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[Nov. 25th, 2009|09:50 pm] |
Went to buy a lightweight jacket online, just something to wear at work when it's slightly chilly. Was disappointed to find that the one I was looking for (something I'd bought for my brother-in-law two christmases ago) wasn't on their website. Until I googled it and found it was actually there, but was moved from the main part of the website because it's now a cheap-cheap clearance item. Score.
Then got annoyed-out-loud at the $10 they wanted to charge me for shipping, which got T to remind me to look for a coupon code for free shipping, which I found and used. See, had they tried to charge me something reasonable, I would have paid it, but because they tried to be jerks about it they get nothin'.
I'm feeling very satisfied about how this worked out. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|07:54 pm] |
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Somebody broke into Tesla's house (not our place, the other house) and stole a few things, including some hundred-year old antique leaded glass windows. We're going to be contacting all of the local shops that could possibly deal in antique windows, so if you can think of any place that would buy/sell that sort of thing, let us know! |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 23rd, 2009|11:43 am] |
Rep Alan Grayson (D-FL) on Dick Cheney:
"Well, my response is -- and by the way, I have trouble listening to what he says sometimes, because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he's talking," said Grayson. "But my response is this: He's just angry because the president doesn't shoot old men in the face. But by the way, when he was done speaking, did he just then turn into a bat and fly away?" |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|01:44 pm] |
Let me explain another way in which I am an idiot.
Five days ago, a large project was birthed. It wasn't meant to be a large project, it was basically, "measure and drill 8 holes, hang two curtain rods, and put curtains on the rods."
It seemed like a good idea at the time to allow this to expand into "move everything out of the room, tear up the nasty carpet, and then put everything back."
Phase three was where we should have detected trouble, but no, the future was full of possibility, and it became "as long as there's no stuff in here, let's paint all the walls."
Which became "paint all the walls, trim, doors, and windows."
But, because the window frames have a hundred years' worth of holes from random crap being hung from them, this led me on an exploration of the proper method to patch holes in painted wood. I eventually settled on a combination of jamming wooden toothpicks into the bigger holes, and then covering over the holes with a nasty toxic wood filler, and then sanding the result.
Which brings me full circle, as I just realized that I have now successfully covered over the holes I drilled five days ago, to hang the new curtain rods. Which will now need to be re-measured, drilled, and hung. Sigh. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 18th, 2009|01:26 pm] |
Here's a question: why doesn't the library get new books right away when they're published? Is this a budget issue, where they just have a queue of books they want to buy, and your book has to wait its turn, or is it something unpleasant, like the publisher intentionally delaying shipments to libraries because it might cost them sales?
I have 3 books on request at the library that have been out for months now, and so far the only listing is for over 10 copies "on order". |
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[Oct. 9th, 2009|10:03 pm] |
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I'm trying to figure out a good high-visibility website or blog to submit the horrendous Michigan Tech article to, because this thing deserves some serious ridicule. Any ideas? |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|06:05 pm] |
This showed up in my mailbox today. It's totally cringe-inducing.
The article is really, really bad. It's basically talking about how great it is to be a woman at Tech because all the men want to date you. Seriously. Did I mention it's bad? You've gotta read the full article to really get the whole ugly experience. Sadly, you miss out on the giant gratuitous graphic that says:Male to female ratio:
1960 22:1
1980 3:1
2008 3:1 Ow. Their complete lack of embarrassment is painful to see. This is one of those articles that would make you laugh, ha ha, if it was an old issue from 1965. Or even 1986. But no, this is a cover article in October 2009. Ow. MTU, you poor dumb backward hicks. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|09:34 am] |
Went to Cafe Lurcat for Restaurant Week dinner yesterday. The starters were decent, a BLT salad (with really, amazingly bacon-flavored bacon) and a crab cake that would have been perfect except it had pimentos (I think?) in it which I found a bit distracting.
