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Similar situation, though I must say that the CTO felt guilty and gave me an ipod. Then felt even more guilty and arranged for the company to give me $5000 and let me keep the ipod. This was, I must add, when ipods were expensive novelties.

Here's a video of one of the incidents: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/11/uc-davis-cops-pepp.... No idea whether those are UC or local police.

Pepper spray (what is apparently used in that video) is supposed to be extremely painful, and pain lasts for about half an hour. Rinsing eyes with lots of water can help, though that may not be an option as the order is generally to pepper-spray, then handcuff. Apparently a 50-50 solution of Malox and water is preferable to straight water. Hold head to side when rinsing, so water drips off, not down body.

Right on about food. Isn't that another fear, global food scarcities, green revolution not keeping up, fields poisoned by industrial fertilizers... Let's get used to having less, unless we get back on the farm.

Semi-related tangent, this is Bertrand Russell on Wittgenstein from the epigraph of Markson's book Wittgenstein's Mistress:

"When I was still doubtful as to his ability, I asked G.E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, 'I think very well of him indeed.' When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said that it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures."

He truly his an engineer's mind. Engineering joy is, of course, a bit difficult.

Not only is there some utility in skeuomorphs (to borrow another poster's reference), but they also excite the imagination. I've heard the opposite critique of iOS widgets, that their flaw is mimicking machine-panels rather than something else, more fantastic. That is part of the appeal of Windows Phone 7: that it looks like the panel of some device a bit further in the future.

As a friend says, "realism is the last refuge of a dwindling imagination".

Though it's no reason to move to Pennsylvania, PPL Electric there adopted a stunningly usable online billing system a few years ago. No idea how that happened, and as I don't live in NE Penn. I can't provide a screenshot.

Ironically (for the original poster), PPL's owner operates a UK utility.

You lucky 64-bit people:

  * cat /etc/debian_version
  6.0
  * file /bin/bash
  /bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped
  * file /lib/libc-2.11.2.so 
 /lib/libc-2.11.2.so: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.18, stripped
  * grep name /proc/cpuinfo 
  model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
  *

This used to bother me, but now that a Pentium 4 seems nearly as archaic as an 80386, I guess it's not so much of an issue.

NWS -- according to rumor -- deliberately keeps their pages nerdy and undesigned due to pressure from commercial providers (AccuWeather, etc.), which don't want a government-supported a "rival". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Duties...) Forget that the government rival was there first. It's been awkward to get XML-ish data feeds from NWS, because private industry is trying to make money selling the same data which is freely available from NWS.

The private weather services don't provide much value. Most of the local current conditions data (METAR) is gov't sponsored, not to mention the satellite imagery. The government forecast algorithms are just great -- the gov't has a mandate to do this & does it well. It does make sense to go to a private provider if you have an oil rigs, agribusiness, etc. which needs tailored weather advisories.

The only place for good local weather which isn't cribbing or catching up with NWS is local meteorologists in difficult to judge regions. For example in the hill country of northern Vermont, the Eye on the Sky forecasters will call the weather valley by valley, a luxury which NWS computers won't give.

The student who knew grew up in a household full of 'em. Videophiles find advantages in LaserDiscs over DVD: http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#Comparison_with_DVD. Jacket art and possible increased quality due to uncompressed video are cited. I didn't know LaserDisc was an analog format! LaserDisc has some of the grooviness of the 8-track, if not the deep catalog of the LP.

I recently had to explain to a class of college students what a LaserDisc was. It turned out, luckily, that one of the students also knew...

OK, point taken! I like what you say about an anti-CMS. I feel like the old Google Pages (and maybe new Google Sites?) were aimed this way, along with the what other posters mention (Let's Eat, Squarespace). The step of getting one's own domain name is a whole other thing, of course.

But I do really love the idea that there's a dialectic between the virtual world of websites/internet and restaurant work -- which is so deeply grounded in the physical. And that there's some meaning here, that these things do not reconcile well, and the lameness of the web presence of restaurants is a living manifestation of this disjunction.

> Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.

That seems a bit condescending to restaurant owners? Rather, perhaps, they are so much in the real world, dealing with suppliers, cooks, kitchen equipment, waiters, decor, etc., that navigating the virtual (websites) is antithetical?

Richard Benson (master printer, MacArthur genius grant winner, former dean of Yale School of Art) has a saying (approx.), "Smart people are a dime a dozen. Show me someone who can make something and I'll be impressed."

Wise people are also, of course, impressive.

