Areas of Unrest

1 June 2001 - In Which I'm Weird But Provide Useful Information

QOTD: "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson

Reading: Tom and Ray Magliozzi, In Our Humble Opinion: Car Talk's Click and Clack Rant and Rave

Listening to: random stuff on the radio

I heard about the massacre in Nepal as I was driving home today and was thoroughly shocked. In case anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, Prince Dipendra took a semi-automatic weapon and killed pretty much the entire royal family, then killed himself. The reports are still sketchy but it looks like 11 people are dead, apparently because of a dispute over who the crown prince wanted to marry. As this happened in Nepal, a country that doesn't exactly have a high profile here (and why not is mysterious to me, but I admit to being a geography geek), I'm going to be very interested in seeing how much coverage the story gets. The BBC coverage on-line was mildly bizarre, including the list of all the crimes Prince Dipendra committed - regicide, patricide, matricide, fratricide, suicide - and the ever important fact that he had attended Eton. They also mentioned that an astrologer had told the royal family that the king would die if the crown prince married before the age of 35. I suspect that American news coverage will be full of little maps of the region, instead of these odd tidbits.

In lighter news, there's this bit that I found on-line:

"The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server. Working with Novell Inc., IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers. Source: TechWeb News, 04/09/01

I emailed the story to several people, adding the comment, "Amontillado, anyone?" I am totally disgusted with the folks who didn't get the reference. On the other hand, Milo told me he found the story quite poe-etic.

As for my own news, I have discovered the major source of stress in my life and it's really quite simple. I'm weird. What led me to this conclusion was the need for index dividers. You see, I like 8.5 by 5.5 inch binders, which is, apparently, a sign of intense deviancy. I like them for two reasons. The first (admittedly stupid) reason is that everybody in my family uses binders that size. So it's sort of a Nadel tradition. The better reason is an entirely rational one, however. Namely, unlike 8.5 by 11 inch binders, the smaller ones fit on shelves that are spaced closer together. If you have as many books (and notebooks, in particular) as I do, this is not a trivial consideration.

The office supplies arena here has been reduced to only two major contenders. Both Staples and Office Depot sell 8.5 by 5.5 inch binders, albeit not in huge quantities and, all too often, only in black. Both Staples and Office Depot sell looseleaf paper that fits 8.5 by 5.5 inch binders. But neither store sells the bloody dividers you need to make the binders useful. Fortunately, there are still a few independents around and I will now owe eternal gratitude to Cash and Carry Office Supplies of Culver City. (They're in the shopping center at Sepulveda and Jefferson, sort of around the side behind Toys R Us, should anybody else in Los Angeles be as weird as I am. But they're moving across Sawtelle in the near future.)

My other strange errand of the week involved voting. I had two meetings scheduled for next Tuesday, one in Azusa (an hour's drive away) and one in Sunnyvale (an hour's flight time away). My solution was to go to the Azusa meeting since I was interested in the whole day's agenda, while I was interested only in about two hours of the Sunnyvale agenda. I should note that I was not the only person with a conflict and that I had, in fact, pointed out the conflict to the person who set up the meeting. He didn't seem terribly concerned about it. But another person (our program's chief engineer, who sometimes has this odd notion that I work for him instead of for Milo) decided that I really needed to be at both and talked the contractor into moving the Azusa meeting.

This would normally not be a big deal - except that the city of Los Angeles is having an election for mayor on Tuesday. A one day trip to Sunnyvale means leaving my apartment at 5 a.m. and returning about 7:30 p.m., while the polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.. In other words, it's impossible to vote before leaving and cutting it way too close to count on voting after returning. And, of course, all this reshuffling happened late in the day yesterday - days after the deadline to request an absentee ballot.

It didn't take much research to learn that I could vote before the election by going in person to the Election Division of the City Clerk's office. It took somewhat more research to find out just where the Election Division was. Armed with the address (it's 700 E. Temple, which is downtown, a few blocks east of Alameda, sort of near where you used to have to park if you had jury duty downtown), I set off first thing this morning. It actually worked quite well. There's metered parking on the street and the people in the office were friendly and helpful - something one rarely expects from civil servants. The traffic getting to work after I voted was another matter. I didn't actually make it into the office until 9:30, which is astonishingly late for me. Not that it's any issue and they're legally required to give you time off to vote anyway, but it did mean getting less done today than I'd planned to.

By the way, since everybody else I told this story to asked, I voted for Villaraigosa for mayor. He's moderately sleazy, but Hahn is much sleazier. It was an easy decision since I consider Hahn the moral equivalent of our current president. Namely, he's a mediocre man, who'd be working in the mailroom if he hadn't had a famous and well-liked father. The race for city attorney was better, since that one included a candidate I actually like (Mike Feuer) and wasn't just a lesser of evils.

By the way, I actually had a reasonably good work week, without a single contractor meeting and with just one particularly annoying e-mail exchange. If somebody asks what software spiral a particular function is in, sending them the entire release plan for the whole program and expecting them to dig through it, is not likely to be well received. I finally got the guy in question to give me the one word answer I was looking for when I asked the question two months ago, but not without wanting to throttle him in the mean time. Fortunately, I had time to discuss scheduling and optimization algorithms with one of my support guys and to have a major inspiration regarding a long standing modeling issue, so most of the week was fun. (And, yes, I know that most people wouldn't consider a three hour discussion of squeaky wheel optimization versus genetic algorithms to be fun. I already said I'm weird.)

Finally, I'll mention that I'm almost done with the Malta travelogue. I'm hoping to get to the rest of it in the next few days. In the meantime, I might as well throw in a few useful grammatical tidbits:

1. Fewer is used to refer to things that one would count (i.e. things that are usually measured with integers), while less is used for more amorphous quantities. There are fewer people who understand this than there used to be because less grammar is taught in schools nowadays.
2. The word "momentarily" means "for a moment," not "in a moment." The airline industry, which I hold largely responsible for this abuse, does not get to define the English language.
3. The word "data" is plural. The singular is "datum," not that you're ever likely to use it. There is a similar relationship between "media" and "medium."

So not only am I weird, but I'm pedantic, too. I can also tell you where in Los Angeles to play petanque (the Cheviot Hills Rec Center on Motor, just south of Pico) or buy live poultry (Manchester Live Poultry, on the south side of Manchester, just west of Aviation). I only know the latter because I drive past the place every now and then. Even my weirdness has limits.