And now it's all this

Redirect

2005-09-09T23:36:00.000-05:00

I'll be shutting this blog down shortly. Everything has been moved to www.leancrew.com/all-this.

Blood and treasure

2005-08-16T22:13:00.000-05:00

I think we need to declare a moratorium on "blood and treasure." It has a good cadence, and unlike many rhetorical flights, it sounds manly and military and serious. Which is no doubt the reason pundits have latched onto it. But it's gotten to where I can't read an article on Iraq without running into it (or its flatter cousin, "lives and treasure").

One good thing about "blood and treasure" is that it forced me to look up what kind of rhetorical device it is. The Handbook of Rhetorical Devices was the first hit on Google and was exactly what I wanted. "Blood" is a synecdoche, where a part is used to stand for the whole--the "hand" in "hired hand," for example. "Treasure" is metonym, where something closely allied is substituted for the thing itself--referring to reporters as "the press" is a common example.

According to the Wikipedia (which I probably should have thought of before Google), synecdoche is a form of metonymy and is pronounced "sin-EK-duh-kee," sort of like Schenectady. In fact--and this is something only Google would tell you--there is a blog called Schenectady Synecdoche, written by a professor of writing at Syracuse University. I bet she thinks "blood and treasure" is hackneyed, too.

Sky High

2005-08-13T20:54:00.000-05:00

My local paper gave "Sky High" just one and a half stars, saying that it was a poor conglomeration of "Spy Kids," "The Incredibles," and any of the "Harry Potter" movies. Well, everyone is entitled to his opinion, so I won't quibble with his rating (except to say that he's full of shit: it's a very fun movie), but the resemblance to those three movies is superficial at best. What "Sky High" is most like is a John Hughes movie. And the likeness is clearly deliberate. Apart from the obvious high school setting and in-crowd vs. outcasts theme, every song in the movies is from the 80s, and the female lead is a delicate-looking redhead cast from the Molly Ringwald mold.

I was pretty proud of myself for making this connection, but then I did a Google search on the phrases "sky high" and "John hughes." 5460 hits. Guess my insight isn't so rare.

Spam, eggs, sausage and spam

2005-07-29T20:50:00.000-05:00

That's not got much spam in it

The spam section of my gmail account is getting smaller. Gmail has a special folder for spam that automatically deletes messages after 30 days. A few months ago, my spam folder had about 3000 messages; now it has 1200-1300. There are no spam filters upstream of this account, so this is a real decline in spam of over 50%. I haven't read any accounts of spam being on the decline, but is for me.

Dress Code

2005-07-21T22:05:00.000-05:00

Having spent much of the previous two days in airports, I am reminded of the knit golf shirt's ubiquity as traveling attire for middle-aged white guys (MAWGs). Apparently, the MAWG believes the golf shirt is a statement, a statement that he is of a certain class--to those of us who are middle-aged, golf still carries the aura of the well-off--but not stuffy. It says, in the mind of the MAWG, that he's a success, but still a guy's guy.

Knit three-button pullover shirts with a collar come in many colors and patterns, of course, but solids and subtle stripes just don't say "golf" and aren't the kind of shirt I'm talking about. No, the true golf shirt is of one of two types:

The first is the bold pattern, usually some abstract leaf motif or something reminiscent of a dashiki. No doubt the pattern is thought to add to the "I may look like your father, but I'm not a square" statement.

The second is the logoed shirt. It could be solid or thin-striped, but it has a company logo on the left breast or, less commonly, the sleeve. The logo certainly detracts from the "I'm not a square" statement, but it fairly screams "GOLF OUTING!!!" And if the logo is for a company other than your own, that means you are a Valued Customer and not just another salesman. Of course, you have to let anyone you're traveling with know that you work for another company and the shirt was given to you by your good friends at XYZ Inc. at their last outing in Myrtle Beach. In fact, there's a funny story about that...

The golf shirt is always tucked in. MAWGs who go to the gym often benefit from this, because it tends to make muscular guys look trim, even if age has made them thick in the waist. Oddly, truly thin MAWGs don't get the same benefit. I suspect this has something to do with the golf shirt's tight sleeves drawing attention to the muscular MAWG's arms, but further research is needed.

While the appearance of the thin MAWG is not helped by the tucked-in golf shirt, at least it is not hurt. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the fat MAWG, especially the most common type of fat MAWG who carries his weight around the middle. The golf shirt clings to the spare tire and, in a freshly-tucked shirt, hoists it up so passers-by can get a better view. Worse, though, is what the golf shirt does to the fat MAWG's bellybutton. The shirt, which follows the large tummy's convexity, suddenly goes flat at the navel, stretched tightly across the sinkhole. The rapid change in curvature plays tricks with the light; from some angles it appears that you can see through the shirt into gaping maw itself.

I have two more plane trips scheduled for the next two weeks, and with luck that will be it for the summer. With cooler weather, the golf shirts go back in the drawers, waiting for Memorial Day to bloom again.

Travel Day

2005-07-20T00:21:00.000-05:00

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'Gitche Gumee'

Route 41 runs along the west edge of Superior's Keweenaw Bay in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. As I drove south on 41 from Houghton to Baraga at around midnight, I went past a break in the trees between the road and the bay where I could look straight down the bay and into the full moon. The moonlight reflected off the water in a short shiny streak that shimmied with the waves. It was gone in less than a second, but made the trip worthwhile.

It's been a long day and my planned posting on the bore three rows behind me on the flight from Chicago to Minneapolis--the one with the voice that cut through the engine noise, you've probably run into him yourself--will have to wait. So, too, my thoughts on how the knit golf shirt has become the unofficial uniform of middle-aged white guys.

One thing I will say is that the world has become a very different place when you can get a wifi connection in a crummy little Best Western in the YouPee. And the place doesn't even bother to advertise it.

