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Vlad!
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« Reply #840 on: December 15, 2009, 04:33:27 PM » |
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The thing I like about Wolfram Alpha--in contrast to Google--is that it is designed to give answers. If you type "how many calories are in a jellybean" into Google, it will link you to some crappy Yahoo! Answers page where you have some guy going "Five or six. I totally used to work for Jelly Belly".
(I have a plugin that lists Wolfram Alpha search results side by side with Google search results. Usually I just laugh at the Alpha results, but sometimes they're more useful than the Google ones).
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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eatenbytehworms
Inphrequent Poster
Posts: 67
Stolen Water is Sweet
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« Reply #841 on: December 15, 2009, 06:20:40 PM » |
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I applied Early Decision to Columbia with ambitions of the Columbia-Juilliard Exchange and got rejected. I never liked Juilliard in the first place, and now I don't need to bother working my butt off for it. I also applied Early Action to University of Chicago and got deferred today. For one supplement, I wrote one paragraph about Radiohead's Paranoid Android and another on Schubert's Piano Sonata D.960 in Bb. Two of my favorite schools don't want me.  i really hope a great school that I like and that has good financial aid will accept me. the only school i'm sure i'll get into is my state school (Delaware), which is good, but not great. to quote something from a friend "God has three answers to prayer: 1) Yes. 2) Not yet. 3) I have something better in mind!" |
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Vlad!
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« Reply #842 on: December 15, 2009, 08:19:52 PM » |
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Your closing quote pretty much neatly sums up my reaction. I got rejected by my top choice too, but I ended up loving the school I went to, it led me to a great job, great friends, a great place to live, and a great church. If I could tell my applying-for-college self one thing, it would be to chill out and not stress about things I have no control over. I realize this advice pretty much sucks when you're in the middle of it, but you can find a way to make your education yours regardless of where you go.
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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bethany
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« Reply #843 on: December 16, 2009, 11:14:49 AM » |
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Interesting fact...I have a friend who worked in admissions at the university here (hint: it's Catholic and its football team sucks), and this friend told me that unless you're pretty sure you're the absolute cream of the crop of applicants across the nation, it's actually better to apply with the regular admission deadline, rather than the early admisison deadline. Apparently all the super over-achievers apply early, and the admissions officers sort out the top x% of those students, accept them, and reject the rest (and once they're rejected, they can't re-apply for the regular admission). Whereas they still reserve a certain number of places for the regular pool of applicants coming in later, and you would have a much better chance standing out amongst the pool of regular applicants than the early applicants.
I thought that was rather fascinating.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #844 on: December 16, 2009, 12:39:29 PM » |
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Wow, that really is interesting. It seems backward to deny application to someone who's already demonstrated that he's super-excited about your university to let in someone who's taking the "quantity over quality" approach that most students do. But the folks in South Bend have been dealing with the problem of how to vet a large quantity of qualified applicants for longer than I've been alive, so they probably have empirical reasons to back up their reasoning.
(Then again, they also thought hiring Charlie Weiss would be a good idea, so who knows?)
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #845 on: December 23, 2009, 08:56:43 AM » |
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I think the word 'great', when used as a statement (Great. I'm so happy) has almost been killed by sarcasm, at least for me. Whenever I write it like that and then read over it again, I can't help but read it in a sarcastic mental voice. I just got the following e-mail:
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The document you referenced does not affect us, so we will decline to provide comments. Thanks.
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I initially typed
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Great. Thanks for the quick reply.
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But I read over it and to me it sounded ambiguous, like maybe I was upset that he didn't have any comments and was being sarcastic about it. So I changed the 'great' to 'excellent', which sounded better (if perhaps more superlative) and sent it.
(I could have written 'great!', but for some reason that felt too unprofessional).
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Vlad!
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« Reply #846 on: January 05, 2010, 07:35:16 PM » |
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So a while ago I stopped using shampoo, in favor of apple cider vinegar. There are many reasons, but the final straw was one memorably awful bottle of shampoo that turned my hair into a complete frizzball, smelled like feet, and left an itchy residue on my scalp. Being cheap, I decided to cut my losses by putting the bottle of shampoo in my guest bathroom.
