Todd Stadler's blog

A brief attempt at describing Twitter

I mentioned Twitter in my last post, but, well, have you heard of it? It's a ... uh, hmm, this is where I always stumble.

It's a service (?) which you can interface with via the Web or your instant message client. And, perhaps most importantly, via text messages. In theory, all Twitter updates (Twitterings? Tweets? Twitter missives?) answer the question "What are you doing?"

But since they're designed to fit in a standard text message, these updates are 140 characters or less. Which is why people refer to Twitter as a platform for "microblogging".

Personally, I look forward to the day of nanoblogging — 10 characters or less — in which people merely post emoticons to express their current state:

Stadler: :-)

JotaCo: =/

Stadler: :'( --<-{@

JotaCo: [8^0)

Stadler: (:3=

Okay, I just Googled "microblogging" to make sure I'm not making it up — people really use that word to refer to Twitter. Over 600,000 hits — I'm safe.

However, I also Googled "nanoblogging", and found a bunch of people (almost 16,000) talking about Twitter. No no no! That's all wrong, people! I came up with the idea of true "nanoblogging" — right here in this post! Fine, I'll call it "picoblogging".

What the ... 83 people think Twitter is picoblogging?! Okay, then allow me to coin the phrase "femtoblogging", but that's it! (I will ignore those two results in Spanish.)

Boy, if there's anything funnier than emoticons and technologically trendy services, it's SI prefix humor.

Things I would have Twittered, but didn't

This past weekend, I found myself accumulating thoughts. You know the ones, that seem clever or worth retelling later, but after a few hours have passed, you realize you were just hyped up on coffee at the time or very bored? Yes.

And yet I saved them all up for you to read. I would have Twittered them, but I only do that when I'm at a computer. Twitter's loss, your gain.

• I saw a doctor eating an apple. This troubled me — does he feel internal turmoil when doing that? Does he have to be careful to only eat one every other day? Or does it only ward off other doctors?
• According to a sign near the pedestrian bridge over I-5, former Portland mayor Josiah Failing was a "public education pioneer". My question is if he did, in fact, invent the F.
• Yeah, I'm not the first person to make a joke about his last name — the pedestrian bridge used to be labeled the "Failing Pedestrian Bridge", since it connects to Failing Street, named in Josiah's honor. Now it's labeled the "Failing Street Pedestrian Bridge", for reasons I hope are obvious.
• Going from our house to North Portland is easy, since we just hop on the #4-Division to downtown and stay on when it becomes the #4-Fessenden to North Portland. I wondered if the #4 wends its way through all five quadrants, since it starts (for us) in Southeast, makes its way to downtown in Southwest, barely nips into Northwest to cross the Steel Bridge, and then ends up in North Portland. I couldn't tell if it actually makes its way into Northeast or not, though it does seem to traverse NE Wheeler Ave. If not, it gets very, very close to Northeast.
• Non-Portlanders think it's funny that we say we have five quadrants, but I really think it's the best way to express the concept.
• While waiting at the doctor's office, I picked up a copy of Martha Stewart Living to flip through. Something about the magazine seemed off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I found myself staring at an ad for a Macintosh computer. "Hmm," I thought, "Haven't heard the name Macintosh in a while. They always call themselves Apple now." And then I noticed the model being sold was the Performa, which I hadn't heard of. And then — hey, there's no mention of the Internet in this ad! What's the copyright date on this thing?! Gah — 1993! The magazine was from August 1993. I matriculated into Rice that year. I can't tell you how eerie it was, in retrospect, to realize that not a single ad had a URL in it. Shudder.

Nerds and their nomenclature

Our server at work is named Maple. Although I was around when it got installed and named, I don't remember why that name was picked. Something about our company being a publisher of horticultural books and, I dunno, relative stalwartness. Also, it kind of sounds like "mail", which is one of its major functions.

Along the way, we added another server, named Dogwood. Sure, why not?

But Maple is getting along in years, and we need to upgrade to a new server. I was given the honored task of coming up with a name for the new server. Or at least, in my utter dorkery, I consider it honored.

See, nerds like order. Order and niche knowledge. So when there's a group of things they have to name, they pick names from a different name space. If at all possible, a dorky one.

I was first introduced to this concept back at Rice, where various buildings or rooms would have themes to their computer names. One particular favorite was a computer lab with the names One, Two, Red, Blue, ... Little-star, Little-car, ... Yellow-hat. (If you hadn't picked up on it, these are all descriptions of fish from Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.)

