Friday: It's annoying when you are 99% sure something should be in the data, but simply can't find it.

Clearly, giphy isn't trying very hard.

• Yes, I'm linking to this solely for the squirrel.
• This is a good thing.
• It's good that they got the best voices back.
• That's cool.

Thursday: Today I finished up like three tasks. It was shockingly productive.

No thanks to you, Giant Gob of Feta.  You need to be smaller to be a helpful part of the salad.

And I saw a helicopter when I was leaving work.  Doing image registration based on clouds is hard.

The links today are two anniversaries, four jerk cats, and a rant about cartoon characters.

• The Challenger disaster was thirty years ago.
• Alan Alda is 80.
• Cats.
• Are.
• Just.
• Jerks.
• WTF?  Let's go in order of least to most infuriating.
• The Flintstones have never been interesting.
• Wacky Races was interesting, but mostly due to the things that make it a cartoon.
• Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, Venture Bros.  Oh, sorry, that's just all the other, likely better, redos of the Alex Toth characters.
• Someone should send Jim Lee pictures of real humans.  I'm not skilled at the kind of redraws they do at Escher Girls, but:
• No one stands like Daphne is standing.  Also: at what point did Daphne carry stupid looking guns?  Why are their four cables on that gun?  Is the gun designed to tangle the user up?
• I'm pretty sure Fred has no right arm.  That hand is just attached to his stomach, which explains why he's pointing some sort of "shooty beam" gun directly at his other elbow.  Probably how he lost hte first one.
• Also no one stands like that.
• I've seen lots of people complaining about Shaggy's mustache.  This ignores the fact that his chin is like a foot long.
• No one stands like that unless they are actively falling.
• Velma is like four feet tall.  Using Fred's humerus as a length scale (and taking 14.4 inches as a standard length), Velma from top to estimated waist is roughly 27 inches.  Double this for her height, and she's 4'8".  She's also is like four heads tall, which is in the infant range.
• Scooby Doo.  Is a talking dog.  Why does a dog who is known for having an actual mode of communication appear to be leaking emoji bubbles?  And magic floating eyebrows.

Wednesday: I should know that segfaults mean I should start by looking at the bounds on the array I'm working with.

-Or-

I just spent a large chunk of the evening fighting something, even after I'd come to an answer I was happy with.

The problem is fairly easy to state: given a printed page, can you reliably determine the column boundaries?  The answer has to be "easily, duh," right?  So, I found a bunch of newspaper images with different numbers of columns, and did some tests. 

First, I wrote a program that did regular and robust statistics on a column-by-column basis, and plotted these up.

The test image.

The normalizations are simply the mean of the given statistic.

So that kind of looks like garbage.  Without the normalization, it becomes obvious that at column gaps, the signal (the mean or median) goes up, as the intensity is brighter.  However, the variance (sigma or MAD-sigma) goes down, as the column becomes more uniform.  Therefore, if you divide the one by the other, these two features should reinforce, and give a much clearer feature:

Which it does.

So, applying it to the image corpus:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mstone/27Feb1895.jpg

http://www.thevictorianmagazine.co.uk/1856%20nov%2022%20web%20size/1856%20nov%2022%20p517.jpg

http://www.angelfire.com/pa5/gettysburgpa/23rdpaimages/cecilcountydare2.jpg

http://malvernetheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Malverne-Community-Theatre-Newspaper-Reviews-14-page-0.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/New_York_Times_Frontpage_1914-07-29.png

http://www.americanwx.com/bb/uploads/monthly_01_2011/post-382-0-70961700-1295039609.jpg

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/blogs/vip-newspaper-scan-6.jpg

I probably should have kept the normalization factor, but that would require calculating them and sticking them in the appropriate places in the plot script, and I was just too lazy to do that.  Still, this looks like it's a fairly decent way to detect column gaps.  The robust statistics do a worse job, probably because they attempt to clean up the kind of deviations that are interesting here.  Compared to the baseline level, it looks like the gaps have a factor of about 10 difference.  It really only fails when the columns aren't really separated (or they might be, if I bothered normalizing the plots and clipping the range better).

• Art Deco.
• Squirrel.
• Etrigan the Demon.
• More Squirrel Girl.

Tuesday: No one cares about my cornbread.

This is just a small bit of the cornbread.

This is the rest of the cornbread.

