1. Lake George, NY looks exactly like what it is: a resort town most of which was built in the 50s, with a huge social gap between the poor townies and the fantabulously wealthy families who come up here for the summer and vacation in extravagant summer homes. I keep expecting a John Hughes movie to break out any minute.

2. Of the cars I have seen in this town, about 30% have been Subarus, and 30% have been Corvettes.

3. I just saw a commercial for PF Chang's new line of prepackaged meals for home use. Their version of General Tso's Chicken is called "General Chang's Chicken". I'm pretty sure that General Chang was the bad guy from Star Trek VI.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to A Mind Occasionally Voyaging. You know, after my last article, a lot of concerned readers wrote in to let me know that I was basically a complete fucktard for my opinion on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And by "A lot of concerned readers", I mean "A voice in my head", largely because I am actually writing this article at some point before the article in which I made an offhand crack about Transformers 2, because I didn't want to forget all the jokes I had lined up.

But none of these myriad fictional complaints prepared me for the fictional complaint I received this morning when I stepped into my library.

You!

Me?

Yeah, you, punk.

Optimus Prime?!

I heard you were talking trash about my movie

You heard that? I -- (Glares at Devestator) -- I didn't know you guys talked.

We don't. But you were right down stairs. There are like 13 of me up here.

[Devestator]: DEVESTATOR! DESTROY!

Shut up, Devestator.

Shut up, Devestator.

So, um, Optimus Prime. Um.

Look, you're entitled to your opinion. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings

Yeah...

So you have the right to be a total douchenozzle about my latest film. I just thought we had something, man

Look, Optimus, it's not like that. It's totally not like that, man. I -- you know what, I hated how this movie treated you. This movie was beneath you, man. It was like Raul Julia doing Street Fighter, or all that crap Orson Wells did right before he died.

I'm not familiar with his later work.

Well, it was pretty dire. It was sad, you know, there was Citizen Kane, the Third Man, the guy who made half of America crap its pants that the Martians were invading, and here he is, shilling for frozen peas and doing voice-over work.

That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with 'in' and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say "in July", and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me by saying so. That's just stupid, "in July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize 'in' in "In July"...impossible! Meaningless!

(Sigh) Rambling anecdotes are the right of all sentient beings...

Right. Anyway, that's what it was like, seeing you in another Michael Bay film. Man, you were my idol. Seriously, if it didn't contravene the laws of God and man, I would totally worship you as a god. This movie? This movie was beneath you, man. Seriously, you were dead for like half of it.

(Grumble)

When I put down my twelve dollars to see a movie-- okay, when I pay my monthly fee to Netflix-- Okay, when I mooch off of my wife's Netflix account to see a movie with The Optimus Prime in it... Well! I can tell you, I really expected somethign better out of the robot who singlehandedly defeated the Drule empire.

Um... That was Voltron.

Oh. Right. Sorry. Um... Defeated the evil forces of Lord Zedd?

Sigh. That's the Power Rangers

Dr. Wily?

Mega Man. You just watched a Let's Play of it earlier tonight.

Right. Sorry. King Ghidorah, then.

That's Godzilla! You're not even trying now!

Sorry. Sorry. Um.. Who did you singlehandedly destroy again?

MEGATRON! You know, "Autobots wage their battles to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons" and all?

Riiiiight.... Only I thought he got away at the end.

Oh nevermind. I didn't even want to be in that stupid Bay movie anyway.

You didn't?

Of course not! Have you You ever tried working with that man? Frakking Wheelie has a longer attention span. And by the Allspark is that man racist. I mean you saw what he did with those twins, right? (Conspiratorially) You know those weren't even their own teeth. He made them get those.

I had my suspicions

That wasn't the half of it. You should have heard the things he said about people from the middle east. I bet you didn't know this, but Bluestreak and Cliffjumper were originally supposed to be in the movie too, but they walked off the set in disgust after he asked them to wear turbans and fight with scimitars. Terrible man to work with. God knows how many times I had to bite my tongue whenever he started talking about money. You know the stereotypes.

Um. No. There's a stereotype about robots and money?

You didn't know? I'm Jewish.



I was not aware of that.

I haven't been practicing in years, but it's still an important part of my heritage. (At this point, I deliberately steered the conversation away to avoid the temptation to make a hackneyed "bot mitzvah" joke.)

So if Bay was so terrible, why'd you do the movie?

(Sigh) I, uh... I needed the work. It's... It's a hard out there in the industry, when you're a giant robot of a certain age. The phone doesn't ring so much, and when it does, a lot of the time they want you to play the old mentor type who buys it in the third act

Like Jetfire?

Heh. Jetfire's half my age. They just put him in makeup. But yeah, And with my ball joints not being what they used to be, I can't do so many of the action scenes any more. And if I throw a rod or something out there, I can't take anything stronger than STP for it, on account of my history...

Your history?

Uh... Yeah. Look, I'm not proud of a lot of things I've done. There were a couple of years back in the eighties when... Well, I, uh, well, I developed a pretty serious drug problem.

You had a drug problem? How does that even work?

Things started getting rough right after the movie. I knew they were going to write me off the show, hell, I asked for it. I thought it would be good for my career to try to move out of TV work and get some more movie jobs. I had some serious interest from the James Bond people, before that throttle housing Dalton got the part. And then they were talking about doing another Mad Max movie, I even got a draft of a script for a Killdozer remake. But the first time they brought that kid Hot Rod out on the set, man, I just knew right there that there was always going to be someone younger, someone who was still under factory warranty. So, the movie deals dried up, Smokey and the Bandit 4 got cancelled. Then, they called one day and said they wanted me back on the show. I was over the moon. But, well, you know how it went from there. They were going to have me come in mid-season on the Headmasters, shake things up, but they got canned five episodes into the next season. It was just a downhill spiral after that.

