A carnival of technology

I have no freaking clue what Coke even does anymore.

We switched vending companies at work, dumping the half-assed operation out of Smyrna (though I suspect we got rid of them not for half-assery, but rather because the lady who stocked the machines talked funny) in favor of the full-assed operation that rents us the pod-coffee thing. One side-effect that I suspect will soon sink in is that these people are going to be a bit more serious about our Coke machine being owned by Coke: they’re aren’t about to put Mountain Dew in it. I tried using this machine today in the hopes of getting some Minute Maid orange juice (sold out), and I noticed a product I didn’t recognize: Vault. All I could make out from the tiny picture on the button is that the can is green, and green means citrus. However, citrus isn’t exactly well defined; my question when greeted with this flavor is whether it tastes like Sprite or Mountain Dew. Coca-cola makes Sprite, and they have Mello Yello to compete with Mountain Dew, so I had no idea what to expect. The can itself clarified with a slogan, “Drinks like a soda, kicks like an energy drink™,” and it does, in fact, taste kind of like Mountain Dew. Mello Yello has never been as huge as Mountain Dew, as far as I know, so I guess this is Coca-Cola’s next attempt to compete. It doesn’t have that same unhealthy glow as Surge, which makes it much less interesting, and I suspect that it’ll eventually go the same way.

Speaking of things that are gross, Coca-Cola will soon introduce another stupid product to unsuspecting consumers: Coca-Cola Bl?k, the carbonated beverage that fuses Coke effervescence with coffee essence. Mmm! I can’t find an ingredient list on the website (though it’s possible that I just can’t navigate it. Why do web designers think that Flash is a good idea? I don’t appreciate sites making noise, moving unexpectedly or overriding my browser’s behavior for things like links, scrollbars and blocks of text. I want to be able to open things in a new window. I want to be able to copy and paste text. I want to be able to use my mouse wheel. Don’t give me your pile of shiny shit just because you can only think of one use case.), I have a suspicion that “coffee essence” means there aren’t any actual coffee beans in this product, other than the same ones they process to put the caffeine in Coke. Really, Coke guys, this stuff sounds disgusting. And your website sucks.

Since Bl?k was first introduced in France, there are two exciting halves to the website. The French half is perhaps the better use of Flash, creating a sort of web-based acid trip of flying bubbles and flashing fractals in which the actions of the mouse through the nonsensical, plastic landscape alter the sights and sounds, handing the user the reins to a merry-go-round spinning out of control. But then it gets stupid and just has a bunch of floating bubbles telling me (if I remember French right), that I should drink the stuff in the afternoon and don’t worry about the tent. The English site just sucks. It plays some smoove jazz while I navigate among the useless pages, and that’s about it. The winamp-esque visualization at the bottom is notable, but only because it keeps looping the same anemic animation whether there’s any sound playing or not. It’s depressing to watch.

You may be familiar with the Northside Neighbor, that crappy local newspaper that I love to hate. Of course, I read the thing religiously every week when it arrives unbidden in my mailbox, and every week I quietly sigh at this reflection of the shallow, the reactionary side of man, and I wonder at the careful editing necessary to cater to its apparent audience of Sandy Springs and north Atlanta residents who want to know what’s going on at the local high school but are scared to death of all those black people in Buckhead. I haven’t read enough of the paper this week to wish that they’d fire the copy editor (or hire one), but there was something that jumped out at me from Dick Yarbrough’s column on the opinion page.

Dick Yarbrough’s website lists twenty-eight newspapers in which he is published, but ten of those are from the Neighbor family, and Neighbor Newspapers also publishes the Marietta Daily Journal and Cherokee Tribune, so at least twelve of those are basically the same thing. The rest are a selection of local newspapers spread far and wide, from Savannah to Gainesville. His website also appears to try to position himself a successor to a more famous Georgia columnist with the quote “Not since the late, great Lewis Grizzard left us have I enjoyed reading a newspaper column so much.” That comparison strikes me as a bit forced. Sure, Mr. Grizzard was also from Georgia, and he also wrote a newspaper column, but his tone was worlds apart from Dick Yarbrough. Grizzard’s resistance towards the societal changes in the South and desire for a return to the old-fashioned values he grew up with was more often expressed as a realization of change and a wish that it wasn’t happening—or occasionally advice that Yankees get on the next Delta flight out of Atlanta,—whereas Dick Yarbrough can hardly go a column without loudly wondering how anyone can think Carter is anything but the anti-Christ, accusing anyone who thinks maybe Bush isn’t all that great of treason, and demanding to know why you aren’t in (a Protestant) church already. Besides Dick Yarbrough coming across as an arrogant blowhard, the difference between the two columnists really comes down to one thing: Lewis Grizzard was funny.

