Italy, days 4 and 5

More of Kim's pictures, from Tuesday...












...and Wednesday...

Italy, day 3

A few select photos and videos from Kim's tour (and a couple shots from the balcony of our hotel)...

Italy, days 1 and 2

For anyone not in the know, my job has taken me to Florence for a week, to attend a fancy CHI conference. I got to bring my wife along, so before and after the conference we get to take in some local flavor together.

Before getting here, we experienced two different classes of air travel. First there was the kind we are accustomed to, sardine-like accommodations and enough discomfort to open for any stand-up comedian. For the trip across the Atlantic, though, we were put on a plane seemingly designed for human beings. I might have even caught an hour or two of sleep, which I'm pretty sure nobody has ever done on a sardine-class plane.

Italy, day 1.

I actually didn't take any pictures. But I'll describe our brief time in Rome:

• waiting for trains
• wondering why "Florence" doesn't show up anywhere in the English UI when trying to purchase a train ticket to Florence
  
• train interiors
• train tracks, garbage, grafiti
• from distant to close: grafiti, garbage, train tracks

Someday we'll come to Italy again and see Rome properly. But it wasn't to be this time 'round. Saturday concluded for us by being driven through very narrow, windy roads and arriving at our hotel, the Residenzia Casanuova, and collapsing for the night. We can whole-heartedly recommend staying here to anyone and everyone; it's easily the nicest place we've ever stayed at in Italy. ;^) Really though, we love it here.

Italy, day 2

First things first. A very nice breakfast is provided here, so we had some food before heading out.

I had to savor the cheese both visually and ... eatingly. As with everything else, it was very tasty.

We didn't go very far on our little self-guided tour; our primary mission was to find an ATM so that we could have some euros with which we could buy, among other things, some actual tours and excursions, including visits to some of the museums we saw but didn't yet enter.

Not the real "David", though it isn't far from here...

Lots of impressive statues of lots of impressive people.

We trekked down to the Arno river and back, crossing a couple of very cool bridges.

There's a learning curve to wandering the streets around here but we're picking up on it. Placed in a car here, I'd give the average Utah driver 15, maybe 20 seconds before killing somebody and/or wrecking something very expensive. Thankfully, the people who do drive here are much smarter. Everything's very close-quarters, though. Our camera's wide-angle lens has been very handy so far.

We passed this gigantic and old church (which is right next to a smaller, even older church) on our way out and on the way back. So we saw it both having little to no bearings and having a pretty good sense of direction.

We've got plenty more pictures and will continue to accumulate them I'm sure, and I think they deserve a dedicated album with proper annotations. I'll have to get on that once we get back. But for now I hope these were enjoyable; it's certainly enjoyable being here. :^)


Update: Italy, day 2 (continued)

Just a couple quick pictures from heading out to dinner. First, the cool stairway we take if laziness doesn't prompt us to use the elevator.

And finally, myself enjoying an Italian beer. :^)

Spare bone

My wrist has been hurting for the last few days, enough that I finally went to a doctor for the first time in ... well years, not sure how many. I spend what's probably an unhealthy amount of time with my hands at a keyboard, so I was worried about carpal tunnel syndrome and such. But enough chatter, the point of this message is to share a cool x-ray image. :^)


It turns out that I have some "calcification" going on, some extra bony tissue showing up where it shouldn't. If I move my wrist the wrong way (which is, basically, too far in any direction) this extra chunk starts annoying whatever nerves and stuff that are around it. I'm wearing a brace now and will have to hunt down an orthopedic doctor at some point.

Here's the little bugger highlighted:




I'm not so sure about this whole getting old stuff, I think I liked it better when my body wasn't falling apart, but I think I'll keep at it, see if this getting old business gets any better with age. ...Wait a minute...

Preserve the Ratio!

Not long ago, in brew pub in Salt Lake City, some work buddies and I noticed that the widescreen TVs showing the game (don't ask which game, or even what sport; I don't know) were actually set up correctly. As it turns out, all of us share a pet peeve, namely the practice of buying a fancy widescreen TV, pumping a 4:3 picture into it, and setting it to the wrong display mode, distorting and fattening everything shown.

An iPhone (is that the proper capitalization?) was present, and we determined that "preservetheratio.com" was indeed available, a vacant soapbox from which we could complain about the vile practice that distorts the images so many see every day, a home base upon which we could collect written and photographic accounts of these public displays of stupidity, a domain name which, though basically useless, we could indeed secure and have for our own.

