nerdmeyr & K

I really have no other way to explain the amazing things I have witnessed with my very own eyes today. Oh, sure, move-in Wednesday on a campus with 35,000 students is not going to be pretty. But imagine the scene you see here - bumper to bumper traffic, moving slowly, cops at the major intersections superceding the lights.

Let’s assume that you realized at some point that you had gone too far on this road, and needed to turn around. Would you:

• Make a right or left at the next light and cruise around the block
• Change your plans and do something else
• Stop randomly and attempt to make a 3-point U-turn, that, because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, sheer size and horrendously bad turning radius of your SUV, ends up being a 15-point turn involving large parts of the sidewalk on either side of the road

Another question, this time involving an intersection. If you are on a major 4-lane throughway that bisects a tiny road (the tiny road having a stop sign, of course), and you see a bicyclist coming up to the stop sign on the tiny road, do you:

• keep going, because you have the right of way
• keep going, because bikes suck
• keep going, because you’re a typical driver and are too busy singing along with the Oak Ridge Boys
• make a screeching halt, almost causing the person behind you to rear-end you, and then impatiently wave at the bicyclist to cross… who refuses, because of course the traffic coming the other way on the major thoroughfare is not stopping for anything

How about one featuring a red light? If you are a driver and are going probably too fast down a different 4-lane road, and the light turns red just as you are entering the intersection, do you:

• blow through and tap the ceiling of the car in a superstitious ploy to prevent the po-po from busting you?
• stop and try to back up so that you’re out of the way
• stop 3/4 of the way into the intersection, so that cars coming across the street either have to stop or swerve into oncoming traffic in order to cross the road

Lest you think its all stoopid eeriot drivers from Chicago who are to blame, the stupidity extends beyond traffic situations. If you are a bagger at the local soviet Kroger (affectionately named thus for their penchant to have random empty shelves, or ridiculousness like no garlic and onions, etc.) and a person comes through the line and says, “no bags, please, I’ve got my own,” do you:

• back off and let the morally-superior-feeling environmentalist pack their own arugula and tofu; “whatever, dude”
• attempt to help the morally superior environmentalist put the groceries in their bag
• proceed to pluck all produce and fruit coming down the line and put each into their own individual plastic grocery bag (which, incidentally, are already in clear plastic bags) (and, which, also incidentally, comprise about half of the items in the shopping order), thereby entombing something as innocent as a bunch of grapes inside a double deathshroud of petroleum product; and then, also, announce to the person as you’re doing it that one package contains the grapes, whereas another contains the lettuce… because obviously at this point, its impossible to tell

The really sad thing about this is that I went to work, went to a meeting, and came home. I wasn’t patrolling the streets, or running around playing bike messenger. All told, I think I was riding around for maybe 40 minutes today… and yet I somehow witnessed all of the above. Which should make one shudder to think of all the other stuff that went on. It is truly amazing people do not get killed (either from being strangled to death or from accidents). < knocks on wood >

Back To School Students: A Danger To Themselves And Others

Found this when reading K’s dissermatation:

Mills argues that “White (male) philosophy’s confrontation of Man and Universe, or even Person and Universe, is…predicated on taking personhood for granted and thus excludes the differential experience of those who have ceaselessly had to fight to have their personhood recognized in the first place.” [Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 9.]

1. Since the size of the plate determines how much you eat, pass by the small snack plates arrayed at the front of the buffet and find a serving dish
2. Your stomach is like a moribund civil servant the Friday before Labor Day weekend - feed it slowly and steadily and it might sigh a bit, but it will start processing the items in the In Box
3. Since the size of the serving spoon determines how much you take, bring your own soup ladle
4. Go for the high-value, low-stomach-volume  items, like sushi and shrimp
5. White rice, noodles and bread are a waste of stomach space
6. Have a humiliating day, wage slave
7. For the love of god, man, don’t drink beer or sake - just sip some water!
8. Eat with someone you don’t know well and don’t find attractive
9. Sit near the buffet so you can survey the arrival of new food and swoop down to capture the crab rangoon still hot from the fryer
10. Take at least a spoonful of everything, so your plate is full of different colors and textures

Thanks to Carl for the ROTFL.

