’ve just been over at Candy Blog, run by Nanowrimo big shot Cybele, and I really like the design.  It’s not what I’m looking for, but it fits her site really well.  And that’s what I want here – a design that fits my site.  Then the question becomes, what sort of a design is right for a blog about complaining?  I don’t know.  I’d like to do something myself, but WordPress uses PHP, and I have pretty limited PHP experience.  I suppose it would be good to learn.

Kids, dont try this at home

I just posted about how much I hate elevators, and how I can’t take the stairs up at work because they lock the doors.  Well, they just started leaving the doors unlocked.  So now I don’t have to wait for the elevator when I come back from getting coffee!  I still can’t walk up from the parking garage, but that’s an extra three floors – I don’t feel bad riding the elevator up six flights.

Now, kids, here’s how you can complain about both sides of an issue.  It requires a delicate amount of self-deprecation, a little poetic license, and a flexible moral compass.  With practice, you, too, can become a professional complainer.  You must learn to deal with the classic complainer’s Catch-22. The problem now is that I have to walk up the dang stairs, or else I can no longer be smug about those who ride the elevators.  I just started going to the gym again last week after a month and a half off, and thirty five minutes on the elliptical makes your legs tired.  And now I have to walk up the stairs or risk invalidating a previous complaint.

Here’s where we redirect the complaint, taking the blame away from ourselves.

The building security people are clearly out to get me.  They must read the site, and know that they’ve come up against a formidable foe, a complainer with a mission and an audience.  So they have set out to undermine me.  They think they can respond to my complaint, and I’ll quietly continue to use the elevator, despite my protests.

_Finally, we say things that don’t mean much, but sound good on television, to leave the reader feeling inspired.  No one pays attention to the middle of something they read, just the beginning and the end. _

They will be disappointed.  I will take the stairs.  Two at a time, if necessary.  I will not be defeated!  They think they can grease the squeaky wheel and get away unscathed, but that is not the way the world works.  I’m on to you, building security.  I’m going to take the stairs every day, just to spite you.

Manhattan smells like gas

Mystery odor permeates Manhattan

“One thing we are very confident of, it’s not dangerous,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference.

We don’t know what it is, but we know it isn’t dangerous. Thanks, Mayor Bloomberg. Sorry to all of you who live in Manhattan. That’s got to be rough on you.

“If you were in a gas station, [the odor] would be magnified 1,000 times,” NEW JERSEY mayor’s spokeswoman Maria Pignataro told CNN.

At least it’s not terrorism. Not sure how they’re ruling that out without knowing what the smell is, but maybe they have advanced terrorism identification techniques that are too secret to inform the public of their existence.

I hate elevators

I have an irrational hatred for elevators.  I hate riding in them.  I hate looking at them.  I hate walking past people waiting for them.  In my office, we have six elevators and eleven floors.  Usually, that means you don’t wait long for an elevator.  I almost always take the stairs down, but you can’t take the stairs up because they lock the doors.  Only the lobby and basement doors open from the outside.

For the last two weeks, they’ve been taking one elevator out of service at a time to replace the doors.  Yes, I’m serious.  Currently, the elevator doors are a golden color, with a column of the same material that runs from the top of the door all the way to the ceiling.  These doors are being replaced in the lobby with silver colored mirrored doors that have stupid square patterns etched into them.  The first time I saw one, I thought it had been scratched as it opened.  They are not, however, replacing the panels above the doors.

So, now our lobby not only has marble walls with patterns that could only be described as six foot tall female genitalia, but it also has silver doors with gold trim.  Awesome.

And the elevators are slow.  I don’t see how taking one out of service quadruples the wait time, but it does.  Let’s do the math here.  Let’s say that the time I wait for an elevator is (# of people)/(# of elevators)(# of trips per elevator), or t=p/er.  Let’s call the time it normally takes t0, and the time it takes with one elevator out of service as tf (Where ‘f’ stands for you know what).  We can reasonably assume that p and r remain constant.  If tf=4t0, we do some algebra, and we determine that 4/e = (6/5)/e, or 4=6/5.  This is false.  Therefore, we have to assume that the elevators defy the laws of physics.

Actually, we should probably assume that t=p/er is incorrect.  Since taking 84% of e causes t to increase four fold, there must be something more sinister afoot here than that innocuous equation.  I suspect that natural logs are involved.