No, actually, I meant, how does a giant robot get a drug problem. What drugs do you guys do?

Energon.

No way. I thought you guys ate it for energy or something. Like us humans and food.

Heh. You ever hear of an intergalactic war over pizza? Nah, the whole Autobot-Decepticon thing was a drug war. The Decepticons were muscling in on our turf.

I had no idea. Though in retrospect, without that piece of information, nothing that ever happened in the show made the slightest bit of sense.

Tell me about it. I mean, seriously, you couldn't tell that Blurr was on something?

And Wreck-Gar

Surprisingly, Wreck-Gar never took anything harder than Nitrous Oxide. I think he got dropped a lot in his youth

Does that mean you were high the whole time you were doing the show?

No, no way, it was nothing like that. I was always a professional back then. Never sample your own merchandise, kid. Not cool. I mean, maybe a little on the week-ends, but nothing big, not until after they wrote me off the show. That's when it got to me. Pretty soon, I was doing two, three cubes a day. I'd go out partying all night, black out, wake up a couple of days later, stuck in a ditch somewhere. I'm lucky I didn't end up wrapped around a tree

So, I guess the drug problem was why we didn't hear much from you for a bunch of years?

More or less. But when I really hit rock bottom was that whole Tommy Kennedy thing.

You mean the kid who used to sit on your shoulder when you did the introductions for the reruns in the early 90s?

Yeah. Look, I swear, I never touched that kid. But all of the sudden there's reporters camped out around my parking lot, saying that I'd asked him to be my Headmaster. No one ever even had enough evidence to go to the DA, but there ain't no such thing as reasonable doubt in the court of public opinion... And then social services started hanging around all the time and (voice cracks) and then I lost custody of Roller... I... That was when I knew it was time to get help.

That's when you quit the Energon?

Yeah. I checked myself in to the Henry Ford clinic. Got clean. It was rough going. I had to take a few years off from acting.

Oh! That's why they got that other guy to play you in Robots in Disguise?

(Snorts) Yeah. You know, I wasn't going to come back at all, but after that piece of shit ran, I started getting calls from my agent. Seemed that they had a lot of complaints about trying to do the show again without me. So, here I am.

Wow. So what are you doing these days?

Bits and pieces. I tried to get back to my roots. I've been doing a lot of dinner theater. Drive-in dinner theater. And I opened for Truckzilla back in aught-seven. And then there was that sweet Knight Rider gig.

That was you? I knew it! You were great in that. I just wish they'd had the good sense to give you a bigger part.

Heh. They originally scripted me in for three more scenes, but they got cut after they saw what I looked like in a bikini.

So, the bit where KARR turned into a giant robot, was that your idea?

Ironically enough, no, they had that in mind right from the storyboard stage. Originally, they wanted Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson for the part, but he couldn't fit into the costume. I was as surprised as anyone else. I thought it was going to be a non-transforming part.

So what else are you doing these days?

Well, I'm doing a lecture circuit in the fall, motivational speaking to the auto industry. I auditioned for the next season of Power Rangers, but then I heard they finally got canned.

You know, they're still making it in Japan, if you were willing to take a gig over there. I bet they've got a lot of work for a giant robot.

Not Japan. Not after Kiss Players. Never again. Other than that, I'm just trying to keep busy until Transformers 3 starts filming

So you're doing Transformers 3? Even with Michael Bay?

(Shrugs) It's a living. 'Sides, it's got its up-sides.

Like what?

Two words, kid. Megan. Fox. She can give me a Lube Job any day.

Uh. Okay. So, um, are we cool?

Yeah, we're cool. Just lay off on the movies. We all know they suck, you don't got to be ignorant about it.

Riiiiiight... Well, okay then. I guess I'll see you later?

Later kid. And hey, can you do me a solid and shut the door when you go?

Um. Sure. Why?

(Sheepish) It's just a little awkward. The other day, your missus happened to, um, walk in on me.

Walk in on you?

Well, uh, I was, uh, kind of... You know. Uh...

Either the captioner has lost his mind or Texas is even weirder than I imagined.

Fox News, in a piece on the Texas State Fair, reports that among the consumables at the fair are (I am not making this up) Deep Fried Coca Cola Syrup and (I wish I were making this up) Deep Fried Butter.

The captions reported that it is "Made with pure butter, then you inject labor.", and then, and, I don't know, maybe this is actually something they do in Texas, "Pure whipped daughter."

Don't mess with Texas. Or they whip, batter-dip, and deep fry your daughter.

Saw this bullet point attached to a news story:

Police say killer wasn't among the dead, wasn't one of the survivors

This is one of those brain-teasers, where it turns out that the killer is a zombie or something, isn't it?

From The Washington Post

Seems that the recession is causing more children to fall into poverty...

In Michigan, for example, the rate of children living in poverty rose by more than a third, from 14 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2007. In Ohio, the number went up by almost a fifth in the same period, from 16 to 19 percent.

"They're like a canary in a coal mine," Beavers said. "We're likely to see this pattern repeated in many states."

Remember folks, in times of recession, Kids are like a canary in a coal mine.

Mostly by way of demonstrating to my readers (both of you) that I'm still alive.

