Shallow Thoughts

Slow news day?

My favorite headline from today's paper:

Waves breach sand berm

What sort of sand berm, you wonder, that merits a headline in the paper? No doubt a critical one, protecting the town from the ravages of the sea? Well, maybe not:

"The situation is not unusual," he added. "It happens every year."

I guess it was a slow news day.

The full-page ad on the back of the main section was good, too.

Mmmmm ... melamine candy!

Tags: humor, headlines, slownewsday
[ 11:42 Dec 29, 2009    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Fossil Hunter -- Real Tools!

(I meant to blog this last month and never got around to it, but it was so fun and silly that I want a public link to it.)

For my birthday, Dave got me this Dinosaur Fossil Kit. With REAL TOOLS! proclaimed the package.

(A few weeks later I was at the dollar store looking for something else, and found out where he'd bought it.)

It's an egg-shaped clod of mud. The REAL TOOLS are a little plastic pick and a paintbrush. You pick away the mud to reveal little plastic dinosaur bones, which you can assemble to form a dinosaur.

Okay, it's stupid. But it was also kind of fun. I have the little dinosaur sitting on the stand beside my terminal.

One of the foot-tabs is missing on mine, so it doesn't always stay in the stand. But that's just one of those hassles that we paleontologists put up with. Not every skeleton will be 100% complete. We scientists also know how important it is to document every step of the process.

Tags: humor, fossil, dinosaur, paleontology, toy
[ 18:38 Oct 17, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

A new theory of orbital dynamics

This PG&E billboard just went up down the street from where I live.

"Solar Power: Making planets orbit and bagels toast."

And here all this time I'd been under the impression that orbits had mostly to do with gravity. Somehow I'd missed the influence of light pressure when writing my orbital software.

Or is the sun's gravitational influence considered a part of "solar power"? Can we look forward to the upcoming generation of gravitovoltaic solar cells?

Tags: humor, astronomy
[ 19:13 Sep 18, 2009    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

On the difference between techies and non-techies

It's so easy as a techie to forget how many people tune out anything that looks like it has to do with technology.

I've been following the terrible "Station fire" that's threatening Mt Wilson observatory as well as homes and firefighters' lives down in southern California. And in addition to all the serious and useful URLs for tracking the fire, I happened to come across this one: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

Very funny! I laughed, and so did the friends with whom I shared it. So when a non-technical mailing list began talking about the fire, I had to share it, with the comment "Here's a useful site I found for tracking the status of California fires."

Several people laughed (not all of them computer geeks). But one person said,

All it said was "YES." No further comments.

The joke seems obvious, right? But think about it: it's only funny if you read the domain name before you go to the page. Then you load the page, see what's there, and laugh.

But if you're the sort of person who immediately tunes out when you see a URL -- because "that's one of those technical things I don't understand" -- then the page wouldn't make any sense.

I'm not going to stop sharing techie jokes that require some background -- or at least the ability to read a URL. But sometimes it's helpful to be reminded of how a lot of the world looks at things. People see anything that looks "technical" -- be it an equation, a Latin word, or a URL -- and just tune out. The rest of it might as well not be there -- even if the words following that "http://" are normal English you think anyone should understand.

Tags: tech, humor
[ 20:48 Sep 01, 2009    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Helpful Error Messages from ALSA (not!)

Today's award concerns clarity of error messages.

My desktop machine has been getting flakier for a week or two. Strange messages at boot, CDROM drive unable to burn reliably or verify after burning, and finally it culminated in a morning where it wouldn't boot at all. Turned out (after much experimentation) to be not one but two bad IDE cables -- and these were the snazzy expensive heavy-duty cables, not the cheap ribbon cables, in a box that hadn't been opened for months. Weird.

Anyway, since I had the system disk out anyway (to recover data from it) I left it out, migrated my data to the newer, bigger disk and installed a new Ubuntu Intrepid. Been meaning to do that anyway -- running two disks just adds to the noise, heat and power usage and doesn't really add that much speed.

