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Quizno's Girl

Michael — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 02:38:10 -0700

New item (Created August 25, 2008)
Categories: Observations

I got a sandwich at Quizno's the other day; when I sat down to eat I noticed a piece of masking tape holding the wrapper closed with a smiley face drawn on it, next to a MySpace address. I typed it in when I got home; it was the girl behind the counter who'd rung up my sandwich. Not my type, but thanks! I'm not sure what her desperation level must have been, but I admire her guts. Either that or this sort of thing's gonna happen more as I get older, and I have no complaints about that. My younger self would've been intrigued...

Tropic Thunder

Michael — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:20:17 -0700

New item (Created August 21, 2008)
Categories: Movies

"Tropic Thunder" is actually pretty good; I was surprised. Wouldn't have guessed it after the first 20 minutes. Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise basically carry the show — Cruise makes me wonder just for a second if he's really been the one pulling the strings all along, and is gonna turn around some day and laugh and say, "Oh, that whole Scientology thing? That was pretty silly, wasn't it? And to think I had all of you fooled, all these years... You actually thought I believed that shit? Ha ha ha, the joke's on you!"

More Comments

Michael — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:31:00 -0700

New item (Created August 12, 2008)
Categories: Observations

James points out: According to some article (I'd love to find it), the more comments code has, the worse it tends to be.

Didn't I Say

Michael — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:29:00 -0700

New item (Created August 12, 2008)
Categories: Observations

James points out: "Didn't I say..." is the polite version of "I told you so!"

Holidays

Michael — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:45:20 -0700

New item (Modified August 8, 2008, Created August 9, 2008)

Who is Henry Hoyal and why did he cancel Father's Day and Christmas Eve?

Scrabuless

Michael — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:53:07 -0700

Updated item (Created August 7, 2008)
Categories: Ideas

Since Scrabulous was taken down at Facebook, I've tried playing the game at the Scrabulous site, where it's still (mostly) alive and kicking. The only way to replicate the Facebook-based experience (being able to play a huge number of games in parallel in non-realtime) seems to be by using the "over emails" function at the official site, which is supposed to send a notification to whomever's turn is next whenever a move is made. But that's having problems now; it doesn't send anything most of the time, which makes the game hard to play (or impossible to play if you don't get the initial notification about someone's having started a game with you). (I wouldn't doubt that their email server is overloaded by an influx of Facebook users looking for a fix...)

Often when I run into buggy software, especially when it's a simple game, I think (in a kind of cocky way, sure!), that, well, I could program that myself, and do it right. And this is definitely one of those cases! I could create a pretty simple Scrabulous-like game (I'd do it in Javascript, not Flash) that implements all the basics required for turn-play. The back-end functionality could perhaps go on Google App Engine so scalability wouldn't be a problem just in case it gets popular, and finally the remaining question is: What to call it?

If I called it "Scrabulicious" or "Scrabuless" (thanks Matthew) would the Scrabulous people, who are being sued by the Scrabble people, in turn sue me for copying their copy?

(Yes, this entire post was just a giant build-up for that one philosophical question. But I'm still two-thirds serious about actually creating it! Yet how to avoid lawsuits? Go the Yahoo/Literati way and create a similar-yet-different game with a wholly different name?)

Hybrid Fruit

Michael — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:08:27 -0700

Updated item (Created August 3, 2008)
Categories: Observations

I wrote a blog post, years ago (which I'm too lazy to find) making fun of the name "pluot" as used for that hybrid plum-apricot fruit you can buy in the supermarket. Shouldn't it be called "plumicot" (which sounds better than "apriplum" which still sounds better than "pluot")? I pronounced "pluot" with a long 'u', too, which is incorrect — the real pronunciation ('cording to Wikipedia) is even harder to say, with the 'u' sounding like it does in plum. What other words have the sounds "uh" and "ah", "uh-ah", next to each other? Uh, ah, none. Wikipedia sheds a wee bit of light on the fruit, and why it's not called "plumicot" (which (without the 'i') means something else). See: pluot (a 75/25 plum/apricot hybrid); plumcot (a 50/50 plum/apricot hybrid); aprium (a 75/25 apricot/plum hybrid). I recently re-discovered pluots, despite the silly sounding name, as being incredibly tasty fruit and have been buying them whenever I'm at the store.

I've never seen nor tried a Peacotum (ha ha), though:

A Peacotum is a peach/apricot/plum hybrid, said to taste similar to fruit punch, created by Zaiger's Genetics, a company that develops novel fruit through deliberate hybridization.

