Chip on my shoulder
While driving to work this morning, I thought I felt something brush past my pants leg near the pedals. Glancing down, I couldn’t see anything on the floor of my car. I decided to inspect more closely once I got to work.
A few moments later, I felt something land on my shoulder. My startle must have startled it and it jumped right back off. As I pulled over in a panic, I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw a chipmunk in the back of the car.
I believe that is the first (and I hope the last) time I have ever had a chipmunk on my shoulder. I’m quite glad it wasn’t a mouse or rat.
I opened the door and after a few minutes the chipmunk departed and ran into the woods. I think I shall henceforth be careful to close my windows when parking in my own garage.
From Chase, for FREE!
I just noticed this email from my Chase credit card:
Dear JEREMY STEIN:
The Year-End Summary for your credit card ending in 1234 is now online and ready for review. Your 2009 Year-End Summary is a valuable resource that’s available to Chase OnlineSM customers for FREE!
Your personalized summary is an easy and convenient way to review your entire year of transactions. It’s a great tool to help you:
- Prepare your taxes
- Track yearly household spending
- Plan an annual budget
[etc]
Is it really the case that there are so few benefits from using their credit card that they have to mention the FREE year-end statement? My only other theory is that Chase is hoping to distract me from the fact that they’re too cheap to mail me my statement.
Single sign-on
Here is part of a telephone conversation with a member of our ITS support staff while he was having me test an issue with Citrix. I was trying to make small talk about the lack of single sign-on.
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Abandoned no. Interesting yes.
I’ve got a slogan for this site:
Abandoned no. Interesting yes.
Does that make you want to bookmark this site or what!
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Jailed 14 years for contempt
Judges can put people in jail for contempt of court. Reporter Judith Plame was jailed for refusing to reveal a source to a grand jury. People are usually jailed or threatened with jail for less noble causes than she.
H. Beatty Chadwick was put in jail for contempt because his wife (who was suing him for divorce) claimed that he had hidden $2.5 million while he claimed he had lost the money in a business deal. The judge didn’t believe him and he’s sat behind bars for 14 years.
He hasn’t been charged with a crime, and yet he sits in jail. For longer than many convicted murderers. He’s now 72. This is a life sentence.
Judges tend to be pretty smart. I’m guessing he did hide the money. But shouldn’t he be charged with a crime and tried by a jury of his peers? There appears to be a gaping hole in American justice system, and H. Beatty Chadwick has fallen in.
Update: he has finally been freed.
Georgia in 2008 = Czechoslovakia in 1938?
I’m not a good student of history or of global politics, but it did occur to me that the situation in Georgia is awfully similar to that of the infamous Munich Agreement. Will Ossetia be just Russia’s first step to taking all of Georgia while the West is too timid to intervene?
The New York Sun has a nice little article that compares this conflict to similar situations in modern European history.
Frogger: Game Over
Part of my jog route takes me down Clover Street along the park. It’s a major road, and the frogs from the pond don’t stand a chance. It’s like Frogger on the impossible level. I often jog around their little corpses.
I assumed that crows and ants cleaned up the remains, but the truth turns out to be a bit more gruesome:
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Telemarketer vs. Google
Hello, Mr. Stein. My name is Susan. I’m calling on behalf of the Cancer Fund of America Support Services. We give aid to the ill and needy and provide support and services to cancer patients who can’t afford treatment. May I confirm your address to send you a pledge card?
[Walking to computer] What organization did you say you were calling from?
Cancer Fund of America Support Services.
[Typing] OK. Cancer… Fund… of America… Support… Services… Ah, yes. It appears that you spend over 60% of your money on fund-raising. I think my contribution would be better spent elsewhere.
*Click*
My first political cartoon
In reference to the public reaction to the FLDS raid:
SQL Server Performance Benchmarks
I’m not allowed to tell you how slow SQL Server is.
Seriously.
To install Visual C# Express, I had to agree to the following:
SQL SERVER BENCHMARK TESTING
You must obtain Microsoft’s prior written approval to disclose to a third party the results of any benchmark test of the SQL Server software that accompanies this software.
They must have included that clause because, while SQL Server is the fastest database, it doesn’t do well on benchmarks. Kind of like your barber’s kids are really smart but they just do poorly on tests.
Can you imagine Google forbidding search results comparisons? Or Amazon forbidding price comparisons? Or Toyota forbidding reliability comparisons?
You use Google because when you compared their results to what you were getting from Yahoo (or Lycos, or God forbid MSN), you found you got better results from Google. You shop at Amazon because, although you’ve looked for lower prices, you found it’s usually cheapest at Amazon. You bought that Camry (or Prius, or Gore forbid Highlander) because your research showed that Toyotas last longer.
These companies are all vulnerable to misleading benchmarks. Yahoo has better search results for “elliptical machines”. Buy.com has a better price on Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul III. Your coworker had a Volkswagen that lasted forever. For Google, Amazon and Toyota, the best way to combat unflattering “benchmarks” is simply to encourage more of them.
I’ve never performed a benchmark on SQL Server, but I don’t think I need to. Microsoft has made it pretty clear what kind of results they expect.
Know Why You Believe
I believe democracy is the best form of government. It’s practically self-evident, isn’t it? We wouldn’t want to be godless Communists, would we?