A Third-Rate Leak

2005-07-12T22:24:00.000-05:00

The Rove thing and the White House response (or non-response) reminds many of us of a certain age of the storied days of the Nixon administration. "Stonewalling" is the term being used to describe Scott McClellan's recent performance, but I'm hoping for the reappearance of the "modified limited hangout route."

Temperature conversion card for HPDA

2005-06-30T21:57:00.000-05:00

Here is a picture of a temperature conversion index card I have in my HPDA. The scale on the left is for the normal range of temperatures; the scale on the right is for a much broader range that includes temperatures I often need to convert at work.

I made the card by writing a PostScript file and then converting it to a PDF file using ps2pdf. In writing the PostScript, I reused the hashmarks subroutine that I had written for my ruler card.

You may think the Celsius<=>Fahrenheit conversion so simple that this card is a waste. But it's much faster to scan the card than to pull out the calculator and do the 9/5 and 32 thing. Especially when you don't have your calculator with you. (Yes, there's a calculator on my cell phone, but it's amazingly inconvenient.)

You may also think the scale on the right is useless. It probably is for you, but I used it twice today when I needed to convert the melting points of a some metal alloys. If you dig into the PS file, you'll see that the code for the scale on the right is on lines 114-174. Cut these out, and you'll have the everyday temperature scale by itself. Change first number on line 59 from 3.50 to 4.25, and you'll move the scale to the center of the card.

A slight alteration of this card would be useful for traveling in another country: the temperature scale on the left and a currency conversion scale on the right would take care of two common issues for Americans abroad. Pounds<=>kilograms and miles<=>kilometers could be on the back side.

Ruler Card for Hipster PDA

2005-06-29T23:02:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, the great 43 Folders
had a post about a set of interesting PDF templates made by John Norris for the Hipster PDA. One of the templates was a ruler, which I thought was a great idea but poorly executed because they looked like bitmaps that were fuzzy. So I decided to make my own crisp PDF versions. Since I don't know how to write PDF directly, I wrote a PostScript file that I then converted to a PDF using ps2pdf.

This is what it looks like.

(I've since learned that the original source of the ruler John Norris used is a nice collection of PostScript and PDF rulers made by Michael Vendian. Somehow it got converted to a bitmap when John made up his templates. It's possible that had I learned this earlier I would have tried adapting one or two of Vendian's rulers. I'm glad I didn't because the format of mine is different enough that adapting would have been more effort than writing from scratch.)

A few notes on the construction and use:

I found that my printer (an HP LaserJet 2200) prints a bit small. When I held an actual ruler up to my first version of the index card rulers, the 4.5 inch mark on the index card was less than 4.5 inches from the zero. So I stuck in a fudge factor of 1.0035, which I called adjust, near the top of the PostScript file and used it to spread out the marks. If you find that your printer doesn't print the index card ruler accurately, you can change this value to whatever works for you.

Both the PostScript and PDF versions have the ruler positioned near the top center of a letter-sized sheet of paper. This works for me when printing the rulers on a manually-fed index card. If your printer works differently from mine, you'll have to adjust the initial position of the rulers; You'll find it on line 60 of the PostScript file. The comment above line 60 explains what it does and should give you enough info to make the changes you need.

After printing, I slice off the blank margins so the hash marks run right to the edge of the card, which makes it more like a real ruler. The card is now about a half-inch narrower than the others in my stack, so it's easy to locate quickly.

Within the PostScript file is a function, called hashmarks, that I wrote in a pretty general way. I've just reused it to make a temperature conversion card that I'll post about tomorrow. I see it being useful for making other conversion cards, too. I'm decent at mental arithmetic, but a simple dollars<=>pounds conversion card would have been a big help when I vacationed in London a couple of years ago.

Desk set

2005-06-17T23:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I bought some kitchen drawer organizer bins at Target, and today I cleaned out the upper left drawer of my desk and put the bins in. The results are:

If you look closely, you'll see that the bin with the binder clips and the bin with the paper clip dispenser were cut. They used to be one bin the same size as the bin with the pencil and leads, but I cut it in two to arrange things this way.

The bins are sold under the "Organized Kitchen" label, a house brand of Target, and come in several sizes. Here I'm using a 6x15, two 6x9s, and two 3x9s (including the one I cut). My Target offered a bundled set of these bins that included some 3x3s and 3x6s, so if I had bought that set I wouldn't have had to cut the 3x9. But I wasn't really sure how I was going to arrange the bins when I was at the store, and the bundle seems to have more small bins than I needed. The 3x3s and the 3x6s weren't available individually.

The index cards are for my Hipster PDA. Merlin Mann's site is a great place to waste time figuring out how to become more productive.

What about Poland?

2005-06-15T13:02:00.000-05:00

According to the AP: Poland said Wednesday it will cut its 1,700-troop deployment to Iraq this summer by as many as 300 troops.

"What's he say to Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland?"

Heartbeat

2005-06-13T21:15:00.000-05:00

Today, on the drive home from work, I heard a commercial promising prospective Chevy buyers the Chevy Employee Discount, that is, the same deal that GM workers get. This is an interestingly-timed marketing campaign, since we just learned last week the kind of deal GM workers get.

Looks like their plans fell through

2005-06-09T15:51:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, there was a joke about how a true intellectual could listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

[For you kids out there, the William Tell Overture was the Lone Ranger's theme music for both the radio and TV shows.]

[And yes, radio once had shows that weren't just music, news, or talk. Not that I'm old enough to remember it directly.]

In a sort of reverse musical connection, I wonder how many middle-aged people were able to hear this story about a father and son arrested for Al Qaeda connections in Lodi, CA without CCR starting up in their heads. If I only had a dol-lar...