I received a book from Amazon today! I had ordered it perhaps a week earlier.

Seems rather appropriate.

I thought this was a very interesting document. Even back in 1996, the the energy industry believed that global warming had a human cause, but decided to protect profits instead.

( On a related note, we've been working on ways to make our new home more environmentally friendly, but there's a ways to go. )

...but in case it missed you, it's quite awesome. NeoGAF's Criterion-inspired game covers thread:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=357454

( My faves, for the lazy )

Yesterday was perhaps the most expensive day in my entire life.

We are now homeowners!

I also bought a fridge and a stove!

My bank account is quite upset with me.

If your boyfriends' hands are cold because his body is trying to keep his heart warm, there's a good chance it's because he's going into shock and might die.

(Shannon insisted I post my commentary on the old saying.)

There's something about having a stressful job and numerous duties that makes reading books (and I mean to emphasize the books, not so much the reading) a very difficult endeavor to begin. I have seen my dad, once a great and prolific reader, reduced to one book every few months for a long stretch of time while the kids were young and the work was hard. Thankfully, I still have friends who do not yet have these awful jobs, and thus still have time for reading. I believe I even owe a few of you (okay, all of you, I get it) books I was supposed to read and never quite got around to it.

Since I've been trying to learn from my parents' mistakes, you'd think that I would have kept reading. Unfortunately, the apple lands not far from the tree and I even seem to have missed the top of someone's head, for good measure. I've fallen into the same trap that befell my own parents, and I've barely read anything fiction in years.

( There's something special about returning to the scene of a crime, or a series you read as a child. )

Needed to update my phone, and discovered that:

1. The update wipes the phone, and


2. You can't back up your contacts on a Windows Mobile phone without having Outlook (not Outlook Express!) installed.

So in other words, I just lost every number I've got. I think I may have them backed up at work, but I won't know for a little while.

In the meantime, if you call/text me, please don't be weirded out if I have to ask who you are. My phone forgot.

The situation has been rectified! All is well with the world. Kind of.

The phone still sucks, after all.

Disabled host draws complaints

I'm not sure how people can complain about a tv show host whose only major flaw is that she is missing a hand. I don't have kids so I feel at least 25% unqualified to offer an opinion. That said, I know it's a pain in the ass to have a kid -- but I have a hard time believing that teaching a preexisting kid about disabilities is difficult.

Fallout 3's invitation to the area. Mmm, Fallout 3!

Magic-8 balls are really hard to properly disassemble. My attempt has actually met with failure, mostly because I don't have a surface stable enough for me to put the 8-ball on so I can whack it repeatedly with a hammer. Proper disassembly seems to require the use of a rotary tool I don't own.

Also, we got a house. Yay! (Haven't closed yet, but we've signed lots of paperwork and we anticipate no problems closing. Or rather, we anticipate lots of problems closing, but nothing bad enough to make us give up.)

This new LJ theme is... passable. But there's just something missing in the layout and the colors. Something's just a little... off. Hrm.

I got my copy of Prinny today! I have yet to play the game and I probably will not get a chance to play it for a while -- as many folks are aware, life has been busy. That said, I do have an awesome stuffed Prinny to sit next to my Vault-Boy Bobblehead on the game bookshelf. There's also a short Penny Arcade comic, a random Disgaea manga, and a nifty PSP case that smells just a trifle strong.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for penguins.

Rondo of Swords is slowly climbing up my ladder of "acceptable games." It just... really, really, really needs a lot of attention to be worth playing. Which is a mixed blessing when one doesn't have much free time.

Anyway, apologies for any extended absences. Work is still eating me alive, and it has a heck of a dentist.

Oh, and I finally (after how long?) decided to try an S2 livejournal style. I'll have to tweak it to death, but for now it's the default. As I assume nobody really looks at my page except for me, I really have no motivation to change it!

Flower is really, really good.

...again.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=897

(I know someone who may need a medic after this.)

What a day! Nothing surprising, of course, but nice nonetheless.

There are those who are being poor winners about this, and although I don't agree, specifically, I can certainly understand. Rarely has a president been so successful at winning the support of 51% of the populace and the enmity of the other 49%. So conservatives, if someone is rubbing your nose in Obama's election, please understand -- we have generally been treated like garbage by your political leaders for the past 8 years. That said, liberals, don't be assholes, please?

Anyways, woohoo!

It's been out a little while, but the Palm Pré still looks really cool. It has a physical keyboard! And it might actually be released for T-Mobile, too!

I love the iPod so far... it solves most of the problems I've had with other mp3 players and it solves them well. Granted, I'm kind of depressed at the thought of no longer being able to change tracks without taking the ipod out of my pocket, but that's a small price to pay. I no longer need to wait for strange databases to update, I no longer have to go through a 5-step process to upload files with fixed ID3 tags, I no longer have to wait 30 seconds for the mp3 player to save a song rating, and the software to make playlists is actually usable.

That said, I have lots of gripes about iTunes. I have no idea how people with multiple tools they use to manage their collections survive -- it just doesn't play nice! Obvious functions (how do I automatically purge files from the iTunes database if I've deleted them?) aren't there, or at least aren't obvious. (I am currently researching.) When I update the tags for files (again, in a separate tagging program that does things much better than most integrated music organizers) it's a pain to find and update the tags because iTunes doesn't have a dedicated "refresh tags" button. (I can reimport the directory, but I don't want to reprocess the entire file! Just reload the tags!) And worst of all, when an album has songs from multiple artists (who didn't all compose or play the same songs) it's breaking the album up, even when I'm not sorting by artist! Man, I can't wait for Songbird to get its act together and get iPod Touch support. (Maybe then, when it does something I don't like, I can rewrite the damned thing.)

How do you guys deal with iTunes' madness?

Since I've been at RAND, I've spent a few minutes most evenings talking to Dave Sedor, a security guard here at the building. Really interesting guy, and one of the nicest fellows you could meet. We used to talk about almost everything, from his work in the Orthodox Church and the bioethics he was studying to what I had been doing at RAND and what I was working on, to funny stories about his kids and the bird that crashed into my windshield.

He'd been absent for a while, at least a week and a half, and I was just thinking this morning that I needed to ask where he had been. It turns out he just passed away yesterday, following complications from heart bypass surgery.

You'll be missed, Dave. :(

I don't normally pick on the Times, but one really has to wonder what world Bob Herbert was in when he wrote this thing. Complaining about a pay cut from $28 an hour to $14 an hour for workers starting at the big three automakers? No wonder the damned things can't make any money. $28/hr is $58,240 -- $10,000 more than the best-case scenario for a straight-A student in computer science graduating from top-three school Carnegie Mellon with an undergrad degree. (For example.) From a less top-flight school, you can expect to need a graduate degree to even get close to that number.

Am I all for a living wage? Yes, of course. And is the problem that the rest of us are paid too little? Maybe, although I doubt it's that much of a difference. I would even argue that $14 is probably too little -- something like $18 or $20 would seem to be more in line with reality.

But sometimes it's just hard to shake the feeling that some people forget what it's like to live outside a major metropolis. Here in Pittsburgh, $60k is a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money.