Anecdotes

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.

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.

Here a Yell, There a Yell

The jury is still out on most of the new students living in my building, but I’m already impressed by the guy who was on the elevator with his friend when I stepped on this afternoon.  He was scrolling through contacts on his phone, reading them aloud.

David… Diana… Danny… Ellen… Erica!  That was her name.  Erica.

The conversation that followed when he dialed Ms. Erica’s newfound number made clear (if it weren’t already) that he’d met her the night before, punched her number into his phone for safekeeping, and then forgot who she was until the next day.  This relationship is destined for greatness.

Now we just have to get the police in to teach the kids above me that it is inappropriate to carry on conversations from their balcony to persons on another balcony at 11:00 at night.  Last year’s students took one or two weeks to learn that.  This year’s seem to be collectively less intelligent.

I Knew I Should’ve Unplugged It First

I’ve bought (over time) five Western Digital “My Book” drives.  Two of them have failed – one the moment I plugged it in, the other just recently.

Those of you who might trust me to make important decisions should note that I bought one of the drives after the two failures.  Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.  Make of that what you will.

The recent failure was of a drive holding many of my collected television shows – West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sports Night, Gilmore Girls, Scrubs, Friends, Star Trek TNG, DS9, Monk, Grey’s Anatomy, Psych… and probably others I’ve forgotten.  Having them all at my fingertips was a great triumph in personal computing for me.  (And this is just one drive in a bank of 3 TB of storage in front of me at the moment.  Anyone else remember when we used 1.44 MB floppies?)

Of course, all my content is backed up.  All of it.  Except this drive.  This drive contains mostly videos ripped from DVDs, which I of course own (shame on you for thinking I pirated content!), so I reasoned I could always encode them again if the drive failed.  Faced with that very possibility, though, I’ve realized something important: I really don’t want to!  It’s well over a thousand hours of video, and I don’t have the patience to encode it all again.

I developed a theory.  Perhaps the physical drive is intact, but the USB connection is faulty.  The Internet backs me up on this.  It also believes we never landed on the moon, but we’ll focus on the hard drive for the moment.

To prove this theory (and reclaim my data), I began disassembling the case, per Scott Cramer’s description.  It went well, until step two.  This requires depressing a catch at the top and bottom of the drive while pulling the two halves of the case apart.  I performed a quick inventory of my hands, and found two fewer than required for this task.

The end result of all this had me sitting at my desk this beautiful summer evening with a hard drive in front of me, jamming a screw driver into one side and a steel letter opener into the other, and thinking, offhandedly, “So this is how I’m going to die.”

It’s What Plants Crave

When I first moved here, I couldn’t find a Starbucks near my office.  (Google Maps told me there was one there, but I literally couldn’t find it.)

Then I found locations one block west and two blocks east of my office.  I drank an occasional cup, but they weren’t terribly convenient.

Eventually I discovered the location one block east, within easy walking distance, but tucked inconveniently inside a building.  Then they built a fourth location two blocks west, from which I bought another two or three cups per year – no real volume at all.

And then they built the one on the same block as my office, and I’ve bought a cup of coffee every morning since.

We’re gonna need a whole team of psychology researchers to figure this one out.

Who Let the Computers Make Hiring Decisions?

I just received an e-mail that begins thusly:

Dear Boston University Instructor

Woo hoo!  I didn’t know I’d gotten a new job, but… okay!

This is way better than the two times BU’s computers tried to fire me.  “Our records show you no longer work at Boston University,” they said.  Well I sure showed them!  Not only did I keep my job, but I got hired as an instructor!  Sure, I don’t have a classroom, or a salary, or any students to teach, but I have this e-mail, which I will now archive and forget entirely.

Pot Pie, Cajun Style

Marie Callender’s makes a great frozen chicken pot pie.  When you cook it in a conventional oven, as I do, the instructions demand wrapping the edge of the crust in a strip of aluminum foil.

This is easy to do, and I’ve always followed the directions before.  On the other hand, it takes two strips of aluminum foil to achieve, given the circumference of the pie and the width of my aluminum foil.

I decided to run a controlled experiment: what would happen if I wrapped only half the crust in foil?  Would the two sides be indistinguishable, rendering the extra 20 seconds of foil-wrapping effort unnecessary?

Yeah… that step turns out to be rather important.  Half the edge of my freshly baked chicken pot pie is now deliciously flaky.  The other half is in my garbage can.