Plaidophile

I just love how iTunes crashes and then leaves its database in an inconsistent state where you have to rebuild it to ever use iTunes again.

I also love how iTunes keeps its smart playlist configuration in the database, seeing as how I have a lot of carefully-written smart playlists which I use for seeding my iPod and the like.

iTunes is such a piece of crap.

Lately I've noticed that a lot of people are confused about what a hash table is and how one goes about implementing it. (This often comes up when I'm interviewing candidates and I ask them how they'd implement an associative array without the use of std::map.)

A hash table is not using a hash function to distill a key into a value which is used to order it in an associative array/sorted list/etc.

A hash table is using a hash function to distill a key into a value which is used to index into a linear, non-sparse array.

So, I was riding up Folsom on my new bike, and actually keeping up with traffic (about 20MPH) and otherwise completely following the law, when an asshole in a black BMW was speeding (at 40MPH or so) and came within inches of hitting me. So I shouted, "Hey!!!" at him. He immediately pulled over half a block in front of me, jumped out of his car, and shouted, "WHAT, HUH?!" (or maybe it was "YOU WANT SOME?!" but my adrenaline was pumping so I'm not really clear on what he said precisely) at me and held his arm out at roughly head level.

I ducked under his arm (clearly he wasn't trying that hard to knock me off my bike) and continued on my way. When he caught up with me the bike lane had started and I guess he decided I wasn't worth killing someone over after all since he didn't do anything specific to try to mess with me after that.

But, still, I can't understand how someone can break the law and nearly hurt someone else and then get offended when they're called on it. Jeeze.

(No, I didn't get his license plate number. It all went very fast. But now that I've seen this SFPD bike video I know better what to do.)

All my life I've always had trouble with my teeth and cavities and so on. I really hate going to the dentist because dentists always blame me for it, which just adds insult to injury. I take good care of my teeth but I still always end up getting cavities and the like. It's very depressing.

It doesn't help also that dental insurance never really covers a lot. They seem to think that by covering only the bare minimum (for example, only covering fillings up to 80% of the cost of old-fashioned amalgams, not covering crowns at all, etc.) it'll encourage people to take better care of their teeth and never have problems. I'm sorry but it doesn't work that way! That's like health insurance only covering basic preventative medicine under the belief that it'll encourage people to not get cancer or something.

In my experience, the number of phone calls someone receives is directly proportional to how annoying their ringtone is. The obvious corollary is that the people who are conscientious about the obnoxiousness level of their ringtone are also the ones who don't spend all their time talking on the phone, thus making it not an issue to begin with.

So, this morning, between signing for the condo and going back to work, I stopped at an AT&T store to pick up a SIM for the iPhone. There was a short line ahead of me. One person in front of me was on the phone, talking in a very dramatic way to a regional manager about some terrible customer experience he suffered at the hands of something or other. I couldn't help but listen in (seeing as how he was loud enough to be heard throughout the whole store) and it was plainly obvious that he was ranting about his experience buying an iPhone 3G on Friday.

What I heard from his story is that he was in line for 4 hours when the Apple store first opened, and was turned away because of the activation issues. The woman in line next to him was "in tears" because of her inability to buy an iPhone (what). He was ranting and raving about how Apple and AT&T need to "get their act together" and how they should have gotten news about the activation failures into "all the papers" ("for the people who don't have Internet") so that people wouldn't have to wait in line for four hours to not be able to buy an iPhone. Furthermore, he refuses to go into an Apple store after his bad experience and was aghast that the AT&T stores were out of phones.

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Okay, so, not only do the DTV changeover people keep on making it sound as if rabbit-ears antennas are the signifier you should look for (PROTIP: rabbit-ears antennas work better for DTV than "HDTV" antennas), but ABC has taken to putting a title crawl on the top of the screen warning about the DTV changeover. On the DTV feed, making it a dire warning that is completely unnecessary to the people seeing it. Way to confuse the issue even further, guys.

What the stations should be doing is running different ads on the DTV and analog feeds — on the analog feeds say, "Hey, you're watching this on an analog set, you need a DTV converter box," and on the digital feeds say "Hey, great, you're watching this digitally. Make sure your friends and family are too." Sort of like the dancing IPv6 turtle.

If they really can't do that for some reason (and I'm pretty sure they can, based on how I've seen early DTV broadcasts fail), they could at least use a more meaningful signifier, like "if your TV channels have a dot or dash in them, like 2.0 or 5-1, you are fine, but if not you are still watching on an analog set."

So, the inspiration for the Wii Fit comic is that, after about a week of daily weigh-ins, I started to feel like Garfield in his Sisyphean struggles against the talking bathroom scale. I have a feeling that Nintendo's designers really weren't thinking things through when they designed the daily body test component.

The big problem with it stems from that it uses BMI's ridiculous classification system (which is good for a casual statistical clustering of body types but is not in and of itself a useful diagnostic tool), and that it disregards progress and only tells you how you're doing based on where you are in the BMI.

So, it looks like there was a class-action lawsuit regarding the iBook power adapter which finally got a settlement. So, great, I could theoretically get $79 back for the power adapter I had to buy for my iBook back in grad school, because said adapter failed after just a few months due to its shitty design.

Of course, in order to file a claim, one must have:

• The computer's serial number (which I haven't had for, what, 5 years now?)
• The receipt for purchasing the power adapter (yep, I'm going to hang on to a receipt for 7 years!)
• A document from Apple indicating that I attempted to get it serviced under warranty and was denied (nope, like an idiot I went to the shop where I bought the iBook and they said, "Sorry, Apple considers that customer abuse," and it never got documented at all)

You will have a much better time gaining legitimacy if you were to keep your bikes on the street and not, say, very nearly run over pedestrians who happen to be walking the other direction. (Such as myself.)