Dick’s egomania cemented itself in my mind with this week’s column about the merger of Bellsouth and AT&T. Apparently he used to be some big cheese at Bellsouth or something. One quote stuck out: “My little band of warriors designed the current BellSouth logo.” For the sake of history, I present to you the current BellSouth logo:

And here’s the old Bell system logo, used by AT&T from 1969 until the breakup in 1984:

He included some other stuff about managing the newfound difficulties of being a publicly-owned company, but I think I can guess where the ideas for those tasks came from, too.

I’ve had a few people ask me how the corned beef turned out, so I guess I ought to post that here. It actually turned out pretty well. I managed to fit about four potatoes, a few carrots and a couple stalks of celery (celery isn’t something I would have boiled, but it seemed like a good crock pot ingredient) underneath the slab of meat and the cabbage. I added the spice packet on top of everything and poured in a cup and a half of water, which probably wasn’t enough to cover the potatoes, but, as the meat cooked, the fat layer melted off, creating a nice oozing, bubbling mess for the potatoes to cook in. The cabbage came out looking a bit rough, since it didn’t get any of that bonus liquid, but it was still soft and tasty after adding the usual splash of vinegar. In all I’d say it was a success.

Sean was the only to come over to share in the feast, which was probably good, since it turned out there was about enough meat for two and a half people. After that there was a Fraggle Rock viewing (it was a little late for The Quiet Man, and Sean had to run), and I wandered off to the bar for some cheap (well, cheaper) Guinness and a couple of shots purchased by the bar’s proprietor and the group of strange women sitting next to me. Though the Irish themselves have over the years been finding that the choice of the Irish pub was always one of availability and that they could go to more upscale, trendy locations instead, I prefer the sort of place closer to an Irish pub, where everybody knows your name and all that. The ‘burb was crazy-packed that night, and the usual musical offering of some guy on acoustic guitar playing classic rock songs had been replaced by three guys on electric instruments doing more or less the same thing. They, like everyone there, turned up the instruments too loud for such a small space, but it was so crowded that it didn’t matter so much. In all, it was a good time for everyone.

Back to Guinness, you know those bottles with the rocket widget inside? I bought a six-pack of those for Friday and, besides that nagging fear that the widget is going to end up in my throat, how are you supposed to recycle those things? I don’t know whether the glass recycling process can handle the widgets, so I’ve been pulling them out with some pliers before tossing them in the bin. I also cut off the shrink-wrapped label, mainly to avoid questions about whether or not there’s a big chunk of plastic in all those bottles I’m trying sneak into the recycling, but I’m not sure if maybe that’s necessary, too. I don’t know whether plastic makes things complicated or not.

I hope this crock-potted (crocked-pot? I guess crock pot wasn’t meant to be a verb) corned beef works out. I used a recipe from the Internet, since I really have no clue what I’m doing most of the time with slow cooking, but the quantities prescribed therein didn’t fit. Despite my crock pot size sort of matching what was in the recipe, the 6-8 potatoes would have gone well over the top, and, even after removing what I thought would be enough, I ended up not using a quarter of the cabbage. Also, I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around the crock pot philosophy. I forget that the goal isn’t so much to boil everything as to just keep it moist and heat it up. I couldn’t quite see how far the water went, what with the big slab of meat of a bunch of cabbage in the way, but it was, at least, below the top of the meat. I don’t know that I’ve ever had corned beef brisket that wasn’t boiled. This should be interesting.

Also, the fact that I couldn’t even fit all of the ingredients in a five quart pot confirms that I am today cooking more food that I could possibly eat before it goes bad (I’m terrible at leftover management). Come on over and have some.

In other holiday news, I was too lazy to burn a CD of Irish folk music for my drive to work today, and the only Irish CD I have is The Joshua Tree. I thought it’d probably be a bad idea to listen to that while driving, so I figured that just switching to something not British was probably good enough. It’s too bad that radio didn’t take up the slack and play something Irish-sounding.

Hey, everybody. Tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s Day, that special day of the year when people four or five generations removed from Ireland get to pretend to be Irish by eating food that my ancestors couldn’t actually afford until they got to America.

