I'd Like To...

From a rather breathless article in the WaPo that teeters along the line between reporting and entrapment, comes the deathless description of a "crude acronym for attractive mothers".

CAFAM? Can't really see that taking off. Can you really not say that in a newspaper?

Wireless Internet

Phone line finally hooked up yesterday: part of the problem was that the phone wires weren't actually connected to anything before a nice man came and tied them together. Amazingly, Verizon don't seem to be able to promise any kind of internet connectivity before the end of the month. Maybe I will give them a call to see if anything can be done about this.

I was also suddenly reminded of something: within a couple of hours I had started receiving spam phone calls: for a newspaper, and for satellite TV. I suddenly remembered the National Do Not Call registry. Since it was a new phone number, it was listed, so I am doomed to receive junk telemarketing calls until my new registration kicks in.

Little Boxes

Having spent the weekend putting things into boxes, and then putting those boxes into bigger boxes, I then spent the last few days taking things out of boxes again. Somehow both directions feel like they involve increasing the amount of order in the system.

Is that increasing entropy or decreasing entropy? Thermodynamics would suggest that I am engaged in a futile struggle against the increase of entropy. My intuition was that information theoretically I am increasing information, but I guess that's wrong: since the highest entropy is a totally disordered (random) system, then by putting things in certain places, I'm reducing the amount of information stored in the system.

Sarky Bastard

I occasionally suffer from Netflix theft, especially when I am traveling: the website insists that the latest disc has been dispatched, but there is no sign of it a week or so later. Clearly, someone is intercepting the discs and keeping it for their own immoral purposes. I lost "Crank", a tongue-in-cheek action-fest to this fate a few months ago.

Now I have encountered a new twist. I got home from France last week, expecting to find "All The President's Men" in my mailbox, but finding it gone. I was too busy to do anything about it, so figured I'd give it a bit longer, and then go through the process with netflix to get a new disc sent out.

But getting home today, I found a familiar red envelope in my mailbox. Not the disc I had been promised, but the next one in my queue. Checking with netflix indicated that they had received the ATPM disc back on wednesday, two weeks after it had been sent out originally.

The most plausible explanation I can come up with for this is that some unknown miscreant intercepted the first disc, and after some time, put it in the return envelope and sent it back to netflix, who duly moved onto the next disc.

For some reason, this strikes me as incredibly cheeky.

Heston's Hands Finally Cold, Dead

Let the prying commence.