Internet Scam

Update: Amazon was not an accomplice. An Amazon receipt got mixed in with all the Dazzling white papers.

A friend of mine got roped into a scam, and Amazon.com was an accomplice. DazzleWhite & CleanWhites offer these low cost "no-risk" free trials of their product. However, the fine print tells says you are going to be charged something like $250 if you do not cancel, and cancelling requires jumping through numerous hoops. Cancelling the order cost an her an hour and $15, with no assurance that she is shut of these guys.

Looking for a Job

Every week I go through the motions of looking of for a job. I look on Craigslist, find a half dozen or so jobs that look like possibilities and I send them a copy of my resume. This time I thought I would try and make my cover letters a little more interesting than the usual blather.

Note #1

Clarity in code and communication is of primary importance. I enjoy working with code. I like to think I can communicate with most people.

Once upon a time I had a friend in Houston who had a Weimaraner (dog). Nice dog, but he could be very tough/dense/stubborn. My friend literally had to hit him with a 2 by 4 to get his attention. (Anyway, that's what he told me. I don't recall ever seeing him hit the dog.) Anything less was just something to be ignored. There are people like that, and generally speaking you aren't allowed to hit them with 2 by 4's. These people can be very difficult to communicate with. Fortunately, they are few and far between.

Ordinary people are a joy to work with by comparison.

Note #2

Designing and writing software requires a couple of special skills. One is to be able to construct a model of the program in your mind. The second is to be able to translate various components of this imaginary model into code that will perform required function. These two skills go hand in hand. One needs to understand how computers work (at least at some level) in order to figure out how to make them do what you want.

That is enough if you are working by yourself, but if you are part of a group effort, you need to be able to communicate with your fellows, and communicate effectively. Simply telling people in some cases is sufficient. Others need to have it repeated several times. Other people do better with written information, and some people do better with pictures.

On Line Applications

Some companies want you to apply on-line. Some of these applications are pretty straight forward, but some of them are getting to be onerous. Some places will parse your resume and figure out everything they need to know from that. Some places use tagged fields, so you can useGoogle's Autofill feature to fill them in.

But some of them ask you to fill in your employment history, your educational background, and your references. All my history is in my resume, that's why I wrote it. You want me to enter all my data in your data base for you? I don't think so. I'm sorry, that's a bit much, especially since I probably won't make the first cut anyway. (Pergiel? What kind of name is that? Next! (Okay, I'm being facetious here.))

And references? I will be happy to give you some references, but only after we have talked and you are considering hiring me. Then I will give you references. Not before.

Then there are passwords. Everybody wants you to pick a password for their site. I have one password I use for all these. I picked it out over a year ago and it has worked very well. Until today. OHSU won't allow passwords with double letters. What is the matter with these people? We really need someone to set some kind of standards for this kind of thing. Something that will log you into the net and automatically identify yourself to all these stupid sites that think they are something special. It's getting to be ridiculous.

People

Black & White

We went through MSP (Minneapolis-St. Paul airport) when we flew to Iowa after Christmas, and I went through there again when I few to Columbus, Ohio, about a month ago. Both times I was struck by the apparent segregation of the races: all of the passengers were white, and all of the service personnel were black. There were a few exceptions, but they were rare.

Coffee Shop Encounter

I went into a coffee shop to buy a something to eat, like a scone or a bagel. It was crowded and I was standing a bit back from the counter. A young woman behind the counter smiled at me, made eye contact and gestured for me to come forward. I was surprised and pleased by this intimate gesture. I told her what I wanted, and she asked if I wanted anything else, like a cup of coffee or something. I said, no, just the roll would be fine. At that point the smile vanished and I became just one more customer. What puzzles me is why she put any effort into the sale at all. It was just a little weird, the way she appeared friendly, and suddenly retreated back into her drone persona. Does it make any difference to this story if she was black or white?

Russians

I rented a car at the Columbus airport. After taking care of business at the counter inside, I walked out to the garage to pick up my car. There was a young woman out there monitoring the situation. I talked to her briefly. I think she was Russian. She had an accent that sounded Russian to me. I wonder if I could tell a Russian accent from one from any of the other Eastern block countries. Or maybe it's because we get more immigrants from Russia than from any of those other places.

When I returned the car a young man met me to check in the car. He had a similar accent to the young woman I had spoken to earlier. Also from Russia? Tough gig, hanging out in a parking garage which is either boiling or freezing 6 months of the year. Nothing to do for long periods of time except wait for the next customer and all of sudden you have to make nice. And probably not making much more than minimum wage.