Things I discovered this past weekend:

1. The lights in the front of the basement, and correspondingly the electrical outlet on the base of the light fixture, are on the same circuit as the back of the living room where my linux box is plugged in, the back of the office where the rest of the computers are plugged in, and the front of the office where the air conditioner is plugged in
2. The light in the back of the basement is on the same circuit as the washing machine
3. Leah's vacuum cleaner plus the three computers in the office plus the air conditioner plus the one computer in the living room all together draw more than 15 amps.
4. So does Leah's vacuum cleaner plus the washing machine.

I just saw a commercial for a new super-powered juicer/salsa-maker/food processor thingie. I wish I had a picture to show you because I haven't posted a new IT in months.

The reason I bring this up is that during the commercial they show a CGI sequence of some piece of fruit being rendered into juice by this device, just like in CSI, when the criminalists theorize how some piece of evidence relates to the crime.

I use this analogy because in this CGI dramatization, the millions of tiny rotating blades of the sarlaak juicer basically cause the small CGI peach (or maybe it was a nectarine. It's hard to tell in CGI) to liquefy instantly, exploding in a shower of peachy (or nectariney) gore. And the first thing I thought was "My god, can you imagine what that would do to a man's hand if he got caught in one?"

And then my mind concocted all sorts of wild scenarios whereby the mafia might grab you for defaulting on your shady debts and, say, make you stick your hand or face or penis into a Sharper Image Juicer.

I think maybe I watch too many crime dramas.

Also, the preppy tween boy and girl that mom hands glasses of their pureed father ocra juice to at the end are absolutely adorable.

The New York Times reviews 'The Gingerbread House':

Call it a whopping case of seller’s remorse. The moral of “The Gingerbread House” would appear to be that retailing your children to strangers will not bring satisfaction. Glad that’s been cleared up.

Me: Hey, look who the guest star is in this episode!

Leah: He looks familiar. Who is he?

Me: Imagine him doing the Truffle Shuffle.

Leah: The Truffle Shuffle?

Me: He's the fat kid from The Goonies

Leah: I thought that was--

Me: No, you're thinking of the fat kid from --

Both: Stand by me

(That waiter? Jean Luc!)

