K-Squared Ramblings

New Spring Returns, New Flu Begins

• Lots of suspected #h1n1 cases confirmed today as labs catch up. How many have been ruled out? #
• Trade-off: make vaccine for seasonal flu, or #swineflu? Which will be more dangerous? #
• Wheel of Time news: New Spring comic adaptation to be finished! 4 years later, I guess the rights are settled. #

Line Items for 2009-04-29

• Amazon response (late): bad form letter, and even if I were buying keywords, they’d only stop paying referral fees on those links. #
• Lunchtime observation: Why is it that whenever I put @viennateng on random on the iPod, “Passage” always seems to come up when I’m *driving*? #
• Holy crud, @cdcemergency has twice as many followers (43K) as they did yesterday. Blame #swineflu. #
• Just saw @viennateng concert at Roxy. Fantastic! Opening act Paper Raincoat was good too #

Not So Farscape

This logo really reminds me of the Farscape logo.

It’s not the same font, but it’s close enough to evoke the same feel.

Line Items for 2009-04-28

• Ironically, I only skimmed Three Steps That Guarantee Every Word of Your Copy Gets Read #
• Bread bowl pasta: in case you had any doubt that the low-carb craze was over. #

15 years of the Opera Web Browser

Hard to believe Opera has been around for 15 years. It’s only 14 since its first release, but 15 years ago two programmers started the project that became the Opera web browser.

I’ve been using Opera off and on for about 10 years. I think it was 1999 when a classmate showed me Opera 3.6, and how fast and small it was. (This was back when the installer fit on a floppy disk — and back when that actually made a difference.) I’ve followed it as they expanded from Windows onto Mac and Linux, onto high-end cell phones with Opera Mobile, and finally onto every Java-capable phone with Opera Mini. I’ve watched as they went from trialware to ad-supported to freeware business models. And while the desktop browser is no longer the speed demon it used to be, it’s been a consistent innovator in terms of both browser features and web capabilities.

So I’d just like to say: Happy 15th birthday, Opera! Just think, in a year, you’ll be old enough to drive!*

*In California, anyway. I think in Norway the driving age is 18.

Line Items for 2009-04-27

• Up way too late browsing 1001freefonts.com (It’s exactly what it says on the tin. Give or take.) #
• Best headlines: learn from the BBC #
• Grr. Amazon wants to stop paying me because they think I’ve been buying search keywords to link to them. No, I haven’t. #
• More concerned than usual about person sneezing in stairway #
• Bad idea: leaving your pay stub in the brochure holder by the ATM. WTF? Someone’s asking for identity theft. #
• Good deed for the day: tearing it into tiny pieces and tossing the confetti in the trash. #
• Ambitious, crazy, or both? Backing up Geocities: Lessons so far #
• Sad, but true: XKCD tackles the social component of #swineflu #

South Coast Plaza Garden Show

Garden Show Centerpiece, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Braved South Coast Plaza this Saturday, and ended up in the middle of the Spring Garden Show, which took up all the non-store space in the wing formerly known as Crystal Court. I ended up wandering the garden show for a bit.

First floor was mostly furniture and decorations. The second and third floor were mostly people selling or showing off plants of various types, tools, pots, etc., with half of the third floor dedicated entirely to orchids.

There was also this huge centerpiece in the middle of the mall. Coincidentally, I was looking through old photos from one of our trips to Las Vegas earlier that day and found the pictures of the giant flower-and-insect display in the Bellagio.

I’ve posted a few photos taken with my phone.

Stealth Mime

Saw guy dressed like mime, standing by an actual glass wall. #

Line Items for 2009-04-24

• RT @BeaucoupKevin: I’m not crazy about DailyKOS, but this short piece about the Texans who want to secede is dead on #
• Irony: normally I walk to lunch on Fridays, but time crunch had me driving today. Apparently it’s “car-free Friday.” Oops. #

Internet Fads: GeoLOLTwit

• My Twitter personality: ordinary sociable cautious. My style: chatty academic ROBOT [note: apparently the "robot" is because of the percentage of tweets with links]#
• Farewell, Geocities. It was nice knowing you. (Wait, no it wasn’t!) #
• Jar-Jar Binks speaks LOLCat – or rather LOLcats speak Gungan (@alenxa on rewatching Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace) #

Spam or Not? Trick Question!

I try to hit Spam or Not a couple of times a week, since it helps train the MSRBL-Images blacklist. Tonight I came up against an image that seemed oddly appropriate:

I had to wonder if it was a trick question…

Media Archives

• WB starts HD-DVD to Blu-Ray trade-in program at $5/title. I’m impressed. Usually they want full price to switch formats #
• Wow: Library of Congress has been posting old photos to Flickr #

Line Items for 2009-04-21

• If NASA really knew about aliens, wouldn’t publicizing it be the best way to solve their chronic budget problems? #
• Amazing how many “people” are sending Facebook messages to the postmaster account, offering helpful links to resources for improving uptime #
• Google’s Social Graph thinks I own Cute Overload. Seems to treat all LJ syndication feeds as one profile, & I linked to K2R’s LJ feed w/XFN #

First item cross-posted at LiveJournal.

Line Items for 2009-04-20

• Pushing Daisies resurrected as 12-issue comic book miniseries! #
• Confused. Someone is forwarding their own mail to him/herself, then marking the forward as spam. #

Solving the Express Lane Problem

While waiting in the 15-items-or-less line at the supermarket to buy a single carton of half & half, and waiting for the person in front of me to process a return (apparently not realizing that the purpose of the express lane is to handle simple transactions quickly, and if checks aren’t allowed, returns certainly shouldn’t be), I hit upon a solution to the problem of people misusing the express lane.

Once someone’s made it to the front, you can’t just send them back and tell them to get in another line, for several reasons:

• It makes them even angrier than the people stuck behind them already are, making a scene. If it’s an honest mistake, they feel they’re being put upon. And if they’re trying to pull a fast one, they won’t like being caught.
• Checkout lines are only set up for one-way traffic, so there’s a logistics problem.
• And there’s that pesky “the customer is always right” meme.

My suggestion: Charge a small fee, maybe 10¢, for every item over 15 or whatever the limit is that you’ve chosen. Post it on the sign and treat it like a late fee. If you want, donate it to some charity so people will at least feel better about it.

• It’s an economic incentive to discourage people from bringing in too many items and slowing down the express lane.
• People stuck behind them will feel a little better knowing that hey, at least the dummy with 25 two-liter bottles of soda is getting dinged for it.
• The line can still move forward smoothly.

Sure, you’ll still get people arguing “I didn’t notice I had 16 items!” (Just pay the ten cents already, and count more carefully next time.) And I’m sure there will be some people full of righteous indignation that how dare the store try to charge them for exercising their right as a consumer! It also won’t take care of people trying to handle returns through the express lane, but I expect that’s a less frequent problem.

So…good idea? Bad idea? Some horrible flaw that I missed? What do you think?