I'm off to the Grand Canyon in a few hours. See everyone in 1½ weeks!

(Ugh... I have to catch the 5:20am ferry. At least it should be on time since it's the first run of the day -- most holiday weekend ferries have trouble keeping to the timetable.)

The folks over at Overheard in New York have a new, related site: Overheard in the Office.

Including gems like this:

Boss: Where the hell were you? I need to call someone.
Assistant: I was in the bathroom.
Boss: But I needed you.
Assistant: You told me to be more efficient, so when nature called, I answered on the first ring.

151 El Camino Drive
Beverly Hills, California

Good or Evil?

I'm beginning to wonder if this being good thing is paying off. So I ask you:

Ah, sometimes I love the New York Times. Their review of the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie describes it as "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

The job interview from hell...

You sign in at reception for your interview. Before you get a chance to sit, someone comes by, mumbles your name, and asks you to follow him. The next thing you know, you're fitted with a microphone and are being interviewed on live TV about the Apple vs. Apple case.

Sounds like a bad dream. However, it happened to Guy Goma [WMV], a candidate for an IT job at the BBC.

The man they were supposed to be interviewing -- Guy Kewney, editor of newswireless.net -- was sitting in another reception area watching the interview, somewhat astonished.

I've been extremely busy. Recapping the last few weeks:

• Tam and I went to Denver for her brother's wedding (29 Apr). Much fun was had seeing the extended family again, especially the younguns. My niece and nephews are growing by leaps and bounds...


• We've also been getting ready for our rafting trip down the Grand Canyon with friends from college. Tamara leaves in a week (she's doing the two-week trip); I'll head down a week later (for the one-week portion) and meet them half-way.


• Work's been insane, as usual. There's one guy on the current project (which I'm offloading today -- yay!) who has taken it upon himself to constantly refactor everyone else's code. This also means he's constantly introducing new bugs (as well as reintroducing bugs we've already fixed) during a period when this project is supposed to be stabilizing.


• Today I've officially started working the Microsoft Project plan for the project I'm managing. Alas, does this mean I've entered the managerosphere?


• Still trying to sell my house in Pittsburgh. The folks who originally put in an offer but then backed out have hired an attorney . So I get to deal with that now. I also just found out that the rains that have been hitting New England hard have started to make their way toward Pittsburgh and have caused a leak in the family room, and a tree has caused some damage to a fence. It never ends...

So nothing terribly exciting has been going on. Thanks to being an Amazon employee, I don't have much of a personal life...

More airline cutbacks...

American Airlines started it by removing an olive from each salad in the mid 80's.

Then they started adding rows and cutting back on the legroom.

Nowadays, you're lucky to get a meal or snack at all.

Tomorrow? They'll eliminate the seats altogether.

Wow. 75 minutes of sleep last night. People paging me about things being broken (when it's clear that I'm already working on it), and then claiming they didn't.

Then, to top it off, someone from another group decides they know better than us what's wrong and breaks the site even worse than it was before. Everyone playing the blame game rather than trying to fix things.

I came very close to quitting today. Very close. The main thing that kept me from doing so was the knowledge that I can't afford to do so.

Ach! Mein Augen!

I was trying to debug something on our internal development site, and this travesty was on the recommendations page.



I would have preferred going to my grave without knowledge that such a book existed. Eeech.

Let me take this brief pause to say:

Being primary on-call on my team really, really sucks.

Thank you. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Even more lights

I just found out they have them for cars, too. They are appropriately called the Pimpstar there:

Remember the ceiling fan display I mentioned earlier? Someone has done it with a bike:

A picture of my new workspace at work:



Strangely, the lava lamp is a "gift" from someone who had this office three or four moves ago. So it doesn't belong to me... just to the office itself.

Other items in the picture:
Coffee mug from Avalon, laptop showing an entry from APOD, printout of a hairy database schema between laptop and desktop keyboard, one of my desktop's monitors showing some random JavaDoc from our latest project, and a Firefox poster in the upper left.

Pictures from my commute

My daily commute, entirely outside of the borders of the interstate freeway system.

Colman dock, Seattle's Pier 52.

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Boarding the 4:40 ferry to Bainbridge. This or the 5:30 is probably the most crowded sailing to Bainbridge on your average weekday, carrying up to 2,500 passengers.

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A not-so-great shot of the Merchant Vessel (M/V) Tacoma, one of the WSF's Jumbo Mark II Class vessels. This is taken after exiting the waiting lobby, before boarding.

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The reverse view, taken from the No. 2 end of the ferry, of the northern third of the parking lot. Most of these cars will not make it onto the boat.

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Cars loading onto the ferry. The truss adjusts the incline of the ramp from the ferry to the parking lot for the tides. In the upper-right corner, you can see the last few foot passengers boarding.

