Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Daniel Jacobowitz's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
4:19 pm	Packing failure eternal_fish and I have a registry for the wedding. Two, actually, but the relevant one for this rant is at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. We have (creepy!) begun to receive wedding presents slightly in advance of mailing invitations. The first one to arrive was a knife. Now, the knife was knife sized. Being charitable about the size of the attached packaging, it would fit in 14" x 3" x 1/2". The size of the shipping box, as measured: 18" x 14" x 9". We just received another box from them. I don't know what's in it yet, but it is 26" x 23" x 17". Weight suggests a roughly comparable inefficiency ratio. Depending on how you calculate it, that could mean the expected volume is about 94"^3. In other words, it could reasonably be the size of a small cookbook. I sure hope it's something light and bulky instead, but I'm not holding out much hope. Corollary: whatever it is probably would have fit in the last box. Along with the knife even! C'mon, people, this is not hard! It saves money to use smaller boxes! Don't even worry about the trees, carbon footprint, or other secondary consequences... (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 16th, 2009
4:13 pm	Why I am not scared of the machine overlords. I just got a call from my doctor's office. The only reason I know that it was from my doctor's office is the caller ID. The "conversation", such as it was, went like this: Soft female generic voice: "Please wait a moment." Brief pause. Male voice: "Error in script file." Long silence. I tried returning the call and got: Different female generic voice: "This is the greeting message. Press the desired four digit extension number." *beep* I tried their actual number, which this was not, and got: Human secratary's recorded voice: "The office is currently closed... *long spiel*". I was in today and scheduled another appointment for Monday so I presume it's got something to do with that - maybe an automated replacement for the very nice nurse at my other doctor who always calls to remind me. I clearly like her better than this version. She has a sense of humor and no error messages. Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
8:22 pm	Dinner was tasty. Seven (or however many) years of LJ haven't taught me much, but they did eventually teach me one thing: no matter how much I plan to, I will never write the huge catch-up entry I'm always meaning to write. So, um, hi everybody. Fancy running into you here. eternal_fish and I have started planning food a week at a time. We both have high-stress personalities and unpredictable hours, so if we have to sit down every evening and improvise dinner we end up cranky and eating junk. Plan it out on Sunday afternoon, go grocery shopping, and we eat better - healthier and with more variety. We don't mind cooking during the week, just shopping and deciding to cook. She's travelling with her mother for the next two weeks so I'm trying the same thing alone. So far, so good - I went shopping and I made my first solo stir fry tonight and it was damn good. This week's menu is heavy on leftovers, but I'll try a couple of new things with veggies. We've got a virtually unlimited supply; we joined a local farm's delivery service and even at the smallest amount they're willing to deliver, we've still got twice what we can eat. Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Ode to My Family, The Cranberries (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
9:52 pm	Melting ice cream I wanted to take a walk today. I'm not too fond of walking aimlessly; I don't need an important destination, but I do need a destination. So I decided I'd try the Dairy Queen that opened up down the street. Get an ice cream cone, wander around eating it, come home. I stood in line for about two minutes, ordered my cone, and then waited for them to give it to me. And waited. Not too long, but about eight minutes. For five of which I could see my cone sitting on the rack as the servers ran around like monkeys. They were completely disorganized. They had a line of receipts, but they were confusingly hard to read; and then, separately, a line of arriving takeout items without any labelling. So most of the time was spent trying to pair things. Compare to the gold standard of takeout processing: if someone had picked up each item as it came in and shouted "Heath sundae! Chocolate cone, chocolate cone anyone?" I estimate they'd have been moving twice as fast. A good automated system should do better than that; this was just a poor one. Ironically, I was waiting for my takeout in front of a sign boasting about all the exciting moments in the history of Dairy Queen. The second most recent was being purchased by Warren Buffett. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing that makes a company an attractive investment, from everything I've read about Buffett... In other news, I'm not dead. Really! Current Mood: amused (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
