CubeCheater
PiratizerHmm
I saw this in a university newsletter spam today:
If you’re SINGLE and want a “special” Valentines Day – Join us for a night of Graduate student SPEED DATING. Just in time for Valentine's Day! Come meet fellow single graduate students!
Who: Current single UW graduate students
What: Speed Dating
When: [redacted]
Where: [redacted]
Please RSVP to [redacted] to let us know if you are coming. (The sooner you respond, the better your chance of getting a seat!). If you feel comfortable please also let us know what table type you would like to be assigned to. There will be four tables to choose from: straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual.
Note: this event is only open to UW graduate students; IDs will be checked at the door.
My initial reaction is "Ha, like that would ever work. Delete.", but on second thought I'm actually considering it, if for no better reason than curiosity. I have never been to one of these kinds of things - anyone have any idea what they are like? The Wikipedia page actually makes it sound somewhat interesting.
Being an engineer I naturally started trying to do a CBA on it, but the usual approaches aren't working too well. Here's what I have so far:
Pros:
- Pool restricted to just girls who are single.
- Potentially lower awkwardness/expectation levels.
- They're graduate students, so at least some level of intelligence-filtering has already been performed.
Cons:
- Potential for embarrassment.
- Speed-dating == speed-rejection? [see: personal phobias]
- Mail does not say whether free food is provided.
UW Grading System
This week I got the grade for my Data Compression class and was somewhat surprised at the format. From my undergrad experience I was expecting it to be in the usual A, B, C format, but instead I got a "3.9" grade.
I looked up the University of Washington's grading system, which is apparently number-based and on the same scale as the GPA system. So 3.9-4.0s are "A equivalents", 3.5-3.8s are "A-"s, 3.2-3.4s are "B+"s, etc..
I'm a bit torn on my evaluation of the merits of this system. On one hand, it's much more fine-grained than the lettering system, and you can distinguish between students who worked really hard and got perfect scores on everything, and other students who just did the work required to get an A. The letter grade system doesn't really distinguish between people to that degree, until you start using the plus/minus quantifiers to the letters, at which point you've basically admitted that just using the letters doesn't quite cover all the information you need to convey. It seems that UW has solved that problem by just throwing away the letter system and replacing it with the number system.
On the other hand, I'm sort of miffed by this, because after all these years of school, it's become very ingrained in my mind that an A == 4.0 GPA. Now I have an "A", but my GPA is 3.9, which in my mind means "dang, screwed up and got a B in 1 out of 10 classes." Of course, in reality, a 3.9 is a perfectly fine grade and probably nobody will ever care anyway (how much to MBA/PhD programs care about GPAs? I am not really sure.. hrmm..). Still, grr 
.
Now that I know how the system works, I can accommodate it if I decide I really need that 4.0 (which, honestly, I probably don't).
1984
Apparently my copy of 1984 restarts from the very beginning on page 43, meaning that it's missing about 40 pages at the end of the book:
If it was any other book I would have just chalked it up to incompetence, but since it was this particular book, I had to wonder if it was done on purpose, and if so, what did those 40 pages contain that caused them to get tossed down the memory hole? Perhaps a stinging revelation that the paperback-publishing industry is the root of all evil? If I asked about it, would the answer be that "1984 is missing 40 pages. 1984 has always been missing 40 pages"?
I found and read the rest of the book on the internet, and alas, it doesn't actually appear to be a vast conspiracy 
Slow news day
Due to the extreme goodness of Super Mario Galaxy, I don't have much news to report for this week.
So here's a new entry in the classic space-filler series, This Week's Weird Google Queries.
They range from the depressing (due to the large number of hits these get):
- 'vista crash' (or 'vista minesweeper crash' and many variants)
- 'exception from hresult c00d1191'
- 'how to open office 2007 box' (or variants like 'cant get vista box open')
.. to the sad:
- 'how do i fix my broken wii'
- 'get rid of embarrassing google results'
- 'locked out of my garage help'
- 'i shut a painted door and now its stuck'
- 'locked myself out how to break in'
.. to the slightly disturbing:
- 'how track wow ip'
- 'how to forge uw student id'
- 'detect blog post ip address'
- 'where to buy nazi hoodies'
- 'how can i get somebody else ip address'
.. and some that are just bizarre:
- 'religion hedgehog'
- 'jokes about wal-mart employees'
- 'see me squirt'
The #1 search hit is still the old classic 'the end of false religion is near' (still #7 for that query, apparently). Amazingly enough, despite it being more than a year since that post, it seems that false religion has still not come to an end (who would have guessed?!).