• There's been quite a bit in the news about the holocaust-denying bishop. Lots of folks think it's uncool that His Holiness un-ex-communicated (recommunicated?) him, because, well, he's a fracking holocaust denier. Comparatively few people have pointed out the church's position on this: "Saying the Holocaust didn't happen is untrue. But that doesn't make it heresy." C'mon. If you could be excommunicated for being a jackass, Augustine of Hippo would never have made Sainthood.
• Another thing hardly anyone is mentioning is that this bishop wasn't excommunicated for being a Holocaust denier. He was excommunicated for the more or less totally unrelated matter of the fact that he'd been appointed bishop by a breakaway archbishop who didn't have the authority to appoint bishops. The whole sect got excommunicated en masse for breaking away from the Church.
• Speaking of news, I'm told that newspapers are failing. Everyone is up in arms and trying to find a way to save them. Most of these proposals are following the example of the music industry and the movie industry: if new media is hurting the sales of your old media, try to force new media to suck. There was a fellow on The Daily Show whose proposal was "Work out a way to stop people from getting news on-line for free." Has anyone actually sat down and answered the question: So what if newspapers fail? I mean, really, aside from the fact that they've existed for as long as anyone can remember, is there any actual value to newspapers in the world we live in? Obviously, it sucks that newspapermen will be out of work, but, well, no one's bitching about all the lay-offs in the cuneiform industry, and no one's looking out for the old fashioned manual typsetters' union. I mean, really. It's not like dead tree format is somehow an inherently better way to receive news. In fact, it's worse. The day Mr. Obama won the election, this news appeared on the front page of (almost) every newspaper in the country. The day Mr. Obama took office, this news appeared on the front page of (almost) every newspaper in the country. There was two, maybe three articles worth of news in these events, but there were hundreds of articles published and millions of trees deadened to deliver this piece of information. Which is fine, I think that the election of President Obama is awfully newsworthy. But there is only a finite amount of dead tree. So every article about the Obama election pushed out one article about something else. A newspaper must by its very nature deliver only those stories which are of the broadest interest, and it can cover only a very few of them in any sort of depth. Back in 1997, when I was about 2 or 3 weeks in college, two newsworthy events happened at nearly the same time. But there's only so much news you can cover if you're constrained to filling the corpse of a tree, so the death of a popular British noblewoman pretty much stole the news cycle from the death of one of the greatest humanitarians of our time. When I was young, my dad got the Evening Sun, which was the penultimate of what had once been, I think, five editions opf the newspaper that came out in a single day. But in the late 1980s, well before the rise of the internet, the Evening Sun was found surplus to requirement, and the paper was only published once a day. Which means that you get one set of articles in the space of 24 hours, each of which takes time to write, and has to be brought to your house via a car or truck from its place of publication. Which means that you are never going to read anything in your daily paper that is less than 12 hours old, often more like 24-48 hours old. Newspapers aren't searchable. They don't include cross-reference hyperlinks. If I'm interested in the content of an article, I can't ask the newspaper to show me more about this subject. Look, folks. It's not that my generation is a bunch of attention-deficit, myspace-loving, twitter-pated know-nothings. It's that, and I can not stress this enough, Newspapers are simply not a very good way to transport news to people compared to the internet. If he coulda, Ben Franklin totally would have been writing Pennsylvania-gazette.typepad.org
• Of course, you can't wrap fish in a blog, but that's not much of a reason to keep newspapers around
• Speaking of new media, folks are up in arms as usual about kids using things like myspace and facebook and all that, because these are SCARY NEW MEDIA and not wholesome ways of social interaction like banding together to go outside and play improvised sports games using sticks and strings, egg cars, walk down railroad tracks and through leech-infested swamps to find a dead body, evade the Fratellis while searching for the lost treasure of One-Eyed Willy, bond with members of other social cliques during detention, torment classmates on suspicion of homosexuality, or all those other wholesome social interactions they misremember from when they were children. Again, has anyone ever actually checked to see whether there's any kind of measurable detrimental effect of this? That it's really unhealthy for kids to make friends based on mutual interests and shared goals, values, and the like, rather than on an accident of geography? Also, shouldn't it be good that kids spend more time reading and writing? 3ven 1f they r writing 2 a bff4eva lol?
• Speaking of children and wholesome social interaction, I've hit that age where my friends are starting to become parents, and therefore by proxy, I'm learning how much childraising has changed since I was myself a child and got raised. We often stop and pause to note all these "ridiculous" safety precautions everyone's expected to take all the time and how cherished childhood institutions like "Stick your baby in a small cage and leave it alone for a few hours while you do something else," "Let your child play with things that produce heat, have sharp corners, or break into tiny swallowable parts", and walker frames have all gone the way of the dodo. Invariably, someone recalsl that we had all those fun dangerous things, and nothing bad happened (This effect is even more prominent when dealing with people of my parents' generation who were, I believe, as children, this is at the age of like 3 and under, if I understand, play alone in the woods, with guns and knives, wearing clothing which was made of -- I think there had been a study done proving it was healthy -- gasoline-soaked asbestos and chewing tobacco, all the while drinking straight whiskey (it helps with teething).). We keep forgetting that when we were kids (and, more especially, when our parents were kids), every once in a while, a young child would die or be horribly disfigured, and that was totally okay. I mean, it was sad, sure, but, hey, sometimes babies just drop dead for no reason. Seriously. This was common enough that both of my parents had siblings who died in infancy.
• Speaking of disapprovable safety, however, I had to drive Leah's car just a short distance a couple of weeks ago. Her car has something like six hundred airbags. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on how many accidents were caused by airbags -- the added bulk of their storage causes all the trim on her car to stick out about three inches farther than it needs to. She's got blind spots you could park a Buick in, because those airbags are obstructing the view.
• Incidentally, Leah and I live together now. We are still working on integrating our separate gigantic stockpiles of possessions. Leah is much more comfortable stacking things up into tall, unsteady piles than I am. Whenever she does this, I hear John Cleese reminding me, and I can not stress this enough, that there are still many things which have not been put on top of other things.
• Immediately prior to her moving in, I bought a new boiler, as mine was busted. Because googling did not easily get me to an answer for this until much tryign and hand-vetting of answers, here is a google-friendly summary of an issue you may encounter if you are ever in this situation:
  I have STEAM HEAT. At the END OF CYCLE I get a LOUD WATER HAMMER or STEAM HAMMER sound from NEAR THE BOILER. I wanted to know HOW TO STOP STEAM HAMMER SOUND NEAR BOILER AT END OF CYCLE. It turned out that if the WATER LEVEL in the boiler is low enough that AT THE END OF CYCLE when as much of the water has turned to steam as is going to, the level of LIQUID water in the system can drop to a point where even though the LOW WATER CUTOFF hasn't tripped, the water level is below the NIPPLE IN THE HARTFORD LOOP. Which basically means that the opening where the WET RETURN system (which is a pipe that hangs off of the main steam pipe so that the returning water doesn't have to push past the steam to get back into the boiler) comes into the boileris above the water. If that happens, the returning STEAM can get into the HARTFORD LOOP. The whole system is connected because this is a single pipe system, but there's a loop that is physically closer to the ground, where the water will accumulate, following the force of gravity, while the steam, which is lighter, will stay in the the top loop. The Hartford Loop is a looping section between the two which exists to equalize the pressure between the side of the system that is full of steam going out to your radiators and water coming back from them. If steam is forced into the bottom loop, it will bang around in there causing a LOUD WATER HAMMER SOUND which occurs right at the END of the cycle. HTH. HAND.
• Also, I just love to say "NIPPLE IN THE HARTFORD LOOP":
• I also had the living room painted red and the bedroom painted green. I am red-green colorblind and this gets me out of ever being allowed to make important decorating decisions. The dining room is battleship gray, because we neglected to tell Leah's uncle that he didn't need to prime it when we hired him to do the painting.
• I got the place recarpeted as well. (We are now into the range of about $10k I have spent in the past three months on this place). When carpeting, there's a tool you use to pull the carpet taught to the wall. It's got a heavy end with hooks that goes against the carpet and a padded end you strike with your knee repeatedly as hard as you can. I wonder if "Carpeter's Knee" is the common name for some sort of chronic knee injury.
• Yesterday, I got to stay home from work on account of snow. Specifically, on account of the three-inch accumulating, all-day, school and business-closing snowstorm. In March.
• New theory: Starbuck's dad is Daniel The Cylon Everyone Thought Was Dead
• Eleventh Hour: Based on a british show which ran 4 episodes and wasn't very good in spite of starring Patrick Stewart, this American show is pretty good and is the only TV show I have ever seen which got that being a genius is not the same thing as being autistic. But halfway through the season, the writers seem to have said to themselves: "Y'know what this show needs? A comedy relief black guy." So they added one.
• Knight Rider ditched half its cast and reformatted to make it more like its predecessor. They also removed their first-half-of-the-season trope of having at least one girl in a skimpy bikini in every episode. Which was The only good thing about the show. The voice of KARR was provided by Peter Cullen, who did the original KARR, and also the voice of Optimus Prime. The body of KARR appears to have been also played by Optimus Prime. But we only see KARR for about 3 seconds, and it's filmed just like the incomprehensible fast-moving jittery scenes from Transformers, plus it's night so I can't really tell. On the plus side, the past few episodes have featured a cute kid, a corrupt hick cop, and a pair of humorous mentally-handicapped car theives, so they really are getting closer to the style of the original. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it was only by the standards of the early 80s that the original Knight Rider failed to suck.
• 'Frack' has entirely replaced 'Fuck' in my normal usage except when I am in physical pain. Now, middle school kids, don't frack this up for us by using it so much that they promote it to be a real cuss word.
• I also have started using the phrase "Surplus to Requirements" a lot
• Rush Limbaugh 2001-2008: "Democrats hate america because they won't support the president just because they disapprove of his policies, and if they really loved america, they'd want Bush to succeed". Rush Limbaugh 2009: "I want Obama to fail. I hope america goes into the toilet because then we will win."
• Speaking of Republicans, I'm not really a pinko, but every time I hear a republican scream "They're trying to turn America SOCIALIST!", I think, "Yeah, and that would suck because laissez-faire capitalism has worked so well for us recently."

