Come on, really?

"We'd like to keep you informed via email about product updates, upgrades, special offers and pricing. If you do not wish to be contacted via email, please ensure that the box is not checked."

At least the box is not not unchecked by default, but this is stupid.

I confess, it’s been so long since I went through my slides that I simply forgot that I’d gotten Dita Von Teese and Lynn Thomas to cuddle naked on a sofa.

And when did I manage to get Vanessa Gleason outdoors for a quick (clothed) shoot? I sleeved the slides, so I must have looked at them at least once. Clearly I’ve been out of the game for too long…

I think all search results would be improved by the ability to exclude departments. Instead of forcing me to guess whether an item has been filed under “Home & Garden” or “Grocery”, let me instead exclude “Baby”, “VHS”, “MP3 Downloads”, and “Clothing & Accessories”. You already allow negative keywords in the search field, so this would be a natural extension.

This would be particularly useful for your “recommendations for you” list, which in my case is currently dominated by cookbooks, salami, and SF novels. If you want to sell me anything else, you have to give me a way to sort it to the top, and the current positive filtering system is trial-and-error, since most of the listed categories don’t actually have anything in them to recommend.

As a general rule, office firewalls do not have to be configured to cope with simultaneous incoming syslog traffic from 80,000+ hosts. Mine did. Sadly, the default limit for a particular element was only capable of handling about 3/4 of that, leaving our outgoing connections somewhere between unstable and “not” when things got busy.

Fixed now.

PS: syslog can be scary efficient at sending packets when a box is unhappy. Enough unhappy boxes makes for a quite impressive DDOS attack, if you haven’t previously discovered that using “no state” in a firewall rule does not, in fact, avoid filling your state table with crap, thus accelerating your approach toward that arbitrary limit.

…or will be in the state of New York, if the dumbest state legislators in American history can manage to pass their new bill.

Not kidding:

"No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises."

The “in any form” really puts the crown on these king-sized asshats. It’s amazing they managed to write a complete sentence, much less an actual bill.

One should never take this sort of story at face value, so I looked it up on Amazon, and my jaw dropped for two reasons.

1. The linked disclaimer that the contents of The Federalist Papers "does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today".
2. The publisher's claim of copyright on the material.

Both are most likely boilerplate, but they’re deeply clueless boilerplate. And they do indeed reflect a certain kind of modern values…

more...

I was looking up a Japanese word. I knew what it meant. I knew how it had been formed from the parent word. I knew the writer had used it correctly. It just wasn’t in my usual dictionaries, and I wanted to see if there was some nuance to the usage that wasn’t obvious from the construction.

The word was 偉大さ (“idaisa”). Idai by itself is in most dictionaries. As a noun, it means greatness, mightiness, grandeur; as a -na adjective, great, mighty, grand. The -sa ending converts adjectives to nouns, so idaisa should end up with exactly the same meanings as the noun form of idai, but it could emphasize one in particular, or it could simply be more formal. In this case, I think it’s a bit of both; formal, because it’s the foreword to a book about her youth, and emphasizing mighty, because her story is about Ultraman.

But the reason I’m writing is to mention the one dictionary entry that did list idaisa, and included among its meanings a word forged from the purest Scrabbleite:

honorificabilitudinity

Yeah, that helped, thanks.

The first time I realized that Amber Benson had more going for her than I’d been shown was when she opened her mouth during the Buffy musical and sang. Suddenly a decent actress who’d capably immersed herself into a minor supporting role in the series was now a singer with a lovely voice. The second was when I got a good look at her face when she wasn’t made up to look plain and a bit frumpy; she looks as good as she sounds. The third time was when Amazon recommended her novel Death’s Daughter, and I discovered that she had another voice worth hearing.

It’s not my usual genre of fantasy; at least, the things Amazon starts recommending once you buy it are the kind of chick-flick broody-goth romangst fantasy that have stronger ties to Harlequin than Tolkien. Fortunately, Death’s Daughter is neither dark nor brooding, and the world-building is first-rate. The supporting cast is only lightly sketched, admittedly, but the heroine makes up for it by being quite thoroughly developed, and carries the story along superbly. It’s a good book, and now she’s made another one, Cat’s Claw.

It’s a lot of fun. I don’t usually stop in the middle of a page, laugh out loud, reread it, and then laugh out loud again. Benson got me to do that in Cat’s Claw. I won’t say where; if you read it, you’ll know the spot.