Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Wednesday: Checked in and packed.

Except for things like "this laptop" and "the other electronics that need to charge" and "that medicine I left in my work fridge, which needs to stay cold all the time."

This is the Titanic Memorial in Belfast, from when I was there six years ago.
I also discovered a massive security problem at work today.  It turns out that my assessment of a previous programmer as "disturbingly obsessed with putting 'extended attributes' on everything" missed some details.


Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Tuesday: I think I should do laundry tonight, but I haven't convinced myself to start yet.

And I caught a wild Venomoth.  I was surprised.
And I keep having to look this up, so I've come up with the short form so I know what the appraisal means:
  1. Exclamation point means it's the top ranking.
  2. "Certainly" is in the second tier rankings.
  3. "Not" is in the worst rankings.
That's all I need to bother with, even though I'm not really battling much, so the actual numbers don't really matter.


Monday, August 29, 2016

Monday: So many people to call a bag of shit today.

I'm going to start with the fuck face at my local PBS that decided that instead of showing "Secrets of Scotland Yard" ("British detectives employ trailblazing techniques to unmask perpetrators. (TV-14, CC, Stereo, Rerun)") right now (admittedly, that only looks barely interesting), they'd rather see "MAGIC MOMENTS: THE BEST OF 50S POP" ("Performers include Mel Carter, the Four Aces, the Chordettes, the Four Lads, Patti Page, Don Cherry and the Crew Cuts. Hosts: Pat Boone, Phyllis McGuire, Mary Lou Metzker, Patti Page and Debbie Reynolds. Length: 120 | Original Airdate 9/1/16").  Who wants to watch that shit?  This entire month PBS has been showing "All The Best Shitty Music For Old People."  Show better shows.

Also: do you know why I can call the PBS programmer a fuck face?  Because my blog has less reach than a television station, so I have very little worry that I'm going to cause a massive incident where people read this and bully that bad TV programmer.  I would think that this would be obvious, but then again, I'm not a bag of shit.

You know who else sucks?  The random number generator that decided to spawn five Pokemon, and then made them a Caterpie, a Weedle, a Rattata, a Zubat, and another fucking Pidgey.  Fuck you, RNG.


And then I had to edit the post after the fact because I forgot to mention that Gene Wilder died today, and that's awful.  All the stories seem to indicate he was most definitely not a jerk.


Sunday, August 28, 2016

Dear Twitter, I think you need to tune your ad engine better.

I'm putting this below the cut, because it's a lot of images.  I also probably should have cropped them, but I didn't.

For the past two days, I've woken up earlier than expected and browsed Twitter when I couldn't immediately go back to sleep.  During that time, I started to notice that the ads I was getting were not really well targeted to me.  I'm not saying anything bad about the ads themselves, just that I do not think I'm the best person to be showing that ad to.  I also tried to get a fair sampling of ads, although this probably isn't all of them.

I've grouped the screenshots I took of these ads into various categories that made sense to me.


Sunday: Why can't weekends be longer?

It was a ramen day.

I had a perfect unmixed gyoza sauce.

Diamond Head.

I'm about to make a second post with like 50 images in it.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Saturday: Now I can go back to using regular titles.

I had not originally planned to do "Twenty Six Days of -Argle," but when I couldn't think up a good title for that Wednesday, I just stuck to it.  I have an idea of fake defining all the words, but I haven't decided yet.  I'm also thinking of checking how many have Urban Dictionary entries.

In any case, I also didn't plan to wake up super early for no reason and not be able to go to sleep.  This wasn't helped when Julie sent me a picture of her delicious looking breakfast, making me hungry as well as tired-but-not-sufficiently-so-to-go-back-to-sleep.

So I read some of my daily internet, and then finally took a nap.  When I woke up again, I realized that it was 12:30, and if I was going to get a breakfast as well, I would have to hurry, as the place closes as 2.  This led to the decision to skip showering until I got back, something I almost never do.  After fighting parking for way too long, I finally had breakfast:

It didn't really meet the level of effort I put into it.
The big problem was that the French Toast was super dry, and sucked up all the butter and syrup without really getting better.  The sausage was fine, and they nicely herbed the potatoes, but they were insufficiently browned and salted.

I was able to get to ride on the other elevator today, so I could scientifically prove that the repaired elevator beeps are something like 7.5% lower in frequency.


Friday, August 26, 2016

Friday: Zargle.

My database/everything server crashed again last night.  I really need to think strongly about replacing it.

Also this:
That's not something I wanted likes on, Julie!




Thursday, August 25, 2016

Thursday: Yargle.