• Yesterday on the way to work, there was a sign at the top of the exit that said "Lane closed 1500 feet ahead". About 50 feet past that, the lane was closed for some road work. I assume that the road work being done was "install a more accurate sign".
• xkcd proposed that YouTube commenters be forced to listen to their comments read aloud before they are posted. This is now a (sadly optional) feature of YouTube. I for one welcome our new stick-figure overlords
• Yesterday evening on the way home from work, there was a sign in downtown Baltimore that said "2 left lanes closed ahead," so I got over. The "2" had been affixed over the original text of the sign when they had upgraded the lane closure. Suddenly, I had to fight my way over another lane, as just up ahead, 3 lanes were closed. Is this the month of inaccurate road signs?
• A friend of mine is pregnant and close to her due date. The past few months, I have heard the word "cervix" spoken aloud more often than in the entire rest of my life. It really does sound like the name of a Doctor Who monster.
• Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, is a tax cheat. Also, he's not even really named Joe. And does not have a license to plumb.
• At work, a word we use a lot is "releasability", which spellcheckers everywhere tell me is not a real word, although "releasable" is. A colleague suggested that anything which is -able ought have an associated -ability (just as I think any adjective has an associated -ly adverb. I bluely believe this to be the case), but perhaps the problem is that what we have is actually "release ability" rather than "releasability", much as he, being able to ride a bicycle, has a "bicycle ability". I pointed out that "bicycle ability" and "bicyclability" are very different things: "bicyclability" would mean "the capacity to become a bicycle". My colleague has bicycle ability; carbon fiber has a certain bicyclability (though I would argue that aluminum has a higher bicyclability, because it is far more able to become a bicycle -- while carbon fiber bikes are excellent, it requires much more effort to hew a bicycle out of carbon fiber.). The only being I know of who possesses both bicycle ability and bicyclability is Cy-Kill, leader of the renegade Go-Bots
• Stuck in head most of the time now: Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac. In spite of this, I think that it is one of the only songs which is actually better if you hear the Kids Incorporated cover.
• It is so weird that as we demand larger and higher-definition TVs, and video snobs insist that even the sight of a standard-dev TV makes them want to puke and all that, we simultaneously are more than ever willing to huddle around a QVGA low-bitrate image on YouTube.
• Also, it is really amazing how quickly you stop minding that when you watch standard definition tv on a high def TV without correcting for the aspect ratio, everyone is a third again too wide. In fact, whent I watch video from my computer (which is smart enough to automatically correct the aspect), everything looks too narrow.

On my way home tonight, I noticed some strange lights in the sky somewhere to the north:

There's a whole gallery here. Now taking theories to wtf these lights signify:

• Large Hadron Collider pierces earth at an oblique angle, coming out in north Baltimore
• Asgard trying to catch a late show at the Senator
• Ass-kicking kegger at Loyola
• Zuul and Vinz Clortho did it, thereby summoning Gozer

Funniest thing today:

Just wondering:

Suppose a man standing in Four Corners, NM, shoots someone across the line in Arizona. The victim falls forward into Utah, rolls over into Colorado, and dies.

Murder is a state crime. Which state gets jurisdiction?

Inspired by i can has cheezburger

I play, I may have mentioned, in a bar trivia league.

Once, a few years ago now, during one game, one of the members of an opposing team took issue with something the host did. She expressed her disapproval by holding a stuffed rabbit up in the air and declaring, "THE BUNNY SAYS NO!"

Until this moment, I did not fully comprehend this statement.

The bunny says no.

Addendum (11/26/07): Posting this article, by virtue of its having unseated something else from the recent list, has demoted me to College Graduate (Undergrad). L-M-E.

One of the best things about being an adult is that you can buy all the toys you want and no one can stop you.

With that observation, I will now reveal that I've been a Transformers fan since I was a little kid. And now that I actually have a disposable income of sorts, I've decided to take up collecting Optimus Primes. I think I've got the majority of them now, or at the least, a representative sampling. There's a few holes in my collection (RiD Optimus is stupid-looking enough that I haven't been willing to shell out the amount that they tend to cost), but I think I've got a pretty fair spread. In my usual geekish way, I'm going to post a series of in-depth commentaries about the relative merits of each one.

But to start us off, here's the top of my TV cart:

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Link: The Which Doctor Who Are You? Test written by TottersLane on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

So, every time I add an article to the blog, the blog engine grows slower and slower, and, as usual, Tech Support is less than no help.

