Ordinary Nothing

Every time I get surprised all over again over how stupid people can get.

Suppose you’re a 45-55 years old men, driving in the evening, with your
three kids in the car. Further suppose you’re tired. Now suppose your 10
years old daughter starts to nag that she wants to drive. What would
you do?

 
1. Stop for a short rest.

 

2. Ignore her and drive home.

 

3. Tell her to shut up and stop bothering you since you’re tired enough as is.

 

4. Agree, let her drive, and take a nap on the other seat while she’s at it.

Well, according to a news report from last week, there’s at least one
person who chose option 4. This guy let his 10 years old daughter drive
the car, and took a nap while she was at it.

They were stopped when a police car that happened by noticed a driver
that seemed a little young. Naturally the guy had his driver’s license
revoked for a few years (no problem, his daughter can drive him), and
said that he understands that he did a very foolish and irresponsible
thing (duh!)…

Yes, that’s today, March 15, aka "The Ides of March".

What does Ides mean, you ask? Just a mention of time. Like you’d make a single word for "the second Friday of the month" or stuff like that.
In the case of Ides, it’s the 15th on March (duh!), May, July and October, and 13 on any other month.

Many consider 13 to mean bad luck. But the most famous Ides for bad luck is on a 15th. Of March, of course.

Many people knows where the phrase "Beware the Ides of March" comes from. What almost nobody knows, and will soon be revealed here, is what the real meaning of it was, instead of the commonly believed falsehood.

OK, History lesson. Anyone heard of Caesar? Julius Caesar, the Roman "emperor" ? Well, as you probably know he was murdered on the Ides of March. Which isn’t all that exciting in and by itself, since it’s likely that over the years many people were murdered on every day, Ides or otherwise.
But, according to the (not entirely reliable, but close enough) histories of the time, Julius was warned, a few days earlier, by an astrologer to "Beware the Ides of March". And decided he’ll stay home on the Ides. Only he didn’t, he went to the senate. And the rest, as they say is history.

Does it mean that this astrologer was the real deal, and that his astrology was real? Well, if you believe the story so far, it’s still no. How come? The place was jam-packed of astrologers, and like most of the supposed astrologers in our days, they probably made vague predictions all the time, most of which did not come true. If you make enough predictions, though, statistically speaking you’ll get a couple of them right. That doesn’t mean you predicted anything.

Astrologers, however, like all soothsayers, oracles, precogs, and the likes, are extremely vague and unclear. Comes with the trade, I guess.
So here is what you don’t know, and with all the excitement over Julius being stabbed, nobody noticed… Ready? The astrologer was the real deal, but he wasn’t talking about Julius at all. At all. He wasn’t the sort that could predict something a couple of days in the future, he was one with the ability to lift the mists of time, and see far away into the future. As far as our own days. Kind of like Nostradamus, only he got a lot less fame, maybe because he didn’t talk about fun stuff like flying exploding pigs. Anyway, he gave the warning to Julius not because he knew Julius was going to die on the Ides, but because Julius was *the man*, and had the most likelihood to be able to do something to make sure the warning will pass over to future generations.

Which you have to admit worked perfectly. Of all the things said in that time "Beware the Ides of March" survived in the best shape, and is among the most famous.

Alas, as often happen with those dire warning, the true meaning eluded everyone. Nobody realized what the warning was truly about until it became much too late. See, the warning was really meant for my parents, or for the hospital staff where my mom gave birth. As it turns out, this is my birthday… And I’m too old now for anyone to heed the warning and do anything about it <wicked, sinister, and ominous laughter goes here>.

So there!

Oh, one more thing, then… Happy Birthday to Me!

This is another one of those things I originally posted elsewhere,
but decided to also copy here. The story was very slightly edited to
keep her anonymous.

Before I get to the sad tale itself, here are a couple of reviews about it, which made me think that it may merit reposting:

I laughed so hard, I was afraid I was going to wake up my mom (and then I realized she didn’t go to sleep yet. LOL)

Followed by

LOLOLOL, know what you mean, I did wake up my roomy – and she wasn’t happy!! :)

So you see, it has to be good. Has to!

Anyway, here goes:

Well, let me tell you the harrowing tale of how she broke my heart and then forgot all about it. Twice.

We were sitting on some lecture in the university. I won’t mention
which since she still has trauma from it, and hate for the explicit
names being mentioned. In any case, at some point she came up with some
harebrained theory about the effects of global climate conditions, and
long-term the climatic behaviour (The lesson was in Economics, it was
potentially relevant to the topic discussed at the time).

And she told me to suggest this theory to the lecturer.

Which is when I made my *big* mistake. I said no.

