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Category Archives: Living
Activation
My debit card expires this month, so I just got a new one in the mail. It has a number you have to call to activate it. So I dialed, and it rang twice. (I’m used to auto-answer systems picking up on the first ring, but whatever.)
I expected something like, “Thanks for calling Visa! To activate a card, press 1…”
Instead, I got:
“November 8, 2007!!!”
[awkward pause]
[lengthy message in Spanish directing Spanish speakers to press 2]
“Here’s how I can help you.”
[awkward pause]
[To activate a card, say “Activate a card.” To report a lost or stolen card…]
Me: “Activate a card.”
“Okay.”
[awkward pause]
“Please say the last four digits of the card.”
Me: [does so]
“All cards associated with this account have been activated. Goodbye.”
It was the strangest thing. And while “normal people” may like it, I find it extremely awkward to speak to computers on the phone. I’d think it would be less error-prone if I was asked to dial the last four digits. And it would certainly feel less awkward than me sitting in the living room saying, “Activate a card! 1-2-3-4!”
The worst is the greeting. Especially when it comes to credit cards, it’s important to at least pretend you’re a real company. Shouting (excitedly) a date and then having a couple seconds go by doesn’t inspire too much confidence.
A New Addiction?
I don’t normally watch TV. If I have time to waste, I find it much more satisfying to waste it on the computer. But yesterday my brother was watching TV. I ended up watching a bit of TV with him, and then he left. So I started flipping through the channels, and came across National Geographic in HD.
Whatever you might have thought National Geographic TV would be about, you’re probably wrong. I tuned in halfway through a show about mobsters controlling Las Vegas in the 80s (or maybe 70s), and the FBI work to bring them down. It was kind of a fascinating show, actually, but when it ended, I looked forward to quitting this “TV” thing and getting back to the computer.
But then the next show was about the Mafia working with biker gangs to sell cocaine in Canada, which got me hooked. After that, I finally escaped.
But then last night was another one of those “I finished the Internet” moments, and I really didn’t have the motivation to go do anything actually productive. So I tried another hit of TV.
National Geographic (which they call “Nat Geo,” a name which for some reason comes across as pretentious and irksome to me) had a program on “police technology,” the latest high-tech they’re using. They talked about the “Shot Spotter,” a neat system of microphones throughout a “bad neighborhood” in LA as a pilot program. They fired a test shot to demonstrate the system (they apparently test it often). About a minute later a cruiser showed up. Apparently it works by calculating the (miniscule) difference in arrival of the gunshot sound to various listening posts, and then triangulates the location with awfully good accuracy. He also modeled some newer non-lethal weapons. They modeled tasers, which, despite the whole “Don’t tase me bro” bad reputation they’re getting, actually strike me as a good thing. (They’re basically there for times when an officer’s only other choice is to pull out his gun, and I’d certainly rather get tasered than shot in the face.) The new ones come with embedeed video and audio cameras for accountability purposes. They also had what’s basically a paintball gun, firing something like 10 rounds a second. They have a few different “balls” they can fire, including hard rubber balls intended to inflict a bit of injury for crowd control, and traditional paintballs for marking suspects. But the neat one was the one they apparently use the most: “paintballs” filled with something like mace in powered form. They can fire a couple at a suspect and stop him pretty much instantly, or, for crowd control, fire a stream of them at the ground in a distance to keep people back.
That finished up at 11. Finally, I could escape the TV. Except, darn them, the next program was about past CIA programs, including some insane attempts at brainwashing people / feeding them LSD, and the pretty blatant murder of one of their operatives who’d expressed to his superiors that he was very uncomfortable with them testing serin on people, particularly after one died. So he “committed suicide” by jumping out a 13th-story window. The CIA insisted on a closed-casket funeral (for the family’s protection, of course!), and apparently discreetly had a few CIA agents at the funeral. The family later caught on that someone wasn’t right and exhumed the body, finding that he suffered blunt trauma to the head (which entirely contradicted the medical reports), and that the CIA the next year released a “manual” for their agents, including a recommendation that, to kill people, you should whack them in the head to knock them out, and then hurl them out a window to make it look like suicide.
Right now I’m just tuning into “Seconds from Disaster,” a show about a volcano in the Caribbean.
