Irritating Acronyms

I am looking on Calagator this morning to see what's going on this week and I find there is an EMC Symposium at PSU next Monday. Okay, what's EMC? Well, there's a PDF file which tells me that this event is:

EMC 2009
WHEN EMC AND SIGNAL INTEGRITY MEET
A Tutorial and Exhibition

But it still doesn't tell me what EMC is. Electronic Manufacturers Consortium? Electro-Magnetic Charisma? Effervescent Magical Conundrums? What we have here is an incestuous jargon fest. Only those in the know will attempt to penetrate their outer shield of obfuscation. Idjits.

Google-ing EMC turns up a company called EMC, that doesn't bother to define their initials either. I look for an email contact that I can click on, but that seems a little excessive for obtaining the definition of an acronym. Eventually I notice at the bottom of the Google search results page EMC acronym which gets me to the eEngineer's Glossary, where I finally get a definition:

Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC)
The capability of equipment or systems to be used in their intended environment within designed efficiency levels without causing or receiving degradation due to unintentional EMI. EMC generally encompasses all of the electromagnetic disciplines.

All the electromagnetic disciplines? Turns out there are a bunch of them.

• Electromagnetic Disturbance (EMD)
• Electromagnetic Emissions (EME)
• Electromagnetic Environment (EME)
• Electromagnetic Environmental Effects (EEE) or (E3)
• Electromagnetic Field (EMF)
• Electromagnetic Interference (EMI)
• Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) Coupling Paths
• Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)
• Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR)
• Electromagnetic Vulnerability (EMV)

All of which are talking about radio waves. Might be interesting, but then there's the $225 fee. They will wave the fee for full-time students. I wonder whether they would accept that I am a full time student of life? I mean, I must be, I don't have a job.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Camouflage

Can't make out just what you are looking at? Click on the picture to see a larger version. Found on Dutty's Blog.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Sun Java Update

I don't like to pick on Sun Microsystems. They are not a giant evil corporation like Microsoft. They are relatively small company that has tried to make a go of it by doing the right thing. Okay, that may be a bit much. They did come up with Java, which Microsoft attempted to hijack, and they are supporting Open Source, so they are generally okay in my book.

I got a notice on my Windows XP system that there was a Java Update available, and there didn't seem to be any way of getting rid of it. You could delay the installation for a couple of days, but this stupid update program is going to keep coming back until you let it install it's stupid update. I don't need this update, I didn't ask for it, and I don't want it, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get rid of it. Fine, go ahead and burn a couple of minutes of my time you stupid program. At least you will stop bugging me. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

I don't really know if I need the update or not. My computer works fine, well, good enough. I see no reason to go messing with it. There is a possibility that there is some obscure bug that this update will fix, and I will only notice it because some occasional glitch in my web surfing will go away.

More likely, it is going to add some annoying new feature, like these dad burn fly-over popups. There will be some magic links in a bit of text on your screen, and if you move your mouse over them, accidentally or on purpose, this little window will pop up "tellin' me more and more about some useless information supposed to fire my imagination", and blocking my view of the text, and it won't even have a close button on it, you just have to wait for it to time out. Whoever first started using this particular device for advertising should be taken out behind the barn and shot. Dad burned whipper-snappers.

So I've been watching the update process and these splash screens look a little ragged, especially this last one. Are they using JPEG's for high contrast text? Idiots. It looks like s**t. Maybe it's just my old, low resolution screen (1280 x 1024). Maybe I'm not part of their target demographic. Maybe they shouldn't be cramming this update down... now, now, we've already been over that. So why do they put this up? I haven't seen a more wretched display of text since Windows 3.0 initial splash screen. I mean just look at this thing:

Because Sun is not Microsoft, and any enemy of my enemy is, at least temporarily, a friend of mine, I thought I would drop them a note. So I try to sign up for their web forum, and this is what I get:

Can't contact the web server. Try again later.

Bah.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture with similar, equally wretched, one.