At the time I thought I had a good reason. Her theory made no sense
and was obviously wrong. Totally so. Due to that it seemed logical to
avoid raising it in class (even though the lecturer was probably dumb
enough to consider it).

So, to repeat the sad moment, I said no.

At which point she gave me this gorgeous, but oh so sad, pout,
raising tears of sympathy to my eyes. I was overwhelmed by the desire
to repent, and suggest her claim to the lecturer, anything to remove
the hurt look in her eyes. But before I could do so she told me…

Excuse me for a minute there, I need a short break before I can continue…

She told me… That she didn’t love me anymore.

Now you have to realize that she never did tell me that she loved me
before that point. Yet, surely, she cannot stop loving me if she never
did, right?

So for the briefest of moments, a mere tiny fraction of time, my
heart soared and leaped to unimaginable heights, knowing that I had her
love. Only to come crashing and tumbling down, the long long way down,
when the realization hit me that she no longer does. Worse, I did not
get to bask in the glow of her love while I had it, and only found out
about it once it was so abruptly taken away…

My heart, as I said, fell down and hit rock bottom, all in an
instant. And if you didn’t know, the preservation of momentum and
kinetic energy hold sway even in matters of the heart. Because it
soared so high the moment before, the landing was so very hard.

My heart, which I thought so durable up to that moment, shuddered,
and broke into billions, nay, trillions, of tiny microscopic pieces,
spread all over the place. Many flew so far and wide that I to this day
know not where they landed. The rest was spread around me, the
glittering dust of my heart that now felt like ashes of despair.

And then she turned around, and we continued with the lesson.

With the utmost investment of will power I managed to hold a
semblance of calm, not showing the turmoil raging inside me. I managed
to go through the rest of the day, the rest of the following couple of
years, in a daze of pain, sorrow, loss, and yearning, while maintaining
an amicable façade to all those around.

Then, at some point much later (about two years), while talking with
her, she asked if she could ask me to do something. I replied with a
flippant "Have I ever said no to you", and as the pain of memory lanced
through me, added hurriedly "apart from that last time?".

And she gave me a totally blank and puzzled look. As if to say what
one time are you talking about?. And then she really did ask "What one
time are you talking about?". I tried to give broad hints, since surely
the most tragic event of my life must have left some memorable
impression on her. But no.

Eventually, I had to relive the entire terrible moment, retelling
the whole story. And as I concluded, and silence filled the room,
laying heavily between us she said…

Please give me another moment here to collect myself…

She said in the most light and indifferent tone, "Oh? Really? I don’t remember that at all. Well, never mind, I take that back".
And turned around to go on with what she was doing before.

For a second, it was as if the ashes of my heart where trying once
again to string themselves together into a remnant, but fuller remnant,
of the whole that once was. She didn’t mean that she didn’t love me
after all. But then it hit me that in the same breath she then didn’t
mean that she did. And my heart came apart again, not having enough
time to glue itself.

Then it became worse. The whole incident meant nothing to her. Nothing.
I was a ruined, devastated, and destroyed man, and she didn’t even notice, didn’t bat an eyelid, didn’t bother remembering.

And life went on. Until a few months later when she again asked me
if I can do something for her. And having temporarily repressed the
memory of the previous incident, I gave the same answer. And can you
guess what she said? Can you? Let me give you a hint… "What one time
are you talking about?"…

Yes, she forgot it again! Twice!

And so it stands up to this very day…

A friend of mine often takes a taxi ride between home and work. Both
are near a main street in his city, so many taxis cover the route,
charging a fare which is identical to the price of a bus ticket.

A few days ago, on the way back from work, the driver of the taxi
decided that instead of going all the way to drop my friend, he wants
to go in a different direction, to another city. So he stopped
mid-route, gave my friend his fare money back, and told him to get off
the cab.

My friend tried to argue, but to no avail. The driver didn’t care he
agreed to carry him, and was mid route. He didn’t care that the time
needed to drop my friend at his home station would have only been a few
minutes of driving. He decided he prefers to get better fares on an
inter-city drive, and wants to do so immediately.

He stopped at a place where another cab was parking. So he told my
friend to use the other cab, and that he won’t have any problems. And
drove off.

The other cab was standing there because the driver was eating at a
nearby stand. And was not willing to stop just in order to carry one
passenger for a short distance (Can’t fault him for that, really).

My friend did catch another cab a few minutes later, and arrived home safely, but that was some lousy experience.

It looks like the Norwegians have joined the bandwagon.

Anyone heard of the large furniture selling network, IKEA ? Well, most of the furniture comes in pieces, as "flat pack", with instruction manuals explaining how to assemble them.