(And if you’re ever tempted to watch Festival Express  - the rockumentary about the 1970 train which brought the Grateful Dead, Joplin, Buddy Guy, etc. to the good people of rural Canada - don’t, and just watch this again.  You’ll waste less of your life, have more fun doing it, and you’ll get the idea anyway).
 

This came in at 7am today:

There has been a waterline break close to the 10th and Bypass intersection, this water main break has affected the water flow to the U school building complex (WCC, E-Buildings, Telecom). Please be advised there will be no running water for the bathrooms, fountains and kitchens within the buildings. At this time they are not sure when the water will be restored.

Since everyone knows that a computer nerd is a device to turn coffee into code, and now there is no coffee (on the input side) or bathrooms (on the output side)… how, pray tell, is anything actually going to get done today?

I was all set to re-ify my disgust and hatred of bottom-feeding self-absorbed celebrities (and I’m not even talking about Lance Armstrong, either) when I watched Paris Hilton’s video reply to that white-haired dude running for president.

I do believe an actual, real-life laugh escaped from my lips.  If there’s one thing nowadays politics needs, its more confusion about what’s real, what’s show, what’s ridiculous, and what’s right on. And the fact that Paris held forth on an energy policy statement without losing her “o-mi-god, can you believe i’m actually talking about this?” smirk was icing on the cake for me.

For me, the real amusement here is Paris inserting herself into the McCain - Obama dyad like a reincarnated Ross Perot with better fashion sense (have you noticed how they both have distinctive ears?) McCain’s ploy - to equate Obama’s potential and past to that of Hilton’s - seemed like something a bitter and doddering old  man would do. There’s plenty to get Obama on; why make such a clumsy and i’m-totally-out-of-it type of criticism?  Obviously, I’m no McCain fan, but its not like I’m really excited about Obama either. His faux-progressive bombast combined with his reactionary and business-as-usual policy statements (e.g. turned down public funding, his relentless and dumb support of ethanol, his hardliner stance towards opening up relations with Cuba, etc. etc.), have left me feeling even more lukewarm about him lately than I did during the primary. I guess I’m disgusted enough with the proceedings that I find delight in clapping and cheering for a verbal pie-throwing idiot savant court jester like Hilton.

If anyone reading this can point me to something cool Obama’s done lately, please let me know!

Hello buoys and gulls  -

Based on a random question from a participant in a class I taught, it struck me that there’s a taxonomy that many people interact with and utilize on a daily basis (much more so than the classification of new genuses and species, interesting mold in the work refrigerator aside)… but that most have little idea how the taxonomy is actually structured.  So, fiends and naybors, here’s a 2-cent description of the taxonomy of a web address.

A Meta-Aspect of Web Addresses

But! before I go into the taxonomy of the web address, , there’s sort of a meta-thing to know about web addresses. A semi-real nerdbot will use the acronym URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to refer to a  ”web address”. I say “semi-real”, because the term URL has been deprecated by the W3C, which seems to me to be another instance of a committee deciding on a solution before they’ve figured out the problem. Nevertheless, the new way of referring to a web address in an obnoxious know-it-all geeky way is to say URI, which stands for Urinary Rack Infection Uniform Resource Identifier. A URI is actually comprised of a URL (our deceased friend the Uniform Resource Locator) and the URN (Uniform Resource Name). The reasoning behind URI is to make web addresses more like library books (and who said there was nothing to learn from heaps of dead trees in meat-space, eh?). A library book has an ISBN (its Uniform Resource Name, something that uniquely identifies it) and also a specific shelving location via the Dewey Decimal System (its Uniform Resource Locator).  A URI theoretically will provide both a unique identifier for the thing as well as its location out in the ethersphere. I find this development interesting and fascinating, mostly because all the net-heads took so long to realize that librarians know whassup in terms of cataloging and finding data.

