Replacing the artist with a computer?

No, not really. At least, this falls far short in my mind.

I came across a CNet review of Photofiddle, a service which will turn your digital pictures into paintings and the like.

Alas, looking at the samples they have online, it looks more like they're just printing stuff onto canvas. You can have various effects applied (e.g. oil painting, watercolor), but I don't think they're actually applying oils with a brush (human or computerized). Brush strokes (and the globs of paint they can produce) affect the painting, and -- unless I'm mistaken -- these are simply absent in Photofiddle.

I'm also quite disappointed in what they claim are sketches. Sorry, but a crappy edge detection filter does not make it a sketch.

Amazon is moving to South Lake Union

It's official -- Amazon is moving to new digs in 2010 in the South Lake Union neighborhood.

I guess this means I'll be riding the S.L.U.T. to work every day.

I'm not so sure if swimming in Lake Union is an option. The south end is where a number of boat docks and Kenmore Air are located; the north end at Gas Works Park is apparently somewhat toxic.

Also, this is the first post I'm making through Blogger. I'll have to see if I can get my replication system over to LiveJournal working.

Hm, so I haven't been reading many LJ entries as of late -- though not for lack of trying. I had to clear my browser's cookies (as I often do -- lots of work-related testing), forgot to log back in, and have been missing anything protected as a result. Whoops.

So I'll embed a video to make amends. (No, I'm not sure how that works, either.) It's an Aussie TV comedy/talk show host flirting with a church group. And not just any church group -- it's the Westboro Baptist Church.

They say that multi-drive failures are infrequent enough that you generally don't need to worry about them. RAID-5 is good enough.

Well, buy me a lottery ticket. I had to deal with a multi-drive failure on one of our login databases on Sunday night -- first drive failed at 9:30 pm, then the second at 10:08 pm. It took us about six hours to recover the database. Fortunately, our applications are resilient to a single-database failure, so there wasn't any impact -- but those were a tense six hours nonetheless.

Friday was another interesting day. A few web devs thought it would be neat to implement an AJAX script which updated a progress bar showing the progress of a sale (what percentage of items have been sold). Alas, they didn't think through the impact their little script would have as a few million users hit the site with a refresh request every half second. The script was badly written enough that it grabbed data from multiple services and then ignored 90% of the information retrieved. The net result? A few services and networking devices melted down. And guess who got to help clean up the mess?

My people? Crazy.

I haven't checked work e-mail since late Friday night. I've been tempted, especially since today's Newsweek had the Kindle on the front cover and I'm sure there's a bunch of buzz in the office, but I need the unplug time.

Incidentally, I've known about this for a year or so, though I only knew it by its internal name, Fiona. I hadn't heard anything about it for a long time; I was wondering if it had died. Obviously not. My first impressions: Ugly? Yes (and it was just as ugly a year ago), though part of me says that if you focus on these sorts of things, you're not the target audience. Expensive? Ayup, too much so for my tastes (though the price will surely come down). Will I give up books for it? Doubtful; books don't have restrictive DRM and you can dogear pages much more easily. They are heavier and (in the instances where it matters) less searchable.

Vacation has been quiet and nice so far. Spent much of today working on my console (an electronics workbench). Lots of sawdust everywhere. Trying to use a 1/8" Dremel router bit to mill out a largeish area (about 10" x 6" x 1/4") is very, very tedious. Tomorrow will involve swimming, maybe some wandering over on the Olympic Peninsula, and more milling. Notably absent: work. :-)

One of the better things about Amazon: our senior managers are not out-of-touch with the engineers. Nor are they afraid to speak their mind; what they say is not couched in managerspeak.

Brian Valentine, my division's SVP, gave a talk today entitled "Lessons Learned" -- basically a rundown of what he worked on in his career (most of it -- 19 years -- at Microsoft), described the mistakes made, talked about what he wanted to do at Amazon, and related a lot of war stories. It was hilarious and inspiring -- and this is from someone who is usually a bit pessimistic.

Alas, I don't know how much I can relate here, so I won't go off quoting bits and pieces of it.

Heh... so my son will be Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--. I guess my daughter will be Elaine:

I was starting to wonder just how much energy a compact fluorescent bulb saves in terms of carbon footprint. It's widely known that you can use a lower wattage CFL bulb to replace a given incandescent bulb; e.g., the light given off by a 23 W CFL bulb is the same as that of a 100 W incandescent bulb.

However, CFLs also contain mercury (on the order of 5 mg per bulb). Disposal regulations vary widely; in my area of the woods, there's some confusion as to how households are supposed to dispose of them. We'll play responsible citizen here and take them to a recycling center.