It took a couple of hours to get the system working the way I want it -- installing things I need, like tcsh, vim, emacs, plucker, vlc, sox etc. and cleaning up some of the longstanding Ubuntu udev and kernel configuration bugs that keep various hardware from working. I thought I had everything ready when I noticed I wasn't getting any sound alerts, so I tried playing a sample .wav file, and got a rather unusual error:

(clavius)- play sample.wav
ALSA lib confmisc.c:768:(parse_card) cannot find card '0'
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_card_driver returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:392:(snd_func_concat) error evaluating strings
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_concat returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib confmisc.c:1251:(snd_func_refer) error evaluating name
ALSA lib conf.c:3513:(_snd_config_evaluate) function snd_func_refer returned error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib conf.c:3985:(snd_config_expand) Evaluate error: No such file or directory
ALSA lib pcm.c:2196:(snd_pcm_open_noupdate) Unknown PCM default
play soxio: Can't open output file `default': cannot open audio device

What does that mean? Well, it turns out what it means is ... my user wasn't in the "audio" group, so I didn't have write permission on the sound device. I added myself to "audio" in /etc/groups and sound worked fine in my next session.

Now, I've seen some fairly obscure error messages in my time, but this one may just win my all-time obscurity award. 9 lines and 744 characters to say "Can't open $device."

And with all that, it still managed to omit the one piece of information that might have been helpful: the name of the device it was trying to open (so that an ls -l would have told me the problem right away).

Impressive!

Tags: linux, alsa, user interface, humor
[ 13:23 Apr 07, 2009    More tech | permalink to this entry ]

Pluto Visits the States

This is a reprinting of an article I wrote for my monthly planet column in the SJAA Ephemeris:

Is Pluto a planet, or not? Maybe you caught the news last month that Illinois, birthplace of Clyde Tombaugh, has declared Pluto a planet. It joins New Mexico, Tombaugh's longtime home, which made a similar declaration two years ago.

When I first heard about the New Mexico resolution, I was told that they had declared that Pluto would be a planet within the state's boundaries. That made me a bit curious: would Pluto even fit inside New Mexico? I looked it up: Pluto has a diameter of 2300km, while New Mexico is about 550km in longitude and a bit more in latitude. Not even close (see Figure 1). Too bad -- I liked the image of Pluto and Charon coming to visit and hang out with friends. Though at Pluto's orbital velocity (it takes it just under 248 years to complete its 18 billion kilometer orbit, meaning an average speed of 23 million km/year or 63,000 km/day) and its current distance of about 32 AU (4.8 billion km), it whould take it about 207 years to get here.

But it turns out that's not what the resolution said anyway. Both states' resolutions said roughly the same thing:

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO that, as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet and that March 13, 2007 be declared "Pluto Planet Day" at the legislature.

RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois' night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared "Pluto Day" in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.

So the law applies to anyone (though it's probably not enforceable outside state boundaries) -- but only when Pluto is overhead in New Mexico or Illinois.

But wait -- does Pluto ever actually pass overhead in those states?

New Mexico stretches from 31.2 to about 37 degrees latitude, while Illinois spans 36.9 to 42.4. Right now Pluto is in Sagittarius, with a declination of -17° 41'; there's no way anyone in the US is going to see it directly overhead this year. Worse, it's on its way even farther south. It won't cross into the northern hemisphere until the beginning of 2111. But how far north will it go?

My first thought was to add Pluto's inclination -- 17.15 degrees, very high compared to other planets -- to the 23 degrees of the ecliptic to get 40.4°. Way far north -- no problem in either state! But unfortunately it's not as simple as that.

It turns out that when Pluto gets to its maximum north inclination, it's in Bootes (bet you didn't know Bootes was a constellation of the zodiac, did you? It's that 17° inclination that puts Pluto just past the Virgo border). That'll happen in February of 2228.

But in the Virgo/Bootes region, the ecliptic is 8° south of the equator, not 23° north. So we don't get to add 23 and 17; in fact, Pluto's declination will only be about 7.3° north. That's no help!

