Author: Ben

Ben http://benjaminfenster.com/

Valentine’s Day Warning

Sophie got a box of valentine cards to hand out to her friends — princess themed, of course.

Princess Valentines

Princess Valentines

The cards came in a box with two curious warning messages inside. First:

Caution: changes or modifications not expressly approved by the party responsible for compliance could void the user’s authority to operate the equipment.

And second:

NOTE: This equipment has been tested and found to comply with the limits for a Class B digital device, pursuant to Part 15 of the FCC Rules. These limits are designed to provide reasonable protection against harmful interference in a residential installation.

Are paper Valentine’s Day cards for children now more sophisticated than they were when I was a kid? They look exactly the same to me.

Owies!

When we warned Sophie of her impending bath yesterday, she naturally protested.  Hoping to remind her that clean and conditioned hair is less tangled than dirty hair, this is the debate that ensued:

Sophie: (adamantly) I don’t want to take a bath!

Mommy: Do you want it to owie when I brush your hair tomorrow?

Sophie: (perfect deadpan) Yes.  I love owies.

(long pause while Mommy and I laugh uproariously)

Sophie: Well… maybe not…

It’s really difficult to compete logically with a four-year-old child who understands the power of sarcasm.

Food, Shelter, and Internet

Google generously sponsored free wireless Internet access at 54 airports during last year’s holiday season, including Boston’s Logan International.  This made hectic holiday travel a little more fun, and surely got Google a metric boatload of ad impressions on all the “wireless jail” pages we see when first connecting.

I don’t mind terribly paying for the resources I consume, as a general rule, but the pricing model for Internet access at airports is a terrible fit for most people.  At Logan, the cost was $7.95 for 24 hours of access.  On its face, that’s not bad.  But of course, most people aren’t spending 24 hours in the airport; they’re just checking their e-mail in the one hour buffer surrounding their flight.

Well, good news, citizens of Boston: Massport has arranged to keep the Internet free at Logan — indefinitely!  Unsurprisingly, use of the wireless network grew sixfold during Google’s sponsored access, and Massport is finally ready to continue offering the third basic element of human survival at no cost.  Excellent decision.

logan-wifi

Logan Wireless Internet

I love the number of shared libraries that appear in iTunes at the airport.  My favorite selection this time: “Stud Beefpile.”  I didn’t dare look to see what was in that one.

The Four Quarters

I stumbled upon The Four Quarters on YouTube this morning and immediately had to play every video they’ve made.  Among my favorites: Downtown, Lullaby of Broadway, and the “Teenager in Love, Lollipop, Earth Angel, Sh-Boom” medley.

Don’t be surprised when you open the “National Anthem” video and hear an off-key “Oh” at first.  It’s actually on key, it’s just followed by “Canada” instead of “say can you see.”  (That was a discouraging little realization of some intrinsic assumptions I apparently make about the universe.)

The Color of WordPress

In preparing some graphs of how well our help desk is performing, I needed to assign colors to various services we support.  Naturally, I posed to my colleagues this question: “What color is WordPress?”

One determined the answer scientifically:

Color of WordPress

Color of WordPress

So today’s contribution to science: the color of WordPress is baby blue.

Death by Taxes

Time spent preparing paper tax returns and doing math on five forms: 15 minutes.

Time spent clicking “Next” four thousand times in order to file my already-prepared paper returns online: 90 minutes.

I applaud things being online, but I still don’t understand why people insist online returns are easier or faster.

So That’s Why They Call it Commencement

My girlfriend recently got this message in her voice mail:

This is Darren from Grand Canyon University admissions.  I just saw your application and wanted to know if you have any questions.

What a nice gesture!  It’s a friendly, no-pressure call to applicants, humanizing the institution and making the admissions office more accessible.

I have just one tiny suggestion.

See, Grand Canyon University has already made an appearance on this site once before, when in February of last year it published the Best PDF Ever.  At that time, I was researching the university’s commencement schedule so that my girlfriend and I could fly to Phoenix and I could see her graduate.

And that’s exactly what we ultimately did.  We flew to Phoenix.  We stayed at a hotel downtown.  We ate at neighborhood restaurants.  We even ended up walking seven kilometers in the desert heat on account of a poorly drawn map.  And on Saturday, May 2nd, I sat in a stadium and cheered while she walked across the commencement stage and got her Master’s degree.

So my suggestion to the admissions office is this: try to solicit questions from applicants sometime before they’ve graduated.

Roxxxy the Robot

In the Business section of this morning’s Boston Globe is this blurb from the Associated Press:

A New Jersey company says it has developed “the world’s first sex robot,” a life-size rubber doll that’s designed to engage the owner with conversation rather than lifelike movement.

So many punch lines and so little time!  Reading on:

The dark-haired, negligee-clad robot said “I love holding hands with you” when it sensed that its creator touched its hand.  Another action, this one unprintable, elicited a different vocal response from Roxxxy the robot.

Oooh.  Saucy.  Now, talk to us about the “sex” part of “sex robot” a little:

It has sensors at strategic locations and can sense when it’s being moved.  But it can’t move on its own, not even to turn its head or move its lips.

No further questions, your honor.

Unconditional Love

Only a child can instill a true feeling of unconditional love.  I had this conversation with Sophie when we woke up this morning:

Sophie: Don’t look at me!

Me: Why not?

Sophie:  Because I don’t love you a lot!  I only love you a little bit.

At least I’m still up for consideration.

In Praise of Colorado

My girlfriend and I decided to visit the casinos in Black Hawk and Central City, Colorado — old mining towns that legislation turned into gambling destinations in 1991.  After our summer trip to Las Vegas, we were anxious to try our luck at craps and Monopoly slots again.

Black Hawk casinos can’t compare in scale to the towering, monolithic resorts of the Vegas strip, but they have the same games, and they’re just a short drive from Denver.  And the best part: due to Colorado’s “Clean Indoor Air Act” (of about 2006), smoking is prohibited indoors, including at casinos!

Instead of suffocating under a cloud of cigarette smoke while we played, taking years off our lives and making part of the experience unpleasant, we got to stay for hours breathing clean air and loving every minute.

Thank you, Colorado, for having faith that gambling can exist independent of smoking.  We may still visit Las Vegas again, but we’ll be spending far more time in Colorado’s mountains.