Tag: reflections

I’m working out of Munich this week hanging out with Dögi and Michael Banck and having a great time.

I’m sure many visitors to Munich have stories that start this way but the last time I visited Munich, I had a funny experience that involved a series of 1 liter beers.

The night with the beers went smoothly. I met a number of Debian folks from Munich and had a great time. I woke up the next morning early and without a hangover. However, my feet were black and covered with dirt, my toenails were cracked and there was some blood on my feet. My shoes had come home with me just fine.

While I remembered the rest of the night quite cleary, I could not remember, and I never found out, how my feet got that way.

I think the only people I would refuse to date because of their names are people named "Mako." I haven’t decided if I would date people named "Meko," "Mayko," or "Meiko" whose names are spelled differently but pronounced identically to mine. I think they would have to be very attractive.

I’ve talked about intercultural confusion and human naming schemes before and the thought has remained on my mind.

In particular, I’ve been thinking a bit about marriage and the often traditional process of the bride taking the groom’s family name I like the idea of changing names and marriage seems to be one of the places where it is quite acceptable to change one’s name. That said, there are limits both to who can can change their name and the types of changes permissible if it’s going to remain generally acceptable.

I can imagine some humorous confusion in the process of name taking between cultures with given name/family name endianness incompatibility. I’d like to be able to also have the option to change my first (given) name and briefly considered the possibility of capitalizing on the confusion mentioned above to do this. The downside to this is that it probably would mean I end with the same given name as my spouse. This, I think, defeats the point.

We are often told that the "e" in "e-n" means "electronic" but this is only rarely true. E-Trade is hardly distinguished for any other trading firms in in the electronic nature of its trading. Similarly, we are left to wonder if eBay is really an "electronic bay" and, if so, what that could possibly mean.

The inaccuracy of this explanation was humorously visible in the dot-com boom where the likes of etoys.com and epets.com seemed to (successfully) be using the prefix "e" to mean little more than "invest in me" and when a domain registrar was sued for accidentally registering — and then rescinding — the prohibited (by specification) domain name "e-.com" to an entrepreneur who, like everyone else, had no idea what "e" meant but who had quite clearly observed that "e" was the new "$".

In turn, Apple has made "i" the new "e" hoping people will forget that the "i" in "iMac" once stood for Internet and that they will not notice that the "iPod" is completely unable to connect to the network on its own.

Mika was telling me that in Japanese "良い" means good and is often pronounced in the same way that English speaker pronounces the name of the letter "e." As a result, prefixing something with "e" in Japanese is done to mean something is good.

If you ask me, the Japanese have both the more correct answer and the more plausible excuse.

I’ve heard that (sensibly enough) many big rich companies highly dependent on Microsoft Word use document management systems not wholly unlike version control systems to track the development of their documents over time. Law firms are a good example of places where this sort of software lives. However, many of these systems merely provide and track spaces that store different versions of documents and then associate these versions over time and provide an interface to help Word compare them.

On many of these systems, you can check out an old version of the document and, if you’re not careful, actually change or overwrite the old version basically rewriting or destroying history!

This really sounds more like a version out-of-control system to me.

Imagine how jealous these folks would be if they knew what they were missing. Of course, it’s worth remembering that there are many ways that one can be out of control and there’s hardly consensus on which are most enjoyable or most useful.

I love sun-dried tomatoes and eat them several times a week. It has always seemed slightly strange to me that the way that they were dried is so important to the final product that it requires mentioning the process in the name of product. Are lamp-dried tomatoes really so unacceptable? What is it that sun-drying adds over dry heat?

A few days ago, I remembered an older scrap of text by Seth Schoen and realized the obvious answer: it must be all of those delicious photons that get left behind in the tomatoes that make sun dried tomatoes so delicious.

Somewhat troublingly, my otherwise unimpeachable theory seems to be challenged by information I’ve found Googling that implies that there is some real misinformation out there in regards to sun-dried tomatoes and many "sun-dried" tomatoes are not sun-dried at all! That is to say, they are dried in ways that may not involve the sun or even light! Apparently, sun-undried tomatoes are easily distinguishably from the real thing.

Mika explained to me yesterday that she she is annoyed when people begin statements with, "I’ll tell you what."

I’ll tell you what, that’s a pretty strange pet peeve.

When people say, "I chose my words carefully," they usually mean either, "I chose my words randomly and now realize that I accidentally said something correct or insightful," or, "I didn’t say that at all."

I spent some time watching people loading, unloading, and working on their boats today. It certainly seemed like a lot of work. Unless you’re very rich and can afford to have people maintain your boat for you, you must really enjoy boating to go through all that.

Having seen this, it’s clear to me that I like boating enough to own a boat. That said, I believe I like boating enough to go out of my way to make friends with someone else who does.

I completely forgot that Monday was Memorial Day.

Greg Pomerantz is a man of many talents. Once upon a time, he worked as a chip designer. Now he’s a lawyer. If that wasn’t enough, he does kung-fu, plays bass, and maintains xkbsel — all of them with at least a reasonable degree of proficiency.

But if he ever gets tired of all that stuff, I think he could become a great professional fish-naming consultant. He’s come up with the two best names for Betta’s I’ve heard. The first was "Betta-Max" ("Max" for short) — the name of Mika’s current fish. The second was "Vasco da Betta" which is also excellent.

Apparently, there are no polo fields in central park. There are also no pollo fields. I can’t say I’m particularly upset about either.

Careful research carried out by myself and Christian Robottom "Yes That’s Actually My Middle Name" Reis — still currently unpublished as per my colleague’s indispensable advice on the topic — introduces conclusive evidence that all of history’s worst mass-murders — a list that includes Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, Idi Amin and many others — were all notorious top–posters.

Breakthrough that this is, we don’t expect any major media converge. It seems that on a certain level, most of us knew it all along.

I don’t like popular music very much — at least in the MTV or Top 40 sense. I do like singing though. I also like some populists.

Populist singers don’t seem to be that, well, popular. I bet if I put my mind to it, I could become a pretty famous populist singer. If I did that, I could tell people I was a famous pop singer.

I think it would be funny to change my name to something with a number in it. I wouldn’t want something l33t like "H1ll." Rather, I’d prefer something that is well-known word that happens to have a number in it like CAT5 or Internet2.

If I was an old man named Benjamin Mako Internet2 half a century from now, I could tell young people that I was the inventor of Internet2, that the project was named after me, and that the fact that it was in some ways similar to the first Internet was really just a coincidence.

That may sound pretty implausible but coming from a guy whose last name is Internet2, I think some people would buy it.