I care about the cornbread, though.  I was hoping to have something here about a thing that I asserted was true but wanted to check, and then had to go to the grocery store twice this evening because I didn't buy the right thing the first time.  This ate up a lot of time, and then Agent Carter was excellent again, which took up even more time.

• Conveniently, something else I asserted (link 5, sub point 5) has a nice scientific paper that generally supports my claim that "people are bad at conspiring."
• Squirrel Girl is wonderful, and I wasn't going to post this just to again repeat that well established fact, but "The Plasmacabre."  That is the best pun I have seen.  It's just so beautiful.
• Here's the one most important maple syrup fact: the USDA change to remove the distinction between Grade A and Grade B syrup was a horrible mistake, because it makes it more challenging to clearly identify the far superior Grade B syrup.  That the American public was too dumb to realize that Grade B was better is not a sufficient excuse.
• This looks tasty, so it's fairly likely I'm driving to Kailua this weekend.
• Detective Pikachu.
• Ambien.

Monday: No.

Here's an old screenshot I took because the clock in the middle looks like a very sleepy bear.

• Grumpy kitty.
• Sad kitty.
• Jerk dog.
• Apparently the traffic issues I had last week are part of a known issue.
• I did not like the Lucifer TV show.  It's the same as all other cop + not cop shows.  There's no explanation about why Lucifer cares about all the humans, or what he gains from that.  Is it just for funsies?  Then what's the point of making it about Lucifer?  It's just so wasteful.
• Here is an excellent story from the comic.  It is rather nsfw.
• Here is a reasonably good story from the comic.  It illustrates a number of problems that I suspect will be present in the TV show.  First, Duma and Remiel take up the management of Hell, making a lot of the "no one's running Hell" discussion from TV nonsense.  This suggests they will not appear.  Secondly, what they've done to Mazikeen is hideous.

And, just so I have them available if I need them:

Sunday: "If you put a taco in a bag with even the smallest hole, the taco will escape!"

To be fair, they weren't actually talking about tacos, but about tako.

Spicy tan tan.

The kitchen miscounted my gyoza.

So they sent out two extra ones from a second batch.  I just finished eating the chicken, as saving that for dinner is my usual strategy.  Plus, even one extra gyoza made me super full.

• Tanuki.
• Dogs.
• A strange link to my own blog, with the search term "cryptic bullshit" pre-filled in.  Why would this be here?
• That XKCD about cell phones and the supernatural.  This also seems an odd link to have randomly show up out-of-the-blue.
• Oh yeah, they showed a new X-files tonight.  I suspected something was up when my twitter timeline was all "who cares about this stupid football, show X-files!" and suddenly turned to "cats and video games" after it played on the mainland.  The reviews keep suggesting that the next two episodes are better, but I think I'm going to stick with Supergirl tomorrow.  Here are more reasons why:
• "I also have alien DNA!"  I thought we knew that already.
• "Everything from the original series was all a lie!"  That's a convenient way to un-corner-paint the story after the train wreck that was the last N seasons.
• "Ker-splodey!"  Yes.  We have computer graphics now.
• "So, there's this vast conspiracy that are poisoning and manipulating the population with lies about aliens and terrorists so they can lure us all into a state where we give up all our rights to them, and then they can use this to rule the country, if not the whole world!"  Why?  This is literally the dumbest plan ever.  You have "zero point energy" machines.  What do you get by having a planet of slaves?  Do you need them to crank a machine all day?  No.  You have what you've defined as infinite energy.  Do you need them to make food?  No, because again, infinite fucking energy.  Every problem that you can come up with is now forever solved because you have infinite energy.  Need more water?  Make some.  Need more gold?  Make some.  It only takes a finite amount of energy to do that, and we've established that you have infinite.
• "Vast conspiracy!"  No.  There is not going to be a vast conspiracy because people are bad at conspiring.  You can't just murder your way to everyone staying quiet, because you'd need to murder a significant fraction of your organization at some stage, and that makes the whole thing hard to sustain.  Call this the Hydra Principle.
• "I am not actually an ex-FBI agent, I'm more like this excited puppy in the way I can dump decades of previous crazy ideas for brand new crazy ideas!"  Or this puppy.  Or this one.  I found lots of good dog gifs.

Saturday: You can't turn left there.

Mostly I just wanted soup today.

