Odd Signs

I spotted two particularly odd signs today.

The first was a billboard on southbound I-15. It's been up for maybe a few weeks, I'm not sure. The billboard has a picture of a yellow sunflower blossom on a blue background and, in large print, the title "Escape Polygamy." So presumably, if you're a woman (or man?) feeling trapped in your polygamous relationship, and you're fed up with it, and you just happen to be on southbound I-15 with a good memory for phone numbers, you can call the number on the sign.

I suppose there are polygamous relationships around here, although you never hear about them outside of occasional mentions in the news. It's still a rather curious billboard to have on one's morning commute. "Ha!" I yell at it, "It's tricky enough to find just the one!"

The other one was a sign posted in the men's room at work. It was advising, in rather polite terms, that you please refrain from passing kidney stones in this particular receptacle because they clog the drain. If it is strictly necessary to pass kidney stones, perhaps one of the other commodes might be suitable? It further mentioned that this should not be taken as any kind of medical advice, and that maybe, if you have kidney stones, you should consult a doctor.

Just maybe. That one obviously has a story behind it. A curious and strange story, filled with pain and horror and frustrated, mystified plumbers.

P.S. Cavan stinks! Will that cover my shout-out obligations?

Going for an English

Come the weekend, an English working man might get together with a few mates, down a few pints at the pub, and then finish off the evening by picking up some curry from an Indian restaurant. Indian food is popular in Britain much the way Mexican food is here, which might explain this rather odd skit: Going for an English.

I missed work today, so I'm going to keep this entry short and go to sleep.

P.S. Shana is awesome.

Toasted Cheese Sandwich

Today's blog title is named after what I had for dinner. It had Mrs. Ball's chutney on it, and therefore it was a good toasted cheese sandwich. What I actually wanted for dinner was steamed veggies, but I have to go grocery shopping for that, and since I left work early because I was feeling sick, I really wasn't up for grocery shopping. Hopefully taking vitamins can sort of make up for eating unhealthily.

Anyway, I'm not incredibly sick (I'll just say "sinuses" and leave it at that), but I'm not exactly bouncing around at the moment.

The Clinton campaign, smarting under a couple months of criticism for not releasing Hillary's tax returns, recently sent out an email demanding that Obama release his. Literally two minutes later, they did. Details on that little exchange here. For those who are too bored to read the actual 103-pages of returns, the summary is: He made about $1.5 million in 2006. He made a lot of money from his book, and made most of his money before that from managing a hospital and legal work. Frankly, the whole thing's pretty boring.

Given their hesitance, it might be that the Clintons' is a little more fun. But no one will know until they release it!

Oh, and regarding my music choice: I don't think I could ever like hip-hop, so I'm probably safe. It's not that country's evil so much as I used to think it was evil when I was a teenager. So the only person who's really disappointed is my former self. And he's a brat, so he'll just have to deal with it.

Blogging on Empty

I could've sworn I had something clever to say, but now I can't remember what it was. So you shall just have to put up with something stupid instead.

In a complete betrayal of everything good and holy, I purchased some country music. I feel as if I have somehow betrayed everything I once stood for. I have little to say for myself, except that I liked one of the songs. So there.

Easter was a lot of fun. I got to hang out with the sibs and much of the rest of the family. There was also an embarrassingly large amount of food served, and I don't think I have quite recovered yet. I continue to work out every day at the gym, but I'm not sure that a mere workout is going to cut it.

Sorry if the news is all boring, I'm just posting to try and stay in the habit. Apologies all round.

I recently realized that some of my readers had never heard of lolcatz. They're not exactly high culture--more like the internet version of kitsch--but they're often pretty funny.

So here's a quick example.

There's also good stuff over at Cute Overload, although technically they're a slight variant from the lolcatz genre.

Weasels and coffee.

Another mini-post: This has to be one of the world's strangest products. Oh, and I'd say that the phrase "no one knows why they do this" has several layers of metaphoric meaning here.

This all started from a conversation about scorpions in vodka, by the way. Apparently, you see, they stick an actual scorpion in an actual bottle of vodka, and then said vodka is drunk. I don't know why anyone does that either, but at least that's got a layer of weirdly awesome on top of the insanity. The weasel thing is just plain insanity.

I liked Obama's speech

Obama gave a really good speech. Better than Romney's really good one. It's a little uncomfortable, deeply thoughtful, and definitely worth the time to read. So go! Read it! Then comment!

Brain oozing out of ears

I've spent the last couple weeks working on a really hard problem.

It all started about six months ago. One of my coworkers wandered into my office in an absent-minded fashion, stuck some burritos in the microwave (I am the Keeper of the Microwave), and doodled some stuff on my whiteboard. He'd been thinking about a painful theoretical problem I'd brought up earlier, and he thought he had a solution. Which he did. It was awesome.

The problem was that it changes everything. It's a completely new way of representing curved surfaces. It can do everything the old method can do, but entire classes of problems simply disappear in a poof of simplicity. We wanted it yesterday, and it pretty nearly requires rewriting all of the code from scratch. Just in case you're not aware, Rewriting From Scratch is kind of the opposite of Staying In Business.

Over a couple of months, we worked out how it might be possible. We were considering some new features that were impossible in the old code anyway, and it was a great excuse. We would start on the new code, but it would have an interface between the old and the new. All the old code would remain in service, but the new tools would be added to the new side. A thick layer of conversion code would let the two sides communicate, and it would be responsible for making sure we could transition all the existing customers' models into the new style.

I spent a furious couple of weeks writing the skeleton of the new code. Everything had to be done over--data handling, saving and loading files, moving objects, undo and redo -- everything. I've already sunk several dozen days into writing the conversion layer, and there's still a good distance to go. I go home mentally exhausted pretty much every night, and it's hard to ask much more from a job than that.