Today I just got an e-mail from a houseguest I hosted over the weekend. It says:
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super odd question: that shampoo in ur upstairs bathroom...i went to buy some today and they have that same thing for normal hair or for dry and damaged hair. would u be so kind as to let me know what it says on the bottle? i know LOL. but i like that shampoo.
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Yeah.
(If he had just told me before he left I would have given him the bottle).
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« Reply #847 on: January 05, 2010, 08:15:40 PM » |
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heh.
I've been washing my hair with dissolved baking soda and a vinegar rinse for almost two years now, and I like the results. I used to skip the vinegar, but the baking soda alone makes my hair feel rough and unruly.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #848 on: January 06, 2010, 12:33:04 PM » |
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I don't think that using vinegar makes my hair look notably good, but it makes it feel clean and doesn't completely destroy it like shampoo does. It's also a lot cheaper, involves fewer noxious chemicals (or no noxious chemicals at all unless you consider vinegar itself to be noxious), and is available in bulk. I used baking soda while I was transitioning to absorb the excess oil that my scalp (which was used to having all its natural oils stripped away each morning by the shampoo) produced, but once I achieved equilibrium I stopped using it unless for whatever reason my hair feels particularly greasy that morning.
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« Reply #849 on: January 10, 2010, 10:38:07 PM » |
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My dryer decided to commit what appears to be electronic seppuku, so I've been doing some research on clothes dryers to see where the state of the art is. The traditional clothes dryer sucks in air from its surroundings, heats it up to very hot, runs it through the clothes while they're tumbling around, and then sends the air through a vent to the outside. This has the virtue of working, for the most part, but it tends to bake your clothes and is quite possibly the most inefficient way to dry them. (Technically speaking, putting your clothes out in the sun to dry is probably the most inefficient way to dry them from a pure-energy standpoint, but since all that energy was just going to warm the ground or your house anyway, might as well use it to dry your clothes). A couple years ago this guy came along and developed a way to use heated oil rather than electrical coils to heat the air. This requires far less energy and is far more efficient. It also keeps the entire mechanism after the "heat the air" part the same, which is either a plus or a minus depending on your point of view. I don't know if US dryer manufacturers are testing it out or if they're trying their hardest to pretend like the technology doesn't exist. It's also possible, for houses with gas hookups, to get a gas powered dryer, but since air is one of the most inefficient heat transfer media available, you might as well just try to blow-dry your clothes using only the air from your lungs. A while back I saw something Joe Kissell wrote about ventless dryers (he originally wrote it in '04, actually, but I think I read it early last year). Ventless dryers work in approximately the same way a household dehumidifier works: by heating the air, running it over the clothes, and then cooling the air to condense the water the hot air picked up. This has many advantages, such as being able to do the washing and drying in a single machine, being very energy-efficient (at the cost of water efficiency), and not requiring a vent. Unfortunately, they tend to take approximately three and a half days to finish a load smaller than your average laundry load, and since it's all in one machine then any parallelism you might have from two machines is gone. I suppose it's great that people who live in old houses or downtown multi-story apartment buildings with no vents can still have indoor laundry facilities, but everything I've found suggests that if you already have a vent, getting a ventless would be a very bad move. Perhaps the coolest thing I found was a spin dryer. The spin dryer is cool because it uses a purely mechanical mechanism for drying clothes. The upside is that it does what it does very well: it will spin a well-balanced load of clothes up to a very high rotational speed, essentially squeezing the water out of the load by brute force. The downside is that it doesn't completely dry the clothes. Anecdotal evidence suggests that once the clothes have been spun dry they should dry out the rest of the way fairly easily, and even line-drying them indoors isn't out of the question (in front of a window is a good idea, since it should get the sun in summertime, and vents tend to be close to windows for wintertime). Even if you have a conventional dryer, a spin dryer should add efficiency by reducing drying time and the load on the tumbler motor. However, if you're in a situation like me (no working dryer at all), a spin dryer isn't going to solve your problem. I could conceivably buy a spin dryer and try indoor line drying, but I suppose this would primarily lead to damp, rumpled, or stiff clothes. I could also buy a spin dryer and thus have the freedom to get a weaker electric dryer which wouldn't have to work as hard, but if I'm buying a new dryer anyway it seems reasonable to just go ahead and buy one dryer rather than two. If you pholks know of any fancy drying technology that I've missed (and yes, I know that there's outdoor line drying, but that's time-consuming and makes doing laundry in the winter something of a dicey proposition), please enlighten me! |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #850 on: January 16, 2010, 09:51:38 AM » |
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A couple weeks ago I went to a dance for New Year's Eve. I wore a suit coat but under it I wore a flowered Hawaiian shirt, because that seemed like the appropriate mix of dress-casual and formal. However, at the last minute I got worried that the event organizers--who had put a lot of time and effort into the party--would somehow be offended by my attire. So before heading out the door I grabbed a white shirt from my closet and threw it in my car. I figured I would scope out the other attendees and talk with the guy in charge to make sure he was cool with it, and if it seemed prudent I would switch.