To find the time when Pluto gets as far north as it's going to get, you have to combine the declination of the ecliptic and the angle of Pluto above the ecliptic. The online JPL HORIZONS simulator is very helpful for running data like that over long periods -- much easier than plugging dates into a planetarium program. HORIZONS told me that Pluto's maximum northern declination, 23.5°, will happen in spring of 2193.

Unfortunately, 23.5° isn't far enough north to be overhead even from Las Cruces, NM. So Pluto, sadly, will never be overhead from either New Mexico or Illinois, and thus by the text of the two measures, it will never be a planet.

With that in mind, I'm asking you to support my campaign to persuade the governments of Ecuador and Hawaii to pass resolutions similar to the New Mexico and Illinois ones. Please give generously -- and hurry, because we need your support before April 1!

Tags: science, astronomy, pluto, humor, writing
[ 19:09 Apr 01, 2009    More science/astro | permalink to this entry ]

The new gtk file selector fstab viewer

When I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid recently, I pulled in a newer GTK+, version 2.14.4. And when I went to open a file in GIMP, I got a surprise: my "bookmarks" were no longer visible without scrolling down.

In the place where the bookmarks used to be, instead was a list of ... what are those things? Oh, I see ... they're all the filesystems listed with "noauto" in my /etc/fstab --the filesystems that aren't mounted unless somebody asks for them, typically by plugging in some piece of hardware.

There are a lot of these. Of course there's one for the CDROM drive (I never use floppies so at some point I dropped that entry). I have another entry for Windows-formatted partitions that show up on USB, like when I plug in a digital camera or a thumb drive. I also have one of those front panel flash card readers with 4 slots, for reading SD cards, memory sticks, compact flash, smart media etc. Each of those shows up as a different device, so I treat them separately and mount SD cards as /sdcard, memory sticks as /stick and so on. In addition, there are entries corresponding to other operating systems installed on this multi-boot machine, and to several different partitions on my external USB backup drive. These are all listed in /etc/fstab with entries like this:

/dev/hdd   /cdrom  udf,iso9660  user,noauto               0  0
/dev/sde1  /pix    vfat         rw,user,fmask=133,noauto  0  0

The GTK developers, in their wisdom, have realized that what the file selector really needs to be. I mean, I was just thinking while opening a file in GIMP the other day,

"Browsing image files on filesystems that are actually mounted is so tedious. I wish I could do something else instead, like view my /etc/fstab file to see a list of unmounted filesystems for which I might decide to plug in an external device."

Clicking on one of the unmounted filesystems (even right-clicking!) gives an error:

Could not mount sdcard
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist

So I guess the intent is that I'll plug in my external drive or camera, then use the gtk file selector from a program like GIMP as the means to mount it. Um ... don't most people already have some way of mounting new filesystems, whether it's an automatic mount from HAL or typing mount in a terminal?

(And before you ask, yes, for the time being I have dbus and hal and fam and gamin and all that crap running.)

The best part

But I haven't even told you the best part yet. Here it is:

If you mount a filesystem manually, e.g. mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt ... it doesn't show up in the list!

So this enormous list of filesystems that's keeping me from seeing my file selector bookmarks ... doesn't even include filesystems that are really there!

Tags: gtk, user interface, humor, linux
[ 11:59 Mar 14, 2009    More linux | permalink to this entry ]

Classic cellphone billboard

On 101 southbound a little south of University Ave in Palo Alto, a new billboard cropped up a month or so ago. It says:

Senator Joe Simitian: Your cell phone law sucks.

Well, that's not ALL it says. Actually, it says quite a lot of other stuff. In small print. So much so that if you actually tried to read it, you'd be virtually guaranteed to veer out of your lane and into another car.

I loved it. It's so classic. For anyone who hasn't heard, California has a new law this year that bans talking on a hand-held cell phone while driving. And honestly, who would think that it was possible to read a billboard like this while driving -- except one of those people who veers their SUV into your lane because they're too immersed in their cellphone conversation to pay attention to the road?

(For a better photo or if you actually want to read the text, the LA Times has the billboard story and photo; here's the Mercury news take, with more details on the 75-word message (no photo).)

