Dangling Conversations

Posted 30 Nov, 2004 at 13:33 by matt in /Chatter | Permanent link

It almost always seems like a better idea than it is. After all, why waste most of a day in flying when you can waste a night, which you'd normally be wasting with sleep anyway? And besides, you can sleep on the plane anyhow, right?

The problem is that the somewhat optimistic theory often leaves out certain details, to wit:

• Being assigned to The Worst Seat on the Plane.
• Sitting beside a guy with headphones that go to 11.
• Turbulence! (OK, that part was pretty cool, but it didn't really help with the sleep.)
• Three-hour layovers in boring airports.
• The need to remain awake for several hours after the flight, that one might put in a respectable day at work.

I'm sure tomorrow I'll be feeling much better; right now I'll be happy in about two hours when today's class is over and I can go off in search of some sleep.

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Posted 25 Nov, 2004 at 14:36 by matt in /Games | Permanent link

As is my custom, I'm spending my American Thanksgiving vacation hanging around with Brent and Lisa in Seattle. This frequently involves the playing of games; this year, the principle game is Civilizations II.

It should be noted that in some ways this marks a kind of devolution. From about second-year onwards back in our undergraduate days, playing multiplayer Civ (of whatever version was current) was sort of a default option when The Crowd of the time wanted a moderately social night in. Thus, the several hours that Brent and I have devoted to this game in the past two days represents a falling back on an earlier pattern of behaviour.

And it makes me wonder to what extent this is typical. Normally my visits with people are of short duration, since they tend to occur when I'm on a weekend road trip and am trying to cram in four or five discrete visits to different folks; also, however, those visits tend to be with people that I see every couple of months. Brent, I see maybe twice a year if I'm lucky; I wonder if that makes it easier to revive the old habits of our friendship, since in some ways we have little opportunity to develop new habits.

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Posted 18 Nov, 2004 at 14:03 by matt in /Math | Permanent link

My spell-checker is constantly suspicious about the perfectly proper plural vertices, but lets Dijkstra pass without comment.

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Posted 17 Nov, 2004 at 23:07 by matt in /Chatter | Permanent link

Recently my Local Phone Company has upgraded their voice-mail system. They notified me of this change via multiple phone messages, logically enough. All of the messages were in this sort of reassuring, we-know-what-we're-doing sort of tone... and so naturally I was expecting trouble.

And yet, apparently the change-over went without incident. I called up the service on the appointed day and reset my message and all that good stuff. Among that good stuff was re-establishing my wake-up service on weekday mornings. My telephone is the only alarm clock I have these days, so this last was fairly important to me.

So the following morning, the phone rings to wake me up at... OK, the actual time of my wake-up call is maybe a little embarassing -- I'm not much of a morning person, let us say -- so the phone rings to wake me up at X o'clock. That happened to be one of my late days -- I didn't need to be on campus until shortly before noon -- and so I lazed about in bed for a little while.

And was thus very surprised when the wake-up service called again at (X+1) o'clock.

Here's my working theory: there's some natural weirdness about time zones in the place where I live. I suspect that the voice-mail server got moved into somewhere in Central Time (explaining the X+1itude), and further that something got backed up in an unanticipated way, resulting in old settings still carrying over and doing so in an unerasable fashion. This makes very, very little sense to me, but it seems to work as a theory.

Really, I'm not that bothered by having an effective hour-long snooze button. OTOH, it might be a bit of a pain when I go off on Christmas break for a couple of weeks and come back to a dozen "wake up" voice messages.

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Posted 16 Nov, 2004 at 15:30 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

I suppose I should raise my voice with my cohorts in praising The Incredibles. I think it might just be the perfect animated movie: realism when appropriate, triumphantly cartoony physics otherwise. Humour and action and a decent moral. Plus a near-constant barrage of pop culture references and allusions.

I don't know that I really want to see a sequel, though. Well, OK, I really really do want to see a sequel, but I don't know how you could make a sequel that isn't a little too... ordinary. Anticlimactic. The story's been told, the character arcs have been run to their successful conclusions. While there's certainly room for more stories -- either as movies or in a more episodic medium -- I can't imagine that the results will be as mind-blowingly cool as this movie.

