I went to Powell's this evening after work.  I prob­a­bly should have waited a bit, as the traf­fice 'round about the 5/405/84 was bad and backed up pretty far.  Any­way, I skipped out on the actual Powell's expe­ri­ence and instead jumped over to the tech­ni­cal book store.  I do not think I have ranted about the park­ing “meters” here yet, but I will do so in the next para­graph.  Any­way, I finally picked up one of the Down­town Walk­ing Maps that Fee­dle had and trans­ferred all the ran­dom Post-It's and scribbled-upon com­puter print­out maps on to the one nice map.  I also picked up Mac OS X for Java Geeks, (Torgo X's?) RTF Pocket Guide, and a book about Crypt­analy­sis.  The first book is because I am get­ting more and more into OS X pro­gram­ming in Java, as opposed to Objec­tive C.  Both Tasty Safari and iGallery were writ­ten in Java, with the spe­cial com.apple.* exten­sions.  The sec­ond book (RTF) was because I had a look at the RTF spec this past week.  An odd Rich Text file sur­faced that may or may not be con­nected with an ARG, may or may not have been cor­rupted, and which may or may not have included hid­den data.  I ended up “decom­pil­ing” the RTF based on the spec, and the spec really sucks and seems to be slightly incom­plete.  (For instance the font table is in the spec, but select­ing an indi­vid­ual font doesn't seem to be.  I had to guess that \f0 means “use font 0″).  The third book was just for fun.  I have been doing cryp­tog­ra­phy from the secure side for so long, it is kind of refresh­ing to approach it from the “let's break it” angle.  Plus, it has lots of exer­cises.  I passed up a few books on genetic algo­rithms, because they were expen­sive and did not really add much to my exist­ing col­lec­tion and/or knowledge.

So: the park­ing meters (or lack thereof).  In most cities, when you walk down the side­walk, you pass row after row of posts with mechan­i­cal (or now, dig­i­tal) park­ing meters perched atop.  There used to be the same thing up here, too, except the meters got old and bro­ken and replace­ment parts were either incred­i­bly expen­sive or impos­si­ble to find.  Because of this, they decided to install new meters, but not just any ol' meters.  The new ones are fancy, high-tech, and you only get one of them per side of the street per block.  They are even solar pow­ered, for the tree hug­ging, gra­nola munch­ing hip­pie types.  Basi­cally, you park, walk up to the machine, pay for your time (using cash and get­ting change back, using your debit card, or using a smart card, and it prints out a lit­tle receipt on the back side of a label say­ing “park­ing valid until xx:yy.”  You then peel the label off and use that to stick the printed side (the back­ing) to your win­dow (on the inside so nobody can mess with it).  If you do not use all your time, you can drive to another block and park using the same sticker, as many times as you want until after the time printed on the sticker.  It is all kinds of smart and all kinds of convenient. 

Oh, also, I got the print ver­sion of The Onion.  It includes the “Fuck Every­thing, We're Doing Five Blades” arti­cle (which appears to no longer be on the site, just in the Google cache).  A few days ago, I had to get some new blades for my razor.  Of course, every­one was out of my measly 3-blade refills.  I ended up get­ting an Xtreme!!!!! 4-blade razor (pass­ing up the red with black high­lights 3-blade rac­ing razor–I think it even had a race car num­ber on it).  This 4-blade razor is so XTREME it is humor­ous.  The lit­tle plas­tic hol­ster thing you keep it in is metallic-colored plas­tic and includes things like lit­tle rivet shapes in the plas­tic and such.  It's as if a high-quality metal prod­uct com­pany (Apple, Oak­ley, etc) decided to sud­denly make all their prod­ucts out of plas­tic at a cheap Tai­wanese sweat shop.  The col­or­ing in the plas­tic isn't even consistent–you can see swirls of color where they poured it into the mold and it cooled at dif­fer­ent rates.  The razor itself is ehhhh.…  It cer­tainly seems bet­ter than my 3-blade, but that's prob­a­bly because the 3-blade was dull, I don't remem­ber how well it was when it last had a new blade, and the 4-blade is sharp.  I did dis­cover I can slice open my face with four times the speed and accu­racy.  Also: why don't shav­ing cream cans tell you how much is left inside?  I had to go back to the store today to get more shav­ing cream, when I could have eas­ily got­ten some a few days ago, had I known.

Movies: got Man of the Cen­tury the other night from Net­flix.  Bril­liant!  This may be a keeper.  Got Cracker, Sea­son 2 from Bor­ders tonight.  So far: Excel­lent!  I also pur­chased a copy of Monk after hav­ing rented it from Net­Flix the other night.  When I grow up and become a ser­ial killer, I'm going to get a crib­bage board stick unlit matches upright in each of the peg holes, and for each per­son I kill, I'll pull out a match, light it, blow it out, and put it back in the crib­bage board.  I am NOT going to shave my head and become a neo-Nazi first, though.

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5. Just because you’re not para­noid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you…

Tagged as: powells