Not mass-produced, but an "open source" kit for making multi-touch: http://labs.nortd.com/touchkit/.

Reminds me of when I had to write a front-end for a web search feed. It was easy to test the standard case (millions of results, of which the first 1000 can be paged). But what about the case when there is only one page of results? The solution seemed to be, rather than finding a topic with only a few results, to keep appending common words until the # of results shrunk enough. For example, from Google:

  "antelope" has 14,100,000 results
  "antelope walrus" has 118,000 results
  "antelope walrus biscotti" has 8,100 results
  "antelope walrus biscotti eisenhower" has 1,690 results
  "antelope walrus biscotti eisenhower lambchop" has 8 results!

Bonus if you can find a word combo which produces a single page of interesting sites, not word spam. Of course now that this comment is on the web, make that 9 results for "antelope walrus biscotti eisenhower lambchop".

Or at least told the U.S. that privately. Which is different, as this could just be what he thinks the U.S. wants to hear, while he can say something different to his people in public.

While I wouldn't claim this is a reliable source, you could check out Dave Emory on Assange (http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-724-wiki-of-the-d... and http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-725-leak-this-wik...). Emory tries to connect Assange, the Swedish Pirate Party, a Nazi conspiracy, western intelligence agencies, and an Australian brainwashing cult of bleach-blond children. He also points to an interestingly dyspeptic cnet interview "Wikileaks' estranged co-founder becomes a critic" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20011106-281.html) with the founder of cryptome.org who (news to me) helped cofound Wikileaks.

One could also argue that once you have Emacs set up, you have enough to learn Lisp. Use ielm mode as a REPL, or lisp-mode for longer code bits. Sure you don't get lexical scope standard, but more than enough to muck around... The elisp info page built in is a fine reference.

Flights from TLV are minimum hundreds of dollars to Europe, over a thousand to virtually anywhere else. So $76 (or $38) per passenger isn't a huge factor, compared to domestic-heavy bargain-biased U.S. airports. (Source: http://www.kayak.com/explore/#/TLV?a=any&d=any&fb=90..., which only shows one domestic choice, TLV to Eilat for $90 minimum)

Why is the Richard Brautigan of 2009.

Anecdotally (from a government scientist), when hiring individuals for gov't work, if you know a good candidate, you write the job description for the candidate. This is because all hires (to avoid nepotism) go through a central office, which works with a checklist of qualifications from the job description.

It could be that when writing a RFQ that there is a similar method: one decides first what product/team you want, then write the RFQ to match that product/team. Not that that excuses the gov't just that it's a standard way to game the system.

Yes, it seems double-edged trouble: On on hand, this commodifies a situation that before lent itself to serendipity and erudition. On the other hand, this also sets up a feedback loop, where the scanners only find books that have already been pre-valued via Amazon-crowds. When I look at the author's Amazon shop, the content seems utterly banal, depressing compared to that of a good used bookstore.

This gives me the bad feeling of when SIGGRAPH used to have papers on "artistic" filters (instant impressionism! instant woodcut!) by people without a feel for the expressiveness of the medium which they are simulating. Such work sometimes seems like subtle satire.

OTOH, I don't want to give the good Googlers short shrift, and it is certainly welcome to consider the meter (and maybe rhyme) of generated text.

It's a lovely chapter! Thanks for pointing it out.

Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art form that allows you to create interactive art. ... . The world needs more weird people who know how things work and who love to figure it all out.

It's inspiring to see him talking about the beauty of (software) engineering as a means of making which has the quality of an art.

The number of hops on a SW flight to a non-major destination has gotten me down, as well as (at least a few years ago) the lack of transparency on the website/tickets about how many hops you might end up on.

I think brc nailed it... (Sorry to be slow on catching up on thread.)

From talking with a "bar designer": Every bar should have a choke point, that is a place where customers have to squeeze past many other customers. This isn't an annoyance, but an essential part of the experience.

Think of PHP as a really amazing shell scripting language. Just as shell scripts can be glue for all the powerful UNIX utilities, PHP gives you APIs for just about any useful library you might need for web work. You won't be able to use your fancy Python chops for things like generators or itertools, but with luck instead you'll be running a bunch of powerful well-designed existing C code with a few function calls. Of course, a significant project will require a bunch of data & logic in PHP...

Also, the PHP source code is quite readable, for those times when the good online reference manual doesn't help.

Can't get over how young the programmer team looks. Compared say, to Lars Bak who is 45-ish and working on V8... Whatever happened to the grizzled JIT writers?