Personal Dork Assistant

The Other IT

Can't but feel sympathetic for those poor souls who don't finish grad school. So I'm all for the happy-happy advice that the Salon columnist provided to the flunk-ee in question, especially since she was a casualty of Caltech grad school. She's a wonderful mother, and the columnist advised her to use her empathy and intellect to educate and help other people, which are awesome things one can do even without some fancy-schmancy PhD. On the other hand, I got a little bit of a kick out of this:

When I was in high school, my teachers assured me that my career in science was clear and I was bright and would do great things. I applied and got into MIT. There are very smart people at MIT and I'm not a MacArthur fellow by any stretch, so I worked really hard and again, although less enthusiastically, I got recommendations to go into science graduate school. I went on to Caltech grad school. And there I floundered. I had finally whittled down my competition to the 0.05 percent of the smartest people on the planet. I tried really, really hard, but I started getting 17 percent on exams, D's in classes and I failed my qualifying exams. Such a good student, and I failed out of school.

Well, everyone knows that Caltech undergrads are much smarter than the grad turkeys. So by the Transitivity of Anecdotal Evidence, Caltech undergrads must be much smarter than MIT undergrads. So there.

saturday! Saturday! SATURDAY!

"Can't wait until I finish these last couple of emails so I can get outta here."

"Isn't it kinda early?" [noon-ish]

"Not when it's Saturday and I haven't even swiped my time card."

Yeah, I got to sleep in an extra hour or so before heading in to work, but then I'd stayed up an extra couple of hours on Friday night, which was not a net plus. It was Friday night already in the US, so at least there was no rush to reply to everything that came in overnight. That was good, as some of the cases were serious PITAs. Our sales guys are out in the field, and they are machine-gunning specs and info requests from the customer, and they all need answers right now because they want to deliver face-to-face. Too bad factory is taking Sundays off now. Hope Mr. Chao is having a good time in Europe on the company-sponsored tour (an itinerary which more resembles the Bhatan Death March, except for the stops for souvenirs). Even with two of us working to fill in, I didn't get out until 7:30pm Thursday night running the weekly shipping reports. Had to stay an extra half hour to finish up on Friday, too, but I was actually leaving early compared to everybody else.

Went over to GF's house after work, mostly to install the Airport Base Station that I now have handy, and to run Software Update on the neglected iBook, which was a pretty useless computer without wireless networking in the house. Well, I would've just been wasting time on the computer anyway if I were home by myself. So this was clearly a superior alternative.

The crowd on the MRT on a weekend is so different from the daily commuting grind. No anonymous crush of students in their identical uniforms, no salary-folk in their non-identical uniforms. In the morning were those of us still going in to work and those families heading out to some outdoorsy thing, with their fully prepared yet rarely used backpacks ready for any need that should arise while in the great outdoors with millions of their Taipei neighbors (Taipei-nese? Taipei-dlian?). The train mid-day were mom and dads taking the little kids for an afternoon outing. The zoo's always a safe choice now that the MRT runs right to it. On the train heading home at dinnertime (the GF already had a thing scheduled with her college friends) were the glued-together couples and the gaggles of friends looking for a good time. From previous experience, I know the late train home are packed with the late-night revelers, especially on the blue line. Ironic that I ended up getting home at almost the exact same time as the usual time I get home from work during the week. Followed uncle's suggestion and didn't punch the clock for the overtime. At least I got paid for the extra time I put in at SCCN.

π

The best opening line for a newspaper article, year-to-date:

Mark Pfeifer loves pumpkin pie more than any sane healthy man should.

Apparently the entire canned pumpkin production in America (all 150,000 tons of it) goes on during these few weeks, from late August to early November. And 80-90% of it comes from Morton, Illinois, where Mr. Pfeifer taste-tests pies made from the cans rolling off the production line.

Pfeifer figures he will have eaten 273 thumb-wide-slices of pumpkin pie by season's end — or more than 34 whole pies.

Of course, the town's embraced the pumpkin as its main claim-to-fame, but being the pumpkin-capital of America is hard work.

"Even if you pace yourself, how could you not get sick of pumpkins?" Badgerow said. "Usually, it's not until October. By then, all you can hope for is to look at a pumpkin pie and not be sick."

Which provides contrast and evidence for the sentiment expressed at the top.

"Some people think I'm deranged, because I still eat pie at Thanksgiving," Pfeifer said.

Extensions

Hauling the Powerbook to and from work every day is getting heavy, so I'm always looking out for ways to carry less crap with me. I've already forgotten to bring the power brick with me a couple of times, which makes things inconvenient, and it's just dead weight in the bag. So I'm tempted to pick up an extra power adapter. Even uncle suggested that I should go get another one. But that really wasn't enough incentive to pay $110 for a power brick here, a big premium over US prices.