Forty Years

I got a note this week from a woman I went to high school with back in Ohio 40 years ago. It seems that she and her buddies are cooking up a reunion. When I left Utica, I thought I would never go back. I really did not like high school. But now, after hearing some of the names of people I went to school with I am thinking I might go. I mean it's been 40 years. Some of the anger and resentment should have worn off by now. Some of the people I remember clearly, for one reason of another. Some of them I didn't remember until I heard the name, and some of them, well, the name sounds awfully familiar but I don't really remember the person.

I imagine Granville High will be holding a reunion as well. I knew a bunch of people from Granville as well. It was closer to my house than Utica was. If the dates are anywhere close I might be able to go to both.

Getting there will be a bit of problem. It's 2500 miles by car, which would amount to 5 days of driving and $200+ for gas, times two. Or for a similar sum of money and a day of misery, I could fly. I just hate flying, but I don't think I really want to drive all that way. Arrrg.

Old Man of the Wood

Walking home from the auto shop yesterday I noticed this statue in someone's yard.

Pam Lusardi

Pam Lusardi died in a plane crash on Chehalem mountain this week. I worked with Pam on occasion when I was at Intel. We got along well. She was one of the good guys. I remember walking down the hall towards the end of my tenure there and her telling me that "Intel is very politcal", and me sagely nodding my head in agreement while I am silently screaming: "arrgh! No, I had no idea, no wonder everything is so screwed up and I am so frustrated with this whole nightmare."

She and another person were commuting from Salem to Hillsboro by light plane and ran into fog and it looks like they basically flew into the mountain. The pilot was Steve Fordyce. My friend Marc knew him, worked with him at Nvidia and on airplanes.

They will both be sorely missed.

The Statesman-Journal has more details.

Movies

Yesterday on the way to the grocery store, darling daughter and I passed by the old mom-and-pop video store. They've been going out of business for the last couple of months or so, but today looked like the very end: All DVD's $1 each. Now that's a bargain in anybody's book, so we stopped in to take a look. I wasn't expecting to find much of anything, but in five minutes I had a stack of a dozen or so disks. Daughter found some she wanted as well. We ended up with 16 all told.

This morning I went through the stack to see just what I had purchased and found only two that might actually be worth watching. The rest of them I picked up for some other reason. Here's what I found:

• Warbirds. Dinosaurs and WWII fighter aircraft. This has got to be the "B" movie of the century. I picked it up just because the premise was so ridiculous.
• Kibakichi 2. Japanese samurai and Japanese ghosts, er, werewolves. I had seen this one on the shelf several times, but as a rental, I always passed. But for $1? How can I resist?
• Threshold. "SciFi Essentials". "The Infestation Has Begun." It's science fiction, it's essential. I should buy it? It's only a buck.
• Space Age. A six hour mini-series hosted by Patrick Stewart. I have six hours to spend listening to the Captain of the Enterprise drone on about stuff I already know? Eh, maybe.
• Redacted. Or rather: Brian De Palma's Redacted. This one promises to be worth watching, if I haven't already seen it.
• Red Road. This might be okay as well. Prize winner at a couple of film festivals. "The Best Thriller of 2007".
• Little Children. Banner at the top of the cover proclaims: "3 Academy Award Nominations". Not sure why I picked this one up. Maybe the banner was all I needed.
• Lust | Caution. "From the Academy Award-winning director of Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I am pretty much down on movies about homosexuals. I've seen two, and that was two too many. But Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, now that was a great movie. But looking at the scenes on the cover now, I may have already seen this movie.
• Zelary. Academy Award Nominee (Best Foreign Language Film). Looks like a WWII Story. I do not think there are any dinosaurs in this one. This might be okay as well.
• Around The World In 80 Days. I think this might be the original. There are two disks. Will I be able to find anyone here to watch it with me?
• Shadow of Doubt. An old Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Same thing here. It might be a decent movie, but I doubt anyone in my house will want to watch a 50, er, 66 (!) year old movie.

Okay, it looks like there might be more than two that will be worth watching, but there are several that I picked up for other reasons, which probably means I won't watch them.