A carnival of technology

It’s a multi-cultural extravaganza! I’ve noticed lately that BP keeps a rotating coffee flavor between the Columbian Supremo and French Roast, and it’s from a different country each time. The last two visits have claimed to be from Kenya and Guatemala. I wasn’t so fond of the Kenya stuff. I’ll put “coffee tastes weird” on my list of reasons not to visit sub-Saharan Africa, right under “might get eaten by a lion”. The coffee from our Central-American allies was pretty good, though I’m not sure that I ever found the tantalizing smokiness that was advertised.

On other fronts of experiencing the world beyond us, Mike wanted some kind of Asian food stuff, so a group of us in the Smyrna-Marietta-Cobb free-trade zone left for Buford highway and its bigass Asian grocery store. All we bought was junk food, but we couldn’t understand any of the letters written on them, so it was rad. I got some pumpkin-pie flavored pocky and a Thai basil seed and honey drink that was really weird and not very refreshing. I got it mainly because I wasn’t initially convinced that it was edible, since the enormous number of basil seeds floating in the yellowish liquid had an appearance reminiscent of very large protozoa, as if the bottle were in fact simply taken from the Thai equivalent of the ‘hooch. It tasted ok, but weird. Boing! was way better, and Mexican. Chris got some peach gummy candies that were both gummy and peachy. I’m not sure what Mike got. Probably real food, since he was the one who knew what he was there for.

In other news, my most recent pair of sandals broke, and I foolishly didn’t have a hot spare. It’s now entirely the wrong season in which to buy sandals, and I don’t have anything to wear with my Hawaiian shirt. Why was I still able to buy, from a reasonably full rack, a flower-print shirt for four bucks, but couldn’t find any sandals in my size? I can understand sandals disappearing faster than the shirts, what with being more acceptable in public and all, but sandals of a particular dimension? Stupid weather-centric fashions.

As an update on my kitchen situation, I’ve come to terms with the garlic press. It’s dishwasherable, so I don’t have to spend more than 12 seconds of work on getting the little garlic bits out of all the holes, and it has opened to me a new world of flavor adventures. It can stay. I threw out the choppy thing, though. It took two runs through the dishwasher to get rid of the onion smell the first time I used it, and today when I tried to use it (again on an onion), the thing that makes it rotate every time you chop broke. It’s in the running for the worst four bucks I’ve ever spent.

This weekend was a new adventure in consumerism. There’s a Fry’s opening in Duluth, so a group of us drove up there in the hopes of arriving for some manner of grand opening. As it turns out, they open next weekend, not this one, so, not to waste a trip all the way to that other interstate, we spent the afternoon at Discover Mills. They have a Books-a-Million there, and, as I do with every bookstore, I decided to play a game of find the philosophy section. Stores usually put them in the same general area—next to religious books but cautiously segregated,—but the specifics of it can lead to interesting speculation on the management’s opinions of religion and society. Is it on the same aisle as sociology or is it next to the bibles? Is it piled in with the New Age and hippie books? Is it large? small? visible? hidden? The Books-a-Million in Decatur, AL, if I recall correctly, goes so far as to accidentally categorize Kant and Descartes as Bibles, hiding them away in a tiny corner of a wing marked for such. I can’t remember the exact label they have up on the wall; it might be something like “Bibles and Inspiration”. Philosophy was about three feet of shelf space at the end of a Bible aisle, whatever they called it. The Barnes and Noble here in Cobb gives philosophy a shelf at the end of a row of Bibles and other religious texts, overlooking the first floor. I don’t know if they intended to give a view to people trying to understand Existentialism without paying for it. The Borders down the street from B&N puts philosophy in a fairly normal position among their other non-fiction texts, parallel to but apart from religion. There are some Bibles and books given categories like “Metaphysics” and “Inspiration” on a shelf that serves as a border for the coffee-shop, but philosophy is separate from these, sitting on the other end of the carpeted gulf, among its peers of Sociology and Bike Repair. The Barnes & Noble at Tech put philosophy at the end of the fiction sections, and I remember it being hard to find for some reason, probably because this was the only time that I actually needed to buy something from it. The Books-a-Million at Discover Mills didn’t do anything like any of that; they put philosophy in the front, apart from pretty much everything else: visible yet hard to find. Chris was the one to find it, so I guess he wins.

And now that I’ve bored everyone to death, I’m going to gripe about Wired magazine. Technology has created some stylistic dilemmas, but language is more than up to the task, and the new stylistic decisions should be made with consistency, clarity and sanity in mind. Firstly, “e-mail” [1] is wrong wrong wrong. Email is a new word to describe a new noun and its corresponding verb, and it should be treated as such. God and Noah Webster did not intend for words to be given arbitrary internal punctuation. The common thing among hyphenated words like double-click and electronic-mail is that all parts of these combinations are actual words. The “e-” prefix isn’t able to stand up as an independent morpheme, so into the word it goes. email. ecommerce. The trend of prefixing e’s to words may be offensive for its tendency to produce unnecessary new terms, but it doesn’t violate the syntax of the English language. If you insist on noting that “e” is an abbreviation for “electronic,” it would be “e. mail,” and no one wants that.

