Slinging groceries

I received the most unexpected compliment Saturday afternoon at Costco. I had just finished deftly emptying my cart at the checkout line when the gentleman in line behind me spoke up.

“I can tell you’ve done this before,” he said as he and his wife smiled in admiration.

It took me a moment to parse what he had just said. Then I grinned and shrugged my shoulders.

“Yeah,” I said, “I used to work in retail and I guess it shows, huh.”

I’d been swiftly pulling out items that somehow went together (like refrigerated items). The hours I spent running a register as a teenager at Dart Drug have stayed with me, I guess. There was a method to it, a rhythm I would get into that became very Zen-like. I loved the physical nature of being a cashier, the challenge of speed and accuracy, the unconscious awareness of where everything is on the counter and how I could simply trust my hands to know where they were going.

Then some bozo would show up in line with a dozen coupons and a checkbook and I’d be cursing and wishing I was somewhere else. Ah, those were the days!

Wow, I can’t believe I just waxed nostalgic about such a shitty job!

One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths

Chew on this for a moment. Our galaxy, just one of hundreds of billions, harbors at least 10 billion Earth-like, habitable planets. This isn’t just an estimate, this is a calculation from NASA.

Ten billion Earth-like planets in our corner of the universe. Still believe there’s no other life in the universe?

One out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.

via One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths: study – Yahoo News.

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say

Eric Schmidt spoke out about this NSA spying today.
GOOGLE-CLOUD-EXPLOITATION1383148810

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

via NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say – The Washington Post.

Meeting Daylight Saving Time half-way

Clock Radio

Clock Radio

Since I am not yet Dictator of America and unable to dispatch with this silly notion of Daylight Saving Time, I have decided to meet the time-switch halfway. I will change all of my clocks to Standard Time again but will adjust my bedtime/waking time by a half-hour. Rather than awakening an hour later than I did during the summer, I’m waking only a half-hour later. Bedtime comes a just a half-hour earlier, too, rather than a whole hour. My daily routine in-between matches that of the rest of the world.

To summarize:

EDT wake time: 5:30 AM -> EST wake time: 5:00 AM
EDT bedtime: 10:30 PM -> EST bedtime: 10:00 PM.

This is the same routine I did a few years ago. We’ll see how long I choose to keep it up.

LED bulbs are the best, hands down

The best lightbulb ever?

The best lightbulb ever?

Last week we had one of our CFL bulbs burn out in our recessed ceiling fixtures over the stairwell. It was less than five years old and due to its location is the hardest bulb in the whole house to replace. I managed to dislodge the bulb from its socket using a long light-bulb-changing pole (catching it in mid-air before it crashed to the ground), but the whole process made me determined to replace it with a longer-lasting LED bulb.

I’ve been thrilled to find LED bulbs at Costco lately. I purchased a fleet of them, with a couple of them being focused-light bulbs for my recessed fixtures rather than the diffused bulbs we’ve been using. Bad move! The spotlight-like light reminded Kelly of a sterile hotel room’s light. She would break out into show tunes while standing below them to make a point. It didn’t take more than a few songs before I realized this was not the kind of lighting we needed. Back to Costco it went.
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Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Google

My brother worked for Google for a time, when his company got bought by a company that got bought by them. I thought he would be thrilled. Much to my surprise, though, he was largely unimpressed with the culture of Google. I suppose making all of that money is making the company lazy. Seems like Google is in the same position Microsoft was in many years ago and, like Microsoft, might also find itself largely irrelevant.

A job at Google. It’s career heaven, right? How could a gig at the biggest, most ambitious tech company on the planet possibly be bad?Well, take a look at this Quora thread, which is being used by current and former Google employees to dish the dirt on working for Big G.We’ve edited some of the standout comments into this excerpt.

Here’s the original Quora thread where this discussion got started.

via Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Google – Business Insider.

Rand Paul Caught Plagiarizing Science Fiction Movie’s Wikipedia Page

This is hilarious. Sen. Rand Paul gave a speech last week that was lifted almost word-for-word from a Wikipedia page about Gattaca.

It was first mentioned on Rachel Maddow’s show. Check it out for some additional quotes.

When discussing Republicans, I often point out that I believe many of them live in some alternate reality which only seems to exist in a fictional world that they’ve created in their minds.In the case of Rand Paul, that world seems to be found in a 1997 science fiction movie starring Ethan Hawke and written by Andrew Nicool, titled Gattaca. Senator Paul used this movie as an example of where he fears we could be headed, but in doing so, seems to have copied excerpts directly from the movie’s Wikipedia page while attempting to explain the plot.

via Forward Progressives — Unbelievable: Rand Paul Caught Plagiarizing Science Fiction Movie’s Wikipedia Page While Giving Speech.

Cheap Thoughts: Leaves and lives

On my bike ride yesterday, I pondered what the trees might teach us. As I rode through piles of freshly-fallen leaves, it occurred to me that we are closer to trees than we think. Our human souls shed bodies the way trees shed leaves. Pretty powerful stuff.

So there’s your Sunday sermon!

The NSA isn’t the only one who’s tracking your websurfing

TigerDirect_Facebook_ad
I did some searches on TigerDirect’s website for some solid state drives. Lo and behold, Facebook presents me with an advertisement from TigerDirect for … wait for it … solid state drives!

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an eerily similar ad from TigerDirect (and others) show up on my Facebook page. This kind of thing happens all the time on the web: private companies track your every move. Your online purchase and websurfing information gets stored and correlated in a marketing database. You almost can’t visit a website without being tracked in some way.

No wonder the NSA can’t resist vacuuming up information from American Internet companies.

Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here’s a Simple Plan to Fix It

Interesting take on DST. While I agree that DST is a bad, bad idea, I think the solution offered here is equally dumb, if not more so.

I believe local time should be coordinated as closely as possible to solar time. That’s how our bodies’ circadian clocks work. Trying to squeeze everyone into two time zones simply for convenience’s sake (and ignoring solar time) is stupid.

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii and residents of 78 other countries including Canada but not Saskatchewan, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.

It would seem to be more efficient to do away with the practice altogether. The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions. But I propose we not only end Daylight Saving, but also take it one step further.

via Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here’s a Simple Plan to Fix It – Allison Schrager – The Atlantic.