Getting Gruntled

It’s interesting to see your own attitudes toward a given historical event change over time. A couple of days ago (Saturday, even) was Patriots’ day. This one has nothing to do with Amercan football, and the majority of Americans on the street wouldn’t be able to tell you offhand what Patriot’s Day is supposed to be about. It’s likely because there isn’t a tradition of buying copious amounts of sugar, or killing a bird to use as a centerpeice.

The high points of the Revolutionary War, including the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s Ride are very familar, mostly due to Longfellow’s poem, but the holiday isn’t.

More info on Paul Revere’s ride
Timeline from PBS

The PBS site makes me wish I’d heard about the film before it aired. I bet it was good.

Just a little blast from the past here. Some of you were around back in the Hayes Volksmodem and BBS days, and will remember this as well as I do.

FYI - a “wahka” is the decidedly “proper” (by popular vote) name for
the characters “>” and “< ". This is in spite of INFOCUS readers of
Denver who still refer to them as "Norkies". The Michigan crowd
apparently has corrupted the spelling to "waka".

To wit, it is -
------------------------------------------------------------
"...a poem we think is about the lowly wahka. Maybe. Well,
perhaps---we're really not sure what the poem actually is
about. Here it goes:"

<>!*”#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

original Leitner page
Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese

I have been thinking back on this recently and was thinking that some new possibilities are possible nowadays with widespread PC usage, the internet, and all of our new web lingo. I’ll be posting a couple of attempts soon. If any of you want to take a whack, feel free to share.

After I heard about the recall on Aunt Jemima brand pancake mixes, I saw a really interesting background article at Obscure History.

I always thought of Aunt Jemima to be a silly product name, and a hearkening to old-fashioned days when the shadows of slavery and repression were still fluttering along the walls.

I know that some of you who drop by here on occasion don’t necessarily get the underpinnings of the Southern American dialect except where it is displayed on silver screens, so the reason the name seems silly to me might need an introduction.

In the plantation part of the south, Aunt Jemima would sound like “Ain’t Je Mama” — “Not your momma”. During the times of slavery and during the period where integration had not taken a foothold, the vision of a black houseworker named Aunt Jemima would bring up the idea of a slave who did all the housework and child rearing, but whom the children were constantly reminded that she isn’t “mother”.

I wasn’t aware of a huge chunk of the company’s background before they were bought by Quaker Foods, another brand known for an extreme close-up of a character who is meant to bring up feelings associated with the American past. This makes me wonder if they will be making an offer in the years coming for Wendy’s or maybe even the Sunbeam bread company or maybe even Martha Stewart.

We were talking earlier today on Pownce about a lot of the micro-blogging and social “heartbeat” networking sites having periods of downtime lately.

It’s probably just some growing pains as more people start to use them. And since they are all more of a “pulse” setup, they are using the networks differently than a page of information at a time.

I think it was Friday, Twitter was unresponsive, then yesterday, Pownce and then the early morning hours, the same thing happened with Jaiku. They all seem to working just fine now.

Does anyone remember a recent outage at Mahalo Follow? Anyone? Beuller?

There are a lot of different social networks out there, and I’m starting to see a lot of splintering. I hope that we start to see some integration tools soon to help us stay connected and also to not have a deluge of information. Everyone has their own personal limit for information dump, and these networks can certainly cause a flood. I’m supposing that with some open API’s, we would start to see a lot of cross-network functionality. updating your “status” in one place will update that status in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc at once, and people who are following you or on your friend list in more than one place would only get a single alert or, optionally, none at all. I’d like to see options for some of this integration, but not necessarily a snowballing effect on social networking as a whole. It’s important that the users are able to separate and maintain “public” and “private” identity as well.

A good example would be to never automatically update linkedin from anything added at facebook or myspace. At least until companies stop cyberstalking, and hire people based on their skills and experience. This might take another few years, and two or three more Petite Anglaise stories, but I definitely hope it comes soon. Not that I have anything to hide: I link everything together. I just know a lot of people who have the need to hide their personal lives from their employers, and I find that incomprehensible.