The entree was even better; T ordered the halibut with prosciutto butter, which was really outstanding. I had a very good pot roast which would have been the highlight of the meal except that it was badly upstaged by the halibut.
We were totally stuffed, but dessert was included so we had Triple Chocolate Cream Cake, which was good, and the Dark Chocolate Profiteroles, which were even better, a perfect balance of sweet and salty.
Most of the Restaurant Week participants seem to have only one or two choices on their menu; I was very happy that Cafe Lurcat had more (4 starters, 6 entrees, 4 desserts). Probably worth making a reservation; we squeezed into a slightly awkwardly placed table right next to the kitchen. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 29th, 2009|12:31 pm] |
I went to election judge training yesterday. It was pretty interesting, considering that there's actually something big and new: Ranked Choice Voting (what Minneapolis calls IRV).
There are actually a few complications that promise to be interesting. First, state laws over certification of vote-counting machines basically mean that all the RCV elections are going to be hand-counted, which will take over a month. Fun! None of the machines are certified to count RCV, so they don't have much choice, really.
The other interesting part is for offices with multiple winners, like the park board. These races also use RCV, so you select your first, second, third choice candidates, and the counting process uses something called the Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method. Basically, once a candidate has accumulated enough votes to win, additional votes for that candidate will be redistributed to the voters' second-place choice. To use the example given, if there are 3 seats to be won, and 3000 votes cast, a candidate requires 25%, or 750 votes, to be elected. If Candidate A receives 1000 first-choice votes, then there is an excess of 250 votes to be redistributed.
The tricky part is how the votes are redistributed. Some cities pull a random set of votes to redistribute, but in MN nondeterministic/nonreproducable counting methods aren't legal, and we use the Gregory Method, where every one of the 1000 votes get split; 0.75 vote from each ballot goes to Candidate A, while 0.25 vote goes to the voter's second choice.
I predict there will be a lot of confusion about this.
Also, even if the machines become certified, it still becomes impossible to always determine a winner on election night. This is because you can't simply add together all the totals from all the precincts and determine the winner. Well, you can try, but it will only succeed if there is a majority winner using first-choice votes. Otherwise, you somehow need to start eliminating losers, and pulling those ballots to elevate their second-choice votes. Which can be done with machines, but the machine now needs to record and transmit much more data* than just a simple number-of-votes per-candidate. There's an element here which makes me feel a little uneasy, simply because the vote-counting process has become extremely opaque, either demanding an uncomfortable level of human counting (which may be error prone) or machine algorithms (which may be error prone or subject to manipulations that are now even harder to detect). Additionally, there's a new vulnerability where vote totals could be manipulated by moving around second- and third-choice votes, such that the winner could be changed without disturbing the naive totals of per-candidate first, second, and third-choice votes.**
There's also the potential for error based on poorly-trained election judges. There are a lot of potential questions and every judge will answer differently. Hopefully there won't be any major disasters (a judge instructing voters to do something that renders their vote uncountable), but I would expect there will be many minor errors. For example, the woman teaching the training class at one point incorrectly tried to tell us that voters couldn't write in candidates for first, second, and third choices, which doesn't make any sense (thankfully, she called in and got the right answer before the class ended).
I'm still a big fan of IRV, but I think it's still going to take a while to work out all of these issues.
* To perform election-night central machine tabulation for a single race, each precinct would need to transmit either (a) a total of votes for each first-second-third permutation, C3 integers for C candidates, or (b) the first-second-third choices from each ballot, 3*V integers for V voters. (a) is better for large precincts or small candidate fields, and (b) is better for small precincts or large candidate fields. Presumably (a) will be the favored format for publishing results for the entire city, as V becomes very large. Though it's hard to imagine them publishing all 27,000 totals if 30 people run for Mayor. I suppose you could have (c) an iterative process where the precinct machine only reports first-choice totals, and then the central tabulating machine can command the precinct machines to adjust votes as needed to complete the elimination of losers and re-allocation of surplus votes, but that seems unlikely (and risky).