Quote of the Day

Best explanation of what's wrong with Communism I have seen.

"Of course you might understand," said Sue, "but unless you've actually lived there- It's just that they have something like a mafia there, only it runs the whole country. If you belong to it you're absolutely safe, because it protects its own-"
...
"I meant it's a kind of mafia," said Sue. "That's what everyone calls it, although the official name for it is the Communist Party. Like the mafia, it's a law unto itself."
...
"Are the police on the take, the way they are in the States?"
"No, not exactly. The police are just extremely well paid, better than most people, and have all kinds of bonuses and privileges. They obey orders. Occasionally one faction of the mafia- I mean the Party- uses the police to get rid of another which is losing ground. Once they even hanged twelve of them, all at once-"

From The Return of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skvorecky. "There" is Czechoslovakia, back in the bad old days.

I picked this one up because it looked like a light murder mystery, it's only 159 pages long, but the plot keeps going in circles and I have become completely confused. I will probably have to read it again just so I can get it straight in my head.

Someday I will learn enough html to indent paragraphs. Right now it appears you have to get into the header for the whole page, which I am not willing fool with.

Sante Fortunato - dance contortion ENC

Sante Fortunato - Hula Hoop/Contortion - ENC
sheu8
Darling daughter turned me on to this. Acrobatics, contortions, dance, circus.

Update July 2022 replaced missing video.

Mortality

There were about 175 people in my high school class (1969). 17 of them have died, roughly 10%. I didn't think too much about this when I first found out. Talking to a spouse of one of my classmates, who went to a different but similar size school, I find out that only one or two of their classmates had died. Some time ago I remember talking to a guy from Arizona who told me that half of the guys from his high school class had been killed in Vietnam. Don't have any idea how much truth there was in that statement, but I suppose it's possible. A lot of young guys did die in Vietnam.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Kind of cool, but full of "current scientific thinking". I read somewhere that some scientists had postulated that the universe could not be infinite because if it was, then the night sky would be white from the infinite number of stars. I am not sure I buy that argument. Each star only gives off so much light, and the farther you get from that star the fainter that light becomes until you are only getting an occasional photon from that particular star. So we are down to an infinite number of stars divided by a fixed amount of light times an infinite distance. Whose infinity is bigger? And then there is the business of the speed of light. Popular science flacks like to trot out that old saw about how "nothing can go faster than the speed of light", but that is a crock. There is no absolute velocity. There is no fixed point in the universe against which to measure your speed, so there is no way to tell what your absolute velocity is. It's all relative. All we can measure is our velocity relative to other objects, and our velocity compared to some distant astronomical objects appears to be much higher than the speed of light. The velocity of light relative to any fixed object is always the same: 186,000 miles per second. It does not matter how fast two objects are travelling relative to one another. If one directs a beam of light to the other and both measure the speed of light, it will be the same. This is what Michelson & Morley figured out a hundred years ago. On the other hand, you may have a hard time convincing the two parties that it is indeed the same beam of light because the frequency (or color) of the light will appear to be different to these two guys. 

That is how radar speed guns (used by the police) work: they mix the reflected radar signal with their outgoing signal and if the reflecting object is moving (like a car speeding down the road), these two signal will interfere with each other and produce a third wave at a much lower frequency that can easily be measured. This is where they get the speed measurement.

I don't like the Big Bang theory, it smells too much like creationism. "And the lord said let there be light, and there was light". Besides it's just a theory about what happened umpteen billion years ago, and like who was around back then who could verify our hypothesis one way or the other? Likewise, dark matter sounds a bit feeble, though there could be a large number of black holes lurking out there, throwing confusion into the calculations. And then there is the red shift of light from distant stars and galaxies. "Scientists" tell us that is because the universe is expanding and everything is flying apart. What if that is not the case? What if the light is just getting old and slow? I mean it has travelled a long way, for a really long time. And light is basically a disturbance of the all pervasive electromagnetic field. Maybe when you get a few, or a few million, light years away from a star, the field gets weaker/stronger, or otherwise changes, and it changes the light that comes through it. I find all this speculation about the origin, size and age of the universe just so much blather. It's really big and we haven't discovered the end of it. Whenever we look harder or deeper, we find more. That's nice. Let's send somebody out there to take a look, see if there really is anything out there or not. Maybe the universe is just a giant hollow ball filled with glowing lights, kind of like the Truman Show.