So you may have noticed a change to some of the entries. Namely, they're not here.

Everything from before the first of the year has now been shoved off to the archives. You can still find it, preserved as though via the Wayback Machine, just not here.

It's at http://amov-archive.trenchcoatsoft.com

If it weren't for those meddling kids.

Link: The Which Lolcat Are You? Test written by GumOtaku on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

(Warning: Will Suck Your Time)

The Attractors

Mingle² - Online Dating

Doolwind's Game Coding Site: Programmer Personality Test

Your programmer personality type is:

DLSB

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You're from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don't mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

As a followup to this... I tried to take a picture of the actual goose in question, but my camera was uncooperative.

Also, I have no idea what compells me to use French for this exercise. It just feels right. Maybe they're Canadian Geese.

Ross a fait une promenade au bord du lac. Il y avait une oie sur la route qui etait au bord du lac. Ross a marché sur la route. L'oie a dit, <<Gonk!>> Ross a continué à marché. L'oie a dit <<Hiss!>> Ross marchait encore L'oie a couru à Ross. Ross a couru loin.

FIN

(With apollogies to my high school french teacher.)

This past weekend, Leah and I went up to visit her family and friends in NJ. Here's some observations...

• We watched Children of Man. There's a featurette on the disc showing how -- at the risk of a spoiler, I'll spoil you only this much: there is a baby in the move, and it was added using CGI, which is why it looks like Gollum -- they did the baby. At one point, the caption said "Rendering the layers of baby." Johnathan Swift would be proud.
• Friday night as I was going to sleep, something made my eye hurt. It was red in the morning, and has been watering ever since. I think I am allergic to New Jersey
• Many years ago in Maryland, there was a supermarket chain called A&P. They are now called SuperFresh. In New Jersey, I saw a "Super A&P". It's as if the name-change had just hit that town, and something caused it to tragically halt halfway through the transformation.
• There was a stretch of highway on the way home called "The Concrete Mile". It was made of asphalt just like every other highway.
• We passed a shop called "Andy Ferrigno's Equipment". The jokes to be made may well be endless. I'll start you off with "Don't make fun of his equipment: you wouldn't like it when he's angry."
• When you enter most states, there's a big sign welcoming you. Often, the sign will remind you of local laws: on the Delaware/Maryland border, the sign reminds you that right turns are permitted on red after stopping. In Delaware, it reminds you that shopping is tax-free. In New Jersey, it reminds you that you need to wear your seatbelt. And right below that is a greeting from Governor John Corzine. I assume the sign was erected by the New Jersey Department of Irony.
• There's a town, it seems, in PA called "Schrodinger". I didn't get a good look at the sign, because my brain insisted that the sign should say now "Next Exit, 10 miles on left", but "The town will not exist until you get there."
• Unrelatedly, I once took a class in public policy from Heisenberg's granddaughter. The class was taught by Distance Learning, because, unlike her grandfather, she could not be in two places at once.
• Billboard: Close deals between laps
• There is a section of US 222 in Pennsylvania called "MIA Highway", but we couldn't find it.
• Sign by a dairy farm in PA: Registered Holsteins. Thank god PA has cracked down on illegal cows.
• A sign at a gas station gave prices for "Regular", "Plus", "Super", "Deisel" and "Kero". For just a second, I read that as "Karo", and thought that it would be a truly wonderful day if we could make our cars run on high fructose corn syrup. Of course, the fumes would probably send me into a diabetic coma.

That is all.

A roundup of things I've noticed or thought of lately...

• The squirrels used to like ot taunt Sarah. Being a small game dog, she'd have liked nothing better than to chase them. To my knowledge, she only ever got the chance once, when she was a puppy and managed to wriggle throuigh the railing around our pool deck to go after one. The squirrels seemed to work out that she couldn't get through the plate glass window in the dining room, and would congregate in the back yard, running up near the window and teasing her as she cried at her inability to go after one.
• The exercise regimen I've adopted to help control my diabetes involves a lot of walking, mostly on the network of pedestrian trails through Columbia, MD, where I spend most of my day. There's a jogger whose path I cross a lot. He looks just like the lovechild of William H. Macy and Jon Voight.
• The office park where I work consists of three buildings in a sort of triskelion configuration. A few months ago, a crew came through and gave one of the other buildings a good power-washing scrub. The sandstone exterior was left so bright and shiny that when it caught the light, it was almost blinding to look at. I can't help thinking that this is possibly the closest I'll ever get to knowing what it was like to look at the great pyramid of Giza when it was new.
• Once upon a time, I was walking Sarah in the back yard, and we came across a tiny little frog. Sarah and I followed the frog for a bit as it hopped along its way, Sarah with her nose to the ground, studying it. Suddenly, just as it landed after a hop, Sarah reached down and scooped it up in her mouth. A few seconds later, just as I was peparing to chastise her for eating the frog, she opened her mouth, and the tiny little frog hopped out and continued on its way as if nothing had happened.
• Another man I see a lot looks just like the love child of Wilford Brimley and Martin Mull
• Walking along the trails, you see a lot of strange things. I keep seeing bicycles, half-submerged in the stream that runs alongside the trail. I can understand how they got there, but why were they abandoned there?
• I'm going to a Cinco-de-Mayo party this weekend. My girl wanted to have a pinata at the party. Since I don't like candy enough to eat it in spite of my doctor's admonishions, I suggested a route that would allow me to take part in the pinata-y goodness: a meat pinata. She told this to her friend via instant messaging, and was asked "Do you mean a pinata made of meat, or a pinata full of meat?" When she indicated the latter, the response was "YES!!!!!!!"
• A few days after cleaning the building I mentioned earlier, the crew went back over it for a second go. The building ceased to shine, and actually looked ratty and dirty. The windows looked particularly streaked and spotted. I found myself wondering the the University of Phoenix had failed to pay its bill, and the crew was sent back to re-dirty the building.
• I also see a lot of abandoned shopping carts along the trail. These mostly belong to the Safeway about a half mile down. But some of them are for other stores which are nowhere near here
• There is a small man-made pond across the street from the office. During certain parts of the year, geese congregate there. About the same time, there are two geese who wander around on the far side of the parking lot of the office park, across the street, with the building between them and the pond. Are they lost, or have they just slipped off for a romantic stroll?
• At one bend in the stream, a shopping cart has gone off the edge and into the water. It's been down there a long time, I think, because silt has built up around it. The process of sedementation has done its work, and there is, right now, an island forming around this cart.
• I saw a blue heron last week. But I don't want to say where. When I was a kid, if you saw a blue heron somewhere, you could be assured that within a week, you wouldn't be allowed to go back there, as the area would be cordoned off to protect the heron. It's quite a pleasant spot, and I don't want it being destroyed by a big chain link fence to keep the heron safe.

