Honeypot.net

Dad is funny.He played a trick on my sister.He says somthing like “Guess
what?“Ari would say"what?“Dad would say"Chickenbut!”

Jen and I were in Kansas City for a convention when Jen decided to exchange some newborn-size diapers for a larger size. Unfortunately, we’d left the receipt at home (because we don’t make a habit of carrying around receipts for every bit of baby gear we take with us) and that completely flummoxed the Wal-Mart staff.

When all was said and done, I had to give them my driver’s license so that we could make the 26-cent swap between two unopened, undamaged packages of baby diapers. I gritted my teeth and managed not to say anything that would get me banned from the store, although I was so tense that I signed the exchange form hard enough to shred it.

And this is why I think that I probably now officially hate shopping at Wal-Mart. We weren’t trying to exchange a plasma TV or a box of donuts. We just wanted to trade up to a larger size of diapers, and this ended up requiring my driver’s license and a signature.

What I should have done — and what I’d love to see everyone doing — is to ask politely for a printed copy of their corporate privacy policy. After all, some stranger is entering my personal identification information into a computer for some unknown purpose, and I think I have the right to know why they’re doing it, how long they plan to keep it, and what their policy and mechanisms are for protecting it in the meantime.

Besides, even if I never read the thing, I’ll know that it cost Wal-Mart far more than $0.26 to print and hand-deliver the document to me. Sometimes just the satisfaction of knowing that their stupid, anti-customer policy costs them more than they made off the transaction makes it a little more tolerable.

Back in my Amiga-using days, I had an email program called YAM. It was excellent and ubiquitous; almost everyone used it. It had three unique features:

• You could configure it to embed small bits of personal information in outgoing emails, such as your birthday.
• When it saw these bits in email that other people sent to you, it could add the information to your address book.
• It had an option to automatically send a “happy birthday” email to everyone in your address book on their birthday.

I was active on a lot of mailing lists, so my address book was pretty full with people I’d hardly met. I sent them happy birthday emails each year, and on my birthday, it was fun to get flooded with a few hundred little messages from well-wishers I didn’t know except maybe from some obscure discussion group.

I had the sad realization a few days ago that for the first time ever since I started using YAM, I didn’t receive a single email from it this year. Not one of my old friends still does this. While it’s not very big in the scheme of this, it still marks the sad end to a happy era.

I bought a nice looking pair of Ecco shoes a couple years ago. Actually, they were probably the nicest shoes I’ve bought before or since. I don’t have a reason to wear dress shoes often, but when I did, they looked nice and I was proud to have them.

About a year ago I noticed that the soles were starting to come apart. I wrote to Ecco to ask for advice, got a short reply along the lines of “we received your message and will get back to you soon”, then nothing. As of about a month ago, they finished literally rotting off — the soles were disintegrating in big, soft rubbery chunks — and my mother-in-law did me a favor by having them re-soled. I wrote again to Ecco to tell them what happened but this time I haven’t gotten a reply of any kind.

I will never buy their shoes again. They look great but were completely destroyed and unusable after wearing them perhaps 10 times to church, job interviews, and other extremely low-abuse situations. What’s worse is that they couldn’t be bothered to respond to customer concerns (although I admit that my second message to them wasn’t quite as polite and deferential as the first). I guess they just don’t really care about quality or customer satisfaction.

There is now a gallery of pictures of rotten Ecco shoes that have been sent in by readers.

I was walking through our house when I saw Jake. He was watching me stone-faced with eyes open wide and bugged out. In our house, that means one thing — staring contest. I returned the stare as I walked nearer and bent closer to his level.

Closer.

Closer.

Until he reached up and poked me in the eyeball and yelled, “you blinked! I win!”

Yeah, he got me: I definitely blinked. I think I can still see his fingerprint on my cornea.

So, I forgot my root password. For non-technical types, that’s pretty much the key to the kingdom when you need to get full access to a computer, or install new software, or to make backups, or to fix something in an emergency. I use this little program called “sudo” all the time that lets you do most of the same things except with your own password. I guess it’d been so long since I’d actually needed that root password that it just slipped my mind. Still, I felt pretty dumb and resigned myself to coming up with a new one and resetting it on all the computers I use.

So, this morning something came up where I really needed that password, and without thinking I picked up a keyboard and mashed it out. It worked. “Oh joy,” I though. “I’ll just do it again and pay attention to what I’m typing.” Except that try as I might, I just can’t type that password if I’m consciously thinking about it.

This has not improved my outlook on an upcoming birthday in the slightest.

In our household, a baby just ain’t a baby without an appropriately geeky birth announcement. And since Nick is mostly functional — I mean, he can’t exactly type yet — this one is in Lisp. Share and enjoy!

; This program forks().  That should be plenty for a few years' entertainment
; Copyright (C) 2007 Kirk & Jennifer Strauser

; This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
; the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
; (at your option) any later version.

; However, the output of this particular instance shall remain
; exclusively licensed to the authors for a period of up to eighteen
; years.

; $Id: baby.lisp 4 2007-09-05 23:18:12Z kirk $


(require :sb-posix)

(defvar *birthtime* (encode-universal-time 0 20 1 1 9 2007))

(defvar *age* (- (get-universal-time) *birthtime*))

(defun hello ()
  (format t "Hello, world!  My name is Nicholas Arthur Strauser and this is ~
my ~:r day!~%" (ceiling (/ *age* 86400))))

(defun labor ()
  (cond
   ((zerop (sb-posix:fork)) (format t "Ouch!~%"))
   (t (hello))))

(defun wait ()
  (cond
   ((< *age* 0)
    (sleep (- *age*))
    (setf *age* 0)
    (labor))
   (t (hello))))

(wait)

Dan Feather, aka “Vapor”, died today after he lost control of his motorcycle. Dan was remarkable for his quiet decency. There were many reasons to like him, but above all else, he was a good man.

Goodbye, friend. You leave behind many people who held you in high regard.

Rest well.

As our anniversary dinner tradition, Jen and I drive to Stanton to eat at the Uptown Brewery. Each year, we ask each ourselves if we really want to go all the way down there. Each year, we decide that we’ll have a nice meal and that it’s not that far anyway. Each year, we wonder why we don’t go there more often. I don’t want to disparage any of the wonderful local places, but it really is true: the best restaurant in Norfolk is in Stanton.

The building itself is interesting and the service is always top-notch, but it’s the food that brings us back. We started with the seafood-stuffed mushrooms and moved to amazingly good tomato bisque and cream of chicken noodle soup. The entrees, though, were exceptional. Jen loved the seafood crepes, which were very similar to the stuffed mushrooms but so large that she could only eat one of the two. I ordered the steak Johannesburg, which is a thick cut of angus beef covered with chopped lobster in Madeira cream sauce, and remembered why it’s my usual.

I’m not a food critic, which you can pretty easily tell by my previous attempts at describing meals, nor have I read many restaurant reviews. I don’t know all the words I should use to tell you why you absolutely must take the trip to Stanton to see for yourself. Just trust me on this one, OK? Go. You’ll be glad you did.

I got the best fortune cookie ever a few days ago:

Your modesty will shame those with lesser knowledge.

What can I say? It was right.