When I boiled a big mess of corned beef and cabbage last year, my main complaint was that it took for-freaking-ever. I could probably do better this year, since I bought a copy of The Quiet Man that I could watch while waiting for the food to cook (nothing says Irish-American like John Wayne in Innisfree), but I think I’m going to try apply some American innovation and know-how to the problem instead: I’m going to cook the meat and cabbage and potatoes and miscellaneous other in a crock pot. This year everything will be ready for eating by the time I get home, and I’ll have more time to get drunk and get in a fight. Everybody wins!

Of course, I don’t plan to eat three or four pounds of meat in one sitting (I tried that once, and the results weren’t really pleasant), so anyone who wants to come over for some meat and potatoes is welcome. Email me for directions.

I bought some Girl Scout cookies this past week. I’m fairly set in my ways when it comes to these things. Even though I enjoy some of the newer models, like All Abouts, I always place about the same order whenever the cookie hawkers come around: two parts Thin Mints, one part Samoas, one part Tagalongs. The way cookie distribution happened to work out this time, Jim, the scout’s father, was using an emptied Tagalongs case to carry them all around, and I ended with that along with my four boxes. Besides making it a lot easier to carry them, it caused me to notice the design on the box. I has an anthropomorphic cookie, who, espousing the deliciousness of this talking peanut butter and chocolate abomination, says, “I have two GREAT tastes!” You sure do, little cookie, and one of them is apparently trademark infringement. Yum!

Editor’s Note: I remember now why I went to a plain-text journal. After spending about five minutes writing this entry, I then spent another fifteen getting it to validate (rather than simply removing nanoblogger’s lie that I’m writing in XHTML 1.1 Turbo Alpha Strict), whatever good that means. I understand the motivation of this idea to separate content from layout, but HTML wasn’t really designed for this (or just designed well at all), and, as anyone who’s ever tried to parse HTML knows, trying to change the Web midstream is a losing battle. All these changes are accomplishing is to annoy people like me who want to know why I have to type twice as much to write <strike> or <u>, but I can still use <i>. Hey, remember back when you weren’t supposed to use <i> at all, instead using elements like <em> and <strong>—which people used whenever they really meant <i> or <b>—for the benefit of screen readers? Man, they got rid of that idea fast. Screw you, blind people.

Back to my point, HTML sucks.

Spring is here, and I have a feeling that my energy bill is about to go through the roof.

Heating has never been a problem for me. There are plenty of sources of heat in my apartment. I’m on the third floor, and the people below me apparently run their heat at desert levels. I run two computers all of the time, one of which is an AM“we’re going to need a bigger fan”D. The water heater is fire-based. I have a westward-facing wall of glass. With all of this, I was able to set my thermostat so that heat came on maybe a dozen times this winter, and I just opened a window whenever it got above 80. Well, it’s 81 degrees outside, so I think that plan is coming to an end. I just turned on the A/C, so I guess it’s just time to wait and see how much Georgia Power expects from me after this. I think I’m going to need more iced tea.

The mp3s are back for those of you who use them. One of those 160GB Maxtor drives I bought a year and two months ago decided that it was no longer interested in reliable data storage, and the filesystem, faced with this new shifting landscape melting away into the unknown, promptly ate itself. This created a bit of a problem for me, since the last time I made a backup was January of last year. I made a level-0 dump as soon as I noticed trouble, but, in my rush, I managed to forget to burn one of the DVD images before deleting it. It turns out that it didn’t matter, though, since the dump wasn’t able to get much of the stuff on the dying drive, grabbing data from the good drive (well, better. I ended up taking that thing out, too, since it was throwing around some SMART errors) in LVM, instead. I replaced the drives with a 200GB Seagate drive. I don’t really want to hear about how I could have gotten something for twelve cents if I’d bought something else at some other place, since this thing has a five-year warranty. So eat it. I suppose I could digress here and ramble on about changes in hard drive warranties and quality over the years, but I won’t. Five years is nice, though, since by the time the warranty’s up, it’s probably time to move on to the next interface/size/color anyways.

The restore didn’t actually turn out so bad other than taking all day long. Comparing the last good ls-lR that I handily keep around, I lost twenty-six albums’ worth of files: ten of those I have on CD, two were mp3 releases, and seven happened to be in the “input” directory of the old tar (I’m kind of slow about going through those), and two I don’t care about. So, in all, I’m down a CD I got off someone on IRC that I probably should have just bought anyways, three CDs I borrowed from Mike, and Ed Kuepper’s Live!, whose source I can’t remember. Ironically, it was the Ed Kuepper album where I first noticed I was having troubles. I didn’t remember having it or anything about it, so my thoughts went along the lines of “Hey, this sounds neat. Hey, this isn’t working anymore.” Apparently he’s Australian. The songs I managed to listen to before the whole thing burst into flames reminded me of Echo & the Bunnymen, but less mopey.