Every once in a while, the little girl who lives across the alley from me will try to strike up a conversation. This is usually a little uncomfortable for me, because, while when you're a kid, you're always warned not to talk to strangers, no one ever tells you, as an adult, whether you're supposed to talk to strange children. But I guess technically we're not actually strangers: we're neighbors. Maybe it's just a symptom of the times that I should think there was anything at all unnatural about being on conversational terms with the children of the people who live across the alley.

But anyway, the reason I bring it up is to relate this conversation:

Her: (Talks a bit about her love of digging up bugs and worms)
Me: (Polite interest)
Her: What do you love?
Me: (after thinking) Well, I like video games. And movies. And I love my girlfriend.
Her: You're lucky you have a girlfriend.
Me: Yes I am
Her: If you had three girlfriends, you'd be the luckiest man in the world
Me: (after a bumfuzzled silence) I think one is about all I can handle.

So, regular visitors may have noticed some strange error messages last week. Those should be gone for now. I was spammed so hard that the database which runs this blog broke, rather severely. I've managed to recover almost all the data to a new database, but the comments table was completely trashed. This means that old comments have been relegated to the status of "ghosts", and will vanish in the event old pages ever get updated.

How do other bloggers deal with spam? I've got spam filters, but those don't really help: a million spam comments an hour pouring into the Junk folder breaks the DB just as bad as a million a day going to the page -- and it's not just the spam being received that causes the problem: just by the act of hammering the server with their spam, they suck up my bandwidth -- and I do mean suck.

Anyway, I've got some redirects in place now to divert suspicious activity away from the comments pages. It's possible that you might accidentally fall into one -- make sure you never navigate your way to a page called spider-trap, as you'll fall permanently into my list of banned IPs.

You scored as SG-1 (Stargate). You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body. SG-1 (Stargate) 94% Moya (Farscape) 88% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 88% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 88% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 75% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 75% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 50% Serenity (Firefly) 50% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 50% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 38% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

In honor of my 200th post, I thought-- well, okay, this has nothing to do with it being my bicentennial; I just noticed it when I clicked on "Entries" and saw the number 199 next to it. So, anyway, on with the post...

You may not know the term, but you've probably seen a CAPTCHA by now. The acronym expands out to the not-really-meaningful-unless-you're-a-CS-guy "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". A bit of background:

Alan Turing, one of the founding bigwigs of the whole theory of computers as we know them, had this theory: If we stick a human being at a terminal of some sort (This was Turing, back in the fifties, so he was thinking of a teletype, but IM would work just as well) and have him chat for a bit with two other entities, one of which is a computer and the other one is a second human, if the guy at the terminal can't tell which is which, the computer has demonstrated actual human intelligence, or, at least, something close enough to it to be interesting.

So, in a nutshell, a Turing Test is when a human tries to tell whether something else is a computer or a human. This is fairly easy (The human is less likely to say "BZZT! DESTROY ALL HUMANS!" if you annoy it). A CAPTCHA, which is sometimes ambigiously called a "Reverse Turing Test" is when a computer tries to tell if the entity it's talking to is human or another computer.

That is to say, it's one of those things you get when you sign up for something on the internet and they show you a picture of some distorted random letters and ask you to type them in.

This is actually a pretty hard test. It's comparatively easy for one computer to convince another computer that it's a computer ("Perform these six hundred hard math problems in under a second" is a pretty simple way), but how do you convince it that you're human? The computer conducting the test can't measure your capacity to love, or detect if you have opposible thumbs or anything like that -- in fact, the reason that it's so easy for a human to distinguish computers and humans is that humans can perceive a lot of things that computers can't -- which, of course, means that that distinguish a human (taking the test) from a computer (taking the test) are things that the computer (giving the test) can't perceive.

So, the way to tell the difference is to generate the sort of problem that humans are good at solving and computers aren't, and ask the test-taker to solve it. Fortunately, a computer can indeed generate problems it can't solve itself. Or, a human can provide the computer (giving the test) with a crib sheet. The most common kind you see is the kind I mentioned above. Computers are pretty good at reading written words, but not if they've been distorted. So you print some letters in an image, mangle them a bit, and ask the test-taker to read them. This is doable, though it's not all that easy: mangle the letters too much and a human can't read them. Don't mangle them enough, and a computer can. Most of the letter-based CAPTCHAs you see on the internet aren't all that good, and throw up manglings that a very clever computer could work out, though there are some very good letter-mangling CAPTCHAs out there. Also, CAPTCHAs can often foil humans with vision problems (Like my color blindness).