As it turned out, I received several compliments on my unorthodox mode of dress, including from the head honcho himself.
Today when I was getting set to do laundry [1], I said to myself "why is my lab coat in my clothes hamper?". Then the gears clicked into place. I guess it's a good thing I didn't need that backup white "shirt"!
[1] Still working out the dryer situation...in the meantime I have a clothes drying rack and a heating vent...
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #851 on: January 25, 2010, 12:18:48 PM » |
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After at least 8 years, the battery in my watch finally died. I've worn a watch since third grade, which not coincidentally was the first grade where I had to go to a different classroom at a certain time, making it advantageous to know what time it was. Thus, I have rediscovered the fact that I have no conception of time whatsoever, since I have grown used to glancing at my watch to determine the time.
(My phone, which I am in the process of weaning my friends off using so I can leave it in my car, is intentionally a piece of junk and will often display the wrong time when I open it until it updates itself. I realized my lack of time perception when, after church was over, I opened my phone to see it displaying 10:05am and didn't see anything wrong with that until it flickered and updated to 12:15pm.)
I thought I might use this as an excuse to buy a new watch, but all the watches I've found have seemed inferior to my current watch. My watch has three features that make it very nice:
* The display's appearance is very smooth because it's designed to display both numbers and text, so it uses a lot of little LCD dots rather than big chunky LCD bars
* It displays the date information all in one place and tells me the day, the date, and the month (it also tells me the year, but I'm not that temporally oblivious).
* It has a back button for setting the time, so setting the time back doesn't involve going all the way around.
Point #1 stems from the fact that my watch is an anachronism from before the ubiquity of cell phones, so it stores phone numbers. This feature was fairly useless even before the era of the mobile, but nowadays it's almost laughably out of date. However, it has the side effect that every other watch I can find has a display that looks old and clunky.
(I realize that analog watches avoid this problem, but I don't like analog watches. Yes, I know, I obsess about the stupidest details).
Looks like I'll be getting the battery replaced in this watch instead. Here's to another eight years.
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #852 on: January 31, 2010, 10:00:41 PM » |
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I got a new microphone a while back as part of my VoIP adventures. I amused myself for about fifteen minutes today reading Internet posts aloud with the inflections I assumed the authors intended to put there. I should really do this with my own posts before I submit them, in the theory that it will reduce some of my tortured, circuitous syntax. Then again, I did that with this post, so obviously it's no silver bullet. |
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« Last Edit: February 02, 2010, 07:48:48 PM by Vlad! »
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #853 on: January 31, 2010, 10:11:42 PM » |
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 ( here is a recording of me laughing this post out loud.) |
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Vlad!
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« Reply #854 on: February 03, 2010, 08:25:52 AM » |
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Here are two (potentially) brilliant ideas I've had percolating in my brain for a while now. I've decided that I don't have the time or the motivation to implement either of these, so I am generously giving them away. If they make you a million dollars then buy me lunch sometime.