So what’s the problem? Some manuals contain drawing of human figures
alongside the pieces of furniture, illustrating positions and movement
needed for the assembly. And the Norwegian prime minister is furious
because all the figures are either of men, or of indiscernible gender.
So it must be sexual discrimination, you see?

Do you? Really?

Especially those indiscernible gender figures. Have they no shame?!

He’s absolutely right. Next time I buy something in IKEA I want the
instruction manual to be jam-packed with drawings of scantily clad
females. And be accurate and elaborate, so there won’t be room for
confusion. We have to know these are real women, and not men in
disguise. Equality is important, dammit! Are you listening IKEA?

On a side-note, the CNN news article
managed to get IKEA’s name wrong in the title. The web page title, in
the HTML, not the headline. The article itself is correct all the way,
but on the title it’s spelled ‘Ikea". An overzealous copy editor?

Hat tip to Common Knowledge.

The timezone set on messages sent from my Yahoo! Mail account is always PST. Which is wrong.

My account settings are correct, and at GMT+2 . Other procedures that rely on timezone (like Yahoo! Groups) get that right, and do the time translations correctly.

The email doesn’t. And the problem isn’t mine alone, or something
unique. Not only that, but it also happen with people using the
localized Yahoo! services. All messages from any Yahoo! Mail accounts (that I checked) arrive at PST, whether they are send from an @yahoo.com address, or from others (like an @yahoo.de address).

This is annoying. I do expect messages I receive to be in the
sender’s timezone, it’s much simpler for me to automatically change
hours based on the known location of the sender than on the email
account the sender is using. And I most certainly expect my messages to show my own timezone.

For comparison, Both Hotmail (which is otherwise inferior) and Gmail
do this properly. Not to mention every client-based program. I can’t
think of a single good reason for Yahoo! not to be able to.

These latest spam messages are amusing. Nothing different in content, the same offers for cheap mortgages as the rest of them.

But the subject line is a work of art. They don’t offer to "lower your
mortgage" or "low mortgage interest rate", no. What they offer is "Become one of the low 3.25% rates".

I wonder how it would feel like to become a low mortgage interest rate… To be one with my mortgage… Hmm…

I was driving in a two-lane street, in a city, a couple of hundreds
of meters before a turn into the highway. The turn to the highway is
only accessible from the right lane, and so this is the lane I was
driving in.

Another car was driving on my left. In the same speed as me, with
its front about 20-30 cm ahead of mine. And it very slightly and
very slowly veered to the right. At first I thought the driver was just
not paying attention, and since the lane was wider than my car I moved
slightly to the right myself, in order to give it room. But as we
drove, the car kept getting more and more to the right, pushing nearly
into my car.
This was all going on for some distance, and not at a high speed.

Eventually, when I noticed I was bordering on getting out of the
lane myself, I realized that the other driver was actually wanting to
change lanes, into mine. Without signalling. When they knew I was
there. They could have accelerated
to get in front of me, or slowed down a bit to get behind me, but no,
they had to start veering to the right directly into my car.

I’m not in the mood of crashing into another car just because the driver is a stupid jerk inexperienced, so I slowed down a bit, and let it get in front of me. All that without any signalling from that car.

We turned into the highway, and the single turning lane joined the
two-lane highway. The car in front of me, with the driver who was so insistent on
violently pushing me off, drove at a speed of about 15 km/h bellow the
speed limit (which makes it about 20-25 km/h below the average driving
speed at that road, but that’s another problem).

I didn’t spend too much time on being surprised as to why they
didn’t just slow down before, but rather waited until the highway to
turn into a turtle, and just decided to overtake.

I turned to the left (faster) lane, while signalling of course, and
accelerated. I took a short peek at the other car and noticed that the
driver was a 30-something years old women, busy talking loudly (I
assume that it was loudly due to the vigorous hand gestures) to a man
on the seat next to her.

As I moved forward I took another look at the rear-view mirror, and
noticed that she also didn’t turn on the car’s lights. Which is
required by law. Worse, which is just a very good idea when things are
cloudy and visibility isn’t good, like it was at the time.

I sped on, and forgot all about it. Until about 3 minutes later…
Guess who came blazing from behind, at a very high speed, overtaking
other cars like a madwoman? That’s right, the selfsame driver in the
selfsame car. And still without the lights…

Our cable company recently updated the menus used by it’s "digital"
tuners. The regular tuners for analog channels were simple boxes with
channel selection, and frankly, most TVs could very easily receive all
the analog cable stations by themselves anyway, so no problem.