4:22 pm	On games This rant of Dom's about time for gaming struck a chord. I like to play each game in a single ongoing session instead of mixed in with a bunch of others. And the games I like are really long... Combine that with being an avid reader and full-time employed and I'm down to five or so a year now. Probably still falling. I've been playing Tales of Legendia for what feels like forever. I'm used to RPGs having a "post-game" - sort of like a playable epilogue. But this is ridiculous. I finished the game in forty hours and I've spent twenty more already on the epilogue. I think there's about twenty-five still to come. And it's still got cut scenes and plot and all the things that normally distinguish the real game from the filler after the credits. It's almost enough to make me wish I wasn't enjoying it just so I could get on with something else! Meanwhile, piratechan keeps talking about Civ. If she keeps it up I'm going to go play myself again. See? I'm not dead! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
10:25 pm	Home sweet home eternal_fish and I returned from Orlando today. It's oh so good to be home. My employer (CodeSourcery) has an annual meeting usually in a place worth taking a vacation in, and this year she was able to come down for the tail end of it. Highlights: Disneyworld was fun. I could talk for ages about how thoroughly marketed it is, but in such a way that I somehow don't mind. I think this is because it is saturation marketing towards children, and I got it when I was a child. I can now survive roller coasters without losing meals. I'm even starting to enjoy them. But only starting. We did Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, and Magic Kingdom. I liked Animal Kingdom the best, even if we did goof up on the hours; we got there at two and it closed at five. Orlando is really not that attractive. Disneyworld, yes. Disneyworld was gorgeous. The non-Disney parts of the city that I saw were just annoying. It says something that I prefered Pittsburgh weather. It's ten degrees here. Our pilot on the way back said "it's currently negative eleven degrees... (awkward pause)... that would be Celsius, let me figure that out in Fahrenheit". AirTran is lame in lots of ways, not least for cancelling both direct flights and rebooking us through Atlanta. For that and other reasons, I will avoid them next time I travel. Also, eternal_fish might leave me if I didn't. Vacations are better without sick. Much better. <clicks heels> No place like home! (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
4:11 pm	Sign of the times. I now have a facebook account. For the sole purpose of playing... scrabble. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 27th, 2007
6:25 pm	Hi crazy people! LJ Mobile keeps eating my posts so they keep getting shorter. Hope everyone is having great holidays. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 6th, 2007
11:32 am	I hate phone spam. Ever since we moved, we've been getting calls from "MARK DOC", from phone number 1-412-487-0996. It's an autodialer. It goes something like this, from memory: Because of the doctor's recently published article, we are calling back pain and sciatica suffers to let them know about [...] Press 1, and a pamphlet will be mailed to you. Press 2 to be removed. At the end there's a mention of "Run Drugs Out of Town Run", but I disbelieve that they could really be involved; it doesn't seem plausible. I got fed up enough to file an FCC complaint. I'm mostly posting this for the benefit of search engines, in case anyone else searches for the caller ID it reports. I'll update it with the exact text if I get it again. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
10:22 pm	Does anybody really know what time it is? I got up this morning feeling very rested when the alarm went off, lazed in bed for a while, and eventually got up. Andrea commented that her phone said it was an hour later than the clock showed. We wondered if the phone had somehow switched over early... bizarre, especially for a connected device. (You can tell if you're following along at home that we weren't quite awake yet.) Later I sat down at my computer. That was an hour off too. Could the timezone updates have not made it into Debian/unstable yet? I was pretty sure I remembered that they had... Eventually, I looked at the installed timezone data and it said the switch wasn't till next week. It wasn't until this point that I realized what was wrong. The clock knew when daylight savings time was supposed to be and had switched back an hour. That's not a connected device so it had no way to get updates when Congress decided to pick a different date. When I realized that it was actually an hour later than I thought it was, I felt obscurely robbed. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