1. An exchange system where the average citizen can buy stock in upcoming movies. Basically, it's crowdsourcing the role of the producer. The writer/director can reveal as much or as little of the plot and characters as he wants, but people would be able to browse their initial pitches and then give money in exchange for stock. As production continues, trading will heat up as it becomes increasingly obvious how well or poorly the movie will do. Once the movie is released, the director and producer pay out the profits to the stockholders (for example, if the movie grossed $100m and it sold 10m shares, each share would be worth $10). Anybody paid on a contingent basis (such as the traditional producer) would receive stock, sort of like company owners and founders do today.
2. A diet pill that works by damping the taste buds so they can't taste effectively. This would keep the brain's neurotransmitters from triggering, essentially forcing the person off the 'food addiction' that has probably led to obesity. Once the person has reached target weight, he or she can come off the pills slowly (so things that used to taste like cardboard don't suddenly taste like heroin mixed with cocaine mixed with fried unicorn nuggets).
I don't even know if people have tried and failed (or are trying and succeeding) to implement these ideas already; finding that out is part of the effort I don't feel like expending.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #855 on: February 06, 2010, 07:36:47 AM » |
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A couple nights ago I played Pictionary with some friends. One of the words was 'matinée", but one friend (who is usually smarter than this) drew a manatee. His excuse? "When I was a child, manatees were my favorite animal. I love manatees".
We were literally ROFL over that one.
(There was also a round where my teammate drew a corset when she was supposed to draw a corsage, but since the opposing team drew a boutonnière rather than a corsage then the handicap was about equal and we ended up winning that round).
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
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Vlad!
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« Reply #856 on: February 10, 2010, 04:08:04 PM » |
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One of the favorite parts of my non-job [1] as assistant college recruiter for Virginia Tech is sitting on a panel in front of an actual class. This is a class called Professionalism in Computing, a class which I took when I was there. In fact, when I'm doing the panel the professor teaching the class is often the same guy that I took the class from, a very chill professor named Dr. Dan Dunlap, who wins the name alliteration award.
In any case, the class (comprised primarily of juniors with some seniors) asks questions to a panel of several company representatives. The questions range from insightful to idiotic, but usually there's at least one question per class that I feel lets me really lay it out to the students and tell them what I wish someone had told me when I was in that class.
One of the more interesting questions I got this time was as follows:
"I'm a senior, set to graduate in May. I don't have any internships or part-time jobs in computer science. What do you recommend I do to make myself appear more attractive as a prospect?"
I jumped on this question, although I first had to resist the urge to say "well, you're boned".
My response:
"Recruiters want you to let your work do the talking, and what we really want to see is you being passionate about something you've done. Because of this, your number one goal should be to produce some work that will talk for you. Internships and part-time jobs are a great way to do this, but they aren't the only way. In your circumstance, I recommend finding a project you love and running with it for all it's worth. I don't care if it's an open-source project that you contribute to, a charity that needs some computer work done, or just a program you've written that does something cool and useful.
"When I talk with you, one of my first questions is going to be "tell me about something cool that you've done". What I'm hoping will happen is that your face will light up and you'll start ranting about some super cool game you wrote or all the contributions you've made to the Linux kernel or the website you designed for a local church. I don't even care if it's related to what we do. We can teach you technology, but we can't teach you passion."
I reproduce this question and answer here because I feel like it's more generally applicable than just to people looking for a job in computer science. It may be easier to enact in CS because there are so many opportunities to prove your passion, but if you're an accountant looking for that first job, saying "I volunteered to do the taxes for my church because they were complicated and the normal staff couldn't handle it" will definitely set you above the rest.
[1] I say non-job because it's technically not my job. I just do it because they let me.
