Aliza's Journal

05:12 pm - Silicon Valley Dentist?

Can anyone recommend a dentist in Sunnyvale or surrounding areas (Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino) who takes Delta Dental insurance?

Current Mood: annoyed

08:55 pm - I Propose we Disclose the Rose Nose

I was talking to a friend about avoiding added sugars in foods, and commented that he should just avoid any ingredient that ended in "-ose", except perhaps for cellulose... or Bose speakers.  Our subsequent conversation used the words rose, chose, hose, lachrymose, grandiose, suppose, lose, loose, goose, and verbose.  We missed working in nose, purpose, moose, comatose, expose, disclose, dispose, propose, those, dose, or lots of other possibilities.  

Somehow this reminds me of the time in elementary school that a classmate fulfilled the "use each of these 20 spelling words in a sentence" exercise with one convoluted sentence... 

Current Mood: amused

01:04 pm - Road Rage

To the curly-haired woman driving the silver Accord, California license plate 5TVA439 eastbound on Mathilda in Sunnyvale this morning:

You are right, it was rude of me to honk my horn after I watched you throw the bottle out your window. Maybe next time I should just call 911 and report you as a suspected drunk driver?

I'm sure that your response, putting your car in park after the light changed and giving me the finger, set a wonderful example for the teenager in the passenger seat.

(And no, I wouldn't abuse 911 like that... but it would have been oh-so-gratifying...)

Current Mood: still pissed off

06:55 pm - Updating the legend

A golden iPhone marked "for the coolest one".

(And yes, I already shared it with a few people on IM and posted it to Facebook. Gotta love social fragmentation.)

Current Mood: amused

02:06 pm - For fighting Florentine against the zombies?

"[...] armed with a chainsaw and sword"
-- from a crime report in the SF Chronicle, 2009-08-26

Current Mood: amused

12:05 pm - Cash for Clunkers -- Just Say No

I'm glad Cash for Clunkers is dying -- if you want to give a boost to the car industry, there's got to be a fairer way to do it than by handing $4500 to a semi-random group of people to buy new cars. Why not hand out transferrable vouchers by lottery? That would be fairer...

A friend was told his 10-year-old Honda with 200K miles on it was not eligible for the clunker bonus because it still got 35 MPG. So he's being punished for buying an efficient car to begin with. Wrong.

Current Mood: aggravated

03:58 pm - Disclaimer

THIS FRIEND IS A SERVER APPLIANCE PRODUCT. ACCESS IS AUTHORIZED ONLY THROUGH PUBLISHED INTERFACES. UNAUTHORIZED MODIFICATION OR REVERSE ENGINEERING OF THIS PRODUCT IS PROHIBITED AND WILL RESULT IN THE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF YOUR WARRANTY AND SUPPORT CONTRACT.

06:11 pm - QotD: Learning Styles

[...] Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning.

Current Mood: curious

09:30 pm - Milky Way

Many many years ago, at Pennsic...

Yes, I know, a lot of stories start this way. No shit, there I was... but this isn't one of those stories.

Many years ago, at Pennsic, I drove up to the encampment, and disgorged a few people and their stuff out of my car, and then went off to park my car. Given the lateness of the hour, Karl G. chivalrously offered to go with me, and walk me back to Badger Camp afterwards.

So off we went, and parked my car, and walked back.

Halfway between the dusty parking lot and the commotion of the camps, Karl stopped me. "Look up!" he said. I looked up, and up, and up... a dark sky full of stars, stars you never see in the city. The Milky Way sprawled across the sky in all its glory, a familiar sight to our ancestors but not to us. Maybe the sky wasn't as clear and pure as I'd seen it from a mountain in the wilderness, but it was a beautiful sight just the same.

A different woman could have looked at that sight and simply taken it for what it was, enjoyed it for what it was. But not me, no.

I looked up at that sky full of stars and exclaimed, "but it's so much prettier in the infrared!"

Current Mood: wistful

08:56 pm - RIP...

Can't imagine much of anyone who cares hasn't heard by now, but RIP Hal Haag, this morning, of not-his-first heart attack.

(East Coast SF fandom, for context.)

Such a nice guy.

Current Mood: sad

12:50 am - I'll take an extra spleen, please...

Please contact us for information on how to return your uterus for a refund or exchange for any other organ.

[Crossposted to oocquotes]

02:56 pm - Hot Cuisine

There's a class of cooking where you are making food, not necessarily putting any talent or artistry into it, just turning ingredients into something that passes for a meal. Not haute cuisine, but hot cuisine.

