Author: Ben

Ben http://benjaminfenster.com/

A James by Any Other Name

I stumbled on a wikiHow post titled, “How to Deal With Having a Boy’s Name when You’re a Girl.”

I enjoy particularly step four:

  1. Go back to school with evidence. Bring a page you printed of a name website, stating that your name can be a girl or boys name. Possibly bring a list of female celebrities sharing your name.

I highly doubt that showing up at school with paperwork defending your name is a way to reduce teasing.  Admittedly you’ll be teased a lot less about your name, but now you’ll forever be the girl who brought Internet research to school.  Naming such a celebrity is a great idea, but bringing supporting documentation really won’t help.

The last step may also be ill-advised:

  1. Get advice. Ask your parents, or if you’re too shy, ask the school counselor or an older sibling. Ask how you can cope with people treating you this way.

Your parents created the problem by naming their daughter James.  They may not have the best advice to give on the subject.

The iTunes Clock

iTunes always shows the number of items in a playlist, how long it will last, and its total size.  For small playlists, this is useful to gauge whether it will fit on an iPod, or whether it will last the duration of your upcoming party.  For a large playlist (or the overall “Music” view) the duration estimate can be silly:

1942 items, 4.3 days, 6.38 GB

Except… I started playing Eddie from Ohio’s Fly before I left work on Friday, and never stopped it.  By Monday morning iTunes was nearing the bottom of the playlist, with The Christmas Song, as sung by Sean Hayes of Will and Grace fame on the album NBC Celebrity Christmas.

They’re not kidding about the 4.3 days.

My favorite part is that my “Last Played” dates are totally meaningless now, since a good 1,000 songs were all played this weekend – including those like Karma Chameleon that I don’t really ever want to hear.  My smart playlist of “highly rated songs I haven’t played recently” is going to be useless for a few months.

Neighbor Rules Parole Hearing, Case #8

When my neighbors moved out in April, I submitted a list of demands for their replacements. Now that the building is full of students again, I can evaluate how well my demands have been met.

Demand #8 read: “They must not repeatedly break up with their boyfriends in the hallway outside my door where I can hear every single word. …”

Just after I’d gotten into my pajamas tonight, a student of some kind knocked on my door.  I considered several important facts:

  1. I’ve never met this person
  2. I have no particular desire to meet this person, and certainly not while wearing pajamas
  3. The probability she knocked on the wrong door is about 96%
  4. Answering the door would just be embarrassing (not for me so much as for her), and she was sure to re-read the apartment number at any moment and realize her mistake anyway

I went back to reading my book.

A minute or so passed before I then heard her side of a phone conversation. She was quite upset with whomever she called, and I do not believe it a stretch of the imagination to suppose she had come over to visit her boyfriend after (or during) a fight, hoping to talk in person.  She asked him to please, please just open the door.

At this point it would surely have just made things worse to open the door and suggest she fight with someone in a different apartment, so I stayed planted firmly on my couch and bumped up the volume on Mr. Frédéric Chopin’s Impromptu in C-Sharp Minor.  A minute later:

Hey, which room are you in?  …  (trailing off down the hall)  Oh.  I guess I forgot.

In summary, not only are my neighbors still breaking up (or on the verge of breaking up) in the hallway, they’re now including me in the proceedings.  I feel quite strongly that if I have to break up with someone, it should at an absolute minimum be someone I have met prior to us breaking up.

Update:  A coworker has pointed out that it’s better to break up with someone you’ve never met.  “I just don’t think we should see each other anymore,” says one.  “Okay,” says the other.  “We’ve never seen each other before, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”

Neighbor Rules Parole Hearing: Rule #5

When my neighbors moved out in April, I submitted a list of demands for their replacements. Now that the building is full of students again, I can evaluate how well my demands have been met.

Demand #5 read, “They must not, under any circumstances, set the building on fire again.”

I got this e-mail on Thursday:

To prevent the building fire alarms from activating and leading to the apartment evacuations that we have experienced in the last few days, please keep your front doors closed when smoke forms from over-cooking food.

Although I wasn’t at home during these evacuations, this is an inauspicious way to start the school year.

