Archaic Soubriquet

For the primaries this year, I went to our local precinct polling center early in the morning. I discovered that there were some barriers to voting. Specifically, the roads and sidewalks all around the polling place were under active construction. A front-end loader was driving around dumping large loads of dirt right next to the torn-up sidewalks to get inside. The main sidewalk right outside the side door where we were detoured to was fresh enough to look like you shouldn't walk on it. (Posted late as I only recently managed to get this image off my phone.)

I'm upset.  My World of Warcraft account was attacked in the early hours of this morning and I'm unable to figure out why.  The two computers that I use to play WoW have active malware scanners..  I change the password occasionally.  I definitely don't fall for scams that try to get you to send your login information to someone for something in return, and yet someone managed to get in.  I'm stumped how they managed to get in, or why they decided to target my user. They immediately changed the password and recovery information, of course, so I couldn't regain control of the account.  They also stripped bare every character I had on every realm.  I'm assuming this, of course, since I still don't have access to the account, but the evidence is there on WoW Armory: every character I check is missing all sellable gear.  I was notified by one of my guild masters during the day that they had also looted the guild vault, since I had at least one privil...

One of the big problems I have using Consumer Reports is that the listings, even if available online, require some pretty significant planning and research before using them.  Specifically, vendors often don't have the exact models that are reviewed, so you have to interpolate other reviews on similar models from that manufacturer.  Also, vendors often have varying stock, so the research you've already done may become obsolete quickly.  Finally, most of the reviews on CR are best used in large-format displays. What I would love to have is a smartphone app where you could enter a make and model of an appliance (or better yet scan something using the camera) right in the store and get quick, easy-to-read summary of the ratings for that product or similar ones, along with recommended prices.  It would make shopping in a store a much more informed process. I would think something like this could make someone a lot of money.

Just watched The Ox-Bow Incident last night and was struck by the message contained in this venerable old movie that so many people seem to have forgotten these days. I'll try not to spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it, so I'll necessarily limit the context and quote only this: Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It's everything people ever have found out about justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very conscience of humanity. Ignoring the law when it's convenient or uncomfortable is breaking trust with our forebears, who act as our conscience today by virtue of the laws that have been laid down over the years. It's a very powerful message that seems to be particularly applicable today.

Netflix supports streaming to your TV and your PC , but only the latter if you have Windows or Mac OS, not Linux.  I realize they went for the ones with the largest market share, but it's yet another snub keeping Linux market share down and off vendor's desktop application support list.

In a study in Sweden , it was found that children who spend time in front of a TV were significantly greater risk of being overweight, compared to no apparently extra risk when they spent the same time in front of a computer. (Article is in Swedish, see the Google translation to English )

A couple days ago, a co-worker and I stumbled upon an unintended constraint in some of the thread pool abstractions in the system we're working on.  These threading abstractions leaned too heavily on the underlying ThreadPoolExecutor in Java for their semantics and did a poor job of hiding these from client code.  Specifically, this class has corePoolSize and maximumPoolSize settings.  The former is often misconstrued as a minimum pool size, which it's not; it's actually the maximum number of threads that should be created automatically before the work queue reaches its maximum size. However, when this abstraction is well-known at a low level and then translated to a higher-level abstraction, that distinction may be lost in translation.  When treated as a minimum size, it fails to meet expectations in a rather significant way.  For instance, if you have the core size configured to be 1, the max size configured to be 20, and are using an unbounded work queue...

While playing my frostfire mage on World of Warcraft , I've noticed some weird screen artifacts when rendering the sky.  In certain azimuth ranges that vary in some way, the sky loses its normal lighting and texture and becomes very bright and oversaturated.  Sometimes it doesn't appear, and sometimes it appears over a very small angular range.  In the latter case, my older boys thought it looked like lightning. To the right, you can see an example.  This didn't used to happen, so I wonder if it was a recent update to WoW, DirectX, or Windows that caused this.

Minnesota's Governor Tim Pawlenty has previously used a state-as-family metaphor , saying that when a family is stuck with a budget deficit, they have no choice but to tighten their belts.  This is not quite true, as it ignores the income side of the equation.  Most families I know have tried to acquire more jobs or longer hours in order to increase income.  Some have even invested in something that might pay off in higher income, like going back to school to finish a degree or get additional training.  Looking only at decreasing expenses is considering only half of the problem. The good news is that Governor Pawlenty now agrees that taxes may enter into the equation.  The bad news is that he's taken a George W. Bush approach to it, advocating lowering taxes to bring Minnesota out of its current financial mess.  My mind boggles at the logic.

Almost four years ago The Onion , fine purveyors of satire and parody, published an article called " Poverty-Stricken Africans Receive Desperately Needed Bibles ". Now, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake last week, comes news that an American faith-based organization, Faith Comes By Hearing , is sending relief to Haiti in the form of solar-powered audio Bibles : With tens of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents living outdoors because their homes have collapsed or they fear aftershocks from last week's quake, the audio Bible can bring them "hope and comfort that comes from knowing God has not forgotten them through this tragedy", the group said. Personally, if I were there, I'd probably probably prefer food, water, medical care, clothing, and shelter to an electronic audio bible, but that's just my own personal preference.