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Toast Tuesday
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Too tired, headachy, unmotivated, antisocial, and cheap to treat myself to tacos for dinner (as it is #tacotuesday), so I made myself toast instead. I have been eating so much toast over the past year. I can not remember the last time I ate this much toast. I am probably going through almost a loaf of bread a week. Don’t worry about me getting scurvy: One of my current vices are these ridiculous fruit-flavored Starbucks beverages that contain plenty of vitamin C.
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I don’t like to eat the heels of the bread, so I put them in large ziploc bags in the freezer, promising myself that I am going to make stuffing or bread pudding or something delicious that you make out of sad bread. It never happens.
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A new person started at work yesterday! Another new person will be starting tomorrow!
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All of these strangers in the office are somewhat terrifying. I am quite capable of inadvertently offending people, and I do not want to be the poorly socialized mathematician who causes one of the new people to have a bad experience at work during their first few days. Also I hold some very strong opinions, some of which can seem, on the surface, to be somewhat unconventional.
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My couch is covered with toast crumbs and cat fur and junk mail and assorted other things. A small part of me wants to take a week off of work in order to finish doing Kon-Mari and throwing away all my possessions in hopes of transforming my home into a calm and spa-like retreat. But it is not as if I have any attachment to the toast crumbs and cat fur and junk mail. I just hate cleaning.
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Private Jets
Since my newspaper was never delivered yesterday, I did spend the morning at the cafe coding up my solution to our hiring puzzle. Out of politeness to the people who I work with, I’m not going to say much about it except that it is not the obvious solution. I also found a slicker way to deal with the bitwise arithmetic than I had originally planned.
Finally got a chance to go back to the airport and take pictures of planes landing. Since I live in a place with natural disasters, there is all this talk of putting together a bag that you can grab if you need to evacuate quickly. Important papers, family photos, precious metals, jugs of water, whatever it is that people think that they should be bringing with them in an emergency. I’m sure that there are guidelines. But I think about that advice every time I go to the airport and, like yesterday, my camera runs out of batteries. I try really, really, really hard to have everything that I need in my camera bag so that I can just grab it and go. I fully intend to have spare batteries in my bag. I try really hard to keep my scanner radio and my ear protection and spare SD cards and everything else in the camera bag. But I keep falling short. So yesterday I had to turn the camera off and miss several Southwest planes (including the 500th 737 delivered) so that I could save batteries to take a picture of Mark Cuban’s plane landing.
Why did Mark Cuban’s plane come to San Diego yesterday? Did the Dallas Mavericks need to be in San Diego for some good reason? Don’t know. But I do suspect that they don’t come here often because the controller told the pilot to turn left onto taxiway B (towards the passenger terminal) when they were headed to the north ramp (taxiway C). Since I forgot to eat dinner, I was starving by the time the plane landed, so I just left the airport instead of switching my scanner over to the ground frequency to find out how the plane was going to cross back over to the north of the runway.
Those reading with feed readers can see the photo on instagram.
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Troll Programming
My employer is hiring software engineers, a DevOps engineers, maybe some other technical/programming roles, too. I’m on the mailing list that sees all the job applications (and I field the math applications), so I’ve seen a bunch of the applications for the software positions come in.
With the full-time math positions, we ask the candidates to send in some fairly standard stuff, and if the candidate looks promising, we send a math/writing test. We use this to decide whether to schedule an on-site interview.
It looks like with the new ad for the developer jobs, we’re putting one of the preliminary coding tasks in the job ad.
Due to my liberal arts education, I know what some of the “right” ways are to approach this coding task. I can think of a few very harmonious ways to organize the information needed to solve the problem. There are some data structures that are so appropriate for this task that you would hardly need to write any comments because anyone who has taken a data structures and algorithms class would immediately see where things are going. Based on what I know about the nature of the position (which is described pretty clearly in the ad as well), I also know which programming languages would allow a candidate to showcase their strengths.
I am seriously considering coming up with the trolliest of troll solutions to this problem. This morning in the shower I came up with a data structure that works but is not what you would expect. I also thought of a way to traverse it that is remarkably opaque. My algorithm relies on a lot of integer division, modular arithmetic, and bitwise
AND.And I’m thinking of writing it as a bash script. If you don’t know bash scripting, then there is no way that you would understand what this code is doing. It’s just going to be a confusing jumble of symbology.
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Why Stop at Alexa?
I have an Amazon Echo Dot, a/k/a “Alexa.” I got Alexa during a period of time where my neurological symptoms were so bad that I was having a lot of difficulty reading from a computer screen.
Even though I have been better for almost a yeat, I still have Alexa, and I still think that she is fantastic. She has greatly cut down on the number of times that I have started to make tea and then forgotten to drink it. It’s much faster to ask her the weather than to look it up on my phone. She can turn the light off from across the room (so I no longer need to regret the fact that I didn’t think to ask the electrician to install a second light switch on the other side of the room).