Unlike most bar talk, this actually led to one of us going ahead and registering preservetheratio.com. He hadn't actually been drinking, even. But apparently it was obtained for next to nothing. Upon hearing this, I snapped a few quick pictures in my office and threw together my own personal rant on the topic. It's not the multitude of articles and arguments and pictorials we imagined when beer was present, but for now it's the only content on the site. And it's a little creepy 'cause my picture is sitting right there on the front of a something-dot-com.

Anyway it's pretty silly, and contains more complaining than humor, but here's a link anyhow:
http://www.preservetheratio.com

 

[Edit: many years later, I have no memory of who owned or ran that domain, but it's long gone.  However, it seems I still have a copy of that page available: http://penduin.mine.nu/preservetheratio/ ]

More Shmoe

The Shmoe has his own website now. Not much there yet, and it'll never be pretty.
http://shmoe.mine.nu

...that is all.

Have fun with your internets

This is a dumb story. But I'm overworked, sleep-deprived, and need a break. Some coworkers and I have been writing a new web-based setup for M+ Guardian. (As in, you buy a Guardian appliance from Messaging Architects, plug it in, hit it with a browser the way you configure your router, and set up the system.) Its implementation is quite slick, and we've spent some really long nights on it. Once everything is set up, the appliance will start up its services and begin dutifully making your corporate email safe and unspammy.

But that last screen, nobody gave me any text for what should be said there. The current placeholder is something like "M+ Guardian is set up, you may now do XYZ". Not great. And in our quickie meeting today, nobody gave me anything better, except Thane who jokingly suggested "Have fun with your internets". After the meeting, I scribbled our new internal M+ slogan and an accompanying drawing on the whiteboard.


...And now, on the other side of the picture, the other side of the story. The dude in the scribble is the Shmoe, who apparently doesn't even deserve a "c" in his name. He first appeared in some high school notebooks, in French class. He was meant to be the guy on the hissy, stretched-out cassette tape telling us to listen and repeat... In any case, he's surfaced around the office lately in various situations. This time he's using his beer belly as a table, and looking up what appear to be either boobies or eyeballs on his super-modern computer.

happy = new Year(2008);

There it is again, the end of this year and the beginning of the next. It's only an arbitrary marker in time, which is already measured arbitrarily, but the programmer in me has to stand down for a moment and let the Sol-3-bound human in me enjoy the idea.

So, to anyone and everyone, have a happy New Year!

Happy Halloween!

This was our first Halloween at our own house, and it saw plenty of trick-or-treat traffic.

Our neighbors went all-out with decorations and special effects, which we couldn't match, but we did have a jack-o-lantern I felt mildly clever coming up with, and a cute little skull-on-the-grill display.

Happy All Hallows' Eve!

Approaching Democracy

I swore this blog wouldn't turn into a political soapbox. I'm breaking that for two reasons: I'm not taking any politically-charged sides here, and it's an idea that's simply too good to go unmentioned.

For as much as we throw around the term "democracy", what we (and all other "democratic" nations) have is a republic. We don't make the decisions; we elect people to make the decisions for us. That's no bad thing necessarily, but that layer of indirection has can be very thick and frustrating at times.

http://senatoronline.com.au/

This is brilliant. It's a hack for an existing republic to inject a bit of direct democracy. All registered voters may vote online on any and every issue that passes through the senate. The senator (human or software) then blindly votes accordingly. If the idea works, clones and variations of the system will also get elected, slowly replacing, to whatever extent citizens are comfortable with, the old republic with a true democracy.

Variations that deal with introducing bills in addition to just voting on them could be very interesting. How to best immunize these systems from party poisoning could become key in how useful and effective they might be in the long term. If nothing else, this conjures a mental image of replacing senators with small shell scripts, which should bring a huge smile to any geek's face.

Them's Fightin' Words!

I've put up with a lot of crap since becoming a homeowner, but I don't think I've ever been directly insulted before. That changed yesterday. If I were to try to come up with the optimal, most derogatory insult per syllable, I don't think I could do much better than this:


Are they serious? "Utah driver"! What cruel joke is this?! Suffice to say, I won't be signing up for this particular brand of auto insurance. Not that I'd have considered it anyway, I suppose.

Next up:

• Junk mail from cosmetics companies addressed to "Fugly Resident"
• Church newsletters to "Hell-bound Soul"
• Discount store catalogs to "Dirt-poor Pauper"
• GED pamphlets addressed simply to "Dumbass"
• Cologne and perfume ads to "B.O. McSmelly or current occupant"

I suppose it is possible that most people around here wouldn't take so much offense to being called a "Utah driver". ...But after further reflection, I just don't see how that could be so.

