Out of my hat

From Triple-H. Pretty clever, especially by the standards of online quizzes.

My gmail account name, as you might notice from the side of the page, consists of a pretty common English word; even if it doesn’t come up in your everyday conversations, it’s not one that you’d pay much attention to if someone mentioned it in passing. As such, I imagine that variations on it are not uncommon.

My primary evidence for this is that I keep getting e-mails for people who aren’t actually me. A sampling:

• Once I received information about when my job interview was scheduled with a consulting firm. In Israel. I think I actually got two of these, one after the other, but it’s hard to tell because the first was in Hebrew.
• I’m apparently registered at a couple of different forum sites; most notable (in terms of the number of messages I get about it) is a French guitarist site, which seems to think I call myself Green Disease.
• I receive e-mails in Portuguese with some frequency. No idea what any of them are about.
• The most recent mystery, and the one prompting this post: I just got a whole bunch of correspondence forwarded from a guy in Finch, Ontario. How do I know this? Because a few of the e-mails are between the gentleman in question and various poker sites, with the latter requiring the former to supply personal information for a credit cheque. This was accomplished by dude scanning in the front of his driver’s licence… which I now have an image of.

So if there’s a lesson here, I guess it’s something like: be careful when you type your e-mail address. If you get it wrong, there’s no telling what kind of freak gets to read your mail.

Amontillado somehow doesn’t seem worth the risk of getting sealed away in a cellar.

The Internet is a source for a great many good things, as long as you don’t care about accuracy.

Most recent evidence: I’m figuring out the chords to a Loudon Wainwright song (White Winos, if you’re curious) and it’s one of these songs where I have trouble keeping the verses straight. This isn’t because they’re sort of random, the way that (say) Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone is sort of random (in that you could easily swap around bits and pieces of the verses and stand a good chance of no one noticing); there’s a story there, and the order’s important. It’s because each verse has a number in the first couple of lines (from one to five), and I can’t keep the numbers straight, and that throws me off.

…what? There’s like 120 different permutations of five numbers, how am I supposed to know which one to use?

Anyway. As I’m testing my chords/fingerings, I figure it would be nice if I had the lyrics in front of me. And lo and behold, I’m on the Internet, where lyrics sites have flourished on and off for a dozen years or more. I’m enough of a geezer to remember the WUSTL lyrics FTP archive, which might even predate Nevada and the original on-line guitar archive; there were lawsuits and such in the 90s, and then some agreement was reached. Or possibly people just decamped to Switzerland. Anyhow, there’s whole bunches of lyrics sites.

And they all crib from each other.

This is obvious, in the same way that it’s obvious when students are copying off each other: there may only be one way to get something right, but there’s a myriad wrong answers, and the mistakes you make tend to be idiosyncratic. If I see two students who’ve both managed to square 6 and get 32, I get suspicious; likewise, when every lyrics site I check omits the first verse (what, was the line …when she was alive too much of a downer?), then I begin to wonder.

Of course the problems don’t end there; the lyrics on each site are shot through with (the same) errors. Let’s looks at the second verse (which is of course listed as the first):

mother liked her white wine

she’d have a glass or two

almost every single night

after her day was through



san se chardonnay chaiblie

pinot gris jiot

just to take the edge of

just to get the glow

So OK, we’re drinking white wine; the “Chardonnay” makes that clear. But “san se”? “chaiblie”? “jiot”?! I’d almost be impressed they got “Pinot Gris”, except for that “jiot” hanging around afterwards. (The corrent lines there? “Sancerre, Chardonnay, Chablis, Pinot Grigio”. Googling on that string actually gets you to a correct and complete version of the lyrics.) The “of” for “off” at the end of the penultimate line is common enough to be forgivable, but the list of (really rather famous) wine types? Never.

I almost wonder if this is how the lyrics sites get around copyright. The original lyrics may well be protected, but does that protection extend to obviously wrong transcriptions?

Notes from the beginning of spring:

• I’ve finally done the smart, sensible thing and cancelled my NetFlix subscription. It turns out that I don’t actually feel likely watching movies by myself very often, and certainly not so often that I can’t walk up the street to the video store when the impulse strikes; it’ll be cheaper that way, too. As evidence for this, I now need to send back my current three discs… which I’ve had for months plural, and haven’t watched any of yet.
• Speaking of charges on my credit card bill… earlier this month I was at a conference in Florida. When I got to my hotel, the desk clerk told me that she couldn’t find my reservation; after much hemming and hawing, I was assigned the Worst Room in the House; my roommate and I checked out the next day, with him settling the account and finding up accommodations elsewhere via Connections™. Well, I guess they found my reservation after all because apparently I’ve been charged for one nights’ stay. I do not see this ending well for the hotel.
• I’m beginning to make plans for a trip east this spring, with Halifax being the technical destination but a certain amount of meandering through Québec and the Maritimes along the way. Applications for travelling companions are being accepted at this time.
• I’ve somehow been persuaded to start doing the FaceBook thing. I imagine that if you know me IRL then tracking me down on that site won’t be hard, but since I’ve barely looked at what all it’s for I may be wrong on this account.

