Is it a sign that I might be too geeky if I can check e-mail and browse the web in my house even though the power is out in my neighborhood?

Amusing quote about Pennsylvania: "Pennsylvania has been geographically described as Pittsburgh in the west, Philadelphia in the east, and Alabama in the middle." (On how Santorum manages to get reelected.)

And what's up with the Carl's Jr/Hardee's Paris Hilton commercial? I actually haven't seen it on T.V., but I did visit their Internet site to see what the fuss was about. Very effective commerical if you're trying to sell sex, cars, or car-washing equipment. The hamburger, though, was thrown in as an afterthought. It's almost like Carl's Jr was embarrassed to be associated with the commercial.

Not getting it. Then again, I don't get the appeal of Paris Hilton either. Skanky just isn't a turn-on.

I'm not smart enough...

... to be deciding who should be the judges, school board members, and coroner for my area.

Today was a primary election day in Pennsylvania. The most important parts, in my opinion, were referendums to eliminate some of the elected row offices here and allow the state to borrow $625M for environmental improvements.

However, there were also (in my district) various offices being decided. Now, of course I want the best people in those jobs. For a judge, however, that's a question of which candidates have a good understanding of and can apply the law fairly and won't bring the office into disrepute. I might be capable of deciding this by examining their criminal records and administering an exam written by the local bar association -- but all I have are their written statements. As for the school board, I'm happy with the way the district is being run and am content to leave well enough alone. Coroner? What the...? Do I look like a medical board? Does it matter whether the coroner is a Democrat or Republican?

Just how far do we want this to go? "Hi, I'm Dave Cuthbert, I'm a Republican running for Member of the Consulting Staff at Cadence Design Systems, I'm tough on software bugs, and I'd appreciate your vote today."

What's going on with my vision?

I don't really feel headache-y, maybe a bit tired, but I'm finding the light level in the office too bright. It's no brighter than normal, from what I can tell... but I'm still squinting like crazy. This is making it difficult to concentrate and get work done...

You know how various groups (e.g., Amnesty International) will recite the names of people killed or missing in certain events? (World Trade Center, Iraq war, political prisoners, etc.)

I propose that we get a group together to recite the numbers from A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates. Hmm... do you think we could get funding from the NEA for this?

Google has a job opening for a Software Engineer/Programming Instructor. A teaching position. At a company.

Joy!

Help.

I'm stuck in a telecon until 7pm, the people in San Jose are not talking into the phone, most of them have Indian accents, and they're talking about subjects I don't care about and using acronyms I don't understand.

On Thursday, I had both a letter and (nasty) phone call from the bank which holds my home equity loan, telling me they've turned it over to collections for non-payment, docked my credit rating, and will (eventually) initiate foreclosure proceedings.

WTF? Not only am I not late on my payments, I've been prepaying the loan and was paid up through July.

I called, and they looked over the records. Oh, they said, it looks like there might be an error from when they acquired the old bank back in October. But that's not their fault, they said, the problem lies in the old bank's records.

After much yelling with the asshole in collections, I got them to review the records. I later got a phone call stating that they did me a favor by correcting them. (Yeah, screw you, too.)

On Monday, I'm signing paperwork to transfer the loan to my normal bank (National City), where I keep my checking and savings accounts and where they actually know me. It'll cost me about $30 extra per month, and there's a chance I might have to pay some closing fees, but you know... it makes me feel so much better to not be doing business with an unethical bank.

Been incredibly busy, hence this space has been empty. But we have finished our downstairs bathroom! It no longer looks like it's missing everything except the basics (toilet, sink, soap, and towel).

I worked from home yesterday, which was nice. Far more productive than a day at the office; amazing how that works.

I came in today, though, to find out that someone here abruptly quit yesterday. The whole thing is kind of shrouded in mystery. I suspect he actually gave two weeks notice, but since he's apparently going to work for a competitor, he was asked to leave immediately -- this is actually a company policy.

He was fairly high up, too -- director level.

Too tired to think now. Need more sleep.

From my brother, who is spending a year in Rome on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome:

Just wanted to send along some photos I took from St. Peters where they were reading the rosary after the Pope's death just a bit ago. As soon as we heard the city bells signaling the death, Lisa and I jumped on my motorcycle and went to the square where there were already tens of thousands. I didn't want to use flash since it was a service, but I wanted to give some sense of the scene there.

Photo credits: Michael Cuthbert

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Trogdor was a man...
He was an... LR(1) man!

Alas, OpenOffice, you are becoming a bloated pigdog which is more annoying to use than your evil twin.

If I could, I'd cut your code down to size using highly lethal martial arts techniques. It'd be like kung fu on a cracker!

Heh... it still strikes me as a tad unusual to see a stock reported as being "up $400":

AIG shares dropped $1.25, or more than 2 percent, to $56.95 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Berkshire Hathaway shares were up $400, or 0.5 percent, at $87,400, also on the Big Board.

I saw the headline: "Jackson Prays With Terri Schiavo's Parents"

My immediate thought was: Michael Jackson is out there now? Can this get any weirder?

Now killing you with three square+ meals a day!

Because they're not about to be outdone by Hardee's Monster Thickburger (1,420 kcal, 107 g of fat), Burger King is rolling out their Enormous Omelet Sandwich (730 kcal, 47 g of fat) for breakfast. Note that a Whopper comes in at a comparatively modest 700 kcal/42 g. I think I'm going to start a chain which sells slabs of deep-fried lard (maybe with some beef boullion cubes for flavoring) in between two slices of bread. Or are they already doing this? I'm no health nut, but.... gaaaaaak.

Total size of my tax returns this year? 90 pages.

Ok, if I, say, owned a sole-proprietorship business which dealt in foreign securities and was trying to hide income in various places, then this might be acceptable. Alas, my life is nowhere near as exciting -- except when it comes to taxes.

Fortunately, not all of these are pages to be mailed in. Some are for auditing purposes. But still...

Oh, and electronic filing? I don't use it. It saves the government money, sure. But they charge $16 for it. Huh? Sorry, but if it saves you money, you'd better be passing some of that back to me. For $16, you're getting the ol' paper returns.

Not a Starbucks every block

In today's business briefs, it was revealed that Pittsburgh ranks incredibly low on the number of coffee shops per capita.

#1 was Anchorage, with 2.8 per 10k people.
#2 was Seattle, with 2.4 per 10k.

Pittsburgh was #142, with 0.5 per 10k.

Now, if they had done the number of bars and pubs per capita, I'm sure the story would've been considerably different.

Why you shouldn't use bad file sharing programs...

My cable modem was on the fritz over the last few days. Comcast came out today and found out that:

1. Another crew had installed an amplifier on the line in my neighborhood.
2. The amplifier I had was no longer necessary -- in fact, it was overloading the signal on the cable modem.
3. My cable line had a (fairly old) block on it, making us all wonder how the modem ever worked.

Anyway, after they left, I found the response to be a tad sluggish. I pulled out a network analysis program... and found that my line was being barraged with requests from Gnutella (think Napster) clients.

This pissed me off. There's no way I could block them, either. So I decided to write a program to accept their requests and send garbage back. Then I discovered that Gnutella has this "server discovery" feature -- a server can say, hey, you might try this other server over here, it probably has good stuff, too. At the suggestion of some guys on IRC, I implemented this feature -- except my version returns the addresses for the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America. I'm sure they'll be interested.

Moral of the story: don't steal my bandwidth.