The turkey and brie panini isn't as good as the turkey and sun dried tomato panini.  Part of the problem is that there was just too much brie on the sandwich, and the whole thing cooled off into a glumpy mess.  Not really bad, just not as good as the girl at the counter led me to believe.  

• Amphibious.
• This looks interesting.
• Fish vs cat vs inflatable shark.
• Marnie.

At this rate, I'll stop posting around 2030.

Based on the yearly post counts from the right side and a quick by-eye linear fit to the past four years.

Friday: I am a big fan of joke cards.

Specifically, repurposing a card for one event for a completely unrelated event that does not require a card.  The problem was that I accidentally stole a sock while travelling, and needed to return it.  This is not a thing that needs a card, but it seemed like a good idea.  The only issue was finding an inappropriate one.

My first thought was to do a sympathy card.

But that seemed a bit too morbid.

My next thought was a bar-mitzvah card, but I couldn't find that.  The next best thing: first communion card.

Appropriately edited to match the situation.

And with cartoon drawings inside.

• Red Bee.
• Animal food friends.
• Steven Universe.
• I want to try this, but it doesn't appear that the supplier ships outside of Japan.

Thursday: Today is Squirrel Appreciation Day!

So I made a gif of the one I saw in Florida.

I also had to reboot my computer this evening.  When I looked at the logs, I last had to reboot it on January 7 and December 21.  Today is January 21.  Now I'm trying to figure out what runs bimonthly that could be crashing things.

• Kids lunch looks yummy.
• I told you it was Monica.  Also: bonus Squirrel Girl on Squirrel Appreciation Day.
• Wallabies are not squirrels, but they do live here.
• Kylo Ren is a stupid punk, and I'm glad he's costing people money.
• Don't live in the south.
• "werewolf mcwerewolf"

Wednesday: I apparently attempted to buy a book from a scam seller on Amazon.

Not this, however.  I really do have an order that's not scheduled to ship until like a year after the first part shipped.  It's a super long preorder.  Also: Amazon, maybe just say "Next delivery: Way off.  Don't worry about it.  You're cool."

I ordered the scam book around Thanksgiving, hoping it'd arrive before travelling at Christmas.  It didn't, and that seemed odd.  I filed a complaint when I got home, and went today to try and check on that.  Still no book, and no comment from Amazon about it.  I complained again, and then checked the store's reviews.  8% positive in the past three months, and the review page full of "never received book" comments.  And they'd been cut off from Amazon.  Complaining again did get me my $7.95 refunded, making this one of the crappiest scams ever.

• Not mistakes.
• I didn't think about it until watching that top gif like a dozen times, but getting hit in the head with a bag of coins probably is medically serious.
• Me: "Wait, is that Monica?"  Yes.  It is Monica.  (On the far right, having worse problems).
• Brooklyn 99 switched times to be on at the same time as Agent Carter.  I should probably add it to the DVR, since otherwise I'm never going to watch it again.
• A) I had that guy teach a history class in undergrad.  B) I miss the rye buns at Peanut Barrel.  Mushroom burger, though.
• Mistakes.
• That is just a way to justify murder.  "No, she was sitting on the side seat.  Totally didn't mean to run her over."
• I should watch these Lego versions of the Star Wars movies.
• Puppy.
• The internet.

Tuesday: I spent a lot of the day in talks and meetings.

This meant that I had this:

Juice and kalua pork bun.

at 11:15.  I didn't return to eat the rest of lunch:

Pepperoni epi.

until 2:15.  I still haven't eaten my blueberry bread because I was watching Agent Carter and then had to fix processing at work.  So I don't think I saw everything I was supposed to on the show.

• I am glad Agent Carter is back.
• Although, from this information, I'm seriously doubtful that she flew TWA from New York to LA via Atlanta and Denver.
• Sense of Right Alliance.
• I kind of hope all these companies have to pay massive fines for doing this.  Also: still glad Steve Jobs is dead.
• Fanart.

Monday: MLK Day

Apparently this is a day-off place to get lunch.  Not quite as good as I was hoping for today.  I think it's because the veggies cooled the burger down too much, and added a lot of soggy to it.

Kapolei's kind of intolerably busy now.  The main issue seems to be that Kalaeloa gets clogged up with people heading towards Waianae.  This backs up onto 95, which is where a lot of the people are coming from (since there's that giant shopping center there).  The obvious solution would be to add a west exit from the center, but that would require an additional bridge over H1 or to connect it through a residential area that despite having a sufficiently sized road that could easily reduce the traffic.