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Posted 15 Nov, 2004 at 12:21 by matt in /Music | Permanent link

I'm re-reading Nick Hornby's Songbook, which I heartily recommend to anyone who's passionate about popular music. It's a collection of short essays about pop music and why we like it, how it affects us. This is from the man who wrote High Fidelity, and reviews popular music for the New Yorker, so he knows whereof he speaks.

Anyhow, in the piece I read this morning (I think it was concerning Rufus Wainwright's cover of his father's One Man Guy), Hornby makes the claim that the experience of voices raised in harmony is not dissimilar to the direct experience of God: that there's something ineffable, something strange and sublime, in the moment that voices join together.

This seems about right to me. For me, the greatest example of such a moment is Love's Recovery by the Indigo Girls. The first verse is Emily (I'm pretty sure) singing alone, and it's quite nice. But then at the beginning of the second verse, when Amy comes in with a lower harmony line... that's magical.

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Posted 12 Nov, 2004 at 22:48 by matt in /FoodDrink | Permanent link

So Thanksgiving on this side of the border is only two weeks away, and I'm reprising my role as Vice-President in Charge of Poultry out West. Huzzah!

This year we've managed to obtain a duck. I don't know entirely what to do with a duck, but it should be fun, and I'm excited. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. (I realise that of the other denizens of this site, one wouldn't touch the flesh of a duck if her life depended on it, and another is my partner in crime (i.e. fowl play); Kael? Anyone else?)

The main constraints: no butter, cream, or anything else dairy. No pork; I've seen recipes that involve laying strips of bacon atop the bird, but that's not an option. No tomatoes, of course.

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Posted 12 Nov, 2004 at 12:08 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

Glad you're enjoying 'em, Kael. Were you aware that there's a movie in the works?

Whedon has said in interviews that his fondest hope is that some network executive will see the movie and say to him/herself, That's great! We should turn that into a television series...

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Posted 11 Nov, 2004 at 18:00 by matt in /FoodDrink | Permanent link

This is perhaps a benefit to making one's own coffee: you can flavour it however you like.

When I'm home and making coffee -- usually on the weekend, when I'll have the leisure to enjoy it -- my current custom when I want to soak in luxury is to grind some cinnamon and a bit of vanilla bean with the coffee beans. I'm told that cardamom can also work very well, though I've never tried it myself.

Or I suppose there's CoffeeMate™, if you really must.

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Posted 08 Nov, 2004 at 12:59 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link

So how smart is Gmail? Smart enough to recognize false PayPal scams, at least. Today I received an e-mail claiming that there had been unusual activity on my account, and so access to features would be restricted until such time as I went to paypal-verifications.net and confirmed my account info. The problem? My PayPal account isn't bound to my Gmail account.

That was an awful lot of uses of the word account in a really short span of text.

In any event, Gmail automatically sorted this missive into the Spam folder, which was uncommonly generous of it. Paypal appears to have nothing to do with paypal-verifications.net, which is owned by "Roger Smith"; he's in Sussex, England and might use the address netanalize@yahoo.com.

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Posted 01 Nov, 2004 at 20:54 by matt in /MovingPictures | Permanent link

I've been reading Bob Harris' new blog recently, and the other day he posted about a trip to England. Here's one of the things he mentioned in a compare-and-contrast sense with the USA.

Cultural differences: One of the longest-running shows on TV here is a game show called Countdown. Try to imagine this on American television: a paunchy, balding, bespectacled host asks two contestants on a plain-looking set to find the longest word they can amongst strings of 9 random letters, displayed on simple cardboard by a 43-year-old model who would look more at home doing news than an episode of Baywatch. Then two experts with a big dictionary chime in, with frequent discussion of particularly arcane usages. That's it. For an hour. Occasionally the game is interrupted with a math challenge, in which contestants try to reach a random 3-digit number by performing operations on six random smaller numbers. Carol dutifully writes up the equations in magic marker.

Imagine that being popular for 22 years.

Now admittedly, I'm a geek. But this sounds utterly fascinating to me. Then again, I'm from the country that gave the world Front Page Challenge.

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