Where’s the peanut butter?!

World’s Best Tools,
originally uploaded by Peru Tha Damaja.

Only the World’s Best Manager would get his team a personalized set of mugs showing all their faces and emblazoned with “World’s Best Tools”!

So I’m trying out ruby on rails and so far it’s living up to the
hype. The href="http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html">onlamp
overview covers all the components needed to get a working install and
runs over a sample application to create a recipe recording system.

I modified the sample application to make it a hockey tracking team
since this makes it a little more interesting and I have the idea
Tanya might find it useful some time and by far the hardest part of
the work was getting the environment set up. After that, rails has
script templates for generating your presentation layer, business
logic, and incredible connectors for hooking into a database
application. You can basically “scaffold” everything and then build
up around that framework where and as needed. I wish that the emacs
ruby mode were a little more full-featured but it’s perfectly capable
for me for now and ought to be easy enough to improve. I look forward
to checking out more of this.

I know that at Microsoft everybody is constantly struggling to hit tough deadlines, but there is one place where I beseech my coworkers to plan ahead so that no corners need be cut. Of course, I’m talking about getting your ass over the toilet before dropping the payload. It is staggering how often engineers fall short on this ubiquitous and prosaic task.

Oh no - I di’nt.

Oh yes, I did. The floodgates have broken and I have what could be called a shitstorm of complaints about the low commitment to quality in the mens bathroom in 36/4.

First, the four urinals and their orientation. The urinals are laid out such that there is never an optimal urinal to choose. As you enter the bathroom, the first urinal is tall and partially obscured, the next two are tall and in plain sight, and the fourth is short (a “kids” urinal). Every urinal user obeys a few unspoken rules governing selection of your urinal. Preference should be given to (1) urinals that which are not adjacent to occupied urinals, (2) tall urinals, and (3) the selection should be done with as deliberately and quickly as possible, without careful contemplation to decide “Where would you like to pee today?” The first urinal, being tall and having only one adjacent urinal, would normally be given greatest preference, however since it is obscured, you can’t tell whether it is occupied without basically selecting it. If it’s open, score! But if it’s occupied you are awkwardly pigeonholed into reconsidering your selection (violating preference rule (3)) and possibly winding up in the second urinal, violating preference rule (1). The second and third urinals are poor choices because they have two adjacent urinals, increasing the chances that the next bathroom visitor will wind up next to you, and the fourth urinal is short. OK, so there is no optimal urinal. That’s a drag. The actual use of the urinals is, sadly, equally unpleasant. There appears to be a practical joker in the building who has labeled the shampoo dispensers in our shared locker rooks “pubic shampoo” and replaced the gel with Nair. There can be no other worldly explanation for the regular and abundant shedding all over the urinals. Are you grossed out yet? Good! You may have the quick learning skills that will aid you when you flush the urinals on my floor and realize that if you don’t move as quickly as possible away from the toilets and towards the sink, you will engulfed in the flush cloud from the overcompensating water pressure. But since you think on your toes, you might dodge that one!

My bus is about at my stop so unfortunately (?) I can’t go into the stalls (except for the brief introductory note, which is really just where it starts) or the sinks (which, thankfully, are only a little annoying and not remarkably nauseous). I’ll save that review for another day…

Answer: a kittasus

Question: what is the chimera produced when cross-breeding a kitten with a pegasus. Also acceptable: what I saw on someone’s t-shirt on the bus this morning.