And Target didn't have everything I was looking for, so that kind of sucked.

• Huh.  Cute Overload is closing.
• I kind of hope they have a Wonder Woman crossover with the Supergirl TV show.
• Misprint.
• Marnie.
• Peridot. 

Sunday: Attempt two.

I'm just saying that they were very convincing gifs.  Plus, it's not really like I had anything else planned for today.  So, another drive out to Hawaii Kai.

The other nice thing is that if they don't seat you horribly, you can see out to the ocean.

The fall back plan was to go to the sandwich place I can't remember the name of, and get French onion soup there.  This isn't as good as their soup, and the cheese forms into an impenetrable layer.  Still, FOS.

Salad, because I wanted to pretend to be healthy.  This was the point where I realized that every dish I ordered had cheese on it.  This wasn't fully intentional.

Not as good as the steak I had in Florida, but better than the other steak I had in Florida.  I think the lesson is to always get a ribeye.

I had a bit more than this, but I have two giant chunks in my fridge, so I should quickly finish this post so I can go eat the leftovers.

• I'm not clear on the details, but it seems that some of the meat at the curry place I go to fairly often is no good?  I guess maybe that shouldn't be the place I go for lunch tomorrow, just in case.
• Baby bunny.
• Squirrel.
• Tacos.
• Star Wars.
• Marnie.

Saturday: It turns out I still don't like people.

Mostly because they're perpetually too loud and too filling places I was going to go.

I did get ice cream today, though.  So that was good.

The ice cream was designed to kill time, but also worked as a late lunch.  It's conveniently located, as I had driven way out to Koko Marina to go to the theater there.  Unfortunately, it was not as empty at the theater as I was hoping.

Yes, I know, but I'd hoped to see it in a nice quiet theater.  That didn't entirely work, but at least there wasn't some dumbass clapping every time he recognized something.

The other part of the plan was to get steak for dinner, due to the influence of very convincing gifs I saw yesterday.  You can already see the next picture, so you can tell how well that went. 

Not well, obviously.

It turns out everyone in existence saw those gifs, and so the steak place was stupid busy, with no places to park even.  I then failed to go to two other places before saying "fuck it, let's get a burrito," and then driving over the Pali to get a burrito.  I luckily arrived six minutes before they closed, and so I took my burrito to go.  Home.  Back over the Pali and twenty something minutes away.  This wasn't the best solution, but it was a decent burrito.  And had steak in it, although it doesn't really count.

I was going to put a discussion of doomsday devices here, but it's already kind of late, and I have like a billion links to get through.  Most of those links are Star Wars related, as this seemed like a good time to clear out all the Star Wars stuff in my saved RSS feeds.

• Star Wars stuff.
• Even Paul Krugman went to see it twice.
• Lego scene 1.
• Lego scene 2.
• Obi-Wan and Anakin.
• Anakin and Kylo.
• Boba Fett and Disney Princesses.
• Boba Fett's real face.
• Wookiees.
• Poe's flight vest.
• Rey's purse.
• Luke.
• Force powers.
• Not Star Wars stuff.
• I found another Marnie link while scanning for Star Wars.
• Cookie Monster Cat.
• Dog and baby chick.
• Best cooking show.

Friday: I got it right today.

• Construx.
• Squirrel Girl.
• Fuck ibus.
• I enjoy reading these kinds of stories about the Sims.
• I just bought these.
• Remember from last week?
• Star Wars/Mulan.
• Star Wars/Barack Obama.
• Peridot.

Thursday: Well.

There are times when you look at something, and think, "Nope."  I have no clue why I suddenly thought it was February for the five seconds it took to fuck up today's date.

• Squirrel.
• Red panda.
• I am looking forward to more Agent Carter.
• Squirrel Girl cosplaying as Howard the Duck.
• Marnie won't win, but it probably should.
• Yet another reason to not like Apple.
• These are all excellent points as to why I should probably stop flying on United, since it looks like they're going to fuck me over on the frequent flyer shit.
• Dole owns ships.  I did not know this.
• Alan Rickman.
• This is also about Alan Rickman, and I should probably have tried to storify it, but I didn't, so here's a bunch of links to tweets.
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

Wednesday: I totally didn't waste two days discovering that the bug is in someone else's code.