Tags: humor, irony, cellphone
[ 20:53 Mar 10, 2009    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Great Advertising

Usually I just delete spam after seeing the subject line. But I couldn't resist one that arrived this morning:

Subject: You'll be saying WOW every time with ShamWow

Wondering whether the seller was familiar with the meaning of the word "sham", I just had to take a look.

I couldn't tell anything from the text -- it was all just random verbiage to try to fool Baysian filters. But the mail also attached two images, img001.png and img002.png. The first was a big grey starburst thing; the second, at 348Kb, was the actual ad (click on it to get the full-sized version; the thumbnail here doesn't do it justice).

There are just so many things to love about this ad, starting with the name "ShamWow" itself. I love the mixture of fonts and bright colors, with the slightly lopsided hourglass shape of the ShamWow! logo. I love the "AS SEEN ON TV" bug -- a charming image that hasn't changed a whit since the 60's, maybe even the 50's. I love the unidentifiable grey and yellow flat things with unreadable text on them -- they look like file folders and folded papers, but they're probably two different colors and sizes of ShamWow -- covered with a square announcing "10 Year [unreadable]", which made me wonder if they were selling auto loans or securities. But if you magnify it you find that the third word is probably "Warranty". I love the presumption that you'll think that 20x the weight of a small cloth object is a lot of water (is it? I have no idea, let me grab a paper towel and a gram scale). I love the blurry red and white "CLICK FOR DETAILS" button.

But what I like best about this image is that it's a PNG but it's full of JPG artifacts. Now, I'm not very picky about jpeg artifacts. (You'd think I would be, as a de-facto GIMP expert, but I'm really not.) I shoot DSLR photos in jpeg rather than raw mode because most of the time the difference just isn't enough for me to care about. I use jpeg for most of the icons on my web site if they don't need transparency, and I lower the jpeg quality level to make them load faster. I'm not a PNG snob (actually, I'm more likely to use GIF than PNG for web icons). But really -- this ad image is a wonderful example of jpeg artifacts and why you can't just turn the quality down arbitrarily far.

I could even understand using extreme jpeg compression because they were sending out a hundred quotillion spam messages and wanted to reduce bandwidth. But they're not sending a jpeg -- they've converted the low-quality JPG back to a 348Kb PNG before sending the spam.

All I can figure is that someone designed the ad and saved it as JPG, making it really small. And then someone in the business saw lbrandy's great cartoon on JPG vs. PNG -- and said "Oh, no! We'd better use PNG instead! And loaded up the JPG and saved it as a PNG with default settings.

(For further reading on PNG vs. JPEG and image file size optimization, you can get an overview of formats at my Image Formats for the Web and some detailed tutorials at the Bandwidth Conservation Society; or chapters 2 and 8 in my GIMP book, soon to be out in its second edition.)

Tags: humor, advertising, gimp
[ 10:54 Nov 14, 2008    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

College Pays

One of the local community colleges sent out glossy flyers advertising their program, with the tag line "College pays for itself; don't put it off!"

To prove how valuable college can be, they include a helpful table showing the "Mediun earnings" for people with various education levels.

West Valley actually has a decent sciences program, and some other interesting programs like Park Management (ranger training). But I suspect I should stay away from their English and Statistics classes.

Tags: humor, education
[ 15:47 Aug 22, 2008    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Paving notice

They're repaving the streets where I live.

They left this flyer on our door to alert us. It's good of them to keep us informed.

I guess they don't want us to ask any questions. It's helpful to know where the cars will be safe.

I wonder when we should start parking somewhere else?

Tags: humor
[ 13:49 Jul 11, 2008    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Not a combination I'd think of

There's a store down the road from me that offers an unusual combination of items. It always makes me stop and wonder when I pass by.

It must be my naivety and lack of marketing accumen, but it never would have occurred to me that cigarettes and pure water were two products that ought to be sold side by side.

The most amazing part is that another store just a few blocks away has started offering the same combination! (Though their sign is much less striking.)

Tags: humor, marketing
[ 22:56 Jul 02, 2008    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Quote of the Week

From a BBC story on the wife of France's president:

She said her husband was so bright he appeared to have "five or even six brains".