Like, say, hacking up a summer squash into rough cubes, microwaving it for 2 minutes, and serving it with pepper and BBQ sauce from a bottle and a dash of rooster sauce.

Not cooking to be proud of, but a big step above not cooking at all.

(Yes, I like the flavor of squash even without drowning it in junk. This was not a day for subtlety, though.)

Current Mood: no-longer-hungry

10:10 pm - Compare and contrast

This may sound weird, but using Facebook makes me miss my LiveJournal.

Current Mood: odd

08:12 pm - Bierfeldt v. Napolitano -- How much authority does the TSA really have?

This is a good one... a few days old but I just came across it.

• The TSA detained, interrogated, and eventually arrested someone for carrying a cashbox with $4700 in it.
  
• The complainant just happens to be a political organizer.
  
• The cash was proceeds from the sale of political literature.
  
• He recorded the whole interrogation on his iPhone... expletives and all
  
• The agent repeatedly refused to say whether the detainee was legally required to answer his questions.
  

Current Mood: contemplative

01:51 pm - A spammer with a toll-free number...

This morning I got an SMS from a spammer who was stupid enough to include a toll-free number to call for more information.

Then again, they are advertising loans with no credit check, so maybe they really are that stupid.

1-888-201-8779

Everyone who calls to listen to the recording will cost them real money...

05:03 pm - Moving to a new PC -- exporting Thunderbird settings

I'm in the dreaded and much-procrastinated process of moving to a new PC, and it's a very frustrating task.

For example, does anyone know of a way to cleanly transfer over my Thunderbird settings? Yeah, I could just copy over my profile directory... but I'm really looking for a way to transfer over the important stuff (the obscure settings I've tweaked, which IMAP folders I'm subscribed to, custom views) without having to move over 2 Gb of cached headers from shared IMAP folders. [I do not keep mail on my PC unless I explicitly download it for offline use.] [This is especially true because I'm using a 1Gb thumb drive for the data transfers.]

I can go to about:config (the advanced configuration editor) and look through the bolded items and configure some of them by hand on the new system, but there has to be a better way, right?

Just figuring out which programs keep data in Application Data and which keep data in Local Settings is a horrible pain.

I found an extension for FireFox named Password Exporter, by the way. Wonder what that does ;-)

NoScript lets me export my whitelist, but nothing else, and in particular not my untrusted sites list; I suspect it will be easier and cleaner to rebuild the whitelist site-by-site than to export it.

(I've already gone through my Firefox extensions by hand and applied them all to the new system. Please don't tell me there was an easier way. Again, yes, I could have copied the whole profile directory -- but again, that's a huge mix of permanent and temporary data)


People tell me that on a Mac this is a simple process of connecting a cable and telling the old system to replicate onto the new one. Please don't tell me "get a Mac" unless you're offering to pay for it.

By the way, these two systems are both ThinkPads running Windows XP. Both systems have Office 2003 on them, but I will just start from a clean profile and download any Outlook data I care about from the server. (Do you sense a trend?)

And then there's software like Trillian that by default keeps some of my personal private data, including passwords, in the same directories as the installed binaries. Argggh. That was a dumb idea even in 1985. (It also caches everyone I talk to's buddy icon -- not just the current one, but apparently several years of history. Why???)

In any case, any timely practical suggestions will be greatly appreciated...

11:22 am - Let's see how many more keyboards I can endanger with this thought...

I have this image of Obama taking office and then pardoning Bush in the name of national unity. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Politics/story?id=6040142&page=1

Current Mood: perverse

02:22 pm - Out of context QOTD

Tainted Memories and Unfinished Dreams

Current Mood: amused

10:29 pm - The beginning of the (financial) end?

Is this the beginning of the meltdown? http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSPEK16693720080925 -- Chinese banks told to stop lending to US banks.

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Added 11:27 Pacific time:

This appears to be just a rumor, denied by the Chinese central bank, dealing with a bank run of its own

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/china-bank-regulator-denies-report/story.aspx?guid={1F3681AC-2953-4963-99EC-57BECF1E9291}&dist=msr_3

Current Mood: worried

08:16 pm - Dragon Cave viral game

Someone talked me into joining. So help me.

http://dragcave.net/user/Morganza

-- Blue Patterned Dragon Egg -- "This egg has strange markings on it."

-- Darkish Green Egg No. 1 -- "This egg is sitting in a pile of small pebbles."

-- Pink Egg -- my favorite, of course! -- "It's bright. And pink."

-- Darkish Green Egg No. 2