At 3pm there’s a show on the Green Berets, but I’m gone then. 4pm is a show about “hired guns” in Iraq, 7pm is about the shooting of Ronald Reagan, 8pm on Kent State, and 9pm is a program they’ve been hyping on the Oklahoma City bombing, with suggestions that the people convicted for it didn’t act alone. 10pm is about Columbine. I can skip 11pm, because it’s a repeat of Kent State. In fact, it’s repeats until 3am, when it’s about an old al Queda attempt at blowing up a plane. 4am is another plane crash, and 5am is another al Queda attack. Then 10am is “Military technology inspired by nature.”
I don’t think I can sleep anymore.
Seriously, this is an amazing TV network.
The Top
Inspired in a roundabout way by a recent Ask MetaFilter question, and fueled my desire to procrastinate a little longer, here’s my take–in no particular order–on the top songs ever. I started off as a blanket list of songs were good, but kept whittling it down until only the best songs ever remained.
- Pink Floyd – Keep Talking: Not only does it sound great, but find me another song with a guest appearance by Stephen Hawking. And, unlike some of their other songs, it’s pretty “normal” and upbeat. (However, High Hopes takes a close second for Pink Floyd songs, and honorable mention goes to Run Like Hell, Cluster One, Learning to Fly, and the rather creepy One of My Turns. And The Happiest Days of Our Lives, but only if you play it loud.
- RHCP – Snow (Hey Oh): I’m hesitant to include things I’ve loved for less than a month, but I’ve liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers for years and years, so it’s not like I’m throwing a Top 10 spot into something unfamiliar. (Their Aeroplane is a close second.)
- Jimmy Eat World – Hear You Me: Many of the songs I love turn into lists of other great songs by that author. This isn’t so with Jimmy Eat World–some of their other songs are so-so. This one has secured a spot in the top, though. It’s always been a good time, but have it come up on Shuffle when someone close to you has died and tell me it isn’t wonderfully appropriate. I also tend to not keep downbeat songs in my playlists, but this one–even with all the associate sadness–stays in. You owe it a listen.
- Creed – One: I think I own a couple Creed songs, but I might rank them in the Top 100 artists in my playlist. But something about this song propels it into the Top 10. Part of it’s just that it sounds great. It also has a neat sort of “burst of energy” that keeps you from just playing it as background music. And the lyrics are excellent, too. (Actually, one might copy-and-paste this text for Green Day’s American Idiot, although I rank One higher.)
- The Fray: I just can’t decide which one. I confess that Iliked them so much that I almost did something vile–bought a CD. I didn’t, but if ever I came close, it was upon hearing their other songs. You’ll surely recognize How to Save a Life and Over My Head (Cable Car), but some of the others–All at Once, Heaven Forbid, Little House, Look after You, and She Is are all as good.
- Smashing Pumpkins – Today: Out of a band that does a lot of, err, melancholy, songs, a beacon of happiness. (I think.) And don’t skip the beginning, which caused my classic, “I forgot about glockenspiels!” line. (But really, when was the last time you thought about glockenspiels? I’d gone years without so much as remembering their existence. I might not think about coconuts more than every few weeks, or ventriloquists more than once a month. But glockenspiels? It’s been years.)
- Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit: Amid a sea of nice calm, upbeat music, we need something that can only be described as loud. This is it. Unintelligible lyrics? Check. Screaming, without being “heavy metal” that grates on my nerves? Check. But the real reason for including them? Lyrics like “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido” are a reminder that sometimes, just every now and then, a song doesn’t have to make any sense at all to be good.
In lieu of finishing a Top 10 list, I’ll leave you with three songs that I bet you heard years ago but forgot all about–the glockenspiel factor.
- New Radicals – You Get What You Give.
- Spacehog – In the Meantime.
- Primitive Radio Gods – Standing outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand.
Confirmation Bias
Have you ever noticed that someone mentions something, and all of a sudden you notice that thing multiple times? One professor mentioned that very phenomenon one week. Early the next week, I was touring Waltham’s 911 dispatch center, and noted the software they used for (Computer Aided Dispatch) CAD, intending to look more into it. The next day, I had that professor’s class again, and, for reasons I still don’t understand, somehow slipped in a mention of knowing someone who worked at that company. So I mentioned this to him after class, and also pointed out the incredible irony of the fact that the week before he’d mentioned the “someone mentions something, and all of a sudden you keep seeing” it phenomonen. {Meta: this phenomonen may, itself, be related to a confirmation bias, but I digress.}
So Kyle mentioned confirmation bias in one of his recent posts. The next day someone on Ask MetaFilter asked why black people were afraid of his dog. Most answers bordered around it being a confirmation bias. (Although it got interesting when several people reported having noticed the same thing, suggesting that maybe, just maybe there is some sort of racial difference in how dogs are viewed.)