Raises all kinds of intriguing followup questions, doesn't it?

Tags: headlines, humor, brains
[ 20:46 Jun 05, 2008    More headlines | permalink to this entry ]

Keyboard Cable by Rube Goldberg

Dave and I were helping out with replacing the keyboard on a friend's computer. Isn't it funny how keyboards never come with cables that are quite long enough to go from the front of a desk to the back, down and around to the computer that sits underneath?

This particular desk has a backboard that makes the cable take a more circuitous path than most, and when we unplugged the old keyboard, we discovered that it was plugged in using an extension cord.

And what an extension cord! It's a PS/2 to 5-pin AT plug adaptor ... connected to an AT to AT extension cable ... connected to an AT to PS/2 cable on the other end. Each of the three pieces is yellowed with age, but to three different colors.

Unfortunately the mass spectrometer is on the fritz again so we weren't able to establish accurate Carbon-14 dates for each of the three pieces.

Tags: humor, hardware
[ 12:09 Mar 29, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

A Curious Advertisement

I encountered the curious ad (shown at right) in the Sunday paper.

The bold text says: "You use parenting instincts every day. Trust the one that says he's not learning the way he should." The small print isn't any clearer: basically, if your child is having trouble learning and might need a different approach, call this phone number right away.

The image shows a spoon, rubber banded to a toy airplane. The spoon is overflowing with ... what? It looks a little like dog kibble, or possibly deer or rabbit droppings. Or slightly furry peas. All I can tell for sure is that the pieces are dark (perhaps brown) and almost but not quite spherical.

And why has one fallen out? Perhaps the pieces of kibble are metaphorical children. And your child has fallen off the spoon, and won't be getting to go for a ride strapped underneath a jet.

So, parents, if your child seems to be struggling in school and you think he or she may need a different approach to learning, don't let your child fall off the spoon! Put some dogfood in the spoon and rubber-band it to a toy plane! Then call the number. Act now, before it's too late!

Maybe if you call early enough, they'll even let you use their spoon and toy plane.

Tags: humor
[ 19:34 Feb 20, 2008    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Shampoo marketing

I bought a new bottle of shampoo. Like many shampoos, its label tries to promote it as a natural, healthy alternative for natural, healthy hair. To this end, it proclaims that it's "enriched with orange fruit extract and provitamin B5".

Leaving aside the question of "What's provitamin B5 and why should it be good to rub it on the outside of a dead keratin layer?", I like the colorful, natural, healthy looking picture on the front of the bottle.

The picture shows two halves of a sliced orange; a wedge of lime; and ... a watermelon?

Now, I know I'm not a botanist, but somehow I'd been unaware up to now that watermelon was a citrus fruit.

Amazing what you can learn simply from browsing the supermarket aisles!

Tags: humor
[ 16:38 Dec 06, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Handicapped parking

The SF Chronicle's solicited reader comments on San Francisco's new parking meter proposal.

My favorite response:

What about the handicapped cars that get to park for free? That needs to stop.

I'm visualizing the poor cars limping in on their flat tires and wobbly CV joints, motors puffing blue smoke ... and then they finally find a place to rest, and ... dang, no hands to put coins in the meter!

Tags: humor
[ 22:50 Oct 14, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Safeway Math

The local Safeway has an interesting exercise in applied consumer mathematics in the sugar aisle.

Sugar cubes come in two sizes. You can get a one-pound box for $1.68, or a two-pound box for $3.86. Of course, the larger size is always a better bargain, right?

Let's check that. 1.68 times two is ... carry the one ... $3.36. Compare to $3.86 for the two-pound box ... um, why exactly should anyone buy the two-pound box instead of two one-pound boxes?

But you don't even have to do the math yourself. Safeway has already calculated the price per ounce and helpfully provides shelf tags giving you the numbers:

You might think this is a one-time oddity, but it's actually been the case for at least a year. In fact, several months ago the price premium for the 2 lb box over the 1 lb actually increased. I guess plenty of consumers are jumping at the chance to buy sugar cubes in the large economy size.