And I distinctly remember the difficulty of coming up with a name to satisfy the über-nerds that ran the network at my college (i.e. dorm), Lovett. Tired (or suspicious) of the pop-culture naming themes at other colleges, they decided it would be wholesome and geeky to choose names from Norse mythology. Except not the obvious ones. No Thor, no Odin, maaaaaybe Freya. I remember one friend, Eric, was lauded for naming his computer Yggdrasil. Nerd.

Mind you, this was in the days before the Web [collective gasp], so there was no obvious source for Norse mythic nomenclature besides heavy tomes at the library. Not that it matters — I don't remember what I named my computer, and that wasn't the point of my story.

So I got to pick the new server name at work. And now that we had a theme going, I couldn't violate that. So I had to pick a tree name. But I also wanted to pick something easy to type and spell, because nerds don't like typing long words. Or spelling.

(As much as Eric's computer name won high praise for its relative obscurity and tight adherence to the rules of our college's name space, there was always the issue of "How many G's in 'Yggdrasil'? ... And how many S's? L's? Any umlauts?")

So, to put it anticlimactically, I named the new server Oak. Short, easy to spell, definitely a tree, and quite possibly a sturdier tree than Maple. Oak.

Which, because I am a nerd (cf. the previous sentences in this entry), instantly caused me to think of a Rush song about maples and oaks.

And simply because I am positively exulting in my nerditude here, I will end by presenting the lyrics to that song, "The Trees", slightly altered to fit the present context. Feel free to look away.

The trouble with poor Maple
And it's quite convinced it's right
It says that Oak is just too speedy
And it grabs up all of the bytes
But Oak can't help its feelings
If it likes the way it's made
And it wonders why poor Maple
Can't be happy with its RAID

Republicans want more crazy

Okay, that's it. I try to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. I try to believe they're not all bat-freaking insane, that they're not all just gunning for war, war, and more war.

And then they go and prove me wrong. At last night's debate, here's what slim-chance candidate Ron Paul had to say:

So we don't need to go looking for trouble. We don't need another Cold War. And all we have to do is start talking to people and trading with people. We don't need to assume that the world is going to blow up.

It was at this point that the Republican audience started booing.

So what was it that upset them so? The suggestion of talking to other people? Trading with them? Or are Republicans gunning (perhaps literally) for another Cold War?

How's that saying go? The considered nutball of those I consider nutballs is relatively sane? Sheesh.

These new-fangled Web things these days!

I think it's high time somebody around here started complaining! No one ever complains on the Internet — it's all sunshine and flowers with you kids!

Here's something that really chaps my hide: those stupid Snap Shots™ from Snap.com. You know the ones — on some sites, you roll your cursor over a link and this tiny window pops up that shows you a small version of the site that the link would take you to.

Here's how Snap.com describes Snap Shots™:

Welcome to the next generation of everything. Snap Shots™ intelligently brings users the right content, at the right place, at the right time, in a convenient shot. ... For website users, it's an enhanced way to surf because links are no longer blind, but a source of information. For website owners, it's a more engaging way to write and edit by using links as illustrations rather than as diversions.

Horsefeathers! Here's how links work: somebody on one Web page wants to refer to a different page somewhere out there and if you click on the relevant words or picture, you go to that page. If you're unsure on whether you want to follow the link, you can look in the status bar at the bottom to see the Web address it would take you to. (And, if the Web page creator was nice enough, there may be a descriptive tooltip that appears when you hover your cursor over the link.)

Here's how links don't work: you go to hover over or click on a link, and a box pops up that you weren't expecting, and, after it finally loads its picture, confirms that the site you were going to does, in fact, have lots of text on it. Which you can't read, because it's too small, but yes, there's text on that page. Were you hoping to go to a page with text on it?

Look, it's not just me. Lots of people hate them. I mean lots, lots, lots, lots, lots of people. Even Latvians!

Now that you've seen all the piles of evidence I've compiled, I'm sure you'll stop using Snap Shots™, or tell your friend who uses them that "they're no longer cool anymore, bro." Thanks.

Also, it appears I have vast amounts of time for angry consensus-gathering revenge Googling. To coin a phrase. Moving on!

YouTube! All the kids today are using it! But sometimes it annoys me!

For instance, why can't a YouTube video show me how long its play time is before I load it?

This hilarious video you have embedded on your blog, will it take up 30 seconds of my time? Or eight minutes? As it is, I have to click the play button and wait for the movie to start before it'll tell me that. Which is often more time than I want to invest just to answer that question.