Then there’s another whole ball of wax when you start to think of integrating dating sites.

I found an article at LLRX that gives an intro to social networking sites and tiny bit of history, just in case you are one of my “less-than-technical” readers.

After reading Mark’s results, I just had to see where I stand… He got a score that said “Cool Nerd King”.

Hmm… Might have something to do with all the Star Wars and Star Trek questions…

It’s funny how things change over time, including the everyday retail experience. With our frenetic daily life getting more crazy and demanding over the past decade.

There was a time within the past three generations that even stopping to fuel up your car was considered to be a special event, with attendants providing value-added labor including checkng the air level in the tires, cleaning the windshield, and checking the oil level as the fuel was doled out.

During my early years, full-service was available, but most drivers opted to pump their own fuel, check oil, and go inside to pay.

Fast forward ten years, and payment at the pump becomes the norm. I have been glad to have this become commonplace, especially when the girls were very small. When driving, stopping to fuel up when you have a sleeping infant in the car, it would be very difficult if it were still necessary to rouse the baby(ies).
The pumps allowed you to either pay at the pump or to pay inside. Later, it became the norm that if you chose to pay inside and if it was after dark, you would need to go inside and pre-pay, which made sense to diminish the problem of people driving off without paying.

Later, it became common that there are video cameras watching at all the pumps, so anyone who does drive off will immediately prosecutable via video evidence.

Fast forward to today, and there’s an issue. Stop at any random gas station, and you likely only have the option of paying at the pump. If the option exists to “pay inside” and you choose it, you are immediately prompted to go inside to pay.

The issue I have with this is twofold: One is that with the fluctuating price of fuel, I have no idea how much to prepay fur a top-off. Guessing wrong means another trip. The prepay-only option is moot with all the cameras. The second issue arises if you primarily use modern payment options, and do not carry cash, and happen to want anything from inside. The convenience store is actually where the highest profit margin is set, so these gas stations are actually shooting themselves in the foot by forcing transactions to be made outside. In order to not have TWO transactions, I can’t begin to quantify the number of times I have opted out of going inside, where being able to hit “pay inside”, topping off the tank, then going inside for a bag of sunchips and a bottled water, and being able to make it a single transaction would help the station more, not to mention the local economy as a whole. I know the extra few bucks isn’t much, but times many visits, times many people who do things similarly…. You can see the probabilities.

The past week I was caught off-guard by a small throng of misinformed miscreants bent and determined to take away both the will to live and the patience to educate them roundly. I’m sure those of you who have worked in technical support at any level are more than able to visualize, sympathize, and relate.

When the storm subsided, I found myself with some new topics on which to blog when one night I went to bed as usual, and the next morning woke feeling very maladjusted. It was only later that I started finding the evidence. I struggled through a couple of days, chilled to the bone, wearing my heavy coat about the office, and having people pass by the office door, muttering things that sounded much like “he’s a techno-weenie, but he’s looking like more of a cave-dweller than usual…” Later, I had one of those micro-naps (the times when you innocently pass out of conscience without knowing it, waking instantly and wondering if you had been “out” for two second, two minutes, or two hours), and woke in a sweat. Looking for a handkerchief, in my jacket pocket, I found two odd things: A 64MB memory card and the stub of a parking ticket. Neither of these was familiar to me in the least. The parking stub looked to be printed in Spanish, and I tossed it in the trash. I slipped the memory card into a reader and found one file, but it was not accessible.

Later at home, I put the girls to bed, and was traveling back and forth to the WC, wishing it would stop long enough for me to pass out when I noticed something ground into the carpet. It seemed to be dried play-dough, but the pattern on the floor made an almost footprint-pattern leading from the living room window back into my bedroom. Taking another look at the file on the memory card, I found that it’s a 3DES-encrypted file. Now I’m wishing that I hadn’t tossed that parking ticket stub, if that’s what it really was…

So I’ve come to the conclusion that it was more than what people refer to as a “stomach bug”. When I first felt it, I was thinking that I may have had some food poisoning, but I had made all of my own meals for a week solidly, and check and test the food compulsively, so that could not be the case. What I had was definitely the product of an alien abduction. The pieces just go together. It’s very likely a space-flight sickness, and being half-waking during that time, yet not conscious would explain the exhaustion. I have some cracking software brute-forcing the file (if you are with the FBI or NSA, I completely deny that statement), and have been cleaning house ever since. Anyone know how to get play-dough out of carpet?