And boxes are no longer allowed in the hallways at work.  So the ones outside my office were finally moved somewhere.  This tiny gecko has been dead behind them for so so long.

The links today are either Star Wars or animals.

• Star Wars.
• I'm not a giant fan of the show, but I really enjoy these Always Sunny title card posts.
• Yeah.
• This is pretty good, as it's pretty much what would have been going through Obi-Wan's mind.
• Force ghost.
• I really want more Ahsoka Tano, too.
• Animals.
• Lazy dog.
• Learned from the birb boss.
• Dog wreck.

Tuesday: Food and a bunch of links.

The other bakery by work is open again, so I got lunch there today.  They didn't have as much savory foods as before, but that might just be the selection today.

Pork and cinnamon buns.

And I got banana bread to have as an afternoon snack.

I also decided I wanted lasagna for dinner.  It's been more than a year since I came up with this plan, so I went back to get takeout.

Lasagna.  I will be eating the second half tomorrow, because this is a giant portion.

Also garlic bread.

• I don't understand this.
• Han Solo.
• What?
• Bird.
• Dog.
• Piping-hot calzone.
• Rick Snyder is a horrible person, but I'm not that confident he will go to jail for that.
• I was going to read this tonight, but ran out of time.  Having Amano art helps, too.

Monday: Back to work and David Bowie

I spent a larger-than-expected portion of the day sorting email, and splitting my inbox into a new 2016 file and moving the old 2014 (and 2015, since the main project spanned years) file out of the way.  I should probably do this more than I do, but it's hard to get back to the quarterly inbox shifts I used to have.

As I was walking to my car, I noticed something underneath it.  "Is that a kitty?" I asked myself as I walked closer.  I then locked the car a bunch with the key, and that made it honk the horn a bunch.  The thing underneath my car was in fact a kitty, as was the other kitty that I didn't originally see (but which I think I can see in the photo).

• David Bowie.  This is a subset, as everything I read today had a post about him.  I also noticed today that nearly every one of his albums is sold out at amazon.  
• The Onion has an excellent article.
• This was a very good movie.  I'm somewhat stunned that it's been four+ years since I saw it.
• How.
• Prince.
• Heroes.
• Not David Bowie.
• Five Guys is coming to Hawaii finally.
• And there will be two to start with, neither of which is particularly close.  I supposed that's a good thing.
• Peridot.
• Bad guys.
• Squirrel.
• "Fix that next time."

Sunday: Returning home.

I'm super tired, partially due to jet lag, but largely due to the fact that I didn't' sleep much last night.

This didn't help dealing with MCO, which as far as I can tell is an airport run by idiots.  Issues I saw:

1. The United counters don't open until 4:30 according to their webpage.  The self-check in kiosks open at 4, though, so checking baggage is an ordeal of waiting for impatient people to get out of the way.
2. Dunkin Donuts doesn't make doughnuts until 5am.  This is by far the largest instance of "WTF?"
3. TSA supervisor guy Mattheus is a bag of shit.  "Oh I have to scan this again, because it tested positive."  Fuck you and your lies.  I'm reasonably sure this was "I'm going to fuck with you because you opted out."  If you really thought there was an issue, I'm pretty sure "scan it again" wouldn't be the option chosen.  Also: what's the point of scanning it again?  Doesn't that largely admit that any given scan has negligible utility?  Also:  good job not even bothering to come up with a reason to scan my poster tube again.  Jokes on you, however, Shit-bag:  nothing's fucking open at MCO at 4:45am, so it's not like I had a lot of things to do.
4. Qdoba is open at 4:45am, but after thinking about doughnuts the entire ride to the airport, I didn't want a burrito.

In any case, travelling home sucked because MCO had no food I wanted open, and then I had a super short transfer at IAH, which doesn't really have decent "grab and go" kinds of food.  I bought M&Ms.

And then had an odd sandwich on the plane that only cost like $10.

But I did eventually make it home.

And the limo I took had this dragon statue inside.

 What?

Yep.  Limo from the airport.  Again.

 And then I went to get food.

Not shown: unagi and tamago.

I'm hungry again, but I got a WF burrito for this occasion.  Because now I wanted a burrito.

• Poverty.
• A different perspective on poverty.
• Fantomah.