Everyone warns me that Alexa might be a spy. But why single Alexa out? Let me tell you about other potential spies.
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Your cell phone has a microphone and probably at least one camera. It connects to nearby cell towers without you even asking it to. It is well-established that when it is on, your phone is certainly revealing your location to your phone company. It is likely that your phone is also revealing your location to the company that wrote its operating system. Your cell phone might be listening to you right now via the microphone. It’s hard to prove that it isn’t. A friend countered this argument by saying that if you turned your phone off and put it in a potato chip bag and if the phone’s battery level didn’t go down, then the phone was not fruitlessly searching for cell phone signal while “off,” in which case it was not spying. This just means that the phone is not constantly trying to stream your life to some mothership. It might save the data and then send it once it has a connection.
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Your laptop. Also has a microphone and a camera. Also frequently connects to the internet. Maybe that is why your hard drive is always full and your battery runs down faster than you expect. Maybe
ps -Ais lying to you. -
Just about any other device that is hooked up to your network. Could my stereo be spying on me? Unlikely. It probably doesn’t have a built-in microphone, and you would only connect the external microphone if you needed to recalibrate the speakers. (It is so cool. You put the microphone where you sit, and then the stereo emits various tones, and it adjusts the levels based on what the microphone hears coming from the speakers.) But if you think that Alexa is a rat, there is no reason not to take a critical look at that Kindle.
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The cable box. Why is the box so big and so heavy and so hot if all it does is convert the signals coming out of the co-ax cable to HDMI? That sounds like the work of a dongle, not a large box. Oh, it’s a DVR, too? You mean that it can store many hours of audio and video? How much do you trust Comcast?
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Your cable modem. Have you opened it up and looked for surveillance equipment?
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Anything. Maybe that weird gift is spying on you (powered via watch batteries), and someone comes within 30 feet of your home every day and grabs the data off it via Bluetooth.
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Quick Updates
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Despite the dentist’s claim that the magical 3D scanner would lead to crowns that fit really well, they needed a lot of adjusting when they were installed this morning. To be fair, crowns approximately always need adjusting upon installation, and there are more parameters in play when they are two adjacent teeth.
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I allowed the dentist to upsell me a several-hundreds-of-dollars piece of custom-made magical plastic that allegedly prevents migraines. If it performs as advertised, it is certainly worth it. Even if it doesn’t, it will limit the wear-and-tear on my teeth.
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Guess what, I get to go back to the dentist for a fourth visit on Monday.
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Things that are neither magical nor dentistry related: The customer-facing function that does the thing calls the other function that checks the condition. The staff-facing function that does the thing does not call the other function that checks the condition. (And if it does call the other function that checks the condition, it does not do anything useful with the result.)
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Did I tell you that I caught a Ditto the other day, so now I am closer to catching a Mew? Also, I caught a shiny Magikarp today. In other mobile gaming news, in Love Nikki Dress UP Queen, I am making decent progress towards crafting Grice. So far this week I have finished the shoes and the hair.
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The Argentine Ant Supercolony
The Argentine ant supercolony has moved into my kitchen.
The difficulty in ant eradication is one frustrating part of living in a building where one face is inaccessible to the pest control contractor (due to the presence of two locked gates). The ants live in the ground, and they walk into the building. However, I worry that the ants are living on the north side of the building and evading pest control.
Also, how can I feed enough poison to the ants if they are also invading my neighbors’ kitchens? Is there any way to politely buy everyone in the building a set of poisoned sugar water to put in their apartments? Poisoned sugar water is cheap (it would cost me less than $40 for enough for the whole building), and I could order it on Amazon and have it shipped to every unit in the building. But while my mathematician brain says that this is the logical thing to do (unify against our common enemy), I expect that some of my neighbors would not be happy to receive some surprise poisoned sugar water.
Oh well, I guess this means that I will have to give up fancy Starbucks drinks and avocado toast so that I can save up hundreds of thousands of dollars so that I can buy a house-house in San Diego and pay to have professional grade poison sprayed anywhere I want on the property.
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Robots Covering Up Their Shortcomings
Normally when you ask Alexa something, a “card” shows up in the web interfacte and the iOS app. You can review what Alexa heard and the answer that she gave. If Alexa did not understand what you meant, then you can provide feedback.
However, recently I learned that this is not always the case.
Me: Alexa, what’s the difference between Lightsail and EC2?
Alexa: Hmm, I don’t know that one.
Me: Alexa, can you help me configure a Lightsail instance?
Alexa: [Says nothing, just makes a sad chime noise.]
And when I went to the app to give some feedback that maybe Amazon’s robot should be able to give me some basic guidance on Amazon’s products, there was nothing there!
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