September is ending, school is starting, my job is alternately tedious and annoying, and the world is filled with people desperate to pretend that everything will turn out all right if we just stop offending the delicate sensibilities of murderous savages.

And so, I spend my afternoon ogling pretty girls from Japan, modeling new bikinis and hawking gaming gear.

And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Ayaka teaching English to Morning Musume.

Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me these things?

First, I learn from Daring Fireball that holding down the Shift key turns your Mac mouse’s vertical scroll-wheel into a horizontal scroll wheel.

Then, just now, I accidentally hit my scroll-wheel while watching a video in QuickTime Player, and it scrubbed through the video. Remarkably useful.

I cherish these people. From the wipe manpage:

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.

Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI commands.

My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers should then be able to find those secret commands too.

Don't trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.

After the violent death of my not-so-very-old fridge, I found several things to like about the new one.

First, it showed up an hour early.

Second, it has a button labeled Rapid Cool, which does exactly what it sounds like. The intended use is for when you’ve had the door open for a while, or you’ve just put something large and warm inside (like a big pot of leftovers), but I saw no reason not to push it as soon as it was installed, and about an hour later it was cold enough to stock with food.

Third, it has a button labeled Quick Cubes, which also does exactly what it sounds like. It adjusts the freezer compartment to optimize for making ice cubes, which is perfect for breaking in a new fridge, where you want to throw the first batch of cubes away.

Fourth, the french doors reclaim about a foot of clearance in my kitchen, making it slightly more practical to have two people trying to cook at the same time. The bottom freezer comes out quite a ways, but you don’t open that as often in the middle of cooking.

Fifth, it has an extra door seal between the french doors, and an audible alarm if the doors stay open for too long. Fridges that don’t always close reliably can ruin a lot of food. Not as thoroughly as ones that break down while you’re out of town for a week, but close.

Sixth, it has a full-width, full-depth, pull-out meat drawer. Actually, I should probably have listed that first…

It looks like you can’t link directly to product pages at Sears’ web site, but if you click on appliances and then type 76602 into the search box, you’ll see what I bought.

So, work took me to Kirkland, WA for a week. Not so bad, even if the fact that my work was critical to the company failed to motivate IT to prioritize my tasks above whatever else it was they were doing.

[but I, having promised my manager that I wouldn’t Speak Truth To The Peter Principled At High Volume With Expletives Not Deleted, was a shimmering fountain of sweet reasonableness]

The flight up was packed, but on time, and I got through security in less than five minutes. My map to the hotel proved useless, since they’d changed their name a few months back, and it wasn’t until I called the front desk that I found out that the Doubletree Bellevue was now the Hilton Bellevue … with really horrible wireless Internet access provided by a company called Waypoint. They’ve promised to refund my $10 eventually.

I put in about 65 hours resurrecting our build service, eventually giving up on the last two brand-new servers that were supposed to have been configured and ready before I arrived. Perhaps someone will get to them this week. Or next. Hey, it’s not like they’re needed to, oh I don’t know, PRODUCE OUR ONLY MONEY-MAKING PRODUCT.

[but I, having mostly mastered the art of Not Caring Because They’re Laying Me Off At The End Of The Year, made no fuss, worked around their limitations, and got the hell out of Dodge]

The flight home was uneventful. $50 got me upgraded to first class, and I had a nice limo ride home from the airport, expecting to relax, have a nice meal, go pick up my car from the body shop, and relax some more.

Naturally, I was greeted by the stench of a broken refrigerator filled with spoiled food. Yummy. And very relaxing.

Tuesday night was spent attempting to clean the damn thing, and then surfing the Sears web site when it became clear that the smell couldn’t be removed without more labor than it was worth, assuming it could be fixed in the first place.

Wednesday morning found me waiting patiently for Sears to open, and then dropping $1600 on a new fridge (Kenmore Elite Trio, by the way), to be delivered Friday. Then I spent half a day at work starting the break-in process of one of our replacements, with much more to come on Thursday.

[Nice lady, who’s coming to realize she’s in over her head. I wish her well, but expect she’s doomed. We’re busy keeping things running, so whenever she gets time with us, the knowledge transfer process is a lot like drinking from a fire hose. And she also needs to pick the brain of someone who’s already left, and is available for only a few expensive hours a week. Worse, she needs to rely on the folks in Kirkland once we’re gone…]

Friday, I will rest. Saturday, I will fill up my new fridge. And rest some more.