Another CAPTCHA you see sometimes shows you several images and asks, say, "Which one is a puppy", since that's a hard thing for a computer to deduce. This works pretty well, but, unlike the letter-mangling test, the computer taking the test can't generate new pictures of puppies, so unless it's got a huge stockpile, the computer taking the test could just poke at random until it got in purely by coincidence.

I read a paper about CAPTCHAs back in grad school, and there was a really neat point they made. Unlike all the rest of computer security, if a CAPTCHA is broken, it's basically great for mankind. Let me explain: You've by now probably heard of the animated cursor bug in Windows. No good can come of exploiting the animated cursor bug. There aren't really useful things you can do by hacking an animated cursor. It's good for exactly one thing: compromising systems to the owner's detriment. Cryptography is largely based on number theory. Until modern cryptography was invented there was no practical use for number theory. People studied it purely for love of math. Aside from its mathematically interesting properties, the only practical use for the RSA algorithm is to encrypt data. Which means that if someone discovers a problem with the RSA problem, RSA encryption is broken. The problem itself has no positive use value, beyond breaking cryptosystems. This isn't the case for a CAPTCHA: if a computer manages to foil a CAPTCHA, it means that the computer can do something which computers are historically bad at. If it can consistently find the puppy, then we have created a computer that can identify puppies, and puppy-identification is a skill with unlimited commercial application. If our computer can consistently read mangled words, then the next generation of business card scanner software will be able to tell that the business card you ran through it isn't for "Lockheart Martini".

But this is just a comically longwinded introduction to what I want to show you. Woe be to all of us the day a computer learns how to break the new Hotness CAPTCHA. It uses AmIHotOrNot API to ask users to identify which of several pictures shows the hottest person. Personally, I think they missed a great oppertunity by not calling it amibotornot.com.

The other CAPTCHA I'd like to show you comes to us via Defective Yeti: Internet Access CAPTCHAs. This one is designed to tell whether the testee is a human, a computer, or an idiot. What's neat about this is that it's much more likely to be foiled by a clever computer than a stupid human.

Welcome to the internet. Enjoy your porn

As you may already know, I've had some trouble with my TiVo over the past few years.

Tonight, I had to reboot it; it locked up while I was deleting the jumk it had accumulated. Upon my reboot, I found that Something Was Wrong.

Specifically, whenever I pressed one of the arrow keys, the thing would go crazy, scrolling to the bottom of the list and then making the "You're at the bottom of the list. Stop pressing down, stupid" noise until I pressed something else. So, thinking maybe the remote was jammed, I stuck my hand over the business end. No joy.

So I googled. No joy.

So I reset the tivo again. No joy.

I reset the TiVo remote. No joy.
It was fine until you pressed a button, then it went crazy. Finally, I noticed that the yellow "I'm receiving an IR signal" light was staying lit. (I should note at this point that I'm colorblind, and only know that the light is yellow thanks to information I've found on-line; it looks the same color as the green "I'm connected to a power source" light to me). Whenever I hit a button, the light would stay on. Sometimes it would go off as I gesticulated angrily at it.

I replaced the batteries in the remote. No joy.

I tried standing up and placing my hand over the IR receiver. The yellow light went out. I tried zapping it from inches way. That worked fine. One down key, moves down once. Yellow light flashes then goes out.

I tried from further away. Yellow stays on. Key keeps repeating.

I got it into my head that maybe my ceiling fan (being reflective) or some other light source in the room was creating some sort of weird feedback loop. Turned off everything. No joy.

What I did find was that if I waved my hand in front of the receiver, the yellow light would switch off. This worked at close range only. At greater distances, I had to gesticulate more wildly.

I sat down, resigned to the fact that my TiVo was once again borked.

And then I worked it out.

Here is my reverse-engineered algorithm for how the TiVo remote control subsystem works:

if ((x=incoming tivo keypress))
 while (tivo is receiving any sort of IR signal at all)
   do x

You see, I wear ankle weights most days, in order to beef up my exercise regimen -- which turned out to be a double-edged sword, as I will explain in a later issue -- in the hopes of keeping my diabetes in check.

You're probably wondering at this point what this has to do with, well, anything at all. What it has to do is this: When I got home tonight, one of the first things I did was to take off my ankle weights. I set them on the couch beside the very spot which currently contains my ass. I set them on top of a small pile of paid bills that I have to file.

What I didn't know was what was under those bills.

The remote control to my DVD player.

You see, my weights had pushed one of the buttons on the DVD remote. That signal, on its own, was not enough to fool the TiVo. However, whenever the TiVo saw a legitimate signal from its own remote, the fact that it was still seeing an unrelated signal kept it going. When the remote operated normally at close range, it was because my body was blocking the spurious DVD remote signal. When I gesticulated angrily, I was cutting past the beam from the remote.

Hopefully, googling this will help future generations. That's why I'm adding the following gibberish, it being things I tried googling in order to find out what the hell was going on:

tivo yellow light
tivo doesn't respond to remote
tivo remote light stays lit
tivo extra button presses
tivo remote spurious presses
tivo arrow buttons
tivo scrolling goes crazy

(Kind folks at Google: Please don't mistake this for a shameless attempt to pad out my page to attract hits. This is what I googled for to try to find the answer to my question, which means that it's part of the story about what I did to solve the problem. Thanks)