I always wondered when I was younger why my mom would freak out to find that we were playing with play-dough, and would say things about the carpet. At the time, it was just another cool activity or toy to play with, and we couldn’t fathom why we shouldn’t be able to play with it just the same as the rest of our stuff. Now I know why. The stuff is in the carpets for good. Besides, It’s made out of alien foot-funk. Hey, Ben & Jerry, I have a flavor idea for you: Alien Tracks! With deeply-embedded green, blue, and white play-dough bits, and a Sigourney Weaver key chain with 7 UPC’s!

Another funny thing is that when I happen to hear the old Beastie Boys song Paul Revere (It was on twice today. Another case for having your mp3 players charged up at all times, kids. commercial radio has completely bitten it over the past few years), I get odd sihouette images as I hear the lyrics:

My name is MCA I’ve got a license to kill
I think you know what time it is it’s time to get ill
Now what do we have here an outlaw and his beer
I run this land, you understand I make myself clear.

Which strikes me as very odd. I am pretty sure that the music that the US sent up in the probe was the Beatles. The only “MCA” I know of for years now would be Mark over at Delusions. Mark?!? ‘Fess up!

Now that the little green goblins are out of my system, It’s time for a last-minute Amie Street post!

During psychology classes (both in high school and in college), there was a section of cognitive psych that explored the ego and self-awareness, and there was always that foursquare chart that laid out personality traits known and unknown, public and private. I often think of that foursquare when I’m out people-watching.

The best manifestations are when people have a lot to do, or are fidgeting. Back before the “high-security crisis”, that place was the airport. At airports you would see some people in a big rush, others trying to get a cab or to a phone, still others bored senseless as they would wait for a layover flight, and many with pre-flight jitters. You can’t really go to the airport just to watch people anymore, though. You would be likely to get cavity-searched and charged with something obscure.

The public-known was usually in the person’s posture and eye-contact, as well as their mode of dress. The lady in the dark colored business attire with hard-set jaw and attaché was obviously busy, serious, and not there for fun, where the relaxed-looking couple in brightly-colored wind suits carrying athletic bags and easy smiles were likely embarking on a vacation getaway.

Sometimes there were some slight hints to both the private-known and private-unknown parts, especially if the onlooker is keen for details of the sort, The public-unknown area is often the most entertaining part of people-watching. Things that you are easily able to observe about someone’s personality that they are completely unaware of is the basis of quite a bit of comedy found in mass media, especially physical comedy.

The business-obsessed lady in the drab clothing has an unknown (to her) preference for the third seat from the aisle, and stands up when dialing her cell phone. The standing probably makes her feel in command of the call.

The other day I was reminded of the lectures on self-awareness after I had picked up the girls and we were on our way home. I was asking them a series of questions about how their day went down, and they started asking generalized questions about the nature of things. The two of them were on a tangent, making references to movies and potty humor, when A very seriously asked, “How big was my butt when I was a baby?”

I’m still wondering if eight is about the right age to be worried with such things. Before, the primary question of this sort was always how big they were when they were born. They love the part where I explain that at the time of their birth, each was able to take a nap in my hands. Now, we’ve moved from the body as a whole to an inquisition of particular parts. When do women start to obsess about the size of their posteriors? I replied, “It was very, very small. Like half of an orange.” The two of them giggled and went on to more one-liners having to do with flatulence as I started to think through the dynamics of what will soon become the “talk on body types”. It will probably be impending very soon. Then my attention got pulled back into the conversation as I became the door-answerer in an endless round of knock-knock involving the dreaded “Banana” response. Lately it cycles for around 15 times before the final “Orange” response appears.