Category: Blog

From a discussion on Kuro5hin about privacy and supermarket cards:

*ring*ring*
“Mmm, hello??”
“Hello, could I speak with Mr. Chapman, please?”
“This is he”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Chapman, how are you today?”
“Mmm, ok…is this a telemar..”
“I’ll be brief Mr. Chapman. This is Safeway(tm) foods calling. Our computer shows that you’ve recently moved to San Francisco, is that correct?”
“Um…yea, I suppose so.”
“And that you’ve been here for more than 30 days, is that correct?”
“I guess. What’s this about?”
“As per public ordinance 89.5T/9, you have thirty days from establishing residence in the Bay Area to apply for a Safeway food club card. Failure to do so can result in a fine of no less that $40.95 and possible jail time of up to seventeen minutes. We strongly recommend that you correct the situation immediately.”
“Excuse me??”
“We don’t play games here in San Francisco, Mr. Chapman. This is your only warning.”
“But I don’t even shop at Safeway.”
“That sort of attitude will NOT win you any favors with the judges in this district Mr. Chapman. If this matter is not corrected, you will be visited by the San Francisco Police Department, Safeway division.”
“Uh..”
“You can fill out an application at any Safeway, Ikea over Oakland, Pacific Bell’s main branch or one of any number of Starbucks coffeehouses in the lower peninsula. Have a nice day and remember. We own you.”

I also liked this one:

“The first rule about Ralph’s Club is…don’t talk about Ralph’s Club.”

…in case [Diet] Mountain Dew Code Red doesn’t give you enough of a lift in the morning…

If you’re actually checking here for updates, I guess you’ve noticed none recently. This is due to Cybertel billing week – where I shuffle data for a week to try to get the bills to come out right. That and the holiday weekend (on Friday, I straightened up the servers at the office, on Saturday I cleaned my garage!). In any case, more rants to come soon.

Today at work we were discussing the phonetic alphabet to use when spelling things out over the phone. The one I’m used to is (I’ve learned) NATO standard from 1954:

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu

But there are others used by police, military, etc. The linked article gives some interesting history. You may prefer, for example, to use RAF 1942-43:

Apple Beer Charlie Dog Edward Freddy George Harry Ink
Jug/Johnny King Love Mother Nuts Orange Peter Queen
Roger/Robert Suga Tommy Uncle Vic William X-ray Yoke/Yorker
Zebra

…or Esperanto:

Asfalto Barbaro Centimetro Doktoro Elemento Fabriko Girafo Hotelo Insekto Jubileo Kilogramo Legendo Masino Naturo Oktobro Papero Rekordo Salato Triumfo Universo Universo-hoko Vulkano Zinko

Happy Ward Cleaver Day! (Today’s the day we get to say goodbye to June, with the traditional incantaion: “Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night”!)

In case Diet Mountain Dew wasn’t vile enough for you,

-it tastes like Hawaiian Punch (which I guess is okay if you like that sort of thing; not sure if I can make it through two liters worth, tho).
-it’s got just as much caffeine as regular Mountain Dew. Get jittery wi’ it.

Last night I helped a friend recover his Mac after a system crash. (**)It happens – in this case probably due to a USB problem and OS 9.2 getting corrupted. DON’T UNPLUG USB DEVICES WHILE THEY’RE RUNNING.

But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you about. To recover, I used “Firewire disk mode” which is useful for this as well as just plain data transfers.

0. Get 2 relatively recent Macs, with Firewire connections. If you don’t have one, both the new iBook and the new iMac are amazing and (relatively) inexpensive.
1. Get a firewire cable. This needs to be a cable with two “big” ends (camera cables have one “big” and one “small” end so that won’t work). These are expensive, like $30, but worth it. If you have an iPod (…you lucky sod) this is the same cable.
2. Shut down the “target” machine. Doesn’t really matter which, but in general it’s the machine you want to copy “from”. Connect the Firewire cable between the two machines.
3. Start the target machine while holding down its ‘T’ key. You should see a big ‘Y’ shaped symbol come up. On the other machine, the target’s hard drive should appear (on the desktop).
4. Copy away. Copies over firewire are a LOT faster (between 4x and 40x) than over ethernet.
99. When done, “throw away” the firewire drive on the main machine (drag it to the trash and don’t give me any guff about that, I didn’t invent it). Then shut down the “target” by its power button.

By the way, USB 2.0 sucks. Just take my word for it. And it isn’t any faster, it just claims to be. Poor solution looking for a problem.

(From Slashdot, natch:)

“random() only returns 666 if you use a demon seed!”

(as well as…)

“Today’s Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e!”

It’s about time, although not necessarily for the reason I would have used.

For the first time ever, a federal appeals court Wednesday declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because of the words “under God” added by Congress in 1954.

Although I agree with the court’s ruling, my complaint here has always been with the LOCATION of the added phrase. When spoken, “…one nation, under God, indivisible..” becomes “..one nation under God indivisible…”; indivisible sounds like it’s modifying God (God is indivisible?) and takes away from the original meaning, one nation indivisible (which you may recall was the subject of the Civil War).

(P.S. Speaking of which, the annoying neighbors have a U.S. flag in front of their house – with a Harley-Davidson on it.)

When I registered obtainium.org I decided to grab obtainium.net while I was at it. So the other day I got email from a Burning Man person who wanted to set up a place to trade stuff, and wanted to know, since obtainium.net wasn’t being used… See if you can figure out the self-reference here.

So check it out; they’re still working on graphics and setup and all. One of the first “real” messages to post was this morning: Looking for Rebar in All the Wrong Places.