I finally read The Republic and was amused to hear Plato disparage democracy:
SOCRATES: See too, I said, the forgiving spirit of democracy, and the “don’t care” about trifles, and the disregard which she shows of all the fine principles which we solemnly laid down at the foundation of the city—as when we said that, except in the case of some rarely gifted nature, there never will be a good man who has not from his childhood been used to play amid things of beauty and make of them a joy and a study—how grandly does she trample all these fine notions of ours under her feet, never giving a thought to the pursuits which make a statesman, and promoting to honor any one who professes to be the people’s friend.
ADEIMANTUS: Yes, she is of a noble spirit.
SOCRATES: These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.
And a subversive thought popped into my head: what if he’s right? It wasn’t really even an idea, let alone a conclusion; just a thought. A thought I realized I’d never had before. It occurred to me that the primary reason I believe democracy is the ideal form of government is because I was indoctrinated with this idea my whole life. Now, I doubt I’d start promoting aristocracy as soon as I completed Comparative Forms of Government 101, but it is interesting to note that I’ve never taken such a course—at least not one that was unbiased. From this perspective, my entire elementary school social studies curriculum appears to have been one big marketing program for Democracy and the American Way.
This post is not really about democracy. It’s about opinions, biases and beliefs that we have acquired through doctrine rather than reason. I don’t mean religion; religion can’t be acquired through reason. I mean beliefs that have been placed in our minds as fully-developed opinions lacking the scaffolding of logic that should have built them.
I was struck by this aside from Chuck Shepherd:
…so many people these days wake up every day with the same, or stronger, sociopolitical biases as they’ve had for decades, and filter any “new” news that day into the same ol’ biased cubbyholes. As a college professor, I hated that habit by students and strived to break them of it. As a law student and lawyer, I was trained that you’re not in command of an issue until you can see the other side in its most favorable light, not as a caricature, which is how biased people typically see the other side. source
How often we see the other side only as a caricature! I’ve often thought the correct debate format would be to have two sides argue the opposites of their own positions. Then the winner would be allowed to explain why his side was actually superior to what he had just presented. I don’t believe anyone can really know why his opponent is wrong until he understands why his opponent is right.
It’s not easy to identify one’s own biases. They are often so integral to our world view it feels like trying to smell the inside of one’s nose or taste one’s tongue. But I think the fate of being simply a product of one’s immediate culture is worse than the trouble of reconsidering.
4213 is an odd number
Tuesday was the first election since our move to a new town. I figured I was doing well to find the actual voting place, but it seems I was supposed to know my district number as well. Four voting districts each with its own table and voting booth were represented in the building. A map on the wall showed that my street was right on the dividing line between districts. I started with district 1.
“Hi, I’m not sure I’m at the right table.”
“Address?”
“4213 Clover”
“OK, let’s see.” [Mumble, mumble, discuss something about odd/even house numbers] “Try table 4″
So I moved to table 4. “Hi, district 1 sent me over here.”
“Name?”
“Jeremy Stein”
“Hmmm… it’s not in the book. What’s your address?”
“4213 Clover”
“Let’s see… Clover Street. Yes, we have the even numbers. I guess you’ll need to fill out a provisional ballot. Now, where are those…”
“Oh, so odd numbers are at table 1?”
“Uh, yes…” [Confused look]
I moved back to table 1. They gave up trying to determine whether my address was in their district and just looked up my name. It was there. I signed in and voted.
Tacky Sun
I would rant, but Jacob Davis already did.
U.S. National Debt has Fallen!
Congress has increased the ceiling on the national debt to $9.8 trillion. Let me assure you that the U.S. debt is increasing only superficially. Counting the debt in U.S. dollars is like counting the money in your wallet by the number of bills you have, ignoring their denomination. You can’t measure the U.S. debt in U.S. dollars; we need an external measurement. How much has the national debt changed in, say, Canadian dollars?
| Month | USD | Exchange | CAN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2002 | 6.2 trillion | 1.576 | 9.8 trillion |
| Sep 2007 | 9.0 trillion | 1.027 | 9.2 trillion |
Over the last five years, the U.S. national debt has fallen by $CAD 600 billion. There are advantages to having the U.S. dollar in a free fall. Those suckers who have loaned us money are actually paying us to use it!
Not like those bad kids
Once when I was shopping at Aldi, there were some children running around and making noise. I overheard a woman talking to her infant:
You’re such a good baby… not like those bad kids… no, a good baby.
Meta-error
From my favorite IDE:
Fidelity mistake
About a week ago, I received a letter from Fidelity informing me that their privacy policy was enclosed. It wasn’t. I figured I was the victim of an envelope-stuffing-machine error and forgot about it. Today, I received another letter. It begins:
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Animal Testing
Subprime Bailout
After all the talk from my fair senators on assisting troubled subprime mortgage-holders, I was delighted to read Patrick Killelea’s diatribe: Stop the Subprime Bailout.
Politicians will exploit your emotions by saying they want to help people “keep their homes”. But remember that the people in financial trouble already had houses. They got into this mess by trying to buy bigger and fancier houses than they could afford. If we do help them, it should involve them moving back into houses they can afford.
Dysfunctional IT
I emailed our company’s IT department to report that my telephone stopped working — I could hear others but they couldn’t hear me.
IT called me for more information.
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