I don't know why "Peacotum" should be capitalized whereas the others aren't; it's also the silliest sounding name of all. Here are the best meldings I can come up with that are achievable with each possible ordering of the three fruits:

peapriplum
pealumcot
apripealum
pleachicot
apripleach
plumicotch.

"Pleachicot" has the best ring to it, I say.

Illogicality of English

Michael — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:42:46 -0700

Updated item (Modified July 30, 2008, Created June 21, 2008)
Categories: Grammar

I like the illogicality of English, and I don't mean that sarcastically. It takes more knowledge and literariness than most languages to use properly. Without proper usage it's still easy to communicate and to be understood, but I like that I can gauge others' backgrounds and interests to some degree by how they speak and write. Without claiming to be that great of a writer myself (but would that be false humility? hmm...), I respect good usage and style.

Fast Drying

Michael — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 02:40:52 -0700

Updated item (Created July 30, 2008)
Categories: Ideas

As the drum inside a clothes dryer turns, the dryer relies on gravity to let the articles of clothing fall from the top of the dryer to the bottom and thereby tumble around, in accordance with the washing instructions tag which says "tumble dry". An important function of a dryer is, then, tumbling action, which happens because of gravity. Drying speed is limited by the rate at which tumbling happens — you might think that if you increased the rate at which the drum inside the dryer turns, it would dry your clothes off faster, but that's clearly not the case — when the drum is spinning very fast, at most the dryer is squeezing your clothes up against the side of the drum due to centrifugal force (or centripetal force exerted inwards by the sides of the dryer, however you choose to look at it), but there's not going to be much tumbling action going on, just squishing action, and that's no better than the washer's centrifugal last hurrah, which leaves your clothes damp as opposed to sopping.

After that introduction, it should be clear that because gravity plays an important role in the automatic clothes drying process, should you ever find yourself in a zero-gee environment and need to do laundry, you'd be faced with a problem. What you need is a device which simulates gravity and provides rotation to create the tumbling action, which is the idea I'm presenting here. Essentially your dryer would have two axes of rotation: the drum which turns around with your clothing inside is itself attached to an arm which spins around in a circle. The centrifuging action of the arm causes the drum with the clothes to feel an overall outward force as strong as you'd like, and the turning of the drum on its own axis causes the clothes to tumble from the 'top', that being from the surface of the drum oriented towards the central pivot of the arm, to the 'bottom', that being the farthest away point in the circle.

Before you dismiss this as completely theoretical and irrelevant because there are probably better ways of dealing with the problem of washing clothes in space which, for example, rely on properties of water in a vacuum, or of clothing made from space-age materials which don't ever need washing in the first place (but which are probably not as comfortable as cotton), combined with the fact that in all likelihood you won't find yourself in space anytime soon, think about the practical applications of a more complex orbital model for clothes dryers down here on Earth. Given that clothes take an entire hour for a standard dryer to dry, there's probably demand for an improvement in speed with respect to the automatic drying process. Besides this being a patentable concept (although so obscure that I really don't expect anyone to steal it, which is why I'm posting it here), it may be, in actuality, pretty easy to implement. The basic premise of my device is that because you could control the speed at which the pivot that the drum is attached to turns, you could crank up the "gravity" your clothes feel to any amount. Want to dry at 10 G's? No problem! Just turn the appropriate dial. There'll be ten times as much squeezing action as each item splats across the drum from the 'top' to the 'bottom', more speed and turbulence through the hot air filling the center of the drum; consequently the overall drying process ought to be accelerated many-fold, no pun intended.

This idea would be equally applicable to turbo rock tumblers, cement mixers, and most other devices that rely on gravity over time in the form of repeated falls to get some sort of job done.

Just remember, you read about it here first.

KCRW Playlist Fail

Michael — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:32:29 -0700

Updated item (Created July 29, 2008)
Categories: Observations

KCRW (89.9 FM around these parts) plays some pretty neat music sometimes, and I also know that they maintain complete playlists at their website. Whenever I hear something I like on that station (inevitably while driving), I'll pull out my phone and quickly send myself a mostly blank email so that when I get back to a computer, based on the timestamp, I'll be able to go find and download the song I'd been listening to by referencing the online playlist. About the last five times I've done this, however, I've carefully gone through all of the songs within a large margin of temporal error as listed in the playlist according to my timestamp, but didn't find anything sounding like what I'd heard. The latest failure was a song I heard around 11:27 P.M. — I came home and immediately looked up what had been playing around that time on July 28th, but after listening to snippets of about ten songs, I found nothing even in remotely the same style. What's up with that?