Events

In honor of the new year, here's a round-up of today's unexpected news items: Usability expert Jakob Nielsen advocates usability features for cats. Google has announced a scratch-and-sniff app for your Android device. Virgin America will acquire Alitalia. Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage will leave the series next season. Updates as the situation warrants.

Paul Krugman takes a quiet moment to meditate on the economy: If you think the problem is that wages are too high, your solution is that we need to meaner to workers — cut off their unemployment insurance, make them hungry by cutting off food stamps, so they have no alternative to do whatever it takes to get jobs, and wages fall. If you think the problem is the zero lower bound on interest rates, you think that this kind of solution wouldn’t just be cruel, it would make the economy worse, both because...

Not only does my time evaporate into multiple projects these days, but the number of context switches I've experienced over the past few days hurts. Here's today's timesheet: Yeah, but I shoot with this hand. I worked from home Wednesday so that I could jam on some documentation. How'd that work out? Blogging, by the way, helps me switch contexts. I think.

Something about the Seder I went to last night and the marriage equality cases currently before the Supreme Court got me thinking along these lines: The wise son asks, "What are the statutes, the testimonies, and the laws that the Constitution has commanded you to do?" To the wise son, you say: The 14th Amendment gives every citizen equal protection under the law. The 10th Amendment reserves powers to the States that aren't specifically granted to the Federal Government. And the First Amendment...

Via Sullivan, a description of how Maxwell House Coffee got its brand on 50 million Passover tables: Maxwell House decided to publish a book, specifically a Haggadah, and offer it to customers for free with the purchase of a can of coffee. (A Haggadah recounts the Exodus from Egypt, comprised of prayers, songs, and stories which guide the Passover Seder.) The Maxwell House edition was an instant hit. Today, it’s the most popular Haggadah in the world, with over 50 million printed. Why has this piece of...

Yeah, it's Passover. Time for this: Same people who brought you this last year:

Quick time-out from my generally useless day (long overdue and appreciated): A sign of a good book is that you spend more time thinking about it than actually passing your eyes over the pages. More on which book in a later post.

Just a quick note about debugging. I just spent about 30 minutes tracking down a bug that caused a client to get invoiced for -18 hours of premium time and 1.12 days of regular time. The basic problem is that an appointment can begin and end at any time, but from 6pm to 8am, an appointment costs more per hour than during business hours. This particular appointment started at 5pm and went until midnight, which should be 6 hours of premium and 1 hour of regular. The bottom line: I had unit tests, which...

At last night's performance, the venue used dim, magenta lighting on the stage that made poor Lauren O'Connell look like a pink ghost. Here's one image exactly as it came out of my camera: Fortunately, I shoot raw photos, which take up lots of room (about 22 MB each) but with the benefit of lots of uncompressed image information. It's therefore relatively easy, using Adobe Lightroom, to correct for it. Magenta lights are pretty grim, though; the only reasonable correction was to make it black and white...

The female half of Pomplamoose, Nataly Dawn Knutsen, played a venue four blocks from my house yesterday, so I just had to go. She and her touring partners Lauren O'Connell and Ryan Lerman were as charming and talented in person as their music makes them seem. Dawn is also tall (178 cm in flats), which isn't readily apparent from her videos. The tour moves east through April before going back to California at month's end. Also, Knutsen assured me that Pomplamoose will continue.