Today, Julie posted a comprehensive set of polls about chicken wings.  These polls largely came to the correct conclusions.  Flats are far superior, as they have a higher fraction of fat that can be rendered out, with a minimum volume of bone.  They are the messiest to eat, but the twist and extract method immediately tells you if they were cooked correctly (poorly cooked wings do not extract cleanly) and is really efficient.  They should be sauced with a liquid sauce, as a dry rub is insufficient way to transfer flavor.  In addition, since they should be fried, a dry rub is going to be cooked too much.  Blue cheese dressing is the best, as it is cooling against the heat of the sauce.  Plus: ranch is gross.  Finally, I chose carrots as the correct side, as I like carrots more than celery.  "Both" is the technical correct answer, although it's fine to throw the celery away for being crap.  I would go further to suggest that the best carrots are rather thinly cut (< 1cm squares in cross section).

I have associated images available here, which has a detail on the best way to sauce.

Because of all that, I decided to try the wing place by work for lunch.  It turns out that they've gone downhill, too.

Here's why these don't match the optimum described above.
This place doesn't do wings like normal people.  They do what I've heard referred to as "Canadian style," but I can't find much evidence that that's a popular term.  In any case, as shown here, they don't cut the wing parts apart.  This is wrong, as although they claim they "give you the whole wing," nobody eats the wingtip.  It's just not done.  So, you're stuck with more work, an inedible extension, and since they're not great at cooking them, a mess when you try to get the parts apart.  So, the easier option for lunch is to get the boneless tenders.  However, they often come out like this instead of the saucy goodness they should have.  Because they don't use enough sauce (or some other reason), they turn into these lightly shellacked things that have a mostly dry texture.  One thought is that this happens because they over cook and then over blot the tenders, resulting in a piece of chicken that must steal all the moisture from the sauce to not spontaneously convert into desert.  They do have blue cheese, but are never consistent with supplying a side.

The other thing I'm complaining about today:  Google "Whatever that thing when you swipe to the left on my phone, or do a long click drag up from the home key on my tablet because it's an older version of Android, so it's not consistent".  It shows news stories and the weather, and insists on keeping an election bar open that I don't care about.  My first complaint was that it keeps recommending articles from sites I have no interest in visiting.  Yes, Google.  I was quite interested in Gawker.  No, I do not care to read gloating about their shut down from a fucking MRA site.  WTF is wrong with you to even suggest something like that?  Then, after clearing that out, I see this:

Really?
Yes, Google, I am interested in Superman.  That article is using "Superman" as a metaphor.  Somewhere your machine learning has failed to learn.

  • Pokemon.
  • Not Pokemon.
    • "Ineffectual malicious AI."
    • I was going to narrow it down to the chandelier, but really it's the whole thing.
    • Evan Narcisse is really doing the best comic book commentary I've seen in forever.  Also: it's unfortunate Dwayne McDuffie died.
    • Who is surprised by this?  
    • I wasn't super into grad student unions when I was a grad student, but I had a reasonably decent advisor.  That is not universally true, and although there are complications with funding (as it's usually grant based, and that implies some time limits), have pretty much changed my mind on the topic.  Especially with the proliferation of sexual harassment, grad students need to be treated as proper employees, and not people who should feel obligated to ignore things because their advisor is "helping them out".  Your employer is not your friend, and that should be made clear.  "But won't that force people to finish faster?  And what if they don't get enough work done during regular hours?  That's not going to work!"  Yeah.  Change the fucking system.  It's not sustainable or healthy in the current form.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Wednesday: Xargle.

My office window was all foggy.


Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Tuesday: Wargle.

I'm not really sure what could possibly be in here to fill the pages.  A type advantage matrix, maybe?
Plus with the game being updated, it's not going to stay up to date.

Don't listen to her, Pikachu.  I think you're just great!
I'm also wondering if the evaluation is the closest to an official IV reader that's going to happen.



Monday, August 22, 2016

Monday: Vargle.

My power went out this evening.  It was not fun.



Sunday, August 21, 2016

Don't be red velvet.

It was red velvet. :(  Also vanilla, which was good.
I mean, they were both pretty good, I just am not a big fan of red velvet.  Mostly because it's always slathered with cream cheese frosting, and that I don't like.  This one had a tasteful amount of frosting in the middle.

And, they were free, so I shouldn't really complain anyway.  Thank you, La Tour Cafe Waitress.

It's not as dramatic as the last time a fire broke out in the neighborhood.

That one was so bad that the smoke woke me up, and there was pretty extensive damage.

I heard an alarm go off, but that tends to happen a lot.  However, when I started hearing fire trucks blaring their sirens, I got up to take a look.  There were lights flashing everywhere, and the fire hydrant was spewing water.

