breakfast first

A Flock of Segers

Ficus was just over and showed me A Flock of Segers, a site blog dedicated to "the wordplay of combining titles of bands (or movies) in order to form new, better names." Very funny, and some good photoshopping, too.

Scratch Tracks

This is genius -- a Washington state lottery scratch-off game for iPods. You know you've made it when your product is more appealling than money.

Took another sip of the potion and hit the three-wheel motion

Faced with the triple-whammy of the impending baby, the search for a house, and the geography of Seattle, Miss J and I caved in this weekend and bought a car. We held out as long as we could, but circumstances finally got the better of us.

We ended up leasing a nice Honda Accord, also known as Generic Car. Leasing was actually a great option for us, since we both work at home and won't put many miles on the car, and since we don't want to tie our money up with a baby and a house in the near future. I'd never leased a car before, so it was fun to learn all about how lease financing works in preparation for dealing with the car salesmen. (I admit a grim satisfaction at negotiating car deals.)

In addition to the Accord, we also looked in the Passat (aka Urban Family Car) and the Saab 9-3 (confidential to Ron in Palo Alto: we used the product!). The Passat GLX was our top pick (the GLS felt terrible, by the way); it had everything we wanted and looks great. Unfortunately, you pay through the nose for that -- leasing the GLX would have worked out to more than twice as much as our lease on the Accord. No thanks, I'd rather put that money towards my mortgage or my kid's outrageous future tuition.

One funny thing came up during the negotiations: we wanted a lease though Honda Finance, since they're offering ridiculously good rates. As we were doing the paperwork, the salesman casually mentioned that the dealership would need to run a credit check. I protested; obviously Honda Finance needed to run a credit check, but the dealer shouldn't have to -- and with mortgage applications in my future, I didn't want any unnecessary inquiries. The salesman told me it was standard, standard, standard. Yeah, why? Well, they just had to verify that I was who I say I am. Why? It's part of the Patriot Act. What?! Yes, it's not us; the federal government makes us verify that you're not a terrorist by running a credit check.

This smelled like total crap to me, so I kept protesting and finally told him that I wasn't comfortable with that and I would have to go home and do some research about that before I consented. Of course, the threat of leaving always changes things, and suddenly the sales manager was willing to take Honda Finance's word that I "was not a terrorist". The salesman went on and on about how exceptional this was -- he'd never, ever seen the sales manager bend the rules like that. Yeah, whatever.

When I got home, I did a little bit of investigation and apparently Section 326 of Patriot Act does redefine car dealerships as "financial institutions" and requires them to verify the identity of people involved in the transaction and check that they do not appear on the list of known or suspected terrorists (aka, Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons) in an attempt to crack down on money laundering. As far as I could tell, nothing specifically states that a credit check needs to be performed -- I think a driver's license would do just as well. Credit reports are probably just an expedient way to meet the federal requirements and an easy way for the dealership to get a bunch of information about you to boot -- at your expense, of course. If you find yourself in a similar situation, don't let them get away with it.

Drawing class, episode 7

Last Wednesday night I headed over to drawing class for the first time in weeks, having missed the two previous classes on account of travelling. Unfortunately, I also hadn't so much as touched a pencil during those weeks, so I was feeling really out of practice.

I missed the bus I regularly take to class, so I arrived a few minutes after the official start time and was surprised to see only one other student in the room (one of the original guys from the class). The instructor suggested we wait a while for other students, since traffic was bad that night, so the three of us talked about the coming Green Line monorail and other random stuff. After twenty minutes, the instructor gave up waiting and started the lesson on shading.

We had a quick discussion of how light and shadow appear on the basic shapes (cubes, cones, spheres) and how to represent light values. As always, the concepts are straight-forward, but their application is not for me. As an exercise, the instructor grabbed two sheets of plain paper, crumpled one up a bit, set it atop the other sheet of paper., and put it under a spotlight. The other student and I were to make a shaded drawing of the sheets of paper (and the table they rested on). The finished product should have no lines, the instructor told us, just edges of contrast. Right.

I quickly discovered that my drawing was even rustier than I'd thought -- I had a very difficult time even getting the general outline of the picture on the page, once again underscoring the need for at least 15 minutes of practice every day. While we were plugging away on the drawing, another student came in and got the shading speed-lesson. She then joined us in drawing the crumpled paper. About ten minutes later, another student showed up, got the scoop on shading, and went to work.

Just about the time when I was giving up on my drawing, the instructor told us to take a break from what we were doing to go next door to the "real" art class, where they once again had a live model, to practice more fast figure drawing. With my being completely rusty, you can imagine how well this worked out, despite the model holding each pose for a leisurely 45 seconds or so. I drew stick figures for about twenty minutes or so before we headed back to our classroom, were the crumpled paper waited patiently.

