How the hell did I miss that?

The volume setting on my Squeezebox 2 goes to 11.

Mini movie review: The Queen

On my flight back from New York, I watched The Queen. In spite of being shown on a tiny cramped LCD screen and "modified to fit this screen and for content", the movie was great. Helen Mirren was excellent as the HM Queen Elizabeth II. The Tony Blair character (played by Michael Sheen) seemed a little naive, but was otherwise excellent. I don't know how much of the movie was based on reports or official documents and how much was based on idle speculation, but the story seemed plausible and was certainly gripping. I'll go watch it for real in the theater if I can still find it playing nearby.

BTW: Continental Airlines feels that the word "God" is somehow offensive, and so bleeped out all occurrences during the movie. An amusing example (actually, a sad example) of this was during Earl Spencer's eulogy to his sister, when he said "even though <bleep> granted you but half a life." Morons.

A New York shopping experience

R: Seems kind of pricey for a simple black sweater.
G: It's the new black.
R: Lack of color is the new lack of color.

Second Life review

This is great: a review of second life.

Welcome to America. Please bend over.

Considering how much I dislike the experience of flying, it's odd that these utterings have more than a few flying stories in them. In any case...

On Monday I flew from San Jose to New York via Chicago. While standing in the jetway at Chicago O'Hare airport, waiting to board my flight, a member of the ground staff entered the jetway through a side door and grabbed a pram that was waiting to be stowed away. The pram had been sitting on top of a bright blue fabric package about 20in by 12in and prominently labeled "Property of the US Government." Beneath that I could make out the words "Department of Commerce" but everything else was too small to read. As the line inched forward, the remaining words resolved themselves to my short-sighted eyes. The package was labeled "Foreign Passenger Survey Data" or words to that effect. I wonder if that's related to the whole US Visit procedures the US is subjecting foreigner visitors to?

Still, though. Whoa! Eh? Whoa!

I recently took an Indigo Airlines flight from Kolkatta to Nagpur. I don't like flying at the best of times: I get altitude sick, feel cramped (I'm a little under 6 feet 3 inches, so there's never enough room in coach) and hate the feeling of being out of control. It's much more fun when you're doing it with a friend in a small aircraft. At least then you feel like your could grab the stick in case of emergency and, you know, crash the plane yourself. But at least you'd have tried to do something about it.

As I was sitting in the Airbus, waiting for the passengers to board and gloomily contemplating all of this, one of the flight attendants walked down the aisle. Flight attendants in India are predominately female, very young and very attractive, and she was no exception. She caught my eye and gave me a big smile. I smiled back. I felt special. She walked past and I glanced over at Kamala, Ramya and Gayatri. The were all staring at me, jaws in their laps, eyes popping.

"Whoa!"
"Did you see that?"
"She likes you!"
"Cut it out you guys, she was just being nice."

The ragging continued for a few seconds. There was much wobbling of heads.

Once we were in the air, I sat back and stared at the seat back in front. Kamala pressed her button to summon a flight attendant. A couple of minutes later the attendant appeared and then went off to fetch a bottle of water. A minute or two later she returned with water.

The flight droned on. I stared at the seat in front some more. I was woken from my reverie by Kamala.

"Robert, can you call the flight attendant?"
"Sure - is everything OK?"
"It's fine - I just want to see how quickly she comes to you."
"What? I'm not doing that!"
"Go on."
"What will I ask her for?"
"It'll be fine."
"No!"

I stared at Gayatri in desperation. Gayatri and her sister were grinning at me: no help there. I rather lamely protested, then pretended to go to sleep. The ladies left me alone for the rest of the flight, then came to my rescue once we were on the tarmac at Nagpur and the airline official wouldn't let me take the bus across the tarmac to the terminal because I'd left my boarding pass in my seat pocket on the plane. But that's another story.

We generically love you, valued employee

Everyone at work found one of these on their desk yesterday. I love the lack of a heart or any red colour at all, the obvious holiday-template and the corporate advertisement, just in case you forget who's your daddy:

That said, the chocolate itself wasn't too bad.

More amazing cell animations

Holy flaming ass monkeys

This video is unbelievable: an animation of the inner life of a cell. There's more details on the making of the video here. It's a shame there isn't anything that says "this bit here is an X doing action Y."



Update: the actual real video is here.

The differences between men and women

Like every other women in the universe, my wife receives Victoria's Secret catalogues in the mail every week. Sometimes more than one a day, even. In comparison, I receive Programmer's Paradise catalogues in the mail every week. Yup, actual physical catalogues. You buy one silly MPI analyzer and you're on their mailing list for life, it seems.

Like the Victoria's Secret catalogues, mine also contain pictures of models (although not very many of them.) Unlike the Victoria's Secret catalogues, the models in the Programmers Paradise catalogues are fully clothed. This is probably a good thing. They're also not so much pouting like their Victoria's Secret counterparts as much as they are smiling at their monitors. I've only ever seen programmers smiling at their work when they're undergoing a nervous breakdown.

So, my wife gets a weekly supply of classically beautiful women in see-through bras with the nipples air-brushed out - we certainly wouldn't want you to think those models have actual nipples - whereas I get a weekly supply of fully-clothed neurotic programmers who are deliriously happy about their Fortran compiler. This restores my faith in balance.

Star Trek meets Monty Python

New Parallels release candidate

Parallels has released build 3150 (RC2) of Parallels Desktop for Mac. Checking my Fedora Core 6 installation from last time shows that, unfortunately, there is still no accelerated X driver, sound is still scratchy and you still can't have more than 512MB of memory without a kernel OOPs. VMWare haven't released a new Fusion build since build 36932, so no progress on that front either.

Hurray for us

Today our company achieved ISO 14001 certification. My role in all of this was twofold: 1) attend the training meeting; and 2) carefully avoid being in the office during the audit.

We're the winners.

That tingling sensation in your brain says it's working

I'm in a ISO 14001 training meeting right now. Somebody shoot me.

God's chef

I've been catching up on all those Morel Orel episodes that I've missed. Today was the "God's Chef" episode. They had this wonderful series of things you tell children at different ages when they ask how babies are made:

Age 5

Babies are little bowls of smiles that fell over in a garden.

Age 6

Martians shoot goo-goo rays into mommies' tummies.

Age 7

Faeries make babies out of bubbles.

Age 8

Babies are made from the skin that flaked off God's foot.

Age 9

You were born because a stork got pregnant.

Age 10

You were born because mommy swallowed a watermellon seed.

Age 11

Babies are made by God's chef visiting ladies at night while they are asleep and injecting them with the delicious glaze from his holy pastry bag.

Civic v. Ferrari

Jeremy and I were driving past the Google campus on Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, on our way back to work from coffee. There was a shiny new Ferrari parked on the side of the road with a red protective cover over it.

Me: "Want to drive real close to that guys Ferrari?"
Jeremy: "I don't care"
Me: <swerves close to Ferrari>
Both: "Whaaaa!"
Me: "That was fun!"
Jeremy: "You know there's no way your insurance would have covered it?"