Tags: humor
[ 15:29 Oct 10, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Science Complex

The new semester started last week. I'm taking a class that's held in a new building:

When Dave first saw the building, he laughed. "No wonder they're complaining that fewer students are taking science and math classes -- they're sending the wrong message! They ought to call it 'Science Simple'. Then they'd get lots of students signing up."

Tags: humor
[ 21:12 Sep 14, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Oh, you wanted to use your LCD monitor at one pixel per pixel?

Dave and I are helping my mom shop for a new computer to drive a 22-inch widescreen monitor, 1680x1050 (long story, more on that later). This is how we find ourselves in Circuit City staring at a candidate PC on the lower shelf running a 19-inch widescreen at 1440x900. Unfortunately that's not the resolution we were hoping to check.

There's an unplugged 22-inch LCD on the shelf right above it, just like the one we're trying to get working. A salesguy comes by and ask if we have any questions, so I ask him, "Is there any way we can plug that monitor into this computer to see if it works?" and explain our mission.

He's amenable, and plugs it in, but Windows doesn't notice the new monitor. I try Display Settings but it's still maxed out at 1440x900.

I ask the salesguy, "Can we try rebooting or something? Maybe that'll make Windows see it."

He looks puzzled. "But it's already running a widescreen monitor."

I point to the Display Settings window. "But it's only running at 1440x900, and that's the most it'll let us use."

He says, "Oh, you wanted to run that 22-inch at full resolution?"

Me: "Well, yeah."

Salesguy: "But ... then your text will be small!"

Tags: humor
[ 10:42 Aug 21, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Hydration Research

I don't usually spend a lot of time reading the sides of Diet Coke cartons, but maybe I should. There's some good scholarly writing there. For instance, did you know that, according to the Diet Coke carton,

"It's true. Research shows that all beverages contribute to proper hydration. That means [ ... ] Diet Coke helps you stay hydrated all day long."

I'm visualizing a big laboratory full of spectacled scientists in white lab coats, cages full of lab rats with hanging water bottles filled with hundreds of different beverages. The sign outside the building says "School of Hydration Science".

I wonder which journals publish the peer-reviewed hydration research papers?

Non-diet Coke cartons have almost the same note, except they leave out the "Research shows" part. I wonder if that means the lab rats didn't stay properly hydrated with regular Coke, so they had to toss those data points out of the final paper?

Tags: humor
[ 19:24 Jul 27, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

A Fast Paste Environment

I got email from a recruiter yesterday alerting me to opportunities for "Engineers who are interested to work in a fast paste environment with talented and passionate people!"

The email came from a reputable place and was well targeted, not random spam like a lot of recruiter email. I don't know, though ... It's good that they're talented and passionate, but I've seen (and debugged) code that resulted from fast pastes, and the result is often not pretty. I think I'd prefer to work in a place where they designed the code from scratch rather than just pasting it quickly.

Tags: humor
[ 14:52 Jul 10, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Artificial Hand

What's up with portable radios that get great reception when your hand is on them moving them around, but the minute you let go, the static comes back?

I have a great business idea: some entrepeneur should make an artificial hand you can drape over your radio to get that effect to stay.

(Please no one mail me explaining capacitance. And in fact, it turns out it works pretty well to lean a long metal bar against the wall next to the radio. But I bet people would buy an artificial hand antenna anyway!)

Tags: humor
[ 11:59 Jun 08, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Gnome Knows Best

"Would you take a look at this?" my husband asked. I glanced over -- he was on the Gnome desktop on his newly-installed Debian Etch system, viewing some of his system icons with pho. Specifically, an xchat icon, an X with some text across it.

"So?" I shrugged.

He pointed to his panel. "But it's really using that icon." A little yellow happy-face-with-blob thing.

He right-clicked on the panel icon and brought up a dialog. "See, it should be using /usr/share/pixmaps/xchat.png. Now, I run pho /usr/share/pixmaps/xchat.png ..." And sure enough, the image it said it was using wasn't the image it was actually putting in the panel.

That jogged a memory. "That happened to me once back when I used Gnome. Try a locate xchat | grep png. I think it was using an icon from somewhere else -- that might find it for you."

