“I liked the idea of simplifying things and … the honour system made a whole lot of sense,†Bergen says. “What irritated me about going into Tim Hortons, for example, was waiting in line for something as simple as getting a donut and a coffee. So the thought was, someone can pour his own coffee, grab his own bagel, cut it himself, throw the money in, and walk out. We don’t touch 60 per cent of the transaction.â€
The article says they have only once come up short, and they have had to kick out the occasional deadbeat jerk, but that in fact plenty of people tend to overpay a bit if they want to get in and out and don’t want to bother asking for change.
I have noticed as well, at the local Irish bar in my neighborhood, regulars pay by piling money down in front of them at the bar, and the barkeep leaves it there until it is time to settle up the bill.
Curious about the results?
Well, energy use embedded in 1 L drinking water delivered to Berkeley CA are:
Calistoga Water –> 1.0 kWh
Fiji Water –> 1.7 kWh
Aquafina –> 1.4 kWh
EBMUD tap water –> 0.0003 kWh
[BTW, if you leave your MacBook Pro on for 16 hour, that’s about 1kWh…]
Our boundary includes transportation, packaging, end-of-life, pipes, dams, treatment plants, supply…almost everything.
What about raw water? 1 L of drinking water is equivalent to…
Calistoga Water –> 3.9 L raw water
Fiji Water –> 5.1 L raw water
Aquafina –> 5.8 L raw water
EBMUD tap water –> 1.2 L raw water
All the embedded stuff mostly comes from the PET bottle, which we tracked all the way back to petroleum extraction. Don’t drink that crap. THE END.
For the record, “raw water” is in the aquifer. It costs 20% extra to be treated and delivered via tap.
Anyway, the thing with bottled water is convenient hydration. Plus we have it infused with various flavors and fizziness, never mind the sodas . . . anyway, I just went to the company kitchen and passed up the beverage refrigerator for a mug of tea. And I have to wonder at the carbon footprint there. It is probably way way less than a plastic bottle, and while a tea bag can travel quite far, it also weighs much less than a bottle of water, so it is a lot more energy efficient. (How you heat the water could matter a great deal: we have a hot-water dispenser her at work, but at home I burn a lot of natural gas to boil a kettle.)
All I’m saying is, maybe tea can be promoted as a more conscientious and classy hydration alternative to bottled water. It’s tap water, dressed up a bit.
“The art of having adventures is simply that of saying, “Wow, that is dang cool!†and then having the courage to let go of all the doubts and the what-ifs long enough to grab hold of the adventure and go, trusting that you’ll be able to solve problems along the way. This is just as true in the creative arts as it is in adventure travel.”
Marc Andreessen had some lawyers do an analysis of the current situation between Microsoft and Yahoo, and then posted an excellent summary on his blog on what could happen, what is most likely to happen, and how things work. It is a good read, and a compelling conclusion:
We are learning that hostile takeovers have arrived in our industry. This is the second major hostile takeover so far — the other was Oracle’s takeover of Peoplesoft — but there will be more.
This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn’t work because the target company’s employees would bail and the target company’s business would collapse.
It turns out that as technology companies become larger and more mature, acquirors are becoming increasingly convinced that neither of these assumptions hold. Perhaps employees of large tech companies aren’t that bonded to current management, and perhaps many of them would actually prefer to work for a larger, more dominant combined company. And maybe as a consequence, the target’s business would do just fine in the wake of a hostile takeover — in fact, maybe it would do better, due to advantages of combined size and scale.
My bet is that hostile takeovers, particularly of larger and more mature companies, are going to become increasingly common in our industry.
One theme is that Yahoo’s corporate structure leaves it more vulnerable to a hostile takeover, and that as hostile takeovers becomes more commonplace in the technology industry, you should see more companies willing to adopt conventions like the dual-class share structure you see at Google.
Use of the word “satiated” tends to annoy me. I figured one is “sated”. I just spent some time looking at dictionaries, thesauri, and my etymological dictionary to figure it out once and for all. Google and Google Trends imply that “sate” is the more widely-used term, though this appears to be in large part because journalists keep mis-spelling “state”.
The word “satiated” looks to derive from Latin “satis” which means enough. (Satisfied?)
“Sate” derives from older English, Dutch, and Germanic, and apparently shares the same root word with “sad”.
The Brooding Northern European part of me wonders if my ancestors had some keen understanding of the connection between satisfaction and sadness.
SATIATE and SATE may sometimes imply only complete satisfaction but more often suggest repletion that has destroyed interest or desire. SURFEIT implies a nauseating repletion. CLOY stresses the disgust or boredom resulting from such surfeiting.
At any rate, I see that there’s nothing wrong with being “satiated” yet it is perfectly fine for me to stick with sate and sated. (Though I do enjoy the word “satiety”.)
I am satisfied with this state of repletion. I am sated.