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« Reply #857 on: February 22, 2010, 07:22:00 PM » |
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This morning I walked into my garage to find my brake lights on. Yes, the amateur auto repair I did several months ago finally failed. Q: What does an engineer do when the duct tape fails? A: Use more duct tape. I got another wad of cardboard and another strip of duct tape and now it's working again. Any more tape and cardboard and it might actually start pressing the brake down at the wrong time (if it fails again I suppose I'll actually devote more than five minutes to the repair by finding a suitable piece of scrap metal, grinding it down, and duct taping that to the lever). |
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« Reply #858 on: March 03, 2010, 10:37:28 AM » |
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In C, if you want to include file b inside file a, you put "#include <file.b>" inside file a. This is fine, but different people read the # in different ways, as we discussed before. Although we understand and live with this, it gets kind of awkward when you have one person saying "pound include" and one person saying "hash include" and yet a third person saying "sharp include", all in the same conversation. |
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« Reply #859 on: March 11, 2010, 10:08:35 AM » |
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Regular phorumers will know that I have an unnatural phascination with CAPTCHAs. Joe Stirt posted a CAPTCHA on his weblog today that I actually suspect would be effective at keeping both humans and computers out. Actually, I suspect that computers would be better at solving that CAPTCHA than humans, assuming they could properly OCR that equation. (I have a math minor and I wasn't sure what the integral sign with the circle in it means. I looked online, and I saw that "a line integral is the integral of a function of two or more independent variables along a given path between two points in the domain of definition". Well, okay then!) |
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« Last Edit: January 27, 2012, 05:34:38 PM by Vlad! »
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« Reply #860 on: March 15, 2010, 10:58:05 AM » |
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The vagaries of the English language never cease to amuse me. From the Amazon product description for Infinite Space: == From the same creative minds that brought you Steel Battalion, PlatinumGames and Nude Maker, have once again joined forces to bring you Infinite Space... == Obviously this is a broken sentence either way, but I read "Steel Battalion, PlatinumGames and Nude Maker" as a list of games missing the Oxford comma. I was like "I've heard of Steel Battalion, but why would you name a game PlatinumGames, and why would a reputable company like Sega publish a game called Nude Maker?". This sentence clearly needs the word 'from' removed, but I'm not sure if that would alleviate or compound my confusion. I think I would have written it: == PlatinumGames and Nude Maker, the same creative minds that brought you Steel Battalion, have once again joined forces to bring you Infinite Space... == Amazon, if you want to hire me as a part-time copy editor, I'm available to work evenings... |
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« Reply #861 on: March 22, 2010, 06:51:54 PM » |
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Security is important. But too much security is almost as bad as too little, because then people bypass it.
Two examples:
For some reason, our voicemail system at work requires me to change my voicemail password every 60 days. Since I get a voicemail maybe three times a year, I always have to change it when I have a voicemail, increasing my annoyance level considerably. I'm not sure why my password has to be 6 digits or longer and changed every two months. In any case, my password is written on a sticky note and stuck to my phone.
I have a desktop widget (or "plasmoid", as it's called) that displays my agenda as taken from Google Calendar. I then have a program running that synchronizes my Outlook calendar at work with my personal calendar to give me a nice snapshot of my upcoming day. For some reason, this thing requires me to store my Google account password locally (despite the fact that I end up having to type it in every time anyway). To prove to me that it's storing the password securely, it uses KWallet, a password-security system. So I set up a "wallet" with a master password...and then the next time I rebooted (like a month later), it asked me for my password, and I had no clue. So I deleted that wallet (yeah, great security, I can delete the wallet even though I don't know the password) and created a new one called "the_password_is_foo". Of course, I set the password to "foo".
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« Reply #862 on: March 26, 2010, 10:23:21 PM » |
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Time for the Rambling Thought o' the Day(tm).
I was going to file this under "things people do that make no sense", but I think it does sort of make sense, but the amount of sense it makes depends on which way you're looking at it, which now that I think about it is pretty much how most issues are.
One of the things that kind of bugs me is when people look at any system, but especially a software system, and say "why don't they just fix it?". Now, I do this all the time and I know it's hypocritical of me, but as a professional software developer this kind of gets to me.
Possibly one thing that people don't realize is that the rank-and-file engineers and software developers who are actually making the product sometimes want to fix these annoying problems just as much as you want them fixed, but they can't because they don't have enough time. At work right now my manager has a schedule that goes from now until August that describes what it is that I'm supposed to be doing. It's an aggressive schedule, so the bottom line is that if something isn't on the schedule, it's not going to get done. I was going to write "the only way for it to get done is for me to work late or work on the weekend", but I do often work late and have worked on the weekend before and that's been just to try and get ahead on my normal tasks.