** A naive total is all that precinct tabulating machines are capable of producing this year. They show X votes for first-choice candidate A, Y votes for first-choice candidate B, Z votes for second-choice candidate A, etc. |
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[Sep. 23rd, 2009|03:05 pm] |
The University of Minnesota, in another example of its ongoing game of chicken with the Met Council, has filed suit in state court. Things seem to be getting even uglier than when the U lost its pissing match over running light rail at ground level along Washington.
Their complaint seems pretty weak, mostly just a bunch of whining about how the University didn't get their way last time, and how much trains will screw up Important Research with vibration and electromagnetic interference (as though trucks and buses don't already cause vibration?). Their examples seem pretty bullshit to me, especially the one about the lab in the EECS building, which is mostly a signal-processing lab, in a building full of other stuff that causes EMI. Yes, it has applications for medical research, but the U's complaint makes it sound like kids with cancer will get zapped if a train goes by.
Their legal argument seems to be that the Met Council's Environmental Impact Statement is defective because it didn't satisfy the U's concerns. Yes, a giant construction project on Washington Ave. will suck for the University, but it seems like a worthwhile effort, and I'm not sure what constructive result the U expects to get from this. Kind of seems like they're looking for the Met Council to pay them money to go away.
Really, the part that I hate the most is that a bunch of money will no longer be going to education and research, or transit, and will instead be paying a bunch of lawyers to beat on each other for a few months. And, as a bonus, a $900 million transit project might get delayed, screwing the public over as well. |
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[Sep. 22nd, 2009|11:46 am] |
Random postlets:
The Revomaze puzzle looks extremely cool. Wish I could afford one. Also, that I'd had the idea first.
Ani Difranco puts on a hell of a show. Remind me of this next time she's in town and I'm acting like I can't be bothered.
I needed to change my billing address at my ISP, so I had to send email from that account, so while I was there I paged through all the spam that had piled up since the last time I used it (mid-2007). Amusingly, someone seems to have gotten ticked off at me around March 28, 2008, because over a few days I suddenly found myself subscribed to a bunch of email newsletters.
And no, I still haven't tackled the vacation photo project. Soon, I promise. |
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[Sep. 20th, 2009|09:55 am] |
I really like Bing Travel for checking airline ticket prices, because they'll tell you at a glance whether you should be buying now or waiting to see if it'll get cheaper. They bought Farecast, who must have a patent or some magic technology that nobody else has been able to clone, because so far they seem to be the only ones doing it.
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 17th, 2009|12:58 pm] |
I have over 3500 photos to sort through from London and France. Haven't started sorting yet.
Instead I've been playing with Dropbox, which seems like a pretty decent cross-platform file synchronization and sharing tool. Now that I have 3 Linux installs and one Windows, and may want to occasionally share files with other people running Linux/Windows/OSX, and even things that can't run Dropbox but can run a web browser, it seems like it pretty much does everything I want. So far their Linux version seems really good.
I've been a bit frustrated lately by how afwul the wireless driver on my laptop is. I would really like to just toss the mini-pci card and buy another that's better supported under Linux, but the kind folks at IBM wrote a BIOS that whitelists only the cards they sell, and refuses to boot otherwise. Thanks guys! |
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[Sep. 13th, 2009|04:59 pm] |
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Home again. No doubt there will be a trip summary to follow. Right now I'm just marveling that we're still alive after a scary cab ride home. I don't know if it's possible for a cab driver to get his license yanked, but this guy is really scary. We're talking inability to stay in a lane while weaving through traffic at 70 mph through the crosstown construction, blowing red lights, merging where cars are already present, generally driving like he was half-blind or drunk or both. |
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[Sep. 11th, 2009|10:07 am] |
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Camera USB cable is missing, so no more pics on lj until our return on Sunday. I am pleased, however, that police sirens in Paris sound satisfyingly foreign. |
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