In my county, there are three sites which accept CFLs. The nearest one is in Poulsbo, a 25.2 mile round trip.

Let's assume it's time to take that bulb to the recycling center. (Ok, normally I would bundle them up and take a bunch at a time.) In my 2000 Honda CR-V, this trip would consume a gallon of gas. According to a random environmental site on the Intertubes, this is 10.9 kg (24 lbs) of CO₂.

Yikes. That sounds like a lot. Does this offset the benefits of a CFL?

The average lifetime of a CFL is 15,000 hours. Assuming our earlier 23/100 W bulb comparison, that's a difference of 1155 kWh over the lifetime of the CFL. According to this carbon calculator, 1 kWhr of electricity results in 0.43 kg of carbon emissions.

That's a 496 kg; discounting our (silly) trip, I will have released 486 kg less CO₂ into the atmosphere -- that's half a ton.

Ok, I can rest easier now. :-)

Watching a train wreck...

A Canadian dollar is now worth 1.08 US dollars. Next stop: Australian dollar parity. And I don't see a bottom to this:

• China has announced that they're moving away from dollars
• GM, still a DJIA component, reported a $39 billion loss
• Oil looks like it will easily clear $100/barrel by the end of the year
• And I don't think the banks are telling us the full truth about the extent of the mortgage crisis.

My investments have been flat. As expected, losing money on domestic stocks; gaining it on foreign stocks.

Who will play Barack Obama on SNL? Well, how about Barack Obama?

What the heck is this? I see it popping up on various sites -- it's one of the most annoying Web 2.0 inventions I've ever seen.


I'm guessing it's supposed to show a thumbnail of the linked page. I've never seen anything but the "Loading Preview" text, though.

As another blogger aptly put it, "I was beginning to think it was the 90’s all over again, with the blinky text and the annoying midi files."

Even better:

Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and un-useful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

What's next? Are these folks going to go around and start modifying cars so they honk every time you hit the brake? Have my office phone ring anytime someone on my floor gets up to use the restroom?

Edit: Thanks to for providing this tip on how to disable it:

If you click on the gear, there should be an option to "disable", and the little preview-page that results will let you chooose "all sites" and then "save". It'll set a cookie somewhere and never bother you again, as far as I can tell.

This is what I've been spending a fair amount of time on over the last six months. Not that web page specifically, but all of the backend logic to make it work as well as migrating about 100k customers from the old set of bank accounts to the new.

U.S. occupies Canada

Our solution to the currency issue? Take over Canada, one piece at a time.

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Yes, I am disappointed in the Rockies' implosion in the series. Excellent showing by the Sox. Careful, though; keep it up, and people will start lumping you with another team in the northeast.

Apple has apparently perfected their Windows emulation:

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs
Apple support drones are getting an earful from Mac users who are getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death while trying to update to the latest and greatest version of OS X. This thread on an official Apple support forum has more than 200 posts left in 25 hours at time of writing. A large percentage of the writers report getting a persistent blue screen that forces them to abort their installation of Leopard.

I cannot help but be amused. I kinda like Apple, but Steve Jobs' arrogance gets to me. This will take him down a peg or two -- hopefully.

On fire...

I-15 is never this empty, especially at rush hour:

I-15 at Felicita Road [map]



I-15 at Centre City Parkway [map]


I-15 at Mira Mesa Boulevard [map]


My parents were evacuated around 1 pm; their house is (was?) on the northwestern edge of the Witch fire. Haven't been able to reach them, but I'm figuring they're safe and probably stuck in traffic on a surface street somewhere.

Anyone else remember Master Ninja's Q&A section? For some reason, I was trying to remember the characters, and then I realized I didn't even recall which site it was. (Google was of no help; it's been gone for a few years now.) No idea why I was trying to remember this; it wasn't terribly amusing back then, either.

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At the risk of offending , , and , I feel a bit sorry for the Red Sox. Now, I like the Sox -- how can you not like a team whose archrival is the Yankees? -- but they're going up against the Rockies. The Rockies who have been kicking everyone's ass -- including my Padres -- since the start of September. The Rockies who have won the last 22 of 23.

Oh, and this time it's not the Red Sox who are the underdogs.

The Sox' best hope is that the boys in Denver have cooled off while waiting for the ALCS to finish up.

BBC News

Argh. They're screwing up everything I like about BBC news; -- basically, dumbing it down to become a British version of CNN or Fox News.

This is what's in the water...

(from the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition)

Tamara, I know what to name our kids now...