I'm also annoyed that, once I've started clicking on a YouTube video in Firefox (and probably other browsers), I lose the ability to Control-tab my way to a different browser tab. Instead, Control-tabbing cycles through the yellow-highlighted YouTube player controls at the bottom of the video. I suppose that's an accessibility feature for someone, but it's annoying for me. It means I have to click somewhere arbitrary to put the focus outside the embedded Flash object. And then I can Control-tab on my merry way.

I'm sure lots of other people share my ire on these YouTube flaws as well, but I used up all my angry Googling in the first part of this entry. Oh well.

The Curves bar: yeesh

A while back, we got a free candy bar with our newspaper.

Now, I know you're not supposed to take candy from strangers, but this is different — I didn't take it. No, a stranger I didn't even see left it for us on our porch for several hours. Very different situation.

Whoops, did I say "candy bar"? I meant to say a Curves™ Bar, because that is its name.

Now I'm going to go ahead and confess that, until I was forced to do research for this article, I had no idea that Curves™ is the name of a women-only gym. This is largely due to the fact that (a) I don't work out, at any gym, and (b) I'm not a woman.

So in the process of learning all about this gym and the snacks that they cause to be tossed onto my porch in the wee hours of the morning, I also found what appears to be the official site for Curves™ Bars, which I skimmed in the interest of learning all about this bar.

Here's what I learned:

• I'm "lucky".
• "Snacking is OK. Senseless snacking is not."
• Curves™ Bars contain 100 Calories
• I should grab one "before [I] need some energy — ahead of a workout, walk or meeting."

That last point is a bit strange, given that it contradicts the previous point that Curves™ Bars don't have a lot of energy. (What's that? You didn't know that Calories were units of energy? That's what General Mills was hoping.)

100 Calories is 5% of the energy one needs for a sedentary lifestyle. So before you flop down on the couch, grab a Curves™ Bar. If you're going to work out at a Curves™ gym, better grab a handful of 'em.

But stranger yet is that the aforementioned site contains no information about what's in their food product.

Well, that's not entirely true. They say it's "calcium-rich" and "loaded with fiber". And that these bars are "chewy granola in two sundae-like flavors", "chocolate peanut" and the apparently mathtastic "strawberries+cream".

But beyond that, you don't need to know. Isn't it enough to be told that Curves™ Bars "help fill you up, without filling you out" and "help keep your bones healthy — something important at every age", without wanting to know the actual ingredients? They're good for you, dangit!

But being the nosy (and bored and easily-entertained-by-free-food) type, I pressed on, daring to actually read underneath the wrapper flap for the list of ingredients that General Mills had not thought worthy of their product's Web site.

And, you know, they have good reason for not really publicizing what goes into these things. The first ingredient is "chicory root extract". Boy, that just screams "sundae-like", don't it? I guess the price on wood pulp was too high during the product development phase. Oh, and here's a fun fact I learned while looking up chicory on Wikipedia: it "has been used ethnomedically to treat ... loss of appetite". Whoops.

But, as they say, man cannot live on chicory root extract alone. No, for that real taste sensation, you have to move a few steps down the ingredient list, after "chocolate chips", to "ethanol, shellac". Mmm — who's hungry?

To be fair, those two ingredients are constituent parts of "chocolate chips with confectioners shellac", but, um ... really? Ethanol? And do you even know what shellac (confectioners or otherwise) is? I'll give you a hint: it "comes from the secretions of the lac insect". "Sundae-like"!

Look, I'm not saying that you should be grossed out that insect byproducts can be found in your snack food. I'm saying you should be disturbed that General Mills cares more about telling you about its products "nutrition facts", than it does the ingredients. How very modern food! What do you care what's in it? It's only 100 calories! Eat it — you'll get thin! Do not look behind the curtain!

Besides, these bars appear to be a mostly repackaged, smaller version of General Mills' Fiber One™ bars.

Not that any of this stopped me from scarfing down the stupid thing when I found myself lacking anything better to snack on. And yes, it tasted exactly like chicory root extract, ethanol, and secretions of the lac insect. But in a healthy, image-empowering sort of way.

Well, I'll be an Australian's uncle!

As of earlier this week, I now answer to "Uncle Todd".