The other day there was a lunar eclipse. Around the same time, we had several short problems with Internet access, where traffic wasn’t leaving Bentley. (Incidentally, I had the same experience I’ve had with most of my tickets–I only open then when I run into an issue I can’t solve myself and am very confident that it’s a problem, so I usually include enough information that the front-level have no idea what’s going on an forward it to an expert… So I ended up speaking with our “Network Engineer,” a position I didn’t even know we had, and we had a good talk about exactly whta the problem was… It appears to lie with an upstream company performing some maintenance.)
So today my professor–who teaches nothing related to electronics nor astronomy–randomly interrupted her lecture saying, “Thursday was a lunar eclipse. Did anyone else experience technical problems because of the lunar eclipse?” People had several problems that day–several brought up the Internet disruption. Someone had their computer crash. She explained that the lunar eclipse tends to cause those things.
If ever there were evidence of a confirmation bias, that’s it. I don’t profess to be a total expert, but I’m pretty certain that the moon being obscured by our shadow isn’t why our Internet link went down for a couple minutes. And yet she’s found plenty of evidence to support what’s probably an urban legend.
Starting Writing
I’ve been asked to write an article for the school paper on what will probably be a front-page issue. Combined with the police logs and a burning desire to write a letter to the editor, I’ve realized something.
I hate writing introductions. Here, I can just start in with terrible openers like “So…” But “So, like, some girl got meningitis” would probably not fly as an opening line in our paper. So right now my introduction is, “Great, gripping introduction goes here,” with a big highlight in Word to remind me to not submit it that way. The vague alliteration with g‘s was to amuse me as I wrote it.
What I really enjoy doing is writing phrases. This isn’t to suggest that I can’t turn phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into a full… things. I can. But for the letter to the editor, something I have no obligation to write (and something that they may well choose not to run anyway), I’m free to work as I please.
So I have some things scrawled down: “foisting their preferences” and “a smug sense of self-entitlement,” for example. They reflect the wonder that is finding the perfect word to get something across. I could have said “forcing their preferences,” and probably would have if I wasn’t allowed to randomly scribble down phrases I liked. Similarly, I’d probably have said, “arrogant” if this was an article I had to rush and couldn’t take creative liberties with. But it’s a letter to the editor that I can submit whenever I please. And besides, “arrogant” sets off bells as being an ‘attack word.’ Calling it “a smug sense of self-entitlement” flies just below the radar, introducing an edge of snippiness without being as overtly offensive at “arrogant.”
And here I am, writing about how I should be writing something else…
Digital Photo Recovery
I just discovered PhotoRec, a tool for recovering digital camera images.
For the non-geeks, a quick basic background…. When you save a file, it writes it to various blocks on the disk. Then it makes an entry in the File Allocation Table, pointing to where on the disk the file is. When you delete a file, the entry is removed from the File Allocation Table. That’s really all that happens. The data is still there, but there’s nothing pointing to where on the disk it is. This has two implications. The first is that, with appropriate tools and a little luck, you can still retrieve a file that you’ve deleted. (Whether this is comforting or distressing depends on your perspective…) The second is that, with no entry in the File Allocation Table, it’s seen as “free space,” so new files saved to the disk may well end up getting that block. It’s technically possible to recover stuff even after it’s been overwritten, but at that point it’s much more complex and much more luck is involved.
Last night we went out to dinner… We took lots of photos, but some were deleted. So I figured PhotoRec might recover them. So I gave it a try.
The filesystem shows 163 photos. After running PhotoRec, I have 246 photos. What’s odd is what photos I have. It’s not the ones from last night. They’re scattered from various events, and several are from almost two months ago.
This does leave us with an important tip, though: if you delete an essential photo, stop. Each subsequent thing you do to the disk increases the odds of something overwriting it. In a camera, just turn it off. Taking more photos seriously jeopardizes your ability to recover anything.
In my case, I didn’t have anything really important… I just wondered how it would work. And I got strange results for recovered files. (Which has me wondering a lot about how its files get written out to disk, actually.) But it’s good knowledge for the future. (By the way, PhotoRec runs under not just Linux, but also, apparently, Windows, and most any other OS you can imagine.)
Criticizing Web Apps
As long as I’ve posted a lengthy diatribe about how awful the library room-booking web interface is, there are two more that drive me nuts.