Sure enough, there were several xchat png images on his system. I suggested going one step further, and actually viewing all of them:

pho `locate xchat | grep png`

We stepped through the images, and sure enough, we found the icon he was seeing. It was at /usr/share/icons/gnome/32x32/apps/xchat.png (with a larger sibling at /usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/apps/xchat.png).

Good of Gnome to pretend let the user customize the icon location, even though it actually doesn't bother to use the icon specified there! At least you get a nice feeling of empowerment from pretending to choose the icon.

Later in the day, continuing to fiddle with the desktop settings, Dave burst out laughing. "You've got to see this. It's so Gnome." When I saw it, I had to laugh too. You may think you know what you want, but Gnome knows better! If you've ever tried to customize Gnome, you'll laugh, too, when you see the short video we took of it: Gnome knows best (764K).

Tags: linux, gnome, humor
[ 18:21 Apr 27, 2007    More linux | permalink to this entry ]

A New Open Source Adventure

I opened the paper and immediately noticed the ad at right.

The ad doesn't include any plot details, but I didn't need them after seeing the ad.

Obviously this must be a movie about two children who boldly install Debian Linux on the family PC, and the adventures that ensue.

Indeed, a check of the official web site -- which I can only read with View Page Source because otherwise all I see is whines about needing Flash 8 -- contains the following synopsis:

Based on the acclaimed science fiction short story by Lewis Padgett, The Last Mimzy tells the story of two children who discover a mysterious box that contains some strange devices they think are toys. As the children play with these 'toys,' they begin to display higher and higher intelligence levels. Their teacher tells their parents that they seem to have grown beyond genius.

Cool, finally a Linux movie! (You can see the Debian logo at Wikimedia if you're not already familiar with it.)

Tags: humor
[ 20:57 Mar 17, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Appropriate Starch

Holder's County Inn, a local diner chain, has new menus. All dinner entrees now come with choice of soup or salad, fresh vegetables, and "appropriate starch."

Invoking Dave Barry, I thought, wouldn't that be a great name for a band?

Or perhaps a phrase to save for fiction writing. "Sir," she replied with appropriate starch, "your participles are dangling."

Tags: humor
[ 10:36 Mar 13, 2007    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Math Skills

I just got back from the local Safeway, where a one-pound box of sugar cubes costs $1.49.

A two-pound box, same brand, is $3.99.

What a deal!

Even better, the two-pound price is up: it used to be $3.49 a few months ago (no change in the one-pound price).

I guess too many people were jumping on that incredible $3.49 deal, so they had to raise it.

Tags: science, humor
[ 16:25 Jul 26, 2006    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Precision

On my wall I have a calendar with pretty pictures of wolves, and assorted wolf facts for each month. July features a wolf howling. In the lists of facts is:

If conditions are right a wolf's howl can carry 10 miles / 16.09 kilometers.

I wonder why wolves are so much more precise when they're howling in metric?

Tags: humor
[ 17:09 Jul 09, 2006    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Carrot Nanotubes

I put a "baby carrot" out on the door ledge to see if the squirrels might like it. (In summer, we're not getting many squirrel visits. There must be something pretty yummy growing in the neighborhood. Notch comes by every second or third day, eats a few pieces of walnut then waits expectantly for take-up (a whole walnut she can take away and bury). A male youngster we suspect is Notch's also comes by every day or two, to eat a few nuts and drink water. We haven't seen Nonotchka for months, and I fear the worst.)

Turns out squirrels have zero interest in carrots. We put the carrotlet into the nut dish and forgot about it for a few days, and discovered something interesting: carrot raisins!

Turns out carrots are mostly water, and they shrink even more than grapes when you let them dry out.

I'm going to let it dry out some more and see what happens. I'm hoping for fame and fortune as the first person to create carrot nanotubes.

Tags: humor
[ 09:32 Jul 07, 2006    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Who Says GIMP Skills Can't be Profitable?

