The vending machine at work confuses me. Water is twice the price of soda. Sure, the Cokes are 12oz and water is 20oz, but it’s water! I can get filtered water for free from the refrigerator.

In other news, I went to a site with a cute little CAPTCHA today. Sure, it’s not quite KittenAuth, but it was still cute enough to give me a chuckle.

Holy cow! It’s a blog devoted to handwritten signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L. Who’da thunk the phenomenon was prevalent enough to support such a blog?

See also: countless blogs that feature examples of extraneous “quotes” and apostrophe’s

So I have been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and something has been bugging me. If you can only bring flesh (or technology wrapped in flesh) and not straight-up technology through a time portal, then how did that bare terminator head get flung out of the bank vault and into the current-day storyline???

Little things that feel good:

* Performing a lane change on a freeway with those nubbily drive-by-braille bumps where you completely avoid hitting any of those dots.

* Coming home to a house that smells of fresh bread, having forgotten that you set up the bread machine hours ago.

* Going to a club and hearing a song or two that you liked way-back-when, but had completely forgotten about in the intervening years.

I have lube for my yo-yo.

Someone in a blue labcoat just wheeled an electrostatic cart past my office door. On the cart was a mewing cardboard box.

…

The hardware design lab now appears to be part kennel. A cat is in there hiding behind a curtain of CAT-5 cables. I think this is the day in which we hope to not have a surprise OSHA inspection (…not that they actually do such a thing at office jobs.) Something tells me they would frown at having a litter box directly in front of the breaker box and a cat in a room full of (hopefully switched off) soldering irons.

Every time I see or hear the term waterboarding, my brain immediately jumps to thoughts of playing in the ocean (specifically boogie boarding.) It takes a sec for my brain to recalibrate and latch in to the fact that waterboarding is really a torture technique currently in use by the US that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Similar to what they did with Aperture rebates a while back, they’ll be doing the same thing with the iPhone. $100 ain’t too shabby.

Do any of you Unix-heads know if there is some network-equivalent of the “nice” command for limiting bandwidth under Linux and/or OS X? For instance, it might let me issue a command such as the following:

netnice wget http://someurl

Yes, I am aware that wget itself has some bandwidth-limiting options, but that’s beside the point. There are other commands that do not, plus it’s easier to remember one command than it is to look up all the right flags for every command and it would be nice to alter a speed after a program has been launched. Architecturally, I don’t really see how this could work without a proxy or nasty Linux-specific drivers and iptables hacks because there’s not much in the network stack that can be hooked for such a purpose. I can do some basic Quality-of-Service hacks in my fancy Layer-2 router, but they’re based on what jack you’re plugged into (i.e. granularity down to a specific machine, but not program-by-program-within-the-same-machine.) I have a feeling this is an impossible search. Searching for various combinations of the terms “Unix network nice command bandwidth QoS, etc.” does not yield anything useful.

Everyone seems to be going hyper over Holga cameras. In case you do not already know, they are cheap (in both price and quality) film cameras originally manufactured in Hong Kong. They have cheap lenses, light leaks, and other “issues.” People love this–Wikipedia describes the resulting pictures as being “appreciated for their low-fidelity aesthetic.” You have no idea what you will end up with until after the film is developed. You either get a crappy picture or a serendipitous piece of art, but you don’t know at the time you’re framing the picture.

It occurred to me, a few weeks ago, that someone should make a digital camera equivalent. I’m not talking about a Photoshop filter (or set of filters), as that is more like “cheating.” The great thing about the Holgas is their apparent randomness, and being able to simulate that in post-production, to come up with exactly the style you want, loses that randomness. So this dream digital camera will have some amount of smarts inside of it. When you take a picture, it will apply some random filters to it, giving it the Holga look. It won’t have an LCD, just a peephole viewfinder. This not only prevents you from perfectly framing your dream shot, it also prevents you from reviewing the photos you just took until after you “develop” them by plugging in to a computer. The lack of an LCD would also keep costs down. You would be encouraged to just snap and snap and snap as many pictures as possible. You’ll end up throwing out a bunch, but because “developing the film” in this version of the camera is free, it doesn’t matter.

While I have heard of digital backs for Holgas and Holga lenses for fancy digital cameras, the key to this particular dream digital would be to make it cheap and accessible to everyone, without worrying too much about breaking it, messing it up, or any other thing that would cause you to leave it at home instead of taking it with you everywhere. A price point of about $50 would be ideal, and probably quite do-able, given the above constraints.