Archive for the 'Life' Category

A local drugstore recently installed two self-checkout terminals. Last night was the first time I had been there since they were installed. The terminals were each being used as Krissy and I walked up to one of the checkers. In a loud voice that could be heard from the back of the otherwise quiet store the pre-recorded female voice coolly, but resolutely, announced, “Card not accepted.” The woman at the first station kept canceling and retrying her checkout. After numerous rejections she pressed the help button.

“Would you like assistance?”
*BEEP*
“Help is on the way.”

Then she waited. While she was waiting the man at the second terminal finally gave up and pressed the help button.

“Would you like assistance?”
*BEEP*
“Help is on the way.”

It was at about this time that the woman in front of us had her card rejected. The cashier called for a manager to void the transaction. The visibly flustered manager eventually made his way over to void the transaction. Then he went to help the man who was having trouble with the self-checkout. He tried pressing all sorts of things and even used his key, but even though he failed the machine announced, “Please take your receipt. Please take your change. Thank you for shopping.” The manager gave up and pulled out the man’s single purchase from the bag that had concealed it. He then placed it forcefully on the conveyor belt behind our purchases. It was a box of home pregnancy tests. The man didn’t look like he was too excited about having this item on public display. Most of the customers in the store were now watching the manager and the other woman at the self-checkout. While this was happening the woman’s self-checkout station beeped again.

“Would you like to keep waiting?”
*BEEP*
“Help is on the way.”

This made her sigh. It was not a sigh of relief, but an aggravated sigh of frustration. The manager was busy helping the other customer and by this time our cashier was ringing up our selections. While scanning our items she got the woman’s attention and asked, “Do you want to cancel your purchase?” The woman then turned around and exclaimed, “No! I’m Canadian and this machine won’t accept my postal code!” A cashier at the other end of the row of checkout lanes raised her hand and indicated she could help the next person in line. It was at about this time that our credit card was declined. Krissy tried it again a different way… still declined. I think they must have been having problems getting cards processed. As we walked out without our purchase I heard our cashier call her manager to void the transaction. He was exasperated, but I didn’t see what happened because we were out the door.

As a child I remember returning home from long trips to Utah and getting excited seeing the dragons on hole 19 off to the right of the freeway heading into town. They always let me know that we were almost home. The Family Fun Center in Escondido is no more. A secondary casualty was the Chuck E. Cheese’s next door. Both of these locations provided me hours of entertainment and enjoyment including a few birthday parties.

I can’t exactly say that I’m surprised to see them go. This part of town has been steadily going downhill for years. Part of this demolition project included what used to be a K-Mart. It was the worst K-Mart in the country though when it finally closed. Twenty years ago it was a much nicer place. There was a restaurant inside and you could buy ice cream cones and Slush Puppies and all sorts of things, but over time it grew worse and worse. I went in there once looking for an obscure toy and the aisles were strewn with discarded merchandise. I am assuming that this was the building that was slated for demolition, but that the new occupants wanted more space so they bought up the Family Fun Center next door for the extra space.

No more bumper boats, no more “maze craze,” and no more miniature golf. Family Fun Center, you will be missed.

When I looked at this picture after getting home I thought it kind of looked like they might be replacing the Family Fun Center with a miniature version of Disneyland with the Matterhorn being constructed first, but alas, I must deal with the sad truth that a Lowe’s Home Improvement store is building there instead.

I’m taking an Algebra class this summer. Six weeks ends up being a really short period of time when a math class is involved. I took Physical Anthropology in 12 days, and that was no problem, but math is a different story.

Today I had this jock sit right next to me. I had noticed this because the previous class periods he had always sat two rows in front of me, right next to a group of people that look like they might be pretty good at this math stuff. A couple days ago I heard him comment that he had expected me to challenge the instructor’s teaching style rather than the girl who ended up challenging the teacher. His motives were soon made clear when he told me that he had cheated on the math placement test so he could get into this college level algebra class. He made it obvious that he was only in college to play baseball. During the quiz the teacher left the room for a few minutes and he tried to see what was written on my paper. After the quiz he said that he thought we had the same kind of calculator. I doubted him because almost no one has the TI-85 in college algebra classes. I asked to see his calculator to check the model number. Even though we all knew that it would be needed on the quiz, he said he had left his calculator in the car and that it didn’t matter because he didn’t know how to use it anyway.

Later on it seemed that he had realized that I wouldn’t prove to be the exceptional math student (and source of correct test answers) he had suspected I would be. He started looking around and asking people who the really smart people in the class were. We have our first big test in class tomorrow and he’s just trying to figure out who might let him cheat!

Cheaters never prosper, or so I’ve heard. I can’t help but wonder what this guy is like on the baseball diamond. If he cheats this wantonly on tests and in class I can’t imagine him having anything against such dishonesty in other matters in his life including baseball. I don’t know why, but something tells me that he’s not going to learn much in this class. If he passes and I don’t, I’m going to be really upset.