Sometime soon, I get to figure out why everything I’ve got that can read certain ClarisWorks 4JP documents can edit and print the Japanese text in some of my teacher’s old documents just fine, but nothing can export them to Word as anything but garbage. I’m pretty sure I got it to work once before, but now her ClarisWorks install is refusing to export to Word (with error messages in Japanese), and everything else spits garbage.

It’s particularly annoying that the OS X-native AppleWorks 6 reads them fine, but exports garbage, even via cut-and-paste.

[update: if I export from AppleWorks 6 as RTF, and then run textutil -inputencoding X-MAC-JAPANESE -encoding UTF-8 -convert rtf foo.rtf on the output, everything works fine. I still shouldn’t need to do this, but unless I can coax another copy of ClarisWorks 4JP to export directly to Word, I think it’s the best I can get.]

Just got a status update from my insurance agent on my car accident. They reached the owner of the vehicle responsible for the hit-and-run, and got the following information:

1. He's insured.
2. That night, the car had been borrowed by a friend who was visiting from out of the country.
3. The friend claimed the car was damaged in a hit-and-run.

#1 is the most important, of course. #2 is amusing, because the person driving the vehicle made a quick escape from 101 to 85 to Central, not something you’d expect from someone who didn’t live in, say, Sunnyvale, where the car is registered.

#3 is true, from a certain point of view… :-)

[update: well, this one’s straightforward: 「女の子の足を開かせる」]

I figured I was getting more Japanese spam recently because there’s Japanese text on this blog, but no, that’s not it. Almost all of it goes to addresses harvested elsewhere, including one I that I can never remember the origin of (“j.nwo@…”). Only one in this batch was even sent to an address in the dotclue.org domain.

The subject lines make for fun reading. One thing to note is that the structure of the language seems to be keeping them comprehensible. Either Japanese spam-filtering is a lot more primitive, mangling it to evade spam filters and still be readable is a lot harder, or both. That might explain why my teacher has trouble sending email from a US Yahoo account to some ISPs in Japan; it’s easier to just refuse messages from specific domains and IP blocks tainted by spam.

• おっぱいを素敵な男性にも吸われたい・
• 迷惑メール届いてませんか？
• 美咲よりjgreelyさんへ
• 突然申し訳ございません
• 火遊び？プリーズ！
• 孤独に死んで行くおつもりですか?
• 写真みてくれましたか？
• 今日待ち合わせできますか？
• ネット版ハプニングバーへようこそ！
• サクラゼロの優良サイトから無料パート
• サクッと軽く性欲解消
• ご指名されました
• Ｈ友１００人できるかな♪
• ☆逆援助相手、真剣交際相手☆
• ☆☆確実な出逢いで今日から楽しい
• ■目的別で交際相手を探してみませんか
• ■即アポ確実■
• 【淫らな人妻、派遣いたします】

I have a large stack of unencrypted (well, they are now…) DVDs. Each one contains several short video clips, correctly separated with chapter marks. I want a new DVD containing a subset of those clips, arranged in the order of my choosing, with a simple menu structure, and without re-encoding any of the videos. A mix disc, as it were, with no quality loss. So far, every Open Source or free tool I’ve tried has choked.

I’ve tried three different VOB-splitting tools. All of the available author-from-VOB tools choke on them, because they’re missing the embedded tags that make it a real DVD-compatible VOB (e.g. muxed with “mplex -f8”). Demuxing (either directly from the DVD or from split VOBs) produces an audio track that none of the tools can read, not even the same tool that just demuxed it; they all claim it’s unsupported. mplayer, ffmpeg, ffmpegX, mjpegtools, dvdauthor, transcode, etc, etc, all the same. mplayer cheerfully plays the DVDs (and the single-chapter VOBs), but it only successfully demuxes if the audio is AC3 or MP2; mine are all PCM.

[side note: ffmpegX and HandBrake both have a tendency to produce garbage in either audio or video when used to transcode and compress DVD video; there are options that work correctly with both, but many things that should work don’t.]

It seems the only realistic solution is to rip to DV and drop them into iDVD, accepting the quality loss from re-encoding. Everything else involves spending more money than the task is worth.