A carnival of technology

Folks have been complaining that I haven’t baked anything recently, so I guess it’s time to start that up again. I’ve decided to try something completely different, a sort of Moroccan take on baklava, so it should be pretty exciting. I’ve never used phyllo before, and I felt some degree of accomplishment just being able to find it in the grocery store. One thing I noticed right away was that the box actually spelled it “fillo” with “phyllo” written small underneath. Why do we transliterate ? as ph? Isn’t there pretty much a one-to-one mapping from Greek to Latin letters? It’s apparently actually spelled ????? if anyone’s curious, and maybe that weird accent is taken into account for the Latin spelling. I don’t even know what it does. The insane part of me briefly thought about trying to make my own sheets, but that nagging rational voice remembered all of my pasta failures, and I just bought the kind in the box.

Really, the only difference between the stuff I’m trying to make and the baklava you can buy at your favorite local Greek restaurant is the addition of some goofy spices. A couple of them were a little daunting, like rose water. I don’t think that’s something I can find at Publix. I asked the Internet, and it offered me some tiny little bottles of the stuff for like ten bucks plus shipping. Then I got the bright idea to try that Middle Eastern grocery store on Mansell next to the pizza place I like and the National Guard recruiting center I don’t like. They sell coke bottle sized containers of rose water for two bucks along with all kinds of other spices I’ve never heard of. The Internet’s a scam. And some jerk in a uniform tried to get me to enlist while I was locking my bike. I would stay away from that strip altogether if the pizza weren’t so good.

I got a jury summons. I have to report at 8 freaking 15 in the morning on August 27th. I’m marked as a standby juror, but I’ve been told by others that everyone’s a standby juror. You just go into a big pool of people and wait around all day and get paid $20. I’m not sure if I actually get to keep the money. Georgia’s laws about employers not being allowed to punish people serving jury duty have been interpreted to include that jurors must be paid their regular salary while absent, but that could mean my regular salary minus the twenty bucks I get from the county. I wonder if I kept that company policy handbook.

Some people see jury summonses as an inconvenience, but I think it’s great. I don’t really know much about the legal system. All of my knowledge comes from Law & Order and that Henry Fonda movie, and, since the law ensures that I can’t be punished by my employer (assuming I don’t get fired in a month for something else), it’s like a free educational vacation. I hope I get picked for something big.

I’m not sure what exactly is expected by “Proper attire is required.” The couple of times that I’ve had to appear in traffic court I’ve worn khakis and a polo shirt, which is way nicer than anything I wear day to day, but hey, I’m not the one on trial here. Twelve Angry Men shows jurors in suits and fedoras and stuff like that, but people dressed up before getting on an airplane or seeing a movie back then. I wonder if I still have khakis that fit. I’ll probably end up losing another pocket knife.

What should I do to try to get selected for a jury? Is a college degree a disadvantage? What book should I read? Should I leave the Sartre at home and try to be seen reading a Dan Brown novel or something like that instead? Do I get to keep the little notebook? Do I have to bring my own? I should probably keep my mouth shut about jury nullification, but I can’t think of other ways to be a good everyman.

Coca-Cola now puts caffeine content information on their cans. It looks something like this:

Internet says the FDA have been considering requiring caffeine labels, but I can’t tell if they’ve decided anything. I’m all for more labeling on packaged products like coke, and I’m surprised that Coke (and maybe Pepsi?) are going along with it without a fight. Like the beers that don’t tell you alcohol content, I would think that Coke wants customers to buy their products based on its crisp, refreshing taste rather than how much of your favorite drug they use.

I think carbon offsets are really dumb. I would like to ignore them, but they keep crossing my attention every once in a while for some reason. Yesterday Earth & Sky even brought them up in the form of an interview with Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University. I think carbon offsets are bad because they send the wrong message, providing a sort of environmental indulgence without encouraging conservation or any change in habits. Dr. Caldeira thinks they’re bad because they’re impossible to measure. So quit buying carbon offsets. They’re a scam.

Now that MARTA has completed the switch to Breeze cards, they’ve changed the gates to require a card tap to exit. The change was made yesterday, and there was some guy standing outside the North Springs exit with a bullhorn, repeating over and over that everyone must tap to exit. It seemed like kind of a mess. To further complicate matters, anyone who connects to MARTA from one of the non-MARTA bus services, like CCT or GRTA, won’t have the necessary transfers to get out, so a couple of the gates still let you out without a tap. One of those is the handicapped gate, of course, which I use when I have my bike, so I still forget to tap on the way out. Oh well.

I’ve started working on a software project perhaps too ambitious, so I might as well write about it here and make my failure that much more spectacular. My parents stopped by last weekend and brought the presents they weren’t able to delivery on my birthday. These included an aloe plant descended from the one my grandfather failed to kill with years of neglect, some kitchen items that held fond spots in my childhood (a glass meatloaf pan, a cake pan shaped like cookie monster), DVDs of some SciFi channel show that turned out to be pretty decent, and a set of encyclopedia that I agreed to take for some reason. I haven’t figured out where to put the encyclopedia yet, but, as I do any time I try to rearrange my bookshelves, my thoughts have turned instead to cataloging.

I don’t have a huge number of books, probably fifty or so fiction and 75-100 or so textbooks and nonfiction. It’s not unmanageable, but I’m getting to the point where I can’t remember all of it. It would be nice to have some kind of database to store all of this stuff. Some people make a spreadsheet for this purpose. My parents maintain a Microsoft Access database. I, on the other hand, want to overengineer the hell out of this problem. I’ve looked into a few programs, and none of them do quite what I want. I want something that can lookup books on the Internet so I don’t have to type everything, something that can store whatever crazy fields I think of that the author didn’t, and something that can export its data out of whatever backend it uses into something more general, like XML or a flat file or something. While looking into programs, I also realized that there are other things I could store in a big database: CDs, DVDs, comic books, magazines, Hummel figurines. The possibilities could be endless! But I can’t find anything that does all of these things. So, like a crazy person, I’m going to try to make my own.

One other thing I didn’t like about the programs I’ve tried is that all of them use Amazon as their data source. Amazon is nice and all, but they have a lot of restrictions on what you can do with their data and how long you can keep it (all of which everyone ignores). I’d like the ability to add new data sources. One I’ve been looking into is the Library of Congress Z39.50 interface, which so far seems weird and hard to use. Hurray, a new protocol and set of libraries to learn. Wish me luck.

Today America celebrates 230 years of Independence, but, instead of blowing up a little piece of it using the fireworks I bought from Alabama a few years ago that may or not still be good, I updated nanocomment. I’ve added trackback support, for those of you into that sort of thing, and added the option for anonymous named comments, like I’ve been using in the blog for a while, to the released files. nanocomment-2.0.tar.gz. Enjoy.