Today, after we got back our quizzes in my six-week long algebra class, one student raised her hand and asked if it were okay to not have used a graphing calculator on one of the questions that asked that one be used and then consulted to draw an estimate of what the graph of a particular function should look like since she did not have one yet because the instructor said on the first day of class that one would not be required until the second week of class. The instructor paused for a moment and said that it was indeed not acceptable and that she needed to have used one for full credit. The whole class seemed quite taken aback. Most instructors would have realized their mistake and awarded credit for requiring something she had previously stated was not required. I took a four-week class that ended just last week and the professor would go through the tests while the students were taking it and tell us the answers to the questions that were not addressed in lectures or our reading materials. Why, after all, should students suffer for the mistakes of their professors?

The rest of the class period was rather tense and uncomfortable. I could feel the loss of respect in the classroom. We all had this feeling like we weren’t being dealt with fairly. Each of us had become that poor girl in the front row. Now, as it turns out, that “poor girl” turned out to be rather bold and obnoxious, but none of us could really blame her. After all, we didn’t respect the teacher anymore. The wronged girl raised her hand a number of times questioning the teacher’s judgment and she did so with an indignant accusatory tone that made each of us in the class feel even more uncomfortable as the teacher then fought for her ideas openly. One such idea was that we should be using the calculator so much for what the girl thought were trivially easy tasks.

I propose the following as the first Article of Fairness in Academics:

Students will be marked down for their own mistakes and not for their teachers’ negligence.

Last week we received a letter from the power company that there would be a scheduled power outage tonight starting at 11:00pm. Well, I put it on my calendar and promptly forgot about it. Krissy was already asleep when it happened, but I was listening to the FLOSS Weekly podcast when all the lights went out as far as I could see out the window. The electric company had brought their own lights to see what they were working on, and that was the only light around. Shortly after the lights went out I went on the balcony with a flashlight. I was not the only one who had this idea, however.

When I started flashing the flashlight onto the field across the way I saw another beam of light originating from another balcony in my building. When I moved my light, the other light followed. No matter where I went the other light tried to “catch” mine. I tried all sorts of silly little things. I spun the flashlight over my head like I was a lighthouse. That really seemed to confuse them. Just when they thought they knew what to expect, I started going the other direction. It all sounds so silly now, but when everyone in a neighborhood all experiences boredom simultaneously it’s like everyone’s a kid again.

You aren’t having fun? Make up a game!

I’m sitting in the computer lab at Palomar College. I just witnessed something so ridiculous that I could hardly believe my eyes. Everyone already knows that 95.7% of computer lab usage is checking MySpace. Although that’s ridiculous, that’s not news. While I was reading digg doing my homework I was interrupted, as is so often the case, by the rapid mouse clicking associated with playing a stupid flash game. Rapid keyboard activity can indicate work (or blogging), but mouse clicks can only be one thing. Usually when this happens to me the person doing the clicking is in a position that doesn’t allow me to see what they are doing. This time was different.

The girl behind me was clicking furiously for about 15 seconds followed by hushed rejoicing in her rapid-fire mousing abilities. It was so annoying that I had to see what all the noise was about. When I turned around to look I was astonished. She wasn’t playing a game. She was on MySpace! For those of us with the AdBlock firefox extension installed: MySpace is covered with little flash ads that you can’t see. These ads promise things like free ringtones as rewards for winning virtual tug of war contests. You “win” by clicking a red button on the screen fast enough that the rope puller starts overtakes his opponent. I say “win” because your reward for participating in this game is a popup ad. That’s right, a popup. People are playing games where you click forever just to get to an advertisement. But it doesn’t end there.

It soon became apparent that this girl knew what she was doing. She was having so much fun that she would click until her reward came. She would then immediately click the close box on the popup, reload the page, and play the next “game.” Apparently there are multiple “click here a thousand times and get a popup” games. The gameplay is identical, but the animations are different.

This takes me back to my original question. I always assumed that no one ever fell for the old “get a free NAME_OF_PRODUCT by (swatting_the_fly | shooting_the_prairie_dog | mashing_the_mouse_button)” routine. By the looks of things, those games are so fun that people will endure the ads just to keep playing them.

What has the internet come to?

I usually have my camera with me. I’ve heard it said that if you don’t have a camera with you, then you aren’t a photographer. Between classes and during breaks at school I like to relax by walking around and taking pictures of interesting things or trying out new photography techniques. Today I happened upon two interesting things that were together. I have probably walked by these at least a hundred times, but today they stood out.

The first thing that caught my eye were these flowers. I know nothing about flowers or plants. I can never remember anything about plants and they all tend to look pretty much the same to me. These flowers though were amazing. Maybe it was just the way the sun was shining on them, but I had to have a picture. When I went in for some really close macro shots I was greeted with mysterious fascinating living thing number two for the day. Sitting atop the flower I wanted to photograph was a tiny insect. Insects are usually wary and fast making them very difficult to photograph without very expensive equipment, but this guy just sat there and let me take picture after picture from different angles all at less than three inches! I thought this was all quite a nice accident to have found him on the one perfect flower that I wanted pictures of. After I started looking at the other flowers more closely, however, I saw this same type of insect on almost every one of these flowers in the area. Most of the other ones hopped off the flowers when I came close, though.