I'm not saying this to complain, because I have a super awesome job and I love it and it would be really self-centered to complain, but to explain why it is that engineers don't necessarily have time to fix the annoying problems--it's because they're spending a lot of their time creating new problems features and the only time there is for bugfixes are the ones the cause your cat to catch on fire or your computer to become a portal to the underworld (which I think is a bug that's been around in Windows for so long they've started calling it a feature).
The other problem--and the one that is at least partly the fault of the engineers--is that the managers are often out of touch with customer pain. The big issues get fixed because customers make a lot of noise. But managers often don't really use the product that they're managing the creation of, or at least don't use it as much as the real customers do. So even though the engineers might know about the annoying bugs, the managers don't. In my company we handle this pretty well because the technical leads have a lot of say regarding which bugs get fixed (and of course we use our own product, known as "eating your own dogfood", so we all have a pretty good idea where the pain points are), but not all companies are like this.
Anyway, that's my Rant I Wrote Before Bed and Will Probably Regret the Next Morning.
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #863 on: March 29, 2010, 08:16:13 PM » |
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awhile back Vlad! had posted about cultural phrases in this here thread. I just came across a blog entry that said this: One of my friends from The Johnsonian staff said he has thought of some words and expressions to teach me.
He asked me if I knew what stick in the mud was.
Nope.
It’s like party pooper, he said.
I had no idea what party pooper was.
“Ok, good night,” he said, giving up teaching his Englishless friend.
It’s like downer, another friend said, after my first friend had given up.
No success. I didn’t know what downer meant.
I understood that stick in the mud, party pooper and downer were synonyms.
But that was it.
A very patient third friend explained to me that the three words can be used to describe people who say they are going out but always find an excuse for not going.
She also said that stick in the mud can be stubborn and that downer can be pessimistic.
Party pooper in Portuguese is couch and cookies (describing a person who is stuck in the couch eating cookies). to me, a "party pooper" is someone who ruins gatherings just by being there, a "stick in the mud" is a boring/traditional person who doesn't want to do anything new/fun, and a "downer" makes everybody sad. I wouldn't feel good to be called any of the above. but I would be okay with "couch and cookies". omnomnom. |
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Vlad!
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« Reply #864 on: March 31, 2010, 04:24:27 PM » |
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My favorite phrase is still the one I cited in the aforementioned post: "You can't have the bottle full and the girl drunk". (I wonder if he understood what his friend meant by saying "good night"). |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #865 on: April 05, 2010, 06:16:21 PM » |
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A haiku, dedicated to the state of North Carolina:
red car is yellow
and so are my sinuses
pollen season sucks
That is all
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #866 on: April 12, 2010, 11:50:48 PM » |
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I hadn't been to freerice.com for a while and just now noticed that there is a category for chemical symbols. I cannot even get past level 1 of the basic mode.  (I've never taken any sort of chemistry class. I like fake periodic tables but know next to nothing about the real one.) |
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Vlad!