12:45 am	Real reading experiences. I am in Ottawa, for a conference. I should have gone straight to bed when I got back to the room two hours ago, after dinner with my company (and my wine quota for the quarter). But I had an unfinished book sitting by my bedside, and I simply could not stop myself. At least the talk I was giving was this morning, when I was fresh, not tomorrow morning, when I will doubtless be a bit wrecked. The book is The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. It is science fiction, but only in passing; it's simply a love story. It is truly one of the most moving things I've ever read. There are tears on my copy of page 517. I finished it at quarter to one, felt the urge to write this down, and discovered my laptop had failed to suspend and was six minutes from running out of battery. It was a sign, I tell you! And here I am. This is part of my recent efforts to read (A) some popular good books, (B) some things that aren't science fiction, (C) some of the things that Amazon recommends to me. These things are all related and you'll notice that it completely fails item B. Well, the last one was Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which doesn't fail B. That was also a wonderful book, by the way. It was overwhelmingly literary - I felt like I got only a quarter of all the references, and there were probably some I didn't even notice - but each paragraph was witty and entertaining to read (except for the sad parts). eternal_fish was definitely getting sick of me laughing inexplicably by the time I finished it. I stopped at a bad point, between a low and the following recovery, and was depressed for an evening. Good books just do this to me. I bought The Time Traveler's Wife in the airport. I packed in a hurry, eternal_fish was home to take me to the airport, and the first collection of the Miles Vorkosigan books (Lois McMaster Bujold) apparently hadn't been unpacked yet, and I had to run out the door. I walked through all three (almost identical) bookstores in the airport, trying to stretch my legs a bit (I blame zombie_hime) and I had picked this up in the first one because I'd seen its name on Amazon and then bought it in the third. And I am not good with faces and had only a small photo to work with, but I have the creepy feeling that I met the author in the airport ten minutes later! I kid you not. There was a women with a vague but definite resemblance to the photo on the back, and she sat down next to me at my gate after I ran there (and discovered we still weren't boarding). She said, as best I can remember her words, "That's one of my favorite books ever. I had to keep a time line on paper while I was writing it to keep everything straight." She might just have misspoken - but I'm not sure which half of the sentence was misspoken... On the other hand, she was traveling with a man called Chuck, and the author's boyfriend is variously Christopher or Chris, which is close enough to fake it, and there was definitely a resemblance to the photo. So, if that was you, Ms. Niffenegger, thank you. Even if it wasn't. If I'd known for sure that it was, been pushy enough, and already realized how moving the book was, I would have asked for an autograph. But now it is past one and I still have to make it to breakfast in the morning. More later. eternal_fish, I miss you. This excerpt is for you: "This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. [...] Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I'm always glad when he comes back." Current Mood: melancholy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 4th, 2007
2:22 pm	I'm enjoying a mid-week weekend. mrblackwood said that this weekend felt like Monday, Friday, weekend, Monday, Friday, and that's totally true - in fact it's so true that I tried to go out for dinner a little early yesterday to beat the Friday rush and didn't realize until after we were seated that it was still Tuesday. I have all sorts of stuff to write about moving, and various before and after photos, but that will all come later. Partly it can't come yet because after photos require being unpacked. And yeah, you know how that goes. We're more or less furnished now, but definitely not done unpacking. Sometimes it hits me how different our new neighborhood (in a small suburb of a large suburb of Pittsburgh) is from the old one (in Shadyside). There were a succession of sparklers and happy children in the parking lot all yesterday evening. I got a pile of things from Amazon yesterday. Chief among them was a Tassimo as an anniversary present for eternal_fish. I think it ranks barely below the engagement ring among presents I've given her, in her estimation. So, men out there with coffee-drinking girlfriends, take note! So far we only have latte for it, but she seems very satisfied. It tasted like a decent latte to me (in my one sip), but I still don't like coffee. I can't bring myself to make tea with it when I have a perfectly good teapot, but I'm going to try the hot chocolate later. Also in my stash from Amazon, Glasshouse, by Charles Stross. Anyone who's reading this and is a hard sci-fi fan, especially with a computer networks background, is highly recommended to read it if they haven't already. He's the best new writer I've started reading in the last couple of years and I like most of his books; I've recommended some of them here before. I picked it up yesterday and read most of it in a single sitting this morning. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