Back to the Topic At Hand: The Taxonomy of Web Addresses

OK, basta!  The rules of web address / domain taxonomy are:

• its hierarchical
• each hierarchical level is separated by periods
• the top-most hierarchy is most general; as you move down in the hierarchy, you get more specific
• the hierarchy reads right to left; that is, the right-most item is at the top level, and as you move left, you move down in the hierarchy
• the hierarchy can have almost unlimited levels
• the top level domain is controlled by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
• second level domains can be owned by individuals and groups, and then also get trickle-down rights to have any number of lower-level domains under the second-level domain

That’s a lot of blathery description, but let’s see what I actually mean, using a real web address as an example: nerdmeyr.com

(we’ll ignore the ‘http://’ part, as that actually isn’t a part of the web address. It tells the browser that we want to access the stuff at the address using the HyperTextTransferProtocol, and not some other protocol, like FTP. And, as a matter of fact, most modern web browsers - e.g., something that you installed in the last few years - no longer even expect that you’ll type http://.. they’ll do it for you )

• top level: com (there are plenty of other common top level domains, like ‘net’ and ‘edu’)
• second level: nerdmeyr

According to the rules above, because I own the second level domain, nerdmeyr, I can also create any number of lower domains, like:

• reallyAwesome.nerdmeyr.com
• my.name.is.nerdmeyr.com
• hello.kitty.is.my.favorite.next.to.gi.joe.at.nerdmeyr.com

and, the one that we’re all most familiar with:

• www.nerdmeyr.com

So, to answer the perennial question of: “do I need to put www in front of web addresses?”, generally speaking: no! When most domain names (like nerdmeyr.com) are created, the hosting web server will often automatically create a 3rd level domain (www.nerdmeyr.com) that just points to whatever’s at the root (nerdmeyr.com). The use of ‘www’ as a third-level domain is a holdover from the days of yore, when it was used as a clue for humans that the address in question was a web address, not an address to a gopher or ftp server.  Could I have a completely different web site at www.nerdmeyr.com than at nerdmeyr.com?  Yes, but then I would be stupid and annoying. Think of each dot in a web address as potentially creating a new virtual room. Each room can have its own collection of stuff, so nerdmeyr.com might have a completely different set of web pages than i.am.nerdmeyr.com. In fact, I could give tastyBaker.nerdmeyr.com to my sister, and she could have her own site there.

Class dismissed!

… the resulting love child, after a 25 year gestation period, would’ve been Lovelock.  I hesitate to blog about these guys, as I have a feeling it will publicly out me and my undying love of dripping-in-cheeze-sauce synth  pop with a cup of Quiet Storm faux-soul/R&B poured on top (see esp. Lovelock’s Maybe Tonight). This delectation would include somewhat permissible people like Sade, Luther “Even Anderson Cooper came out of the closet eventually, but not me” Vandross, and Teddy Pendergrass but also dentist office muzak stalwarts like Anita Baker, bless her heart.  IMohsohumbleO, Lovelock is the perfect music to play when you’ve got a glass of cabernet, are wearing a slippery shirt made from petroleum products, and its raining outside… throw it on, compose your face in a “i’m a lover, not a fighter” expression, and gaze thoughtfully out the window.

Only 5 percent of consumer electronics products returned to retailers are malfunctioning –yet many people who return working products think they are broken, a new study indicates…

Accenture estimates that 68 percent of returns are products that work properly but do not meet customers’ expectations for some reason…

The study attributes another 27 percent of returns to buyer’s remorse–situations where customers simply changed their minds. That leaves only 5 percent of returns that are attributable to defects or other malfunctions.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/146576/most_returned_products_work_fine_study_says.html

I don’t know what to make of this study.  Almost 70 percent of [objects] are returned because they don’t help with getting laid losing weight making more money looking cool butter the toast after toasting the toast grow new hair prevent hair from growing just don’t fit into our self-conceived lifestyles? (e.g., the one where we’re gorgeous and smart and charming and we shouldn’t have to mess with poorly designed products that overpromise and underdeliver?)

I’m kinda tempted to substitute “hyper kids” or “immigrants” or [other social problem] in for [object].  Like, only 5% of hyper kids or immigrants or whatever are actually causing problems, but collectively, we seem to want to turn in 95% of them because they don’t mesh with our dreamworlds closely enough.