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« Reply #867 on: April 13, 2010, 09:20:48 AM » |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #868 on: May 02, 2010, 10:20:59 PM » |
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I visited Charlotte this weekend, and I note that the roads there are in general more confusing than those in Raleigh or even Cary. I'm sure there's a certain amount of bias because I live here and am at least slightly familiar with the roads here, but it seems like the civil engineers and city planners in charge of laying out Charlotte's road system were inspired by the pretzel. And I'm not talking about the straight pretzel stick kind (I am speaking specifically of the 77/277 interchange around which we spent most of our time, and which generally involves a series of merges and onramps-onto-offramps that even confused our GPS half the time). I think someone might have mentioned before that even when you get to the part that pretends to be laid out like a sane grid, all the roads run northwest to southeast and northeast to southwest rather than anything sane like cardinal directions. (A Charlottean friend suggested that I try to find out why the city is called the Queen City. At the end of my trip I suggested that it's because in chess the queen can move in any which way, a trait necessary to navigate Charlotte's road system.) |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #869 on: May 07, 2010, 01:14:17 PM » |
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As was previously documented, I freaking love Fresca. I only rarely drink it at work these days, but there are some days where a dude needs his Fresca. I used to work on the third floor of building 1, and only the fourth and first floor vending machines had Fresca. I would walk up the stairs to the fourth floor just to get my Fresca fix. When I moved into building 2, none of the floors had Fresca. I complained to our product manager (whose job title doubles as Team Mom, because she handles things like vending machine inventory as well), and she got the vending machine closest to me loaded up with Fresca. So now floor 2 of building 2 is the only floor in building 2 with Fresca. Well, except for today, because it's out of Fresca. I'm proud of myself because instead of walking over to building 1, I just got water. I'm going to pretend like it's because I'm health-conscious and not because I'm lazy and it's about one billion degrees outside. |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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enemy anemone
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« Reply #870 on: May 08, 2010, 02:26:08 PM » |
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is it not practical and/or more cost-effective to bring your own Fresca?
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Vlad!
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« Reply #871 on: May 08, 2010, 02:41:39 PM » |
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is it not practical and/or more cost-effective to bring your own Fresca?
Soft drinks are subsidized by the company, so no  |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #872 on: May 10, 2010, 01:33:43 PM » |
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Conclusive proof that I am, in fact, an idiot: Since we're coming up on the tail end of a huge project at work, my manager asked all of us to schedule our vacations in advance. This seems lame, but since he could just as easily told us that we weren't even allowed to take vacations then I kept the complaining to a minimum. Anyway, I figured I'd need a break sometime around Mayish, so I requested a Monday off this month. When I requested the day off, for some reason it showed up as zero hours. I double-checked that it wasn't already a holiday, and even re-requested the same day off again to make sure. Then I said, oh, well, free day. Today I checked to remind myself which day I had off. And I discovered that I had not in fact requested a Monday off but instead a Sunday. Complete self-ownage. At least the tool (being smarter than I am) didn't deduct any vacation days from my pool . |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #873 on: May 29, 2010, 12:51:51 PM » |
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At one point, I remember reading the following question in an online computer help forum:
"I formatted my drive with NTFS, and now my computer is slower. Does it just have to get used to it?"
This reminded me of the following quote from Charles Babbage:
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. "
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Aaron
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« Reply #874 on: June 01, 2010, 08:41:27 AM » |
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*pops in* HI! *pops out*
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Vlad!
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« Reply #875 on: June 01, 2010, 09:27:44 AM » |
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*pops in* HI! *pops out*
Hi, O Wandering One. If you have time and feel comfortable making an update, feel free to fill us in on your status in this thread. |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Aaron
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« Reply #876 on: June 01, 2010, 09:33:59 AM » |
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the time I do have. I'm not comfortable about things yet but keep up the prayers. They are appreciated!
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Vlad!
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« Reply #877 on: June 14, 2010, 09:03:36 AM » |
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My A/C unit konked out yesterday ( yes, I know), and the repair people in Durham I decided to go with turn out to have also been the guys that the previous owner of my house chose when the A/C died during his stay. Small world. |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #878 on: June 21, 2010, 02:30:18 PM » |
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Rather than doing my actual job, I have spent the past quarter-hour or so reading this. It has many amusing quotes, but I was laughing out loud at this one: "My good friend Rob rightly informs me that this course of action does not strictly speaking "destroy" the Earth - there is no actual destruction event in which the Earth goes from existing to not existing. What one ends up with instead is a universe in which the Earth does not and never did exist. "Destroying Rob proved remarkably easy." |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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Vlad!
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« Reply #879 on: June 23, 2010, 11:10:32 PM » |
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After changing a friend's tire my hands got really dirty. I happened to be wearing a couple of band-aids (I seem to hurt my fingers a lot), and I took them off before I washed my hands. The difference was, erm, striking:  |
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If you don’t have freedom as a principle, you can never see a reason not to make an exception. There are constantly going to be times when for one reason or another there’s some practical convenience in making an exception.
rms
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