I actually didn’t know that Wired used “e-mail” until tonight, since I’m not hip enough to read Wired, but tonight I stumbled across Wired News’ more recent declaration of style and accompanying explanation of why it makes them so much better than me. Wired News is going to cease capitalization of the word “Internet” [2]. I really don’t understand the justification for this at all, since it seems to require the realization of an imagined pretentiousness in this apparently pompous typographical act, using some finely-honed sense for the emotions and trends of written culture, rooting out all our deepest secrets that even we, the masses and blind capitalizers, could hardly begin to imagine. Internet is a proper noun. There are many IP networks; the Internet is a specific one that also happens to be large and famous. In English, proper nouns are capitalized. Lowercase-i internet would work if people talked about internet liked they talked about telephone or radio, but they don’t; as a noun, it’s always an entity: the Internet. Our company does business through the Internet. I can’t access the Internet. “Net” is obviously just an abbreviation of Internet, and “Web” behaves the same way: I spend too much time at work browsing the Web. Is there something that I’m missing?

References:
[1] http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39450,00.html
[2] http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00.html

Breakfast just isn’t very convenient anymore.

QT, our usual breakfast destination, has been a disappointment lately, first upsetting Mike with their new and strange restrictions on the 3 for $3 2L sale, and upsetting Chris and I with their constant lack of those chicken biscuits. Sometimes they don’t have any biscuits at all, selling instead only low-carb mockeries of food. I tried a chicken taquito once in search of breakfast deliciousness, but met only with failure. Yesterday the choices were so unappealing that we left empty-handed.

But, not to be defeated so easily, the three of us tried taking our business elsewhere. There’s a BP on the way to work, and they, too, have breakfast foods. I’d never eaten the food from the Wild Bean whatever that BP’s have, so I was entirely unprepared for their ridiculous ordering system. Rather than just asking the guy behind the counter for a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit, I had to order this using a touch-screen and about 47 menu options. “Breakfast. Breakfast foods. Breakfast food on biscuits. Biscuits with sausage.” And so on. It has all the bad parts of those horrible ticket kiosks at movie theaters, but without the benefit of paying without human interaction; all it does it take orders. Also, after all that, the biscuit I got seemed a bit overcooked. Maybe I accidentally hit “crunchy” in one of those screens; I don’t know. Stupid BP.

Speaking of those stupid ticket kiosks, they improved the one at the big purple dinosaur. I can now lie and say I’m a student without having to get out my buzzcard, and it no longer spits the tickets out onto the floor. Take that, surly human cashiers!

There is a secret world, deep within the heart of Smyrna, a world hidden from view, nestled snugly within its isolated corner, away from the traffic and the stamping feed that surround it. I am, of course, talking about the Smyrna World of Beverages. They really are pretty big, and they have all sorts of fancy beer made by monks, and such. Chris and I went there last Friday in search of novelty; after a good long while of debate and indecision, I went with Hacker Pschorr as the mostly-normal-but-probably-not-at-Publix selection (if I’m interpreting all these pictures and German words on the label correctly, I think Hacker Pschorr is basically German for Sam Adams), and, for the off-the-wall selection, got one called “Fraoch”, a Scottish beer made with heather and making a tenuous claim to 4000 years of tradition. Old Scotland means druids, and druids are rad, so why not. It was actually pretty good. I’m not pretentious enough a beer drinker to really know which qualities of the beer come from where, but overall it tasted a little sweet and pleasantly smooth. As for the beverage store itself, it seemed like a fairly cool place, though the cashier’s statement of “I don’t need to see your ID, I remember you” while the cop behind her was staring at me made me a little bit uneasy.

I also made an important self-discovery this weekend. I don’t have the patience to chop things. I finally broke down and purchased two items that I had always dismissed as foolish tools that take more time to clean than the task they replace: one of those choppy things and a garlic press. The garlic press I can at least justify, since it’s a fairly mundane kitchen tool, and I bought a pretty badass looking garlic press, but the choppy thing still bothers me. Do other people use these things? Am I just incompetent with a knife? Will everyone make fun of me?

In other news, my copy of the new TMBG EP arrived this week. They seem to be making an attempt to restore their indie cred: the CD itself is a burn, and the insert is a photocopy of a hand-drawn doodle with the track names and an explanation that “the fancy cover to this C.D. is still at the printer.” The songs themselves seem pretty neat, and I’m glad that they’ve finally written one about how Canada can be so creepy sometimes.

For those of you who still visit the web-facing front of this site, you may have noticed that I’ve started putting up some SML projects. The world needs more SML code. The next project that I was going to attempt was bindings for zlib, but I seem to have to run into a bit of snag while trying to figure out where to hook zlib into SML. Mainly, I/O in SML (or at least SML/NJ) is really freaking slow. This is kind of frustrating, since, due to the lack of any sort of documentation on this, it’s quite possible that I’m just doing it wrong. Yargh.