It's under control in this picture.
At first, I thought maybe it was just the hydrant that the fire fighters where there to fix.  Then I looked closer:

Oh, yeah, that's smoke coming out of the building.
I guess that building is The Village Maluhia.  A lot of people were evacuating, but not everyone.  That also seems to be coming out of the stairwell, so at least it doesn't seem to be in any of the units.

Panorama showing the street blocked off by the police.
 The siren is off now, but the road is still blocked.

Sunday: Uargle.

As usual, I didn't know what I wanted for lunch today.  Eventually, after getting on the highway, I decided to drive back out to Aina Haina to get the soup/sandwich combo.
The Aina Haina version of the croque monsieur is less charred than the Iwilei one.
Also, after I had sat down for a few minutes, one of the waitresses brought out my soup and that top envelope, which contained two macarons "since it's taking so long to make my sandwich."  I was confused, because it didn't really seem that long, but thanked her for them.  Then, about a minute later, my sandwich appeared.

So now I have leftover pizza, some leftover sandwich (they put piles of ham on it, and I ate all the soup), and macarons to have for dinner.

And as I was working on the links, a fire broke out next door.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Saturday: Targle.

I wanted pizza for late lunch today.
So I got pizza.
Pieology takes the Subway/Chipotle/Potbelly's theme where you point at which ingredients you want, they put it together, then you pay and sit down while it bakes in the oven for a few minutes.  It's not bad, but there were issues with my pizza.  I went with regular sauce, mozzarella + gorgonzola, mushrooms, garlic, pepperoni, and spicy chicken.  The sauce guy suggested olive oil around the edge, and I think this was a mistake.  It's probably not clear in the picture (look at the ~7 o'clock area), but there was a lot of oil pooling on my pizza.  The crust also didn't really feel fully cooked.  The bottom was crispy, but the middle was soft and a bit gummy.

It wasn't bad, and I ate half of it (another chunk of it will probably get eaten in the next 10-15 minutes).  I think it mixed pretty well, but the garlic and chicken spice can make some bites a bit too much.



Friday, August 19, 2016

Friday: Sargle.

Alternate title: Admissions Day means I get to sleep in really late and you don't.
Alternate title 2: Why do I always think the peach flavored things from the Coke freestyle machines will ever be good?

After going over the options, I decided to celebrate Admissions Day with a burger from Honolulu Burger Company.  I think they were a bit skimpy with the blue cheese, but I like the new buns. 
Also they were out of honey mustard for the sweet potato fries. :(

And then I walked back to my car, stopped walked back, and took this picture.  The power of the Pokeball symbol.
Besides, if your girlfriend doesn't want to play Pokemon Go with you, then I think you've made a larger mistake.



Thursday, August 18, 2016

Thursday: Rargle.

Alternate title: Thursday: Effective Friday.
Alternate title 2: Thursday: Holy shit why do I have sixteen tabs open for linking?

Seriously.  The terms for the output X and the output Y dimensions are different.  They're all still there, so it doesn't save space.  It was insane.
And then because Gawker is being shut down, and no one knows if they're going to keep the site up as an archive, I spent a half hour printing all the Best Restaurant In New York posts to pdf.  Their series on Epcot is pretty much the sole reason that I went there in January.  Fun fact: Chrome doesn't know how to not split images across page boundaries.  Second fun fact: Firefox doesn't know how to render things in pdf such that it doesn't shrink the text space on each page until the post is just a column of individual letters.  So now I have 531 pages of internet in a pdf because there's no great way to archive everything.  Also: fuck lazy loading of images.  I hate that on every site I see it on.  And, finally, Peter Thiel is a misogynistic fascist vampire, and wish him only the worst.



Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Wednesday: Qargle.

I don't have a good picture today.  I also spent the day trying to make sure that all of my changes to our file database were going to be safe and correct.  That caused me to lose track of time and not realize I hadn't had lunch until 3.  :(



Tuesday, August 16, 2016

Tuesday: Pargle.

I went to the store last night, came home, and immediately realized that "hand soap" was on the list of things to get, and I didn't get it.  So I planned to do the "pick up lunch and stuff for my office fridge, and also get soap" thing today at work.  As I was about to throw out the receipt, I noticed it said that I had bought 13 items.  "Wait, I went through the express lane.  Was I the asshole with too many items in the express lane?"  No, I was not, as both the receipt and me holding the shopping bag with the seven items I bought told me.  The item thing counts the bottle fee/deposit things, which is dumb, because I thought the "number of items sold" thing was there to prevent theft.