Cheddar that has been aged for two years or more really shouldn’t taste like process cheese food.

Damn you, Vermont! I blame you!

The thing about daylight saving time is that we believe it.

I look at the clock in the corner of the screen, and it tells me that it’s 2:43 in the afternoon. Twenty-four hours ago it wasn’t, but I look at the clock and say to myself, yeah, that sounds right to me. This might be because I have no internal sense of time-in-the-world, objective time, and hence must take my cues from the timepieces around me. Or that I do have such a sense, but what it tells me is that what it says on the clock is (roughly) correct. Or maybe that I recognize on some level how arbitrary it is to assign particular numbers to particular hours, and hence any label will do.

(I’ve never swung between more than three time-zones in a single trip, which I suppose isn’t much, but I get the same effect when I travel from Eastern to Pacific: I accept what the clocks around me say, and generally adjust pretty quickly to the consensus.)

We talk about gaining and losing hours when we make the shift from standard to DST, but that’s just a convenience of the notation. All we’re doing is relabelling hours, and then being silly enough to believe that we’ve done something real.

For the past week I’ve mostly been using Firefox at the office. This is a phase I go through every now and again: I tire of how slow Safari can get, and how some of the fancy stuff out on the web works so badly with it, and so I go with the alternative.

It generally takes about a week before I’m even more frustrated with Firefox, for running slowly and for doing Wrong Things with more frequency than Safari would ever dream of. (I have limited use at present for things like Google Documents, for instance, but printing things on web pages happens somewhat more frequently. Firefox does the first gracefully, Safari the second, so really there’s no contest.) So I’m back to the default state now, though still less than happy about it.

Possibly what I need to do is upgrade to the most recent version of the OS, since Safari 2 seems to be a much happier app than Safari 1.x; the last time I asked, the university IT folks hadn’t finished vetting 10.4, but that was a while ago. Or I suppose better might be to wait until 10.5, which is supposed to be RSN. Or maybe what I need to do is get better hardware (i.e. more memory) or else change my habits (of having ten apps open on a regular basis, and three browser windows with multiple tabs in each) or something.

Anyhow. There’s no actual point to this entry, other than I’m not concentrating well on things this week. I’ve got several things that need writing, and I’m hoping that a bit of random blogging will prime the pump.

For the past twenty-four hours, the city where I live has been in a state of snow emergency: essentially, the word from the mayor’s office has been to stay off the roads. I can’t say that I was particularly tempted, all things considered.

Notably, my university’s campus is closed today as it was yesterday. This is pretty close to unprecedented, since even a single “snow day” is pretty much considered a last-resort kind of thing; there’s no official policy, and the unofficial one seems to be that campus closes when the city’s shut down.

This is the first winter in eight years where I’ve had to wield a shovel. Dammit.

One effect of the winter-that-is is that I’m driving into school more; this is partly due to the fact that the obligations of shovelling various walkways (including the one from the street to my building on campus) are being honoured more in the breach than the observance, and partly because my typical day on campus has me leaving several hours after the sun has gone down, which isn’t ideal for walking home for half an hour. (I tried, last week, and I was about ten minutes into the walk when some random stranger pulled over and offered me a ride home.) Hence, car.

But one of the quirks of the early-model Prius that I drive is the dreaded turtle. This is a dashboard light (amber, and turtle-shaped) that is meant to appear when something’s up with the hybrid battery; in the past, it’s generally only made an appearance on those rare occasions¹ when I’ve run totally out of gas and was proceeding solely on electrical power.² According to some quick research (i.e. reading web pages), though, the indicator can also shows its… shell?… when the temperatures are 2 3xxtr3m3 for the poor car.

Like, say, a sustained -20°C or so.

So yeah, been seeing the turtle a lot lately. What it’s supposed to indicate is that you shouldn’t do a lot of hard acceleration, since there’s currently issues with the electrical system. Given my past experiences, I was a little bit wild-eyed about it, but since the battery meter says all is well back there, I’m just driving very slowly. (Which is probably for the best, since I’ve noticed before that the old Prius isn’t at its best when accelerating from a stop over packed snow. Slow and easy = the right idea. Hopefully, things will warm up before my scheduled bout of highway driving this weekend.)

[1]: I’ve done it three times. Twice, there was a gas station within about fifty meters. The third time was less fun.

[2]: This is officially considered a Bad Idea, incidentally, though apparently you can mod the new Prii pretty easily to run electric-only for short bursts; this might even be available from the dealer in Europe and Asia. Of course, the newer models don’t have the turtle either, since I guess whatever bugs mine suffers from were worked out shortly thereafter.