Things to do before I turn 30:
1. Learn how to ride a bicycle.
A little over one year after he passed away, my dad got an absentee ballot and a jury duty summons. Go, California.
(Note that this might not make much sense to anyone who hasn’t lived in New England.)
When I was growing up in Massachusetts, I used to hate going to Building #19 with my mom. Building #19 is a chain of stores in New England that sells heavily discounted items; it sells overstock, clearance items, damaged goods, and liquidated inventory from failed stores. It even sells food that’s a bit past the sell-by date. It basically sells a lot of junk, and you never really know what you’re going to find at any individual Building #19 store. It is not comparable to any stores I’ve seen in California. Dollar stores don’t come close.
I didn’t like it as a kid since it had few toys, if any (possibly that’s because Child World/Children’s Palace was still in business and in the area at the time), although they seem to have a somewhat better selection now. Over my past few visits to Massachusetts, though, I’ve developed a new appreciation for the stores. Each store is full of cartoons drawn by Mat Brown and Bill White (who even run a Building #19 cartooning class) utilizing a distinctive style of self-deprecating humor. I confess that I think the illustrated Building #19 advertisements influenced me (particularly the lettering style).
I was at one today, and an announcement over the PA system interrupted the store music with the message:
Building #19: Where else can you get a free cup of coffee? If you find a freer cup of coffee anywhere in New England, we’ll reward you with a second cup and immediately lower our price.
An Abbott and Costello moment at a Wal-Mart where I was buying a 377-type of watch battery for my mom:
“Hi, I need a three seventy-seven watch battery.”
“Okay, that’s three seventy-seven.”
“Right. Three seventy-seven.”
“Three seventy-seven.”
By then I had realized that she meant that the 377 battery coincidentally cost $3.77, although the clerk seemed kind of oblivious to that and to her ambiguous wording. Or maybe she just got a kick out of confusing customers.
Damnit. A couple of Stanford jerks stole my idea for online speed-dating.
Or maybe I should be saying, “Woohoo, now I don’t have to implement it myself.”
Addendum:
Okay, I should be saying, “Phew”, because apparently they filed for a patent on the thing five years earlier, so as Mitchell puts it: “Our laziness saved us some legal fees.”
Surely to the dismay of my coworkers, I have been remarkably unproductive at work during the past few weeks. I suspect one factor (or a convenient scapegoat) is that VMware recently started a shuttle service that has a stop near my house. I’ve been taking it to save what I estimate to be about $1500/year on gas, but I think it has significantly fouled up my daily routine:
- I used to wake up at around 10 AM, do about an hour of web surfing and responding to email, head to work between 11 AM and noon, and eventually return home at around 10 PM. Now with the shuttle, I’m forced to wake up earlier, and since I end up rushing out the door, I do my morning web surfing ritual when I arrive to work at 9:30 AM. This means that I actually start working at 10:30 AM, an hour earlier than before, but I have to leave by 7 PM, three hours earlier than before, yielding a net loss of two hours from my normal workday.
- When I drove home, I used to think about problems I was in the middle of working on. Consequently, when I returned home, I was ready to (and often did) continue working remotely. My brain was active, and driving increased right-brain activity which supposedly can give different insights. Now that I spend the commute on a shuttle, I’m sleepy and end up trying to nap or vegetate, and by the time I get home, I’m totally disengaged from whatever I was working on, and I don’t feel like doing anything else.
Of course, some people will say that maybe I was working waaaay too much before, but my claim is that I have to do that to keep up with all my smart coworkers. Sigh.
I received papers from Sony today saying that the USPTO actually approved some ridiculous patent application that my then-coworkers dragged me into filing with them four years ago.
I think it’s just further evidence of how overwhelmed the patent office is, of how ill-equipped they are to evaluate software patents, and of how software patents are usually lame. It’s another example of how large corporations flood the patent office with anything and everything to try to build up their patent portfolios, and not because they think they’re good ideas worth pursuing, but because they want things with which to defend themselves in case someone else sues them for patent infringement. Stupid patent cold wars.
It saddens me to think that my name is associated with that dreck. On the other hand, my name’s all over the dreck that I call my weblog, and as we already know, it’s not an uncommon name anyway.
My claim: a set of 2000 people has a greater than 50% probability of having someone else with my name.
VMware recently hired someone else named “James Lin”. Today I received four separate emails for him. I wonder if he’s receiving any of mine. Maybe he can fix some of my bugs.
And it happens to be on the 7th day of the week too (at least by the American calendar).
All the pregnant women having Cesarean sections today are cheating.
In other unrelated news, the power supply to my ReadyNAS seems to have failed, so most of my data is inaccessible. Grumble.
Several weeks ago, I received two bills from Sprint on the same day. The first was our usual monthly bill, due on May 23rd. The second was addressed to my dad’s estate. It listed no due date. (I have a photocopy of the bill as proof.) It was a bill for the unpaid balance on my dad’s account, a balance I had tried to pay when it was originally due, except Sprint closed the account on the due date, so I wasn’t able to pay it online as I normally do.
I paid both bills last week. Today I received another bill addressed to my dad’s estate with a late fee applied; apparently the previous bill was due on May 14th.
I wonder if I should bother refusing to pay. It’s probably not worth the $3, but the principle riles me.
Update:
For once dealing with Sprint was relatively painless, and they agreed to waive the late fee.