The Best Wurst

That title's a Red Green-ism, by the way. Credit where credit is due. Anyhow, this post is mostly a pointless anecdote, but can also serve as a series of tips for any bratwurst-grilling newbie. :^)

We went to an Independence Day party last night, and I was charged with bringing and preparing the brats. This is a responsibility which I gladly accept anytime, and which I take quite seriously. After all, I'm representing Wisconsin out here. We cheeseheads are a proud, brat-grilling people. We have a rich tailgating culture. Here in Utah, though, there would be no beer dulling the senses of these Latter-Day Saints. Their taste buds would tell no lies. My brats had to stand on their own.

Luckily, I was not without help. A week or two ago, a work buddy introduced me to a local family-owned sausage shop, Colosimo's. A quick drive up towards Salt Lake scored us three packs of high-quality bratwurst. Not to knock the big-name brands; you can get a decent brat anywhere, but these small places survive by being the tastiest, not the most cost-effective and well-distributed. Not surprisingly, mom-and-pop sausage shops are a bit harder to come by in Utah than in Wisconsin.

Now, to someone like me, it's pretty non-controversial that in order to grill the best wurst, one ought to soak them in beer and onions at some point(s) during their preparation. Pre-boiling is common practice, for good reason. I didn't dare go that route though, as I didn't know if the various Mormons I'd be feeding would be comfortable with it. As it turned out, nobody objected to their brat having a good soak in some appropriately-patriotic Samuel Adams lager.

Cutting up an onion was murder on my eyes, but that was good - it meant the little bugger was potent enough to quickly impart its flavors to the hot brats swimming around in the pan. Surface area's the name of the game, the more thin slices the better. Tears of joy, right? :^)

I also made sure to capitalize on my tendency to micro-manage the grill. Rather than turning once or twice, I made sure every brat got plenty of rotation, including being balanced sideways. (You can actually see that going on in Proby's picture up there.) A curved brat can't be cooked perfectly evenly, but it's pretty easy to do better than two charred sides and pink everywhere else.

Using cheese as a brat condiment is a very Wisconsin-y touch. If you ask me, get plenty of colby-jack melted between the bun and the sausage, and there's no need for mustard or sauerkraut or anything else. Cheddar was more popular yesterday, and I won't argue with cheddar. That would be folly. Point is, cheese and brats go together like ... actually, I can't think of much else that goes together that well. Beer and brats, maybe. Or beer and cheese. Oh, got it. Cheese and bratwurst go together like fireworks and the 4th of July.

I received a whole bunch of compliments on the brats, so I must have done something right. We got to digest while watching lots of pretty fireworks go off, both amateur and professional. Celebrating the nation's birthday with grilled meat and explosions, who could ask for more? :^)

Prior Art

One of the memes buzzing around the hippie geek community lately is a way to stick it to those greedy corporations who think they can own math and such, and who bully everybody with patent infringement lawsuit threats and backroom licensing agreements. How? By brain-dumping ideas publicly. If proof exists of prior art or even that an idea has been published, a patent on it can be struck down.

I don't have any brilliant ideas, but i have some mundane ones that are much more clever than half the crap that gets awarded patents these days. So here they are, at least the ones I can remember off the top of my head, and if any greedy corporation is reading, go ahead and make these things happen, but you can't have patents on 'em. Not for long anyway. They're braindead ideas, documented here as prior art.

Video Projector With Smart Auto-Adjust
Implementation 1: Infrared beacons or reflective tape is built-in or can be attached to all 4 corners of any reflective screen, a small infrared camera in the projector (much like the one in a Wii controller) detects the positions of the screen corners, and software distorts and adjusts the projected image to be the correct shape and size.
Implementation 2: No beacons, but a small camera built into the projector feeds data to software that scans for a big, bright, 4-sided polygon, and adjusts the projected image. Probably the better implementation for most cases. A single unit could be capable of using both methods.

Product Placement in Photo/Video/Art Sharing Sites
My friend's Flickr account contains a photo of someone clearly holding a branded pop can. He deserves ad revenue-per-view as much as advertising agencies do. Better yet, pay individuals for stuff like this and stop polluting broadcast and print media with loud and obnoxious ads.

Non-Fling Fingernail Clipper
The otherwise-standard clipper has a soft, spongy clamp behind the blades, which holds a clipped nail until released, rather than ejecting it at a random, high-velocity trajectory.

Pi Compression
(see earlier post)

AI-Engineered Codecs
(see earlier post)