0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~> cd public_html/toldme
0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~/public_html/toldme> svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/
[ . . . ]
Updated to revision 7839.
When I logged in to post this little note, it blocked me and ran the upgrade procedure, then I had to log in again, and here I am!
There’s a further note about the secret key setting:
Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.
It leaves me to wonder: if the secret key can be randomly generated by a machine, why not go ahead and do that and then stash it in the database? There may be a good reason for that . . .
In unrelated news, I upgraded to the newer Ubuntu release at home yesterday. The only trick I have noticed so far is that it runs with Firefox 3.0, which is beta, and I lost use of my foxmarks plugin, for now. So, I’m waiting until that is supported before I upgrade my workstation.
Today was a special election for my congressional district. It was an open primary for Congress–two Democrats, two Republicans, and a Green. I voted for the Green candidate in part because he is the only one who sent any campaign literature, and because this is a safely gerrymandered Democrat district anyway.
I was the first citizen of my precinct to try the electronic ballot. To explain the touch screen, the staff boasted “it’s just like an iPhone!” I dug around in English and Chinese and explored the “large print” zoom feature, then I had to ask how one actually casts the ballot. (The user interface places commands on the bottom of the screen, but the “review screen” had a big box in the middle that said “press here to review your paper ballot” and below that the standard “review” button to review the electronic ballot . . . I kept pressing the little button, until the guy showed me that the big box in the middle is also a button.)
I was pleased at the paper trail. On my way out, I noted that the optical scanner had counted three ballots thus far, so this morning’s exit poll is running at least 25% Green.
That is not cool. To me, it makes the protesters sound like a radical fringe group who would rather spoil the party for the entire world, and it makes the implausible anti-Tibetan propaganda from China’s government sound . . . less implausible.
The Dalai Llama’s non-violent approach toward the struggle gains the Tibetans a lot of international credibility. It must be impossibly frustrating for the Tibetan people to struggle against the Chinese occupation. The passions that are driving these folks are understandably extremely powerful, and I’m not surprised at the reaction. But I am disappointed, and I hope they can coordinate to protest the Chinese in a more compelling manner that kindles rather than douses the sympathies of the world’s people.
“So you don’t approve of getting even — of taking revenge for something that was done to you?”
“Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant.”
“What can you do?”
“Forget,” said Borges. “That is all you can do. When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.”
“Does that work?”
“More or less.” He showed his yellow teeth. “Less rather than more.”
Talking about the futility of revenge, he reached and his hands trembled with a new subject, but a related one, the Second World War.
“When I was in Germany just after the war,” he said, “I never heard a word spoken against Hitler. In Berlin, the Germans said to me” — now he spoke in German — “‘Well, what do you think of our ruins?’ The Germans like to be pitied — isn’t that horrible? They showed me their ruins. They wanted me to pity them. But why should I indulge them? I said” — he uttered the sentence in German — “‘I have seen London.'”
Jorge Luis Borges speaking with Paul Theroux
_The Old Patagonian Express_
Revenge has its appeal, but I don’t think it helps. We use the expression “forgive and forget” but the concern is that certain things should not be forgotten. I figure it is better to forget than to have difficulty stuck in your heart. I think I’d say “forgive, if you can, draw a lesson from the memory, and then move on.”
Try to remember the circumstances and what happened, and that you felt a certain pain and whatnot, perhaps with great intensity. The pain itself, the “pain memory” I would leave behind, if you can. We are fools to forget, but we are foolish too to react in the present to pain from the past.
While women are the more frequent victims of domestic violence, men can be victims too. Whatever your gender, it is good to keep an eye on things. If you are dating someone and your partner seems a bit psycho, you may be entering a situation of “dating violence”. Wikipedia has a good starting point, with a list (adapted from ACADV) of early warning signs of dating violence:
Extreme jealousy
Controlling behavior
Quick involvement
Unpredictable mood swings
Alcohol and drug use
Explosive anger
Isolates you from friends and family
Uses force during an argument
Shows emotional hypersensitivity
Believes in rigid sex roles
Blames others for his/her problems or feelings
Cruel to animals or children
Verbally abusive
Abused former partners
Threatens violence
There’s plenty of material online, and the CDC has a teen-oriented web-site called ChooseRespect.org.
The most lethal time for an abused person is when they are trying to leave the abuser. Have a plan and get back up! The news is full of (seemingly) nice people whose partner was trying to leave and ended up dead. When in a domestically abusive situation, use universal precautions and assume anyone has the propensity for violence.
As far as I can find anywhere, the best and seemingly sole advice regarding how to handle domestic violence is to leave. To this end, there is a National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
If you are preparing to resolve an abusive situation, the American Bar Association offers a Domestic Violence Safety Plan. It is a bit scary to read, but better to consider such things before you actually live them!
Tuesday morning Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech in Philadelphia about the need to talk openly and honestly about America’s racial troubles, and the need of all Americans to unite and focus on real issues and not get caught up in the usual crud of divisive politics.