Sam had picked up an Airport Express for me (avoiding the Apple Taiwan premium there, too), and I was waiting for mom bring it with her when she comes to Taiwan next month. But then GF's friend wanted to pick up the book I ordered for him right now, so as long as we were stuffing an Global Priority envelope anyway, we might as well as slip the Airport Express in there, too. The APEx came with a duck-head plug attached directly to the station itself. I kinda wanted the extension cord, but I didn't want to pay $43 for some stupid pieces of wire, even if it's "special" Apple and Monster wire. However, the duck-head plug on the APEx is replaceable, just like the plug on the Power(book)brick, and in fact the power supply actually comes with both a duck-head plug and a compatible extension cord. This works great for me since I can leave one power brick at the office with an extensiion cord, plug the other power supply right into the wall at home with a duck-head plug, and use the extra extension cord with the Airport Express. Awesome! Of course, I didn't actually save any money with this arrangement. In fact, I'm probably spending way more than necessary, but at least my back gets a little relief.

I was heading down to Nova to pick up a new wireless router anyway, as the old Graphite Airport Base Station was periodically hanging under the strain of Bittorrent, so I could hit the nearby Apple Center where they happened to have a power brick in stock. I've been meaning to upgrade the home network to 802.11g anyway, but I wasn't quite sure what wireless router to pick up. It had to be compatible with Apple's implementation of Wireless Distribution System, because the APEx will only act as an Ethernet bridge if it was in WDS mode. I also liked some of the cool Linux hacks that was available for the Linksys WRT54G routers, but Linksys doesn't seem available in Taiwan at all, and an American brand was due to be more expensive than the home-grown stuff. The routers are based on the same few OEM chipsets, and Taiwan companies OEM-manufactures almost all these routers anyway, so it was just a matter of finding out which Taiwanese company's model is the equivalent of Linksys & Friends. Thanks to an Internet forum in the Netherlands, of all places, I found out about the Asus WL-500g, which uses the same wireless chipset as the Linksys and Apple routers, which means compatible WDS implementations. It's also based on Linux like the Linksys, which allows all sorts of hacks and mods. In fact, its default software already includes a features only available as hacks on other models, like statically assigning IPs to MACs via DHCP. It even has built-in parallel and USB ports for print and file sharing, adding to the hacking possibilities. All that and it's cheaper than the other Broadcom-chipset routers, too. Yay, even if it's got the ugliest configuration pages ever.

Came back from my Sunday-morning jog to find the special delivery envelope from home sitting on the dinner table, which was quite a surprise considering it was Sunday and all. Well, it's not as I've got anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon than setting up network equipment. Apple stuff never takes long to set up anyway. Except dad didn't include the software install CD in the envelope. That's usually not a problem since I can just download it from the company website, right? Except Apple hasn't posted the APEx software itself, only a small update that requires the original install in place to work. So all I had was a very white and very expensive brick. Thankfully Sam was at home over the weekend, and I could call home and talk/IM him through the process of ripping the software CD into a disc image and SCP'ing the image onto my webhost. The process wasn't exactly swift, due to the damn A in ADSL, but I was just being impatient. The goal was to set it up as a WDS remote station to the Asus, use it as an Ethernet bridge to get the HTPC online at 802.11g speed to replace the USB 802.11b network dongle, which also puts it next to the receiver so I can stream iTunes to it, too. That turned out to be a little trickier than planned, since the APEx started out on a different subnet than everybody else, then the WDS settings are scattered around three different screens, creating a large number of settings permutations. Not to mention the work of setting up of the Asus router, too. Took a little trial-and-error, but it was happy days once the Airport's lone LED (boo!) finally turned green. Even more wires scattered around the upstairs TV now, but uncle's a good sport about it. Although I'll have to be careful with using the TV as a screen since he may not be as kind if I burn out his $10K plasma monitor. That's a lot of overtime.

Not Just In The Back Seat

Sounded like a prime candidate for the Darwin Award. If you were dumb enough to be having sex while driving, aren't you just asking for a head-on collision with oncoming traffic?

Another car veered into the couple's path in this town 25 km northeast of Quebec City, shattering both vehicles and trapping the occupants. The 25-year-old driver, from Baie-Comeau, Que., was killed on impact and the driver of the other vehicle was gravely injured, said provincial police.

Witnesses said the deceased man and his female passenger were partially undressed, leading police to believe the couple had been having sex prior to impact.

So it turned out that the coupling couple wasn't even driving erratically. It was the other guy who fell asleep at the wheel and veered across the median. Talk about getting caught with your pants down. Still, it's good to know that it is possible to drive straight during a quickie, although I imagine it won't help your reaction time any.