We all got back to work, but after two minutes or so, I just got really annoyed. Nothing I was doing to the drawing was improving it at that point, and pushing harder wasn't going to help me learn anything, so I called the instructor over (he had just been off on his own) and told him so. "What do I do with this drawing?" I asked. He sat down, squinted at the crumpled paper, and started reworking my drawing. He wasn't explaining what he was doing, but at least I got to watch someone who knew what he was doing. He (and the other students) drew on and on while I looked over shoulder. After about twenty minutes, he turned to me and said, "I think you pulled a Tom Sawyer on me." Sort of, I said, but in this case I didn't know how to paint the fence myself. He continued working on the drawing until the end of the class, when we all put the drawings up on the wall to see how they turned out. "Mine" was definitely the best.

Our homework for next week is to draw a shaded self-portrait; no lines. That seems so unappealing to me that I think I may just not do it -- I'd rather spend the time working on basic sketching rather than force myself to try something trickier. Next week's our last class anyway. The instructor's keeping the topic of the final class a surprise, so it's sure to be a doozy.

Baby books

The Seattle PI ran an article yesterday on lilaguides, which they describe as a type of Zagat guide for new parents. The lila city guides cover everything from where to shop for maternity clothes to what parks are the best for kids. Since Miss J and I barely know Seattle, this should be very helpful. I'll report back when I pick one up.

May I have the envelope please?

Yesterday afternoon Miss J and I went to the ultrasound office, and while it's not certain, it looks like we're going to have...a daughter! I'm very excited. I had a feeling it was a girl. (The Chinese Calendar concurs.)

Still, it's not certain, since the baby -- either demurely or rebelliously -- kept its legs crossed during the entire exam, only uncrossing them when we weren't looking. Based on the few glimpses the doctor did catch, she reckons it's a girl.

Now the baby name fighting can begin in earnest.

Programming language news: sad, interesting, and funny

Three interesting items on programming languages have come to my attention in the past 24 hours, so I thought I'd pass them along:

First, on a sad note, I learned today that Ken Iverson, the creator of APL, died back in October of 2004. I learned APL as a freshman in college, and it completely changed the way I looked at computers and programming. While I detected that shift in perception as a freshman, it took me many years to fully appreciate its consequence.

Second, yesterday CJ linked to an interview with Alan Kay in ACM Queue. I have something of a love/hate relationship with Alan Kay. While he's a very smart guy who has done some interesting work (Smalltalk, for example) and who continues to do interesting work (check out Croquet), he never hesitates to blast away at the direction computer science and software engineering has gone.  His comparison of programming to literature is faulty; what makes literature good or bad fundamentally comes down to a matter of taste (personal and social), while what makes software good or bad, like other feats of engineering, comes down to whether it works or not. And while the internet is a giant mass of duct tape and baling wire, holy shit, it works. While we can and should do better, don't pretend that this doesn't matter. Had the world decided to wait until everything was perfect, we'd still be waiting.

That segues nicely into the final, humorous item, a parody of Paul Graham's essays. Fantastic stuff.

Drawing class, take 5

The title's a bit misleading, as I cut class tonight so I could pack. Miss J and I are headed down to San Francisco tomorrow for business, but we'll also be there for our anniversary on Monday, which we're really happy about. It's not by design, but we've ended up spending every anniversary in San Francisco. This one will make eight -- hard to believe. It seems like only yesterday that Mr. TD was going wild in the bus we'd rented, post-reception, on the way to celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

It was on our first anniversary that I surprised Jennifer with a trip to SF (neither of us had ever been), and that's when we fell in love with the city. A few short months later, we were living there, a thousand little pieces having magically fallen into place. I can't wait to be back, if only for a week.

Saving IM conversations

Now that I work remotely, an enormous amount of my work is done over IM, and a lot of these conversations have details that I'd like to refer back to (and search) later. I know that several companies make IM archival systems for the financial industry, but for individuals, why isn't there simply a "mail all conversations to [email protected]" option on IM clients? Having my IM client silently mail me a timestamped record of the conversation every time I close a conversation window seems like an ideal lightweight solution.

Storage, comrade!

I'm excited to report that some of i-drive.com's Soviet propaganda-style artwork can be found here (3rd row down), in the designer's portfolio. When I briefly worked for i-drive, this art was everywhere in the company -- shirts, stickers, and best of all, on giant banners in our very, very dot-com office. I must admit, I found the banners strangely inspiring.