Wouldn't it be funny if on April 1, they made the street lights mean the opposite things? So red was go and green was stop and yellow was cluck like a chicken? And then if someone's stupid enough to fall for the joke and gets in an accident, 911 can be all "doo doo doo, we're sorry, this number has been disconnected! HA HA FOOLED YOU" and then the dispatcher could send a clown to take the accident report! And if someone needs medical attention the EMTs can start singing "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Another funny joke would be to get people listed on their local sex offender registries! Hilarious!

Just because I'm in Japan doesn't mean I suddenly know how to read Japanese.

It's a bit annoying how you can always switch to a language-specific Google by appending the appropriate ccTLD, but how do you go about specifically doing the American version? (okay actually it turns out that google.us always works, and surprisingly isn't squatted on by some sort of social networking outfit or something. I'll have to remember that.)

So, at work, one of our target platforms used to have a supporting toolchain on both Linux and Windows, but the next version will be Windows-only. Previously, at work I was running Linux on my work-provided laptop (which I kept locked up in a drawer) and a MacBook connected to it (via NFS) for all the actual user interface stuff (since that combination also works well with perforce, which is pretty finicky about how file permissions get managed).

So, because there's no more Linux support, we have to move to Windows for our primary dev environment, and since Windows and OSX don't really get along that well in terms of managing file permissions and so on, I decided it'd be easier to just reinstall Windows on the laptop and use that as my only environment.

I was never that big a fan of Windows, but starting today I absolutely loathe it. Anyone who thinks that Windows and Macintosh are "more or less the same" can bite me.

So, my apartment has contracts with a number of service providers for things like telephone service, satellite television, and so on. Lately I've been considering getting some sort of regular cleaning service, so I checked the apartment's service provider directory. For cleaning services, they linked to a company called Service Magic. So, I filled out their form (on the apartment's site) asking for a quote for regular (bi-weekly) cleaning.

Within minutes I got a phone call from Service Magic, which is based in LA. Rather than actually being a cleaning service themselves, they are a "contracting clearinghouse" which exists as a referral service between clients and actual contractors. Okay, fine. I explained what my (very simple) needs were, and the guy said he'd get back to me with a list of contractors.

So much for the Buffalo WHR-G125s being any good. The wireless stopped working entirely on the one hooked up to my DSL modem, and the WDS-bridged one doesn't seem to want to work as a router. Meanwhile there's something wonky going on with DHCP at sonic.net which is preventing me from reconnecting, so I'm on via GPRS/Bluetooth right now. Ugh.

11g is pretty assy anyway though. Seeing as how the only devices which "need" 11g connectivity are my Wii and my old Powerbook, I went and just ordered a pair of Netgear 11n bridges. I'll just use my G5 as my router and 11g access point, and the Netgear bridges will (hopefully) give me much better network performance for the bridged devices anyway, as well as for my MacBook. Hopefully they'll also arrive sooner rather than later, as my parents are visiting me for a week in a few days, and of course TiVo gets very unhappy if it's without fresh TV listings for too long. I guess I can try using my Airport Express as a WDS→Ethernet bridge in the meantime (though that always was fairly unreliable).

6:25 PM Yay for neighbors who have an unsecured AirPort access point.

6:52 PM Hm, looks like the original base router is working again. Maybe I can salvage it after all. (However I did want to upgrade my network to 11n anyway, especially the bridged portion.)

Okay, so I'm trying to watch Lost because everyone's all HEY ITS REALLY GOOD and stuff (yes I know I'm late getting into it) but ABC has decided, in their infinite wisdom, to do non-stop trivia popups through the whole show. They are very dumb (e.g., when a character refers to something that happened in the present, it says, "We now know this is a flash-forward") and very obnoxious and distracting. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

So, recently I ordered a bunch of stuff from Musician's Friend. Given that it was over $100, shipping was free. Some of the items were backordered and would ship at a later date. I was fine with this.

The first shipment arrived several days ago, and contained the two items which weren't backordered. This seemed fine.

The second shipment arrived today. It was a fairly large box. Inside this box was the following:

1. One 10' instrument cable, blue
2. Packing material

So, there was one item, which could have easily been shipped in a regular padded envelope, assuming it even made sense to ship it alone at all (which it didn't). It's not like I'm in dire need of rush delivery of a single instrument cable. The other two cables I ordered (one red, one green) are still listed on my order status page as "backordered," along with the pedalboard case (which I actually do want to get as soon as possible). Will each of those cables also ship individually in a large, environmentally-unfriendly box, wasting fuel too?

Why doesn't Musician's Friend use a bit of common sense when they decide what to pack together? Do they just look at the orders generated by the computer and laugh when they see that someone's (apparently) ordered a single $6 instrument cable?

On a related note, why do they constantly send out so many catalogs and mailings which are pretty much impossible to get off of? Why do many of their "special offers" require calling a salesperson on the phone rather than making a web-based order (which would ostensibly be cheaper for them, and certainly makes me as a customer feel more confident that I'll receive the right item)? I think they need to rethink a few of their strategies, here.

So, my reimbursement from my CES travel was downwardly adjusted to the tune of $88, with a note, "Please be advised that your lodging expense has been adjusted to reflect the appropriate limit as stated in the corporate policy." Well, gee, thanks for "bringing my expenditures into compliance with the policy" (did you go back in time and change my credit card bill, too?) when I had actually requested a much less expensive hotel room at Bally's and for whatever reason I was upgraded to Caesar's Palace with no explanation.