atomicthoughts.com

IMG_5473,
originally uploaded by bbendick.

My first Halloween costume in 27 or 28 years.

It’s interesting to realize the things that seem second nature to us, but actually have to be learned. When Jane was playing T-Ball, for instance, the entire infield would converge on a ball, rather than someone actually covering a base. Today’s lesson, though, was a dictionary. No one had really taught her how to use a dictionary, and I had to re-teach myself before I could teach her. Not that it was some big challenge, but it’s an eye opener to analyze the things you’ve been doing for years without thinking about them.

I spent many, many, many, many hours of my early internet life at LamdbaMOO. Many posts of material could come out of that, but for now I’ll just highlight one important lesson I learned. Straight from the help file that’s still there today:

When paging, just page the question. You don’t need to start with “Can ask you a question?” (Answer: you can and you just *did* — this is an example of a real-life courtesy that actually becomes counterproductive when translated to the MOO; if one sees an actual question, it is possible to deal with it relatively quickly, whereas if the page is merely a “mind if I interrupt?”, time is lost waiting for the actual question to appear).

It’s a great lesson I learned 15+ years ago today, and one everyone who uses IM should keep in mind.

Thiscan be a handy plugin if you’re a thunderbird user. You can use it to mail you about something later. Or you might have something you want to capture, but don’t want to bug someone about right now exactly. This morning I used it because the mail server I was sending to was flat out rejecting my messages. I contacted them and they knew about it, so I just scheduled the messages to be sent in a few hours.

Bruce Schneier has a great blog on security, technical and physical. Today’s post about The War on the Unexpected is exceptionally good.

Like most people I’ve chatted about street view with, I just didn’t get it. It seemed like a curious novelty. Maybe useful to scout out somewhere you might be going and get a lay of the land, but even that seems specious.

But today I got a chance to use it fill a niche in the mapping world that I haven’t been able to fill before. One thing missing (or maybe I just haven’t found it) is the ability to find a building and say “What building is that?”. Or put another way, I know where something is, I just don’t know what it’s called. I’ve had relative success with zooming in on the area and searching for things until it rings a bell. But using street view (whose avatar is a witch on a broom today) I was able to clearly view the front of the store and see the name. Woohoo!

Here’s a new frustration caused entirely by the internet. “Why has my [ups|fedex|etc] package been sitting there for 10 hours? What the heck is going on?” Repeat every 5 minutes to 3 hours, depending on your level of connectivity.

42 seconds of goose pimply season 4 trailer.

When driving the kids to school with the ipod on full shuffle mode, be aware that “Uncle Fucka” drops the F bomb in just 2 seconds, which may or may not be enough time to hit the “next” button. Also be aware that those first 2 seconds is also catchy enough that your 7 year old will ask you to go back to it. But you already knew that, because that’s one damn catchy melody.

NYaK I have 6 songs in iTunes with the word “Uncle” in the title or artist.

What an incredible game tonight. Colorado wanted in the playoffs as bad as the Mets didn’t. I can’t wait for Wednesday.