soapbox

The new house in Edmonds is close to a road variously called Aurora/99/Evergreen way. It just happens to be the road you’d drive down to get a hooker and a motel that rents by the hour, but I think it’s also really an example of what powers the US.

No, not the hookers. It’s the thousands of small used car lots, vacuum repair shops, small box stores, etc. They don’t seem like a lot until you realize that each one of them represents something like two to five solid jobs and the road stretches for 20 miles.

So, huge economic power. Ugly as hell though.

I’m not quite sure that I understand the reasoning for Apple deciding to move the tabs in Safari 4 up from the “normal” position to the top bar. I really wish that they’d followed Chrome’s lead of having each tab be a separate (and therefore separately-killable) process, but instead it just looks weird.

However, it does seem a bit faster as promised, and with the color change I don’t mind the tab location nearly as much. I still don’t like the occasional click-confusion where sometimes my mouse isn’t sure whether I’m clicking on a particular tab or clicking on the application window as a whole, but so it goes. Anyway, this link describes a super-easy, less than 5 minute process for re-coloring that active tab, and I’d put it in the “recommended” pile.

So this is a little late in the posting, but things have been busy (though not as busy as GMoney-busy) recently… but anyway, a couple weeks ago there was a big firestorm on slashdot and elsewhere sparked by the announcement that Windows 7 Starter Edition would allow only three applications (excluding antivirus apps) to run simultaneously.

To review, three is not a large number. At last year’s Professional Developers Conference, MSFT said that that “70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time”… but that’s a pretty useless empty stat given the vagueness of “windows”. This year, the MSFT monkey asserts that

most users wouldn’t be affected by the three-app limit. “We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time],” Painell claims. “We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn’t affect very many people.”

This is all stupid, and may not even happen due to the EU’s legal team.

But… a clever post buried in the slashdot thread got me thinking – this is actually a good thing for linux and Mac users! This way we get a cheap(er) version of Win7 to run via Parallels/VM/etc, and the app limit constraint is meaningless.

Finally, some humor:

A Microsoft study has shown that users seldom use all 26 letters during a session, and so the economy-priced Windows 7 Functional Illiterate Edition will only support A through W and the numerals 0 through 7. However, the software will be endorsed by Sesame Street and today is brought to you by the letter “/”.

(Note: this is a pretty dull post, but would be way more interesting if I’d had a phone with a decent-quality camera. Sorry y’all.)

Yesterday we took a trip to the County Clerk’s office to get a marriage license, our second attempt after encountering an out-the-door-and-down-two-blocks line a couple weeks ago. This time, armed with an appointment, we were more/mostly successful.

Really, the whole thing was simultaneously both easy and frustrating. The DMV parallels were obvious in terms of long lines and lots of people just hanging out, filling out paperwork then waiting in another line, etc – except that it was a much more positive and more cheerful kind of clientele. Almost half of the couples there looked to be getting married on-site, including several girls/women/brides in pretty fancy-looking dresses and an entertaining mish-mash of suits, sport jackets, one tux, one blue-on-white pimp-stripe suit with blinged-out baseball cap, and a cute little 2-year-old in a tux with light-up LA Gear sneakers. Had we not had an appointment I suspect the entire process would have taken all afternoon – as it was, we were in-and-out in a little less than an hour.

Without getting too much into the politics of marriage and how they shouldn’t be mixed, it’s a weird experience. Cali does not require a blood test, nor is CA residency a requirement; you just have to show some kind of ID and list your parents and their state of birth. K had been planning to add one of my last names to her middle name, but apparently that’s not allowed – you can change/add something to your last name, or replace your middle name with a last name of your spouse, but apparently that’s it? dumb, I say, but oh well.

The parties may choose any of the
following middle or last names as the name they wish to be known as after marriage [FC § 306.5(b)(2)]:

♦ Current last name of the other spouse
♦ Last name of either spouse given at birth
♦ A name combining into a single last name all or a segment of the current last name or last name of either
spouse given at birth
♦ A hyphenated combination of last names

I am told that Philly is due to get hit with 8-14 inches of snow this evening/tomorrow morning, with the Upper Valley getting almost that much tomorrow. In honor of the frozen stuff, I give you two Alexander Ovechkin vids:

This is the kind of thing where YouTube quality sucks… seriously, check it out on NHL.com or something. What’s really amazing about this one is not the goal (though that’s pretty sweet) but the way Alex goes from skating forwards to backwards to frontwards at full speed. Seriously, many a figure skater would wipe out trying that.

Secondly, a great hockey smile, and a great reason for smiling:

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just say “I want X job doing Y at Z location”?

This week has had ups and downs in the job search.

First, the most geographically disadvantaged job that I applied for told me that I’ve made the final three in their search. It’s a tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college even. Unfortunately, taking the job would require living away from the family for at least 18 months and I’m just not sure I could do that.

Second, the geographically blessed job I applied for turns out to be contingent on someone becoming an astronaut. It said “contingent on funding”, but what it’s actually contingent on is the current post-doc in the position getting through the last couple of hoops to become an astronaut. Then there’s an open space that will have funding. Frankly, I’m a little bit pissed. “Contingent on funding” in my mind is we think there’s a good chance of getting a grant so we’re starting to look now… not “there’s a chance that maybe one of our people might be leaving and we want to keep our bases covered.”

An astronaut. That’s hard to believe.

Two more applications to hear about. If they fall through I’m going to be spending time at the playground.

We re-learned two things today: first, that the NFL really doesn’t care about its players once they stop playing. Health benefits, pensions, long-term conditions, no matter – once the guy hangs up his helmet the No Fun League wants him to disappear into the ether/not get in trouble/not make the league look bad. I’ll stop now because this could be a whole series of posts.

Secondly, concussions are bad; even one can cook your brain significantly. When Tom McHale died at age 45, the Cornell grad was posthumously identified to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy – and yes that’s the same Encephalopathy that makes up the E in BSE/”Mad Cow Disease”.

I used to think that it was pretty silly that kids playing soccer are often required to wear head-padding very similar to what rugby players wear. Presumably soccer players are less likely to have their ears torn off, but given the negative effects of repeated heading of the ball (proven all over the place, I’m too lazy to look up a link right now), it’s probably not a bad idea.

More generally, humans were really only ’supposed’ to live until ~age 30, and now that we are doubling and tripling that we run into all sorts of maintenance errors – Alzheimer’s, cancer, etc. That’s probably stating the issue a little too simplistically, but still, today’s news is an important reminder: you wouldn’t go around sniffing asbestos, and you shouldn’t run around taking liberties with your neurons.