For those of you who used the iPod-friendly mp3-converted tree, that was missing from the backups, too, so I’m still working on regenerating. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but my money’s on for-freaking-ever. Patience. I’ll rerip the CDs when I get around to it, and I’m not about to list them all here, so if you notice something missing that you wanted, let me know and I’ll bump it to the head of the queue or something. It was mostly Nick Cave stuff.

I like USPS. Sure, they have their share of problems: things sometimes get lost, things sometimes get damaged and employees can be surly. Overall, though, I’ve consistently had better experiences with USPS than any other carrier. The lack of guaranteed timelines and tracking for most forms of mail may add a couple of days or a little more risk compared to Fedex, UPS or DHL, but I can be reasonably sure that my box of lightbulbs won’t be used as a wheel chock, it’s the cheapest way to ship just about anything under five pounds or so, and, most importantly, they’re damned convenient. One problem I always face with deliveries from other carriers is how to actually get the package. I don’t work at home and my apartment complex doesn’t accept packages, so, since I’m never at home at the time of delivery, I usually return to either a package lying beside the door (Fedex) or a brown and yellow sticky note (UPS). The US Postal Service gets around this issue by just using those boxes in the middle of the complex. Sometimes the lockers may be full or the carrier may have lost the key or something and I get one of those little notes telling me to pick it up at the post office. These are annoying, since the process of finding a package a real post office seems to be about the same as that at Tech; i.e., takes forever due to a lack of a coherent sorting system that everyone understands, but it still has several advantages over picking up a package at UPS.

1) The Post Office is nearby.

2) The Post Office has more than one person working the counters.

3) The Post Office won’t shoot my package into the sun if I don’t pick it up by the end of the week.

I can’t remember exactly how long USPS holds things for, but it’s probably a month. UPS, on the other hand, always creates a sense of urgency since, lacking an efficient means of storing packages instead of simply shipping them, they’d really rather not hang on to your crap. This is complicated, however, by package pickup not being the default action to take upon failure. Rather, like some sort of transmission-layer protocol, they try a couple more times, just in case. And then toss it into the river. “Will Call” is a resolution option presented on the website, along with changing the delivery address, and I always pick this since I don’t really want everyone in the office knowing what I ordered from Amazon.com this week. The problem is that, since this isn’t the default action, the package is probably still on truck, so good luck with it being there when you pick it up.

As you might guess, I recently picked up something from UPS. The last time I did this was in January, when I picked up the DVD player. This time my purchase was of some comics, a story for the next paragraph. This visit to UPS was actually a bit nicer than the last one. After trundling myself over to Doraville, I signed the sheet, presented my sticky note to the clerk a couple of minutes later, and was quickly handed a package. However, the package wasn’t comics: it was comic supplies (Since comics are such a fragile (read: cheap) medium, some precautions are necessary to get them to last more than a few years, so I also bought some overpriced mylar and cardboard from another company). The box of comics was still on the truck, so I have to go back and try again Monday. Fun! Attempting to delivery to homes while everyone’s at work must be a common problem for companies like UPS and Fedex, so it seems like they could come up with a better way of handling this. I think I like Airborne DHL’s solution best: their “Home” delivery option actually involves them taking the package as far as the ZIP code, handing it to the local post office and telling them to handle the rest. I do not like how DHL tends to crush my packages.

As for the comics, I will, hopefully, on Monday have a current set of Thieves & Kings comic books. I began reading this series in 2001 or so—I can’t remember why. I just recall that I picked up the first significant batch of the comics at Oxford, from the sad, forgotten corner in the back where small-press comics are left to quietly yellow and die, and, as such things tend to go with picking up a series 7 years late, this batch was full of holes. It’s not the sort of comic where you can miss a couple and still keep up with the storyline, so my habit was to read a few, try to fill in some of the holes through the Intarweb and other means, and then leave them in a pile on the shelf until I move, when I remembered and the cycle would repeat. I guess the cycle has gone around enough times now that it finally worked, since I now have issues 1-46, and 47 is in the hands of UPS (why can’t more companies just use the mail?). Though the comic is apparently no longer on any sort of a schedule, the author says that 48 is coming out at the end of this month, so I guess now I’ll have to remember to stay current. I suppose I should to try to finish reading them at some point, too.