Slate's "Today's Papers" column brings us word of a Wall Street Journal article (alas, subscribers-only) describing a new service: Friends Beyond the Wall Photos. For a small fee, an image from a prison photo can be combined with photos of families, vacations, or posh cars to make it look like you've been on holiday with the kids rather than behind bars! No more need to explain why those visiting room photos have such a drab background!

And here I thought learning GIMP skills was just an amusing hobby.

Tags: humor
[ 20:41 Jan 07, 2006    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Zeno's Stump

A house down the street just sold. It had an interesting large tree in the front yard, some sort of yucca: an odd looking desert tree with several thick branching trunks, spiky bayonet leaves and sometimes big clumps of white flowers.

The new owners apparently didn't like the stark desert tree. No sooner had the For Sale signs come down than a crew was at work with chainsaws.

The upper parts of the trunks, and all the foliage, were quickly cut off and tossed in the street. Then the real chainsaw games began.

It turns out that the trunks of this tree (at least four trunks, connected at the base) are each quite a bit larger in diameter than a chainsaw's blade. Even going from both sides, a chainsaw can't really cut through them.

It's been a couple of weeks since the top bits of the yucca tree got dragged away. Every day, we hear chainsaws in the late morning, and chainsaws again for a while in the afternoon, as workers whittle at the tops and edges of the stump containing the bases of the four trunks. Every time I go by, the stump has gotten a little smaller: a few inches here, a few inches there. Chips and slivers of wood join the pile in the street by the curb. Hand saws and axes sit wedged at strategic places in the stump.

I'm finally seeing Zeno's Paradox in action. You remember Zeno's paradox? You're trying to get from A to B in a finite time: so first you must go half the distance, which also takes a finite time. But to do that, you must first go half that distance; and since you can divide the distances in half infinitely, you can never get to the finishing line, because it would take an infinite number of finite time intervals.

The pile of wood by the curb gets larger every time I look.

And yet ... somehow Zeno's Stump doesn't look any smaller.

Tags: humor
[ 21:09 Jun 07, 2005    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Me, as an icon

Me! From the Abi-Station Icon generator.

Tags: humor
[ 18:40 Feb 19, 2005    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Bentonite Magma!

Reading the ingredients on a bottle of calamine lotion turned up something interesting.

Funny, it didn't feel quite that hot going on!

(And yes, calamine implies that my earlier comment about poison oak being gone only means that the visible leaves are gone. Oops! Current theory is that it happened when Dave touched the baby newt while moving it off the trail, and that the newt had been crawling in poison oak. Though it's slightly possible that it could have been the newt itself: it turns out that California newts are indeed poisonous, though only if you eat them. From that page: When a predator approaches the newt strikes a warning posture showing its brightly colored underside. This is a warning that the newt is poisonous. If the predator continues the newt will secrete white milky oil out of the skin on its back. If the predator eats the newt, the predator will die quickly from the poison. The newt will then crawl back out of the animal's mouth and continue on its way. )

Unrelated to newts or poison oak is another humorous picture I took a while ago and have been meaning to upload: No Swimming.

Tags: humor
[ 10:55 Nov 19, 2004    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Windows XP Starter Edition

The new XP Starter Edition only allows three apps to run simultaneously.

Do viruses and spyware count toward your limit?

"We're sorry, but you can't log in, because you've already reached your process limit."

Tags: humor
[ 18:40 Aug 17, 2004    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Great joke from Yosh

Q: What's the difference between Kerry and bin Laden?

A: Bush is willing to cut short his August vacation to stop Kerry.

Tags: humor
[ 09:34 Jul 19, 2004    More humor | permalink to this entry ]

Doggerel

Carla (I think it was Carla, anyway, under a differnt nick) got foulmouthed on #debian-women tonight. She was quoting a line from a doggerel song:

When you're sliding into home, and your pants are full of foam, diarrhea.

I thought that was gross, so I countered with:

When you wish your bird was blue, and there's nothing left to do, dye a rhea.

Later, she posted another line:

When you're running up to first, and your stomach's going to burst, diarrhea.

So I countered with

When you need to make a plot, and Illustrator you have not, dia free-a.

Tags: humor
[ 20:00 Jul 10, 2004    More humor | permalink to this entry ]