But all the newest channel are sent as digital channels, and you need
special digital receivers/tuners from the cable company. Ideally it
wouldn’t matter, but it does. You see, these tuners offer special
features. You can get a short description of the show you’re watching
(not including something like original name in English, since nobody
there apparently thought anyone would want it. As if any extra details
whatsoever are searchable based on the stupid Hebrew translation of the
name), timetables, and so on.

I don’t mind the extra features, some of them are even useful. But channel switching is slow.
When you enter a channel number, it takes a few seconds for it to
switch. Just browsing channels by going up and down is impractical and
as annoying as hell, it’s just so slow. But that’s it.

In any case, a few weeks ago the cable company decided to upgrade the
design and functionality of all the menus in the digital tuner devices.
So for a while they sent the updates over the cable connections. And
everyone got the new menus. Which look worse than the previous ones,
and offer reduced functionality. But are more similar to what the
competitor, a satellite TV company, is offering. I thought the idea
was that the player with the worse offer copied the better one, but I
guess it doesn’t work like that around here.

Anyway, since I rarely watch the digital channels, and I needed an
extra power outlet for a while, the tuner in my own room was not
working during the time they sent the updates. So now I still have the
old menus. Which work fine.
As long as they don’t decide to roll a second update, I’m a happy
camper. And I seriously consider keeping the thing disconnected when
I’m not using it, despite the simplicity and ease of leaving it always
on…

One service which in retrospect seems obvious, but which I never expected to see…

Find a Grave. Where
you can… er… find graves. The main value for most people is
probably to locate the graves of important/famous people, but they’re
perfectly willing to list the grave location of everybody else as well.

The person currently quoted on this blog’s subtitle, Goethe, is buried in Weimar, Germany. Yea, it doesn’t really matter, but I figured I should check someone, so there you go.

Hat tip to Karen (No, it didn’t come from a blog or a public web page, so no link).

From the New Scientists, Another fine example of how not to do research.

Sample size of 20 people? Only 14 showing the result of the conclusion?
In my book it’s more like meaningless statistics with plenty of noise,
than actual sample and conclusions.

And even so, they reached a conclusion that laughter is good for you.
Because there was a measured 22% increase of blood flow after laughing.
Compared to the 35% decrease after stress. If the sample and research
are unreliable (which they sure seem to be) then none of these matter.
But if the research can be used to reach a conclusion, which seemed
stronger? That laughter is good, or that stress/Ryan is bad? My money
would be on the other direction that the one the research used.

Can I say "Who has a conclusion waiting for a research" or would that be slander? Can it be slander if it’s true?

After a recommendation from a commenter here, and various good opinions on the web, I decided to also try the Copernic Desktop Search program as a computer search tool.

I used the 1.2 version, got rid of it, and lately installed the 1.5
beta version. The review is true for the 1.5 beta build 624, but most
thing would be the same for the 1.2 version if not explicitly stated
otherwise.

Pro:

• The interface is clear, and very easy to use. It’s less useful, and wastes more "screen real-estate" than YDS, but it’s elegant and has a "professional/serious" feel to it.
• Intuitive search refinement. Like a combo-box for file date, which
  has standalone answers like "today" or "this month", but also "after",
  "before" and "between" which open additional fields for dates that were
  previously hidden as long as they were irrelevant.
• Indexes changes. That is, it monitors for addition of new files (or
  file changes?), and index them in real time. This is a huge improvement
  over scheduled scanning (like YDS does) for several reasons:
  • It takes less HD
    resources when nothing has changed. Not that scanning the disk for
    change is an heavy duty, but if the disk is constantly working, it’s
    noticeable. I had YDS
    installed on two computers, one which is mostly idle, and one with
    constant disk activity. On the one with the disk activity, the
    schedules scans were very noticeable, but Copernic was smooth.
  • When something does change you have it indexed almost immediately. No need to change for the next indexing time.
• Preview for a large amount of file types. Common file types that I tried were all previewable.
• Fast searching. For the things which are indexed, files matching various keyword combinations were shown relatively quickly.
• Result count in other categories. The results are separate for
  general files, emails, audio, pictures, video, etc… But when running
  a search on one category you get a view of result count in the others.

