Author: Jon

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.

What have we done?

In the House, Suddenly Righteous Republicans

Anne Kornblut of the New York Times asked McHenry if his complaint might come across as whining.

“I’m not whining,” he whined.

So, when the Republicans were in power, Nancy Pelosi submitted a bill asking for fair treatment of the Democratic minority. The Republicans ignored it. Now, the Republicans are submitting the same bill with the roles reversed, and are mad that the Democrats aren’t jumping to do what they ask. The Republicans even had it delivered by a new member who could argue with something resembling a straight face that he had nothing to do with the Republicans actions a few years ago.

This is a pretty crappy thing to do on both sides, especially the Republicans. But the Washington Post has to go and ruin the article by the above quote. “Ooh, let’s call the Republicans ‘whiners’. That’ll show them.” On a related note – Cindy Sheehan is not helping anything. Defunding the Iraq war is the worst idea I’ve heard since someone thought, “Hey, it would be cool if George W. Bush was the President!”

I think my point here is that, when we “cleaned house” and got rid of some of the biggest problem Republicans in office, we seem to have replaced them with equally bad (though in different ways) Democrats. My mom doesn’t like Nancy Pelosi. And my mom has an incredible gift for finding the good in anyone, so if she can’t see anything positive in Nancy Pelosi, it’s probably not there.  And yes, I know my mom doesn’t know her personally, nor is she a professional political analyst. Actually, I don’t think I have a point. I’m just terribly frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a single person anywhere in American politics who seems to represent my views. There’s no one I can get behind and say, “Hey, this person speaks for me”.  Am I asking too much?  Should the leaders I helped elect occasionally say things I agree with?  There are things I believe in on both sides of the political spectrum (Although not on the strange third axis of political thought where George W. Bush lives).

Is this my least coherent post ever?  Vote in the comments.  It’s not even 8:30AM. I swear I’m not drunk.

Its book review time!

I mentioned earlier that I was reading “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreau.  I just finished it last night.

It was interesting.  He presents three possible scenarios – the “Heaven scenario”, prominently advocated by Ray Kurzweil, the “Hell Scenario”, foretold by Bill Joy, and the “Prevail Scenario”, which he learns about from Jaron Lanier.

The Heaven Scenario is where technology moves us past such problems as sickness, hunger, and death, and into a utopia.  The Hell Scenario is where technology moves forward without us, and we’re all eaten by rogue self-replicating nanomachines or wiped out by a bio-engineered super plague.  The Prevail Scenario is where we take control of the rush of technology and use it to find new ways of connecting people.  The key element of the Prevail Scenario is that we are in control.  The other two predict that the rapid rate of change in technology, which is currently increasing, is going to be too fast for us to have any input on where it’s going.

As I read the book, I went through a few phases.  First, I read about the Heaven Scenario, and envisioned myself enhanced and posthuman, immune to disease, constantly connected to an ever-present network, and immortal.  It was pretty sweet.  Kurzweil thinks we’ll have significant changes in what it means to be human in the next 2-3 decades. Then I read about the Hell Scenario, which seems less likely.  Maybe I do still have a little faith in humanity that we won’t totally destroy ourselves just yet.  Probably we will before the sun goes out, but that at least gives us a little time.  Although, if we do have a man-made global killer, it’s going to suck pretty hard.

The Prevail Scenario is less concretely defined.  It’s almost like an extension of the web 2.0 user communities into all aspects of life.  Instead of people being kept physically apart, sitting at computers in basements, new technology would allow richer connections between people than are possible now, combining the best of online communities with the best of physical communities.

In all, it’s a good read.  Even those who don’t know much about the tech side of things should be able to follow along.  The writing style is accessible.  And it’s exciting.  The idea of transcending humanity is really fascinating, and it doesn’t sound that far-fetched.

Next on my list is Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which is actually a novel about posthumans.  In the first chapter, we already have a duel for making eye contact and a no-strings-attached orgy just for fun.  The future is awesome!