Fig. A: The baby Farley (artist's conception)

My nephew, David John Farley, was born in the wee hours of Monday, October 8th. We got phone calls almost as soon as it happened, our phones vibrating while we were teaching Sunday school — we didn't answer, but we knew what was going on. Why else would anyone call me on an early Sunday morning?

But that's the trouble with transpacific babies. They're born in the future. We had to wait 17 hours before we could celebrate, because he hadn't been born yet. If we'd started celebrating when they called us (aside from interrupting our Sunday school lesson), they'd have gotten mad: "No, he'll be born tomorrow!"

As such, October 7th will henceforth be David Farley's Birthday (observed, U.S.).

I mean, there's no point in my calling my nephew to wish him a happy birthday on the proper day, only to have him say (in a delightfully cute accent), "Oh Unkie T, ya dag, yeev made a blue again! Ma birthie was yestie! Oh well — good on ya for tryin'! Yer still a grouse rellie in my book." Not that I'll understand a lick of it, but that's not my job as uncle.

Fig. B: The baby Farley (much hipper artist's conception)

No, my job as uncle, as far as I understand it, is to come up with nicknames for the kid that aren't necessarily approved of by his parents. Along those lines, I couldn't help but notice that his first two initials give the impression of his being a turntable master.

DJ Farley. It has a ring to it. The ring of bling, that is.

Okay, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I did like the little drawings I made.

Welcome to the world, little man. Love, your uncle with the weird accent.

An engineer rides the bus (and dials his phone)

I keep discovering that people I'm talking to don't know about the wonderful invention that is the TriMet TransitTracker.

On the off chance that you (a) read this blog, (b) don't know about TransitTracker, and (c) live in or near Portland, here's the deal: you can call a phone number and, given a bus or MAX stop number, have it tell you what is arriving next at that stop.

For instance, if I dial the main TriMet number, 503-238-RIDE, press 1 for "TransitTracker arrival times", and then enter 12780 for the stop on "SW 3rd between Pine and Oak", it tells me the following bus lines and arrival times:

• 17 Holgate to 136th Ave.: arriving in 3 minutes
• 4 Division to Gresham Transit Center: arriving in 20 minutes
• ... and so on

The times are usually based on actual bus positions gleaned from GPS units on the buses, though occasionally the system loses a bus for a minute and just reports the time a bus is "scheduled at".

This real-time information is useful in several situations. I mainly use it to determine if I should run or walk to the bus stop as I leave the house in the morning (I don't have a consistent schedule at that time, and neither does the #4, it would seem). Or to figure out how much time I have left to work in the office before the next bus arrives. But it's also useful to determine which of two different buses will arrive first, and therefore which bus stop I should walk to.

The only trick to the system is knowing the TransitTracker number for the bus stop you're interested in. Many bus stops have it posted, but a few do not. And the process to get through the phone menu to learn the stop number where you're waiting is almost guaranteed to take long enough that the bus will have arrived before you've figured out when it will come.

Given that it's hard to remember the numbers for all the bus stops I use, I've stored all my favorite TriMet stops in my phone.

Of course, they all start with the same phone number: 503-238-RIDE. But I figured out that it's possible to program my way through the TransitTracker phone menu by inserting pauses (which pause for two seconds between digits) or waits (which wait for you to hit OK before sending the next digit). I'm pretty certain most phones have this ability as well.

Thus, the phone number for the bus stop at the west end of the Hawthorne Bridge (heading east) is 503-238-7433w1w3635. That breaks down into the main TriMet number, a wait for my OK, 1 for "TransitTracker arrival times", another wait for my OK, and then 3635 for "SW Madison and 1st".

I used to have pauses inserted instead of waits, but the TransitTracker system can get busy enough that it takes longer than two seconds to think, thus missing when my phone sends it the stop number.

Just to add to my little geek-out here, I'll note that I've labeled each phone number with the TriMet name for the stop, but preceded by an underscore, so that they all get grouped together at the end of my phone book (underscores go last alphabetically in the Razr). This makes them easy to browse, since I just go to my phone book and scroll up, which takes me to the end of the list.

Yeah, I know, I'm a dork. But I'm a dork who doesn't miss his bus. Unless I don't run fast enough.

An engineer dials his phone

Like half the planet, I own a Motorola Razr phone. It's almost two years old, but it's still slim, so I still like it.

Well, sort of. For one thing, its phone book is terrible. I don't know if later versions of the phone (either software or hardware updates) fixed this problem, but on mine, you can only search by the first letter of the contact's name.