We have a way of putting in work orders for maintenance. Last semester I tried to open one of our windows and it just fell out. This semester, we had three different light fixtures burn out in 2 days time. So you go online and put in a work order. This is a great thing to have web-based. Except they picked this insane system that opens multiple browser windows, resizes your browser (?!), uses copious JavaScript requiring you to double-click on links… And it only works in IE. Oh, and there are irritating things that could be fixed with one line of code… You log in with your student ID, which is eight-digits that inexplicably have an @ sign in front of them. So they have this big note on how you cannot use the at sign, you must only use your eight-digit number. One line of code could just strip it out if it was included.
Much like booking library rooms, submitting help tickets is a Programming 101 exercise. In fact, it’s easier than the library interface, because you don’t have to do time calculations. You have an employees table, a clients table, and a work table. Tasks get entered into work by the client, and the staff assigns an employee to it. And when it’s done, you set work.status to “Complete,” a simple ENUM field. This is like 45 minutes of coding, although I’d probably spend more time prettying up the interface.
Then there’s the computer help desk, another web app. For one thing, all the links to it point to an http:// URL. But if you actually use them, it barfs up an error that you must view it over a secure channel. Being a web dork, I just take “s” onto the end of “http” and life is golden. To someone who’s not so good with computers, and who’s already at wits’ end with their computer, they’re probably going to break down and cry, because even the help desk webpage doesn’t work for them.
This, too, only works in IE. In this case, they didn’t have copious bizarre crap (like requiring double-clicking on links), so I set Firefox to pretend it was IE. The page loads okay, but looks terrible, with nothing lining up right. IE and, well, the rest of the world, have differing views on how lots of things are done, but requiring IE really isn’t the best solution. Oh, and as an added bonus, they control your mouse cursor, preventing it from indicating links in any manner. This means that someone took time to write code that does nothing but decrease usability.
But worst of all, even if you use IE like they demand, if you actually try to click on any tickets to view them, you get taken to a random system with a long canonical hostname, which just throws you “HTTP 400 – Bad Request.”
So last night, I submitted a help desk ticket indicating that the help desk is broken. Because, frankly, it doesn’t work. All of its internal links take you to the wrong server (or, seemingly, the right server but with the wrong hostname), and that’s assuming you’re smart enough to get in, by understanding the error indicating that you need to use HTTPS, not HTTP.
Most of these things are sold as turnkey devices, it seems. Maybe I should start a company making them. Apparently, no technical expertise is required to do so.
Can We Widen Our Lead?
Incidentally, polling data, reported on Electoral-Vote.com, showed them as neck-and-neck, generally favoring Clinton by a few points. Obama won by 15 points, 57-42, (significantly) more than any poll predicted.
Cold War
Anyone who’s learned about the Cold War will be familiar with the chilling fact (no pun intended…) that we came very close to a nuclear war.
But after reading things like this article, mixed with other anecdotes, I’m left wondering how on Earth we didn’t go to war… Accidentally. Both the U.S. and the Soviets, on multiple occasions, “detected” launches of nuclear weapons by the other, and came within seconds of retaliation before someone noticed something out of the ordinary.
Fortunately, the U.S. was very thorough the first time around, and quickly proved that the first “attack” they witnessed was caused by some guy inserting the wrong tape… In the case of the Soviets, the only reason they didn’t launch a counter-attack after their own false alert, it seems, was because the guy who was supposed to press the button disobeyed orders and went with his gut. (And boy are we glad!)
And there’s a further set of coincidences, really. After a flood of nonsensical data, officials discovered some problems. Apparently, one detection system was alternating between reporting some 2,000 incoming missiles and 0 incoming missiles. Because of the conflicting data, they turned to alternate systems, which also reported 0 incoming missiles, and it was traced to a hardware malfunction, with the 2,000 number just happening to match, by sheer luck (or lack thereof), internal checksums.
So they wrote some code to compare results from multiple systems. And not more than a few months later, the problem with the training tape occurred, when one of the systems began reporting more believable numbers of incoming missiles. (Apparently, a steadily increasing number.) The data “made sense,” but, because of the newly-implemented code to compare with other systems, they realized that it was just one system, and quickly isolated it to a case of someone sending “training data” as if it were live data. It’s almost a case of two wrongs making a right–had the first error not occurred, the safeguards wouldn’t have been implemented to catch the second error.
Oh, and there exists a slightly-creepy website dedicated to the Russian who decided to trust his gut over the myriad indications that we were attacking