Con:

• No fall-back in case of errors. For example, I had a few
  non-standard xml files. It tried to show them using it’s xml viewer,
  and failed. Instead of showing them as text instead, I got an error
  message with the problem the parser/viewer encountered. This is fine if
  it was my file and I wanted to debug it, but not on the general case
  when it’s not. I think it should at least show an option to show as
  next-best-thing, which would be text in this case.
• No Hebrew support. Oh, it’s possible to enter Hebrew text in the
  search text box. But it doesn’t index it, and doesn’t find it. Worse,
  it can’t show Hebrew on previewed files. I assume this problem isn’t
  just for Hebrew, but for other languages as well.
• Slow preview for large text files. I have an IM
  log file slightly larger than 1MB. When I choose it on the search
  results, it could take a couple of minutes to load it on the preview
  pane, during which the Copernic program is unresponsive, and so is
  Windows Explorer. On the 1.2 version it was worse, and I gave up and
  killed the process after five minutes of waiting. So even randomly
  browsing through returned results can hang the program for a long
  duration.
• It doesn’t index the same log file. There is a setup option of not
  indexing content of files above a certain size, but I keep it at the
  default of 50MB. Yet searching for strings contained within this log
  file does not return it in the result list. Searching for strings in
  the file name does. Other, much smaller, log files are returned when
  searching for words in their content. This is a big problem, both because I can’t count on the program to fetch files it’s supposed to index, and because it’s not documented.
• The indexing of Thunderbird
  email isn’t working in this version, despite this being exclaimed as
  finally included in the 1.5 beta. When going to search in the email
  category I’m told that email indexing is disabled, and provided a link
  to open the settings dialog to fix it. But I fixed it. I specified that
  emails for Thunderbird
  would be indexed, and emails for Outlook won’t. It just doesn’t pay any
  attention. It’s not that it claims there aren’t any indexed, which
  would be a different problem. It claims I didn’t enable indexing of
  emails.

I got rid of the 1.2 version due to the problem of it hanging over
large text files. It made it unusable for me. The 1.5 beta isn’t very
much better, since the files are still not indexed, but it doesn’t hang
the computer, so it’s usable. Currently the computer with the high disk
activity is running Copernic 1.5 beta, but the one with low disk
activity is running YDS…

My main conceptual problem with Copernic at this stage is that it
feels like a stable and complete program, yet has those problems. YDS
also has some big problems, but it still feel like a program in
development stages, so it’s somehow less problematical. It’s all in my
head, of course, since what really matter is functionality, but still.

Posts to Yahoo! Groups are acting very strangely in the last few days.

Small delays of up to a minute between the time you post a message and
the time it shows on the group were always common. It’s understandable,
it’s a large service, with a huge amount of users.

But on the last few days it’s terrible. Some posts still find their way
to the group nearly instantly, but some don’t. And those who don’t can
be delayed for hours, for no obvious reason. I had posts
waiting about 4-5 hours until the appeared on the group, and saw posts
that waited around 12 hours by other people.

The behaviour changes from post to post, so I can’t find any obvious
cause like poster identity, thread topic, keywords, time of posting, or
whatever.

I try to imagine a method of queuing system that would have such
results, and can’t. I don’t have a clue what is going on there, and
what is their problem. I just hope they fix it soon, since it’s
becoming very annoying. You can’t have a conversation when a certain
percentage of the posts just don’t show up until way too late…

As probably anyone who ever listened to a weather forecast knows, they
are woefully inaccurate and inadequate. In recent years the quality is
improving, but it’s still not much better than taking a look out the
window, and tossing a coin.

And yet, since those are the official forecasts, people pay attention. It may not be good, but it’s all we’ve got.

Part of the reason is of course that it doesn’t cost anyone anything to give bad predictions. Heck, everyone expect it,

Well, no more. It seems that from now on weathermen in Moscow will be fined for providing bad forecasts. So far it’s only if a financial loss to the city could be traced directly to the forecast, but hey, it’s a start.

It seems like one more of those crazy legal things, but I don’t think
it is (Hey, it’s not from the US, for starters). That’s one habit that
I do hope everyone will adopt, and the sooner the better.

Hat tip to Overlawyered for the link.

A sexual harassment lawsuit? Check.
Nipple fetish? Check.
A gorilla (a gorilla?!) ? Check.

What more could you possibly ask from a news story?

Two fired caretakers for Koko, the world-famous sign-language-speaking
gorilla, have sued their former bosses, claiming they were pressured to
expose their breasts as a way of bonding with the 300-pound simian.

Yep, you read that right. And that nipple fetish I mentioned? It’s not the boss’ fetish, it’s the gorilla’s. Seriously!

 

They were threatened that if they "did not indulge Koko’s nipple
fetish, their employment with the Gorilla Foundation would suffer," the
lawsuit alleged.

 

The lawsuit claims that on one occasion Patterson said, "’Koko, you
see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples.
You need to see new nipples.’"
 

If I’d have seen this at a satire fake-news site, I would have been
sure that they stretched it a little too far. I guess it’s true that
reality is stranger than fiction…