Here's what I mean. To get to the M section of my phone book, I press 6 (i.e. MNO). It takes me to the first entry whose first letter begins with M. And that's it. If I press 6 again, I go to the first entry starting with N.

Now, I'm not the best-connected person in the world, but I still have over a dozen contacts that start with M. It'd be nice if I could just type out a name — for example, 6453 for Mike — and be taken to his entry. In fact, my previous phone worked like that. But it wasn't slim.

No, on the Razr, I have to press 6 and then scroll down a ridiculous number of times. It's stupid. And if I had more people in my phone book, it would be unbearable.

I suppose the obvious solution, according to what the phone offers, is to set up voice dialing for all my frequently called numbers — you know, where you press a button, say your friend's name into the phone, repeat it louder, and then have to explain to your other friend that you weren't trying to call her, but your phone screwed up, and then you have to explain that you didn't mean how that sounded.

Yeah, I hate voice dialing, just as much as I hate voice-activated phone menus. I don't talk to machines. At least, not politely.

I thought of giving my frequently called contacts a speed-dial number, but I couldn't think of a particularly good, memorable order for my friends after the first and second spot (that would be Julia and my parents, respectively).

Then I realized that, rather than trying to somehow rank my friends and remember who was number seven and who was number nine, I would assign speed-dial numbers based on their names.

If I define a function ph(N) such that, for the name N, it returns the phone digit corresponding to the first letter of that name, then it turns out that for all my frequently called friends, the space {ph(FirstName), ph(LastName)} is remarkably evenly distributed.

That is to say, if I want to call my friend Aaron Kunze, I just dial his initials (25), followed by the pound key, and then hit Send. And it so happens that I don't know anyone else whose initials map to 25. I don't think any of my friends overlap like that.

Anyhow, I don't know if someone else has already thought of this, or if the Razr's phone book has been improved in the past two years so that this hack is obsolete, but on the off chance that this idea is useful to someone else, I'm putting it out there.

I hate you, Brassica oleracea

Great gravy! How long have people known about this and not told me?

I speak, of course, of the evil that is Brassica oleracea. What? You know, wild cabbage.

Why are you looking at me like that? "What's the big deal about wild cabbage," you ask?

Well, it's cabbage, first of all. I suppose cabbage wouldn't be all that bad — it has its place in dumplings and fish tacos — if that were all.

Don't give me that "What do you mean, 'if that were all'?" jive. B. oleracea is a mutant. It mutates! And cabbage is just its Dr. Jekyll side, if you will.

Now read on, if you dare, as I present to you some of the many faces of its Mr. Hyde side:

• Kale and collard greens! (Acephala group)
• Broccoli! (Italica group)
• Chinese broccoli!! (Alboglabra group)
• Cauliflower and broccoflower!! (Botrytis group)
• Kohlrabi!!?! (Gongylodes group)
• Brussels sprouts!!!!!! (Gemmifera group)

All cultivars of the same species! What do you want with me, B. oleracea? Why do you torture me with your many-faceted, foul-tasting nature? Every time I turn a corner in a dark culinary alley to find a vulgar vegetable, I rip off its mask, only to find — every time — that the villain is you! Leave me be!

Egads! The only thing that could weird me out more than that plant's mutant powers would be if, say, every apple tree variety were a bizarre, asexually-generated clone of every other tree of that variety!

I mean, try to imagine ... the horror! The horror! A vast clone army of Fuji trees! All coming after me, led by their vegetal overlord: B. oleracea!

Okay, maybe I'm overreacting, but you have to admit, produce seemed a lot more innocent before you found out about all this.

Just to be safe, I think I'm gonna have a burger tonight.

With cheese. Only.

All work and no play ...

Okay, so maybe I spend too much of my life — both work and free time — working with Web pages, staring at HTML.

Fig. A: An ordinary exit sign

Because when I see exit signs like the one pictured here, I find myself thinking, "Of course! And when I go down the stairs and get to the door that leads outside, I'll see a sign labeled '</EXIT>'."

And that's all sorts of sad.

(Okay, for all you Web naïfs out there who don't get it, and yet for some reason care, the sign pictured here, with arrows indicating exits to the left and right, looks like an HTML tag, with its surrounding angle brackets, as such: <EXIT>. Specifically, an opening, or beginning, (yet completely imaginary) EXIT tag. The corresponding ending tag, as described above, would be </EXIT>. Get it? No? Still lame? Would it be even lamer if I told you I added this explanation just to balance out the white space issues presented by the exit sign image?)