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The No. 2 bridge of the M/V Tacoma. Below that is the sun deck. I am standing on the main deck, one level below, and just ouside the main cabin.

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Piers 54 and upward, north of Colman dock. These tend to be the more "touristy" attractions.

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Piers 48 and downward, south of Colman dock. These are the piers used for the commercial hub of the Port of Seattle.

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Something I've never seen before: A mechanic up in the No. 2 crow's nest, fixing the radar. Actually, he just seemed to turn a bunch of screws; I never saw anything come apart.

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A picture of the Seattle skyline, showing that the Space Needle -- despite how it is usually depicted -- is definitely not downtown.

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West Seattle.

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A Hanjin Shipping freighter sitting in the middle of Puget Sound and the M/V Wenatchee, the other WSF Jumbo Mark II Class ship, on its return trip from Bainbridge to Seattle. I'm not sure why I often see the Hanjin freighters just sitting out there; perhaps they're waiting for customs to clear them?

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A not-so-great shot of Bainbridge Island taken about two-thirds of the way there. It's only slightly more visible in real life, though.

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A mere 10 minutes into the 35 minute trip, people on these sailings will already queue up to disembark. They are standing behind a yellow line, where one of the deckhands will set a barrier just before unlocking the railing.

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Eagle Harbor, Bainbridge Island, which houses the ferry terminal and one of WSF's ferry maintenance yards (a source of annoyance to some Islanders). Despite what you saw on the map above, ferries don't sail directly into the harbor from Seattle -- there are rocks and shallow waters just east of the harbor. Instead, they aim for the midpoint between Eagle and Blakely Harbors and make a sharp jig north before jagging west into Eagle Harbor.

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The old creosote plant in Eagledale. This will eventually become a park; first, though, they need to clean up the plant.

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A view of the No. 1 end as we dock in Bainbridge. The turbulence in the water is due to the reverse propulsion applied by the captain to slow us down.

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Mooring the ship. In addition to the lines, the captain will apply a small amount of forward (Dockward? Fore/aft/starboard/port don't make as much sense on a dual-ended vessel...) thrust to keep the vessel docked.

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Bringing the passenger ramp down.

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Meanwhile, on the car deck, bicycles get off first. They'll be followed by motorcycles, ambulances (there was one on this trip), carpool/rideshare vans, and then all other cars. Sometimes this will include a school bus or two.

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The sea of people leaving the ship. On these sailings, it will take far longer to get all of the foot passengers off than the cars.

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Cherry blossoms near the ferry terminal.

I've wondered for a long while if anyone had died in a pinsetter. For some reason, they've always fascinated and terrified me at the same time.

Borometer

I'm sitting in a meeting right now, and just got this in an ACM TechNews e-mail. I found the coincidence amusing.

Device Warns You if You're Boring or Irritating
New Scientist (03/29/06); Biever, Celeste

Researchers are scheduled to present a device that will inform people with autism that they are boring or annoying the person they are talking to at next week's Body Sensor Network conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" device is an improvement from previous computer programs that detect the basic emotional states of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust because it focuses on the more complex states of agreement, disagreement, concentration, thinking, uncertainty, and interest, which appear more frequently in conversation. Built by Rana El Kaliouby of MIT's Media Lab, colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, with Peter Robinson of the University of Cambridge, the device consists of a camera (small enough to be attached to eyeglasses) connected to a handheld computer that uses image recognition software, and software that can read the emotions of the images. The software makes the handheld vibrate when its wearer does not engage the listener. The device, which gets emotions right 64 percent and 90 percent of the time when presented with video footage of ordinary people and actors, respectively, is based on a machine-learning algorithm that was trained by showing it more than 100 eight-second video clips of actors expressing different emotions. The researchers say they still need to reduce the device's computing demand for a standard handheld, find a high-resolution digital camera that is easy to wear, and train autistic people to use it. In addition to autistic people, teachers could benefit from the device.

Ok, trusty friends list, I need your help.

I need a backronym for "Balboa," the Spanish conquistador and currency unit of Panama. Not (well, at least outwardly) to be confused with Rocky Balboa, the fictional Italian Stallion featured in endless sequels (including another coming out this year), but, hey, the cheesier, the better.

This is for a software component which deals with payments. I've already argued that it has the Portugese/Spanish theme (almost a requisite at Amazon) and currency relation going for it, and since it is being delivered to replace existing legacy services it is a sequel in and of itself. My manager is trying to veto it, though, because of its cheesiness, so I need a stronger case here.

Looking for a new bed or mattress? Be glad you don't live in Germany.

My desire/willingness/motivation/whathaveyou to do work today has hit rock bottom. Then again, I've been tasked with writing specs and attending meetings -- how did I ever have the motivation to do this?

I've started declining meeting invites sent out by my boss that clearly don't add any value to the work we're doing. We'll see how this goes.

I've also started the process for transferring to a different group.