Shiny Things

08:15 am - Bus Stop, Wet Day

and I was the last person to get a seat on my bus this morning. The two people behind me weren't so lucky: this is the first time I've actually seen them turn people away. I'm going to have to start leaving home a bit earlier in the morning. 

08:37 am - Hillary Offers $30 for Your Vote!

I hate this kind of stupidity, and this is exactly why I don't want Hillary in office.

In a nutshell, Hillary is pushing a summer-long tax holiday on gasoline. I have to believe Obama is right on this: this is nothing but political pandering--offering a short term benefit of maybe $30 in gasoline savings--in order to collect votes. It won't help anything in the long run, so why bother? How stupid must we be if we fall for this? And when Obama doesn't jump on board too, she says he doesn't care about ordinary people. Grrr.

Hillary supporters have called us on the phone three times, interrupting our lives to try to get support for her. I hate that. Obama's supporters have not called us once. So that's another reason why I voted against her this morning.

I don't like to get political, but jeesh. This is ridiculous.

 

09:15 am - Performance Review

 I'm supposed to have lunch with my manager today to start talking about my performance review. I find myself wanting to start the conversation, pen and paper and hand, by asking, "We start these things with a self evaluation, right? Do you spell 'awesome' A-W-S-U-M?"

05:32 am - Well Lookee There!

Look what I just happened to stumble across it this morning while I was supposed to be doing my homework: yesterday's Tanga deal for the day was Mother Lode of Sticky Gulch!

It looks like you can still take advantage of it for a little while. After that I guess you'll just have to get it at the publisher's web site. :)

11:55 am - "A Reuben Sandwich Teaches Quality"

A colleague sent me this: I don't know the original source. I was intrigued because of the conjunction of two things I'm interested in: quality (in the form of good interaction, at least) and Reuben sandwiches.

09:15 am - I Hate Notes

This is an actual email I had to send to several colleagues this morning:

My apologies. <rant>Lotus Notes is the dumbest, most worthless, most despicable piece of broken trash software I have ever dealt with.</rant> Okay, now that's out of the way....

I didn't realize that Notes would not keep track of who had actually accepted my meeting invites. Or rather, it _does_ keep track of them, but only until I invite more people. At that point, all previous reponses from prior participants go away. If you don't keep the actual acceptance messages, as I did not, you have no way of knowing who accepted.

So please remind me if you accepted the invite to the May 13th Reuben outing at The Ram (at 11:30am). I will write your names on a piece of paper with a pen so I don't lose this information.

Again, my apologies.

-Carl

09:22 am - Good Things

I just finished the first Dresden Files novel, Storm Front, and enjoyed it very much. I actually found myself looking forward to the bus ride so I could read more of it.

This morning I turned in my final presentation for my HCI class. I just need to consolidate my previous deliverables into a final report before next Saturday, and I'll be done.

My brain's already churning on a new game design project to start afterward. (Though I won't be going full tilt on it right away. I need to relax for a while, and make up to my family for how cranky my homework made me.)

I just got the invite for our next Reuben outing, at The Ram downtown.

Karen and I have a fun getaway planned for this weekend.

It's warm enough again to sleep with the windows open.

So I'm just taking a moment to be grateful for it all.

07:38 pm - Pulp Blank Verse

I saw on my friend Lawrence's blog that someone has started a project to rewrite Pulp Fiction in the style of William Shakespeare (whose 444th birthday is today! Congrats, Will!). This sample Lawrence posted about made me fall out of my chair.

The other interesting bit? That unnamed "someone" above is Kevin Pease. If that name sounds familiar, you might remember him as the designer of the nifty ambigram logo at the top of this page (and animated on the right side of this page).

12:15 pm - Now that's service!

zappos.com
Originally uploaded by cklutzke

10:57 am - How Smell Works

I thought today's Straight Dope mail bag article was particularly interesting. I remember when I was pretty young a friend mentioned that he hated going into livestock barns, because he knew if he could smell the manure, manure molecules must be in the air and getting all over him. He was right.

I've wondered for some time if we would ever be able to mechanically reproduce smells the way we do with light and sound: perhaps something that releases samples from the seven primary odorant groupings (camphoric, musky, rose, peppermint, etherial, pungent, and putrid) could do a worthwhile but limited simulation, sort of like black & white TV does for vision. You'd have to periodically replenish the chemicals, I assume.

It was also interesting to me to learn that you can't actually smell metal, but smell instead the oxidated lipids upon them. Come to think of it, maybe that's why all metals seem to smell the same.

09:57 pm - That answers that

PETA is offering a $1 million X Prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.” Apparently there is considerably dissension in the ranks on this topic, but pragmatism, in the form of less suffering for fewer animals, won out. (NY Times)

06:11 am - Creepy

Coincidentally, my web clips in GMail just had a link moments ago to this article: April 18, 1906: Mother Nature 1, San Francisco 0

06:06 am - Confirmed

It was an earthquake. We just caught the edge of it.

05:46 am - Did you feel that?

Either there was a massive explosion that I didn't hear, or we just had a small earthquake. Since it was a lot like what I recall of the tremor Karen and I felt when we were at Purdue, I'm guessing the latter.

07:42 pm - Indiana Governor Candidates

I hear lots of people talking about the presidential candidates, but this year the office of governor for Indiana is also up for election. The incumbent Republican is running for re-election, but I haven't heard much about the remaining Democrat candidates: Jill Long Thompson and Jim Schellinger. Does anyone know anything about them?

(I may regret asking this...)

06:09 am - Sundial

IRT
Originally uploaded by cklutzke

05:45 am - State of the Career(s)

Current Mood: content

12:56 pm - The Importance of Design at Microsoft

I was pretty excited when I found this Microsoft Design site. It looks like it has some interesting articles. But I refuse anymore to go check a web site for updates: I want an RSS feed. Hmmm, Microsoft's site about making things easy to use doesn't seem to have an RSS feed. Nor does it seem to have any contact information so I can ask them about it.

Oh, and the events they are promoting are from 2007. *sigh* Never mind.

11:52 am - Kosher Pork? Un-Kosher Fish?

In my recent post on vat-grown meat I totally missed the religious ramifications. I wonder how experts on kashrut would interpret Leviticus 11 for such things? Pork would probably still be out, since the source of the meat still doesn't chew a cud, but for that reason vat-grown beef could be unkosher too. Likewise, they may forbid vat-grown fish because, like shellfish, it has no scales or fins. Could a Hindu or Buddhist eat vat-grown meat without violating ahimsa? I wonder.

08:17 am - Googlegängers

Via the Reaction blog, I just found this New York Times article on "Googlegängers", people on the web who share your name. Interesting article, but given my rather distinctive name, it doesn't apply to me. A Google search on "Carl Klutzke" turns up 11 pages of stuff about me and nobody else. It makes me feel kind of proud, lonely, and overexposed all at the same time. It also makes me realize that nothing you ever say on the Internet ever goes away (and that, as a result, I doubt I could ever get hired by Microsoft).

And I have to wonder when, if ever, this post will appear in such a search. :)