  • Pokemon.
    • This is a good indication that this live action movie may actually be good.
    • Pokemon Go has made me hate Pidgey, but these are pretty cute.
    • I mentioned this before, and assumed that the people complaining were assholes.  Yep.  It turns out when presented with more evidence, it seems super likely that these people are assholes.  Look at the second picture.  That plus the street name means I can go look at things in street view.  That's a public park.  Spin it to the left a bit, and you can see the sign "Private Road".  So that makes it rather obvious that these people are complaining because the park is busier than they're used to, and some people didn't find the parking lot on the other side.  "They are on our lawns".  Yeah.  That's because your shitty street doesn't have sidewalks.
  • Not Pokemon.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Monday: Oargle.

I don't have any good pictures for today, so here's the Hello Kitty store from 2009.
Also I learned today that you can dive across the finish line in an Olympic race.  That seems super cheaty, but also like it should be its own event.


Sunday, August 14, 2016

Sunday: Nargle.

I got the burger I didn't get two weeks ago.

It was very tall.
I think this is the best one I've had.  Carrot strings, burger, blue cheese, sauteed mushrooms, over roasted cherry tomatoes, and scallions.  They've changed their sauces, so the "hot wing" sauce now tastes like garlic and the Korean BBQ is now a bad aioli.  Oh well.


Saturday, August 13, 2016

Saturday: Margle.

Today felt like a pork chop day.
Also partially because I needed to get gum, and the only place that sells the gum I like is the Japanese market next to the pancake place.


Friday, August 12, 2016

Friday: Largle.

I decided this morning that today would be another burrito Friday.
This one was an astronaut burrito.
That was going to be the big thing, but then something astonishing happened.  Here's the map of my path home:

Ok?

Each of those red dots is a stoplight.  All of them were green for me.  All of them.  Seventeen perfect green lights.  That never happens.  The strip of Kinau at the end with five lights?  Green.  I've had days where I get stopped at every fucking one.  I got in the car, started driving, realized I hadn't gotten any gum out, and then couldn't until I was parked at home.

Also fun to note that without stop lights, that route takes 15 minutes.


Thursday, August 11, 2016

Thursday: Kargle.

Magikarp looks super sad in the new sightings menu.  Poor Magikarp.  Stuck in the grass.

I think I was planning on having something here, but I don't remember what that thing was going to be.


  • Pokemon
  • Not Pokemon.
    • I've seen this story earlier in the week, but it took the Fark headline for me to click and read it: "Lesbian couples sue New Jersey for discriminatory law that requires them to try and have sex with men in order to get pregnant before getting approved for fertility treatments".  Holy fuck, I assumed they were on the right side, but to see that the other side was so crazy was surprising.  Did no one at the insurance company stop and think, "wait, this might be expensive, but we're going to look terrible if this gets out"?
    • This lamp is ridiculous.
    • Dog.
    • President Obama is the best president ever.
    • But I don't really want to rewatch all of Lord of the Rings just to check that they don't talk.
    • Leopard seals are apparently super nice.  When they aren't devouring penguins, but still.  Super nice.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Wednesday: Jargle.

Twitter broke earlier today.
And I couldn't get the thing I was working on this evening to work.  It always underestimates, and I double checked all the derivatives.


Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Tuesday: Iargle.

Today was a bad day.  I woke up way earlier than I wanted, got some bad news, tried to snooze a bit more, had a bunch of nightmares which should have a better name when it's kind of day time, woke up again way later than I wanted, and then fought a stupid bug all day.  

Two years ago I had wings after having my flights disrupted by a plane breaking while I tried to avoid a hurricane.


Monday, August 8, 2016

Monday: Hargle.

Bird.
It is still super hot and humid, and I am still unhappy about this.



Sunday, August 7, 2016

Sunday: Gargle.

Today was a ramen day.
And the waitress stopped by just as I was checking Pokemon Go.  "Oh!  You're playing that game too!  Everybody is playing it!"

Then I spent two hours organizing slides for this talk tomorrow.  Yay.  Fun weekend.


Saturday, August 6, 2016

Saturday: Fargle.

I wanted fish today.
So I got fish with some fish.
Nico's turns out to have a Poke gym, but all the Pokemon in it were like 1700 CP monsters.  And I didn't get a screenshot, but the radar told me that there were only Magikarps in the area.

Then I came home and spent hours outlining the talk I have to give on Monday.  That's the hardest part, so it should be somewhat easy to make slides tomorrow, making this the bestest weekend, ever, I guess.

And then I had more fish.

This is a poke-bowl/Poke-ball pun.

Friday, August 5, 2016

Friday: Eargle.

That's a really powerful Dragonite from the super-classy trainer.



Thursday, August 4, 2016

Thursday: Dargle.

I remembered today that I wrote that thing to pull up old photos if I didn't have one I took today.

I'm reasonably sure this is the sunrise from Haleakala, taken in 2010.
And, looking at the exif data and remembering today's date, it was actually taken tomorrow.  No idea how that got mixed up when I was creating the archive.