Maximum Security Shirt Packaging

I readily admit that some packaging is necessary for our economy to function – I’d have a hard time getting a gallon of milk home from the store without a container of some kind – but let’s consider for a moment the packaging that comes with men’s dress shirts:

  1. An outer plastic bag
  2. A sheet of paperboard inside to keep the shirt pleasantly flat
  3. A cylinder of paperboard or plastic in the collar to keep it straight
  4. A bit of plastic in the opening in the collar, covering the topmost button, for no readily apparent reason
  5. Two pins holding the collar in place
  6. Between two and six pins holding other parts of the shirt in place
  7. Between one and three tags affixed to various parts of the shirt with sizing and pricing information (not the label that’s sewn into the shirt, but separate, removable labels)

Not one of these elements serves any practical function.  It all exists to make shirts look presentable in stores.  The cost of that presentation is not only harm to the environment through wasted resources, but also wasted time when buyers have to undo all those elements for every new shirt.

Manufacturers need to eliminate every single packaging element, leaving only the material consumers actually want: a new shirt.

Stores can handle this new arrangement in (at least) two different ways.  The easiest is to put shirts in bins, with samples on display on mannequins, or even pinned up if they want.  Shoppers could then pick out the sizes and colors they want.

Most people would probably say that’s inelegant or low class.  Fine.  “High class” establishments can do what they’ve always done for sweaters, pants, ties, and myriad other forms of sartorial essentials: fold piles of shirts neatly on tables.  Yes, shoppers will mess them up, so the same clerks straightening sweaters will now also need to straighten the shirts.

Such a change would be so easy to implement that tolerating the status quo is irresponsible.

How Computers Get to Sleep at Night

There are two good ways to iterate over an array in PHP.  One is the classic syntax found in some form in all modern procedural languages:

for ($i = 0; $i < count($colleges); $i++) { ... }

There’s also this straightforward variant, also found in a lot of languages now:

foreach ($colleges as $college) { ... }

Given these two loops, under no circumstances is the following acceptable:

$i = 0;
while($i != (count($colleges) - 1)) { ... $i++; ... }

Besides being unnecessarily verbose, this will also never terminate if the array is empty.  Eventually the server will get bored of counting up one integer at a time and forcibly kill the script, but that just means users will have to call me to fix it.

In conclusion, please don’t let student developers touch any more of my production code.

We the People

For reasons that I shall leave ambiguous, I was perusing the (current) Boston Municipal Code yesterday. There’s some great stuff in there. For example, it’s illegal to manufacture or sell a mercury thermometer in the city of Boston, except by prescription.

Then there’s this restriction:

Whoever sells, or distributes, or imports, or loans, or possesses with the intent to sell … a book, pamphlet, ballad, printed paper, phonographic record, print, picture, figure, image, or description which depicts or describes … patently offensive representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated … shall be subject to a fine of fifty ($50.00) dollars….

Then there’s this regulation for street-railway cars (emphasis mine):

No person having control of the speed of a street-railway car passing in a street shall fail to keep a vigilant watch for all teams, carriages, and persons, especially children, nor shall such person fail to strike a bell several times in quick succession on approaching any team, carriage, or person, and no person shall, after such striking of a bell, delay or hinder the passage of the car.

That’s a point to me: my city built its subway and streetcars before anybody dreamed of having automobiles… and it’s still there today.

Thar be Dragons Here

We’ve started creating a lot of video tutorials at work, and we thought speech transcription software like MacSpeech Dictate (built on the supposedly phenomenal Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine) would help us prepare scripts.

I gave the software three long samples of my voice, and then imported a collection of lengthy documents it supposedly used to analyze my writing style.  In the end, I even slowed down my speaking to probably around 60 or 70 words per minute – a speed an ordinary typist could probably keep up with just fine, and an advanced typist would find boring.

I tried reading this simple test sentence:

This video is a tutorial for web developers who want to create new applications in our web space, or install applications they’ve downloaded from the web.

This is what came out – I swear I’m not making this up:

This is a program of us look like he’s our lips excreting around each or install outrage at a gallop away.

A coworker swears Dragon is both reliable and accurate, though when he tried to demonstrate that on his own computer he got no better results than I did.  I’m underwhelmed.

Legalese, as Outlined Herein Forthwith

After my building changed owners, they started using a different lease.  I read through it this weekend, and my favorite representative clause really has to be this one:

1.3.  The pet will be an ordinary house pet.  Ordinary house pets include cats.

That’s just an amazingly gratuitous use of legal sentence constructs to say, in the end, “You can have a cat.”

I also haven’t figured out this one, though Google suggests it’s a standard clause in many leases:

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.  Time is of the essence of this Lease and each and all of its provisions.

The way that phrase is used in casual conversation, I feel like I’m being told if I don’t sign the lease quickly someone will die.