Nazi hoodie
I was buying a jacket at Macy's the other day and was surprised to come across a hoodie with the totenkopf logo of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, the branch of the infamous SS secret police charged with running the concentration camps in Nazi Germany. It's probably one of the most offensive Nazi logos, after the SS 'lightning-bolt' symbol and the swastika itself:
I was not surprised specifically that the logo made it onto some clothing. It's not a very well-known logo, and the clothing designer probably just searched the internet for 'skull' and copied one of the results without knowing what it was. For some reason the skull motif seems to be very popular in young men's clothing these days (who wouldn't want to 'rebel' against the System by buying some overpriced designer clothing with a skull logo that's vaguely reminiscent of the latest Disney blockbuster movie franchise?).
I was actually mostly surprised that Macy's would let this slip through the quality-control process, risking a massive P.R. backlash and humiliation, similar to what happened to Wal-Mart when it got caught selling t-shirts with the same logo. You'd think big companies would have systems in place to stop that kind of stuff, but I guess not.
Unfortunately I'm not sufficiently outraged at this point to go on a crusade against Macy's like The Consumerist did with their "Wal-Mart Nazi T-Shirt Watch" campaign (culminating with even Congress getting in on the 'outrage'). I just find it more interesting than anything, from a sociological sort of view.
Disappointed
At work I made an apparently too-cryptic joking reference to the Total Information Awareness Program and John Poindexter, but nobody understood it.
I was quite disappointed - I had figured that most people would get it. I'm sure if it had been a reference to American Idol or Survivor more people would have understood it.. So sad.
Mr. Lightswitch
Mr. Lightswitch is angry because he couldn't get a parking spot today:
I was hoping that the switch part would look like a mouth, but I don't think it really works.
Destroyed Cup
One of my plastic cups fell down to the bottom of the dishwasher and was melted by the heat. It looks kind of weird:
Pirates
My cousin is getting married tomorrow and today at the pre-dinner the most absurd thing I have ever seen at a wedding occurred.
After dessert we heard a loud siren coming down the street and there were several loud bangs that sounded like gunfire. I was afraid it was some sort of gang fight in the middle of this quiet little Everett suburb. Fortunately that fear was quashed when a gigantic pirate ship drove up to the back yard, firing its 'cannons':
The Seattle SeaFair Pirates all jumped out of the ship/truck contraption and 'captured' the bride (upper left, below) and all the bridesmaids and drove off. The groom and his friends hopped in a car with their plastic swords and chased after the pirates.
At this point everyone in the wedding party and all of the neighbors were in total shock and disbelief about what had just happened, until somebody explained what was going on. In the end the pirates came back, returned the captives, and we all had a jolly good time with their pirate rum.
All in all, definitely the most bizarre experience of the weekend.
Willows Lodge
This week I'm on another corporate brainwashing training retreat at Willows Lodge. So far the accommodations are a lot better than last year since we get catered food at a 5-star resort hotel instead of having to fight over cots and cook our own food.
Pics:
Jacuzzi, bed, fireplace (this pic looks it's out of a brochure for some reason..)
Fold-out concave shaving mirror
Fancy sink
Shower with on/off buttons and temperature controls. What temperature water do I usually use? I had no idea until now
Some bizarre statues outside the window
Zero stars
Whenever I see this apartment ad on the way to work I think, "wow, zero out of five stars, why would they advertise that?"
Obviously they're trying to say that it's a "five-star" apartment, but in the age of Amazon starred reviews and iTunes ratings, the "outlined star" symbol has come to mean "empty star" or "missing star". Interesting to think about..
Accepted
Today I finally got a "Thank you for enrolling at the University of Washington" letter, which was a bit of a surprise since I was expecting a "Thank you for applying" letter first, at which point I would decide whether or not to enroll. I guess they made that decision for me . I'm sure the next thing I'll be getting will be a big bill.
Now I have to send in "proof of measles immunity". I'm sure I got the vaccine when I was 5 years old, so I have no record of it, and of course neither does my current health care provider (no doubt due to general incompetence, or laws prohibiting automatic transferring of my medical records without my consent or something like that). This will be fun to track down. I'll be mad if I have to get another shot, but sadly that might be the easiest thing to do..
Wallmonster is all stressed out today
How do you pictorially represent a headache? I guess a lightning bolt to the brain works.
Denver Street Views
Google Street Views has patchy imagery of Denver, with pictures at lower resolutions than their San Francisco imagery. Even so, I was surprised to be able to find lots of pictures of familiar places:
My parents' house (obstructed by a tree):
High school (shudder):
Old job (Sun Microsystems):
Across the street, my old apartment (not really visible):
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