I know less about bugs than I do about plants, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin in identifying him. I would be interested to know more about both of these. They seem to go together, but that might have indeed been a coincidence.

Let’s face it. I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle and I eat as if I were a linebacker. I was the kind of guy who lost weight on his mission because that was the most exercise I’d ever gotten in my life. I like food. I don’t like exercise. My hobbies include reading, playing video games, and programming. Geocaching is good, but that’s not even close to enough exercise to do me much good. Since getting married I’ve taken to eating two servings worth of everything Krissy and I cook. When I went to see the doctor for a physical his exact words were: “You don’t smoke. You don’t drink alcohol or coffee. You don’t lead a risky lifestyle. Nope… weight will be your nemesis.

My cholesterol is too high and I need to lose weight. Krissy and I attended a class this evening aimed at educating unhealthy people about healthy eating habits specifically geared toward lowering high cholesterol levels. We were given a charge to document all of our food intake in a week and to then compare that to our goals and see where we might improve. They gave us a sheet of paper upon which to track our eating habits. There was no way I was going to let things go on paper where the information would languish in uselessness. When we returned home I immediately set out looking for Free Software to track my food intake and my progress over the next few months.

The first thing I found was Gnutrition. This software looked promising at first. It includes information from the FDA on over five thousand different foods and allows one to track progress and plan meals. Unfortunately the most recent release of the software was in 2001 and I couldn’t even get it to compile. I found a few other applications for nutritional information, but none of them allowed tracking of eating habits, which was what I really wanted.

When I first thought about using my geek talents to get healthy I thought that there ought to be a website that would allow me to keep track of these things no matter where I was so I could hop online and update it. I thought that something like a “Google Diet” sounded like a good idea. I guess I wasn’t the only one that thought that might be a good idea. In searching for Free Software I found a free website called FitDay. FitDay is a free online nutrition and exercise tracking system. It allows setting goals and seeing how much fat, calories, and nutrients are being ingested.

As far as exercise goes, I am a complete novice. I have no clue where to start, what to do, or how long to do it for. For people like me RunFatBoy.net was created. The site’s not quite done yet, but it looks like it’s just what I need to get started and to get my stomach to stop spilling out over my pants.

Getting in shape and healthy may not be fun, but it can be just as geeky as you want it to be. And if you’re me then that’s very geeky indeed.

I have had my share of problems with companies and institutions calling multiple times in a day trying to get ahold of either me or my wife, but this voting season has been the worst yet. Tomorrow is the primary election in California and I have received nearly eight telephone calls so far today with pre-recorded messages from well-known supporters of candidates and candidates themselves urging me to vote for one or the other or this way or that on a proposition.

Will it ever stop?

Of course it will stop. Sometime around June 7th when the election is over. The best part of all this is that I’m registered as a permanent absentee voter, and I’ve already mailed in my ballot. Of course, I dislike the volume of messages I’ve received so much that I wish I could have my ballot back just so I could vote against these old-school spammers.

The National Do Not Call Registry has been a success for me and my family. We have received almost no unsolicited calls since then except for the political advertisements preceding this election. You see, the politicians that drafted this bill made a nice exception for themselves making it impossible to penalize them for telemarketing. “It’s not covered because it’s not a sales call” they say. How is it not a sales call? All they are doing is trying to sell themselves and their friends.

I did a little research and found that they are most likely calling all the numbers that are registered with their political party. I am going to have to re-register and put some bogus number on there if I’m ever going to get this to stop. I can try to track down all the organizations that are using that number to boost their candidates’ numbers and ask them to please stop calling, but they are in no way obligated to do so and there are just so many that it’s not worth it.

We need a new law against this behavior. I would love to just vote against everyone who is doing this, but that is often impractical. The best candidate in most important regards is rarely the one who is not advertised through telephone solicitations. In some categories I have received calls backing all of the candidates that are running. Then what am I supposed to do? Not voting is out of the question. I have no obvious recourse available.

I can only hope that they don’t get ahold of my email address.

Free for Windows XP users, that is. Skype is software that allows voice to be carried over the internet between two or more participants in a phone-like setting. In other words, it lets you talk to people as if you were talking to them on the phone, but lets you do it for free over the internet to anywhere in the world for free. Skype is released for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux and all three can talk to one another. The video features, however are still in beta and are only available for Windows XP.

Krissy’s brother and his family recently moved to Georgia, so we decided we would try to keep in touch using the new video capabilities in Skype. The audio quality is excellent, but with the limitations in bandwidth imposed by our asynchronous broadband we can only really communicate with the bandwidth of a palty sixty Kilobytes per second. The video quality is less than stellar, and we have experienced dropouts that required us to manually reconnect. The dropouts were probably not Skype related, however.

I am looking forward to using the Linux version when it comes out to talk to them from our place, but I really doubt if we can maintain a three-way video connection with only thirty Kilobytes per second transfer rates. I don’t even know if Skype’s software supports more than two parties using video at once.

While it’s less than perfect and nowhere near as good as being in the same room with your family, it’s still better than talking without video at all, especially for the younger ones that can’t yet really talk a lot. At least they get to see their family and learn who they are even if it’s just the grown-ups talking.