10:46 pm	Sharing. Two people on my friends list have already posted this but I don't care, I have to share anyway. Especially recommended to anyone who has ever played Zork or been a graduate student. zwol, that means I'm talking to you. And then I was eaten by a grue (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
8:17 pm	I want something from the world. A fairly simple thing, I think. This is what I want: Every time that someone who used to go around persuading pregnant women that abortion is evil dies - wherever they go after they die, I don't much care if it's a happy place or a sad place - I want them to be politely informed that they were wrong. That's all. (For anyone wondering, see over here. Going back to my regularly scheduled dinner Iraq and politics now.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 13th, 2006
10:50 pm	Hopeful end of a saga After a pissed off week of messing around with cables, splitters, jacks, modems, and ranting, I think my phone is working again. About two weeks ago, it developed a loud and dreadful case of static. It came and went, and most notably went away when the DSL was unplugged. Which meant I couldn't test it downstairs at the junction box and thus I couldn't get Verizon to come look into it without charging me piles of money. I used to have the DSL and my phone connected to a splitter, which connected in turn to a long flat cable that ran along the ceiling of the hallway. This worked fine. Then suddenly it didn't. Now, after many trials, I have the DSL out in the hallway connected to the only phone jack in the apartment, through a splitter, and a DSL line filter right at the splitter, and my phone still at the other end where it used to be. And now it seems to work. The static was pretty clearly DSL artifacts echoing on the audible portions of the line, however that works. It is my theory that something else in the building is now generating a field that interferes with the long phone cord; after all, a long cord with cheap shielding is basically an antenna. There's some chance that it's actually the distressingly noisy fish tank pump currently living on eternal_fish's desk, since that happened around the same time, except that unplugging it doesn't do any good, so probably not. It is a corollary to my theory that someone in the building is doing something stupid, possibly with the power illegally boosted on a wireless access point, because they think it's cooler with the power turned all the way up. Now let's hope it doesn't show up more static tomorrow and I have to go hunting again. RANT! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
3:59 pm	Hello out there! I keep meaning to update this more regularly, but it just hasn't happened... the last couple of months have been somewhat overwhelming. And I'm way too easily distracted. Case in point: I have about five projects I was GOING to work on this weekend, but instead I finished reading EVERY LAST STRIP of Questionable Content. It's hella funny. Oh my lord. I've been catching up on reading things that eternal_fish keeps around the house. The first batch was Naomi Novik (Temeraire novels), which I highly recommend. They were awesome and I await the next one. Unfortunately the second batch was David Eddings' The Elder Gods series. Any of you who have read David Eddings will understand what I mean when I say that they are just a little too familiar. All of the mannerisms, plot devices, and personality quirks from all of his earlier novels are here. And way too many people have Sparhawk's sense of humor. Way too many. It's not bad, but it's definitely wearing. And Disgaea. Oh so much Disgaea. Anyway, it was great to see Sarah and others this morning! And I have been successfully reminded that (for now) I live right by Piper's Pub and can go there whenever I please! Yay! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 11th, 2006
1:40 pm	Some photos from Devin and Beth's housewarming party are up now; not very many. The highlights are Shadow and the power drilled pork. (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 6th, 2006
12:57 pm	Another blog I've put up a second blog. I mostly use LiveJournal for friends and personal stuff; the other one, assuming I keep updating it, is going to be more geeky. It's on Planet Debian, so it's got a whole lot more readers than I'm used to... (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 8th, 2006
10:39 pm	Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Other times a picture can be priceless. Here's a priceless one for all of you: Some more here: Shiny Thing pictures. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
12:38 am	We just saw Mission Impossible: III. It was great; I really enjoyed it. On the way home from action movies I always have to remind myself that I live in Pittsburgh, that no one is trying to kill me, and that as long as you keep an eye on them Pittsburgh drivers tend to more or less obey traffic laws (in college, we called this Crazy Taxi Syndrome). I reminded myself of this out loud and I believe eternal_fish laughed at me about it. While stopped at the second (red) traffic light, a black sports car made an illegal u-turn from the right lane across traffic without signalling. I have no more to share this evening. Current Mood: bemused (Comment on this)