What I'm doing RIGHT NOW

Updating the firmware on my Tektronix oscilloscope. I'm such a fucking stud.

More "no way" names

The fun continues:

• Bhooshit
• Hind
• Ishit
• Jasbeer
• Jashith
• Kshitij
• Luv
• Mansukh
• Megh
• Muni
• Phani
• Shatarupa
• Swastik
• Viral

The list is ready

No, not the list of names we're thinking of for our pending baby, but the list of names we've definitely discounted:

• Akshit
• Kumbum
• Manmeet
• Rhimjim
• Gopi
• Dikshit
• Sukhdeep
• Hardik

We're having way more fun making that list than the one that might actually be useful when pending baby makes an appearance.

Found art @ Santana Row

Fascinating bldgblog article

Two things are interesting in this article.  Well, lots of things are, but two stood out for me:

• The reference to Gilles Tréhin, who I hadn't heard of before.  He is an autistic artist that has produced an imaginary city complete with history, drawings (beautiful pen-and-ink), tour guide, etc.  Fascinating stuff.

• This excerpt:
  

  Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street. The city has a sum total of eleven pedestrian bridges—and twenty-five percent of the world’s cranes.

Blogger fail

My wxr2blogger script seems to have mysteriously stopped working because the nice folks at Blogger have disabled importing blogs from sources other than their own export files.  This kind of sucks: why would they do this?  It's like they're going out of their way to make this difficult.  I could probably spend some time tweaking the output to make it look more like what they expect, but I have almost zero bandwidth for this right now.  If anyone else wants to take this on, please let me know and I'll add you to the project.

Analogy

I'm always on a look-out for a rude analogy.  From here :

If you called a plumber, but the plumber refused to answer any questions and instead kept talking about how "innovative tubular architecture can enhance your shitting needs", you'd tell him to fuck off.  But yet that's how "business experts" mistreat innocent clients all the time.  Sometimes the direct technical details are the best, and are exactly what the client both wants and needs!

Favourite new word

I'm currently reading Defending Ireland: The Irish State and Its Enemies since 1922 by Eunan O'Halpin. The book is a history of the Irish defense forces and the Gardaí. It's fairly academic, so I won't bother you with the details except to say that I'm enjoying it immensely so far.

The book does document some prize early 20th century Catholic Ireland moments, though, including a bit about how a Catholic magazine accused the army of encouraging contraceptive use amongst it's members by providing allowances and board to soldiers for up to four children only.

If that's not funny enough, the term used by the magazine to describe contraception was "stopery," which is a word I now intend to use in as many technical meetings at work as I possibly can.