The gist of it is that America started with a serious problem: slavery, and America has been moving away from that problem for a long time, but problems of racism and the legacies of inequality have left scars that one can still feel today. Sometimes black folk express anger and frustration at injustices and the slow pace of progress, and sometimes white people express frustration and offense at the idea that they should have to work to repair the damage wrought by generations past, when they have plenty of their own difficulties to focus on.
And all too often, politicians exploit these frustrations to set Americans against each other and distract them from working together on the real challenges that we collectively face. If we want change, we can not pretend that these divisions do not exist: we must acknowledge them, openly and honestly. We must remember that they can be a distraction from important work. We must reach out to one another and work together on the more important common concerns that unite us: education, health, defense, climate instability.
Here’s a link to a high-quality video from the campaign without the CNN ticker:
America is fortunate this year: in Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain we have a diversity of candidates whom we actually admire. I’m supporting Barack Obama.
It is fun to see how people change over time, and how they stay the same. A decade ago I wrote a “Computer Literacy Narrative” for an English class:
The Internet continues to play a very big part in my life. My web site grows slowly every week. I keep my diary on-line for others to read. I write CGI applications. I’m a hard-core Unix geek, administering two of my own systems, writing my HTML and perl scripts in vi, wowwing friends with afterstep. I work for the networking group at NCSA, for the CSIL as a labsitter, and worked last summer at an ISP in Chicago called EnterAct, where I may very well return this summer.
I now use only Unix, and my old Amiga systems from time to time out of nostalgia and respect for history. I own two Unix boxen, four Amiga systems, and the old Commodore 64. While most of these are antiques, I still lend some systems out to others from time to time to facilitate their computing needs.
My fanatical Unix snobbery does mean that I know very little about Windows 95 or Mac. Because I have good computer karma, I still tend to negotiate such systems better than the average Joe, but I’m by no means a wiz. Instead I enjoy spending my time tinkering with completely open systems like FreeBSD. I am proud and inspired by the idea that there are now several very competent Operating Systems available even for normal users that are built and maintained entirely by volunteer effort. It is my goal to continue to learn and ultimately contribute to this effort as I can.
Walking down the hall at work, I hear an engineer lament.
“Click to focus? Arr!!”
And of course, I shout:
“Focus follows mouse!!”
I hear, beyond cubicle walls, a chorus of agreement.
Back at my desk, which I have recently switched from XP to Ubuntu, I note that I’m clicking to focus. Fortunately, I spent the morning tweaking mutt, which I started using again, after many years, because it deletes e-mail faster than Thunderbird does.
I like this place.
I hear muffled discussions of multiple desktops. I think I’ll figure out how to FocusFollowsMouse in this Gnome stuff real quick before I return my attention to work-work.
ObSolution: In Ubuntu / Gnome, go to System > Preferences > Windows and enable “Select windows when the mouse moves over them”
I am a big fan of Google and their myriad products, but sometimes they get on my nerves. I like having Yahoo! as an alternative. I love Flickr. I would hate to see Yahoo! swallowed up my Microsoft, leaving the biggest players on the Internet being a choice between the Google and the Microsoft.
I prefer an online world that isn’t simply black and white, but which also has a weird shade of purple to it.
I have been less the NPR / Politics junkie than I have in the past. And in the February 5 primary, it doesn’t take much thought for a Democrat from Chicago to prefer Barack Obama. I have already had the privilege of voting for him twice to get him in to the Senate. I just really like the guy: he is eloquent and he seems like and honest, good-hearted, hard-working guy who can pull things off.
But I don’t know much for him on the substance, so I have kept kind of quiet on the matter.
I want, for once, someone I can vote for not because I dislike the other candidate, but because I’m proud of mine. Obama is the real thing.
Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obama’s commitment to open systems — for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizens’ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, it’s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption.
Obama stands against bad governing not only in his support of specific practices like open data standards and basic network neutrality, but in his work against corruption from day one. He’s sponsored legislation to restrict gifts to Congress by industry representatives (which also carried a whole slew of anti-corruption measures that were a breath of fresh air). He’s fought against vote fraud. He’s been pushing for election and lobbying reform from the start, and in his campaign he’s refused to take lobbyist money.
[…]
The Democratic party has a long, painful history of nominating unlikable, uncharismatic ‘default’ establishment candidates who are eventually swatted aside by the voters. Nominating Clinton would be continuing that tradition at the very time when we have a chance to do so much better. Let’s not let that chance slip by.
I like Hillary Clinton, as well. Don’t know much about her, but the thing is we have had “Clinton” or “Bush” in the White House for two decades now, and it is time to do something different. I liked the Clinton years, but they could have been . . . more inspired.
I can’t say that the system won’t grind Barack down in his first year in office, but you gotta dream, right? And Barack Obama is the candidate who inspires me most.