There is this old Peanuts cartoon that a lot of people recognize where Lucy is sitting behind some scrapwood with a sign on her desk reading “psychiactric advice 5¢” I am constantly reminded about this when I see articles or blog entries like this one which is currently the most popular delicious link. And it drives me crazy because the author carelessly denounces numerous services and just tells readers to disable them. I couldn’t make it very far but it starts by telling you to disable the service that does LAN network resolution saying that no home users need this service. The discussion should not start and end with whether or not the service is essential, it should include the impact of the service and a justification for its removal. The author carelessly ignores “did 99% of the testing in windows probably happen with this service enabled and is there any practical benefit to disabling it?” Later the author advises that readers disable crash reporting and completely misrepresents the service as “sending information to microsoft? no thanks.” We could debate whether a sound is made when a tree falls in the forest but I can assure you that if you don’t send your (anonymized) crash reports to Microsoft, no one will know, care, or fix the bug. Then he says you should disable the content indexing service saying you should just use google desktop instead. I will concede that the user experience with Google Desktop is a lot smoother, but this is especially frustrating. If you hate microsoft so much that you’re going to write an article that defenselessly says “you should disable this core service that has been shipping for years and does basically exactly what Google Desktop does and then go install Google Desktop” then why don’t you just quit using Microsoft software entirely? Obviously your philosophy is “microsoft=bad, everything else=good.” “We love Google - it’s so easy to use and they’re so not evil.” Oh yeah? My wife went to lunch at Google yesterday and had to electronically sign-in to enter the building and sign an NDA. To get lunch.

The real problem is this: if someone isn’t in a position to research and understand whether some system service is beneficial to his computer experience, he probably shouldn’t be told to just go in and disable a ton of services. Definitely not with advice that starts “First, disable the mechanism that helps identify and report problems to people who will understand your problem.” Ugh.

myrtle

Eleven years ago on a snowy December night in Cleveland I was studying
for finals at Case Western Reserve University. I’d just joined a
fraternity, had recently completely bombed with a girl I wanted to
date, and I got a call from my family that my grandfather, Norb, had
just died. I didn’t really know what to do or what I could do. I was
right in the middle of finals and had a ticket home for the holidays
shortly afterward, so I made the difficult decision to not go to the
funeral. I put Astral Weeks in my walkman, put on my headphones and
boots and went out for a long walk through campus and Wade Oval. The
snow was falling too heavily to drive safely so it was especially
peaceful and in hindsight probably the perfect backdrop to be
heartbroken and to have lost a family member against.

A few years later, in 1998, I would leave Cleveland after graduating
from Case in what was to become “my” minivan and after a sad farewell
with the woman who would become my wife as I headed back to Minnesota.
On the way, I stopped in Elkader, Iowa to visit my grandmother,
Myrtle, who was still living in her house on North Main Street. Myrtle
was being attended to by a very nice caretaker named June and,
incredibly, surviving on what must be the least healthful food I had
seen in years - “chuckwagon” something-or-other. I had to go through
the awkward conversation that I knew well by this time after meeting
many old close acquaintances: “Well, I really appreciate the gesture
and hospitality [as a chronic sauce-o-phobe, this was among the top 5
most outrageous lies of my life] but I’m vegetarian now.” “Oh,
no…really?” This wouldn’t be easy for either of us. Unfortunately,
my time was short because of my itinerary over the summer. I had a job
waiting for me in Seattle, friends I hadn’t seen in years, and other
family to visit. So after an afternoon of socializing, hearing a
little of June’s demo tape (June had aspirations to sing what I think
was country music and it seemed OK to me by what I know of those
standards), and a chuckwagon-less lunch, Myrtle and I posed for a
picture and I was on my way.

The last few years and months have been harder. They sold the house on
Main Street and Myrtle moved into the Elkader Care Center. This was a
pretty obvious choice. Even as a 12-year-old I recognized that the
stairs in the house, which were always kept finely polished with NASA
surplus equipment, were designed to people to their doom. Or maybe
Norb might have left a rusty mole trap ready to spring somewhere.
Regardless, the house was not designed with modern safety standards
and was too big for one person to reasonably live in. But as far as I
know, practicality is rarely an attractive justification for moving to
a care center. And in the past few months with ulcers and internal
bleeding, everyone has understood that the inevitable day that no one
could look forward to would have to come. Today.

So this weekend many of us will get together in Elkader to say
goodbye. No one will look forward to the occassion, but at least it
will bring family together.