I got a new watch. Again. I bought my last watch in 2001. There was nothing wrong with it. However, Casio brought out a new version that drops the moon phase and tide graph, and instead has 5-band radio atomic clock synchronization. 
As you can see, it’s not a major departure, visually speaking. The function of the buttons is slightly rearranged, the actual time is larger and easier to read, the time zones don’t have editable names, and the alarm now has a snooze function. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same watch. Still titanium, solar powered, waterproof. But with the atomic clock synchronization, it’s one step closer to being the perfect watch–which, by my definition, is an indestructable watch that requires zero maintenance. I have a mild obsession with accurate timekeeping. The first watch I ever remember owning was the Timex I had as a child. It was a simple analog watch that required regular winding. Its clockwork mechanism was fairly awful as far as accuracy goes, and I had to adjust it each morning. Next, I got one of the first ever digital watches: a TI-500 from Texas Instruments. Mine was brown plastic with a brown leather strap. Since I was a kid at the time, it got scratched up pretty quickly. It also ate batteries. Still, I loved it; and I bet if I’d kept it, it would sell for a bundle on eBay. But technology was changing rapidly, and before long I had my first LCD watch, a Casio. Casio would soon take over the watch market, almost destroying the Swiss watch industry. My contribution to this process was one of these: 
That was the watch that never died. It lasted me through the 80s. I also had Casio calculators, but I’m happy to say I never had a calculator watch. I just wasn’t that geeky Since I love swimming and tend to be forgetful of whether I’m wearing a watch, I eventually upgraded to a waterproof Casio, again with a metal case and strap. I don’t remember too much about that one, except that once the battery needed replacing, it stopped being waterproof. Update: I’ve found out you can actually still buy the waterproof metal Casio I had. In addition, as the 90s arrived the backlash had happened, and digital watches were about as fashionable as flared trousers. So I looked for a watch that was waterproof but didn’t need batteries. For a while I wore a Swatch automatic. Aside from the lack of batteries needing replacement, I liked that it was totally unlike any other watch I had owned. Also, the back was transparent, so you could see the mechanism. It kept pretty good time, but still needed weekly adjustments. 
So, then came the Seiko Kinetic, which I wrote about before. Then, back to Casio. And now, atomic. I don’t know why atomic time synchronization is so seductive to me. It’s not like I need that level of accuracy in my timekeeping. Nevertheless, all the computers are synched via NTP, and we have a couple of radio synchronized clocks too. I think there’s just something fascinating about time, and about the idea of knowing it precisely. When Harper’s recently published an issue that had a whole feature about the debate over leap seconds, it was like they had published it just for me. Part of the fascination is that time is so mysterious. From the point of view of the laws of physics, you can treat it as another dimension; and physics itself doesn’t seem to care about which direction time flows. Yet our perception is that time is utterly unlike any other dimension, that it has a clear direction–and nobody can explain why that is the case. We simply don’t know what time is, even though we can measure it with very high precision. So now I know what time it is. For sure.
If you want to use Twitter, use it, but don’t re-post a copy of all your Twitter guano as journal entries. Your Twitter updates are pointless and uninteresting enough in their original context; if I wanted to read them, I’d be reading them there.
(Unsubscribing from two feeds today.)
Someone noticed that google.jp had a picture of some kind of computer. Turns out it’s the Parametron. Not a Futurama character, but instead an early (1950s) computer from Japan that I’d never heard of.
There doesn’t seem to be much on the web about it, but from what I gather, it used a really freaky design with no valves or transistors. Instead, the fundamental unit involved two magnetic coils and a capacitor, with the binary 0 and 1 values being represented by the phase of the AC current. From this unit, the usual AND and OR gates were constructed, and then those were strung together to make a computer.
I wonder if the ideas might be applicable to optical computing?
J2SE 6 has some interesting new XML functionality called JAXB. Using JAXB, you can take an XSD file and compile it into Java classes. You can then add those classes to your project, create an Unmarshaler object, feed it some XML which meets the XSD, and it will pass you back a tree of appropriate POJOs you can mess with.The only problem is that the XML file my source application generates refers to a DTD which JAXB tries to load via xerxes, causing epic fail.
Clearly I could rewrite the XML on the fly, perhaps even using XSLT to make the code even more enterprisey. However, I can’t help thinking that there should be a simpler way to either make xerxes/JAXB ignore the DTD (which, after all, it doesn’t need), or tell it how to find it.
Anyone happen to know?
[And yes, this is horribly enterprisey, but the benefit of being able to unmarshal a large population of XML-represented objects in only 20 lines of code is too good to pass up. Plus, I already know that the bottleneck in the intended application will be database speed.]
“The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.”
—former White House official Ann Lewis, Senior Advisor for Hillary Clinton for President.
Remember “Best viewed with” buttons? How about those ugly “Under construction” banners? Well, now there’s a new craze in bad design: pimp buttons, those little buttons people stick under every single thing they write, begging you to submit it to Digg, Facebook, MySpace, or anywhere else that might inflate their page hits.
Here’s an example from a real web site: 
The effect, to me at least, is rather like a desperate “L@@K!!! PLEASE READ!!! FORWARD THIS!!!” subject line in an e-mail. It begs and pleads for attention, and by doing so serves as a very good indication that it doesn’t deserve any.
In case the pimp buttons aren’t enough to get across the idea that the author is desperate, take a look at the top left:
Eighteen readers? For a site that you’ve been posting to for four months? You can put up a web site where you post pictures of your lunch each day and get more subscribers than that.
I’m all in favor of everyone being on the web. If you have something you feel compelled to say, get out there and say it. But if you can only find 18 people interested in what you have to say then (a) you really don’t need Feedburner, and (b) you really don’t need to be displaying your feed stats for everyone to see.
While we’re on the subject of unnecessary cruft, I think that the Creative Commons license could be removed as well. I’ve a hunch that if anyone was interested in reusing the content, they’d start by reading it.
We went out in search of some music on Saturday night.
8bitpeoples were having a label party at Molotov’s on 6th. When we got there, it became readily apparent that the best sound was available by standing on the sidewalk outside the venue, and looking through their open windows. We had a pretty good view of the stage too.
Later we went in search of Chris de Luca vs Phon.o, the former being half of Funkstörung. Sadly, it appeared that they had canceled or changed the date to 3 days earlier or something, and the venue denied all knowledge of them.
Last night, the spouse hit a kerb. Didn’t think anything of it.
This afternoon, she went to drive to the museum, and discovered we had a flat tire.
I tried re-inflating it to see how badly punctured it was. Once the pressure reached around 10psi there was an audible hissing noise, and the tire went flat in about 5 minutes. So, no going anywhere on that. Hence, I have just changed a tire on a car, for the first time in my life.
It turns out that car wheels are really rather filthy things, and so is the floor of our garage. Given that I’m not exactly the beefiest guy, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get the nuts loose, and it was touch and go on a couple of them. However, I exceeded my own expectations and got the job done without any mishaps, using the mini jack and wrench supplied with the car.
It’s probably time for a new set of tires anyway. We’ve done over 30,000 miles on the factory set, which I gather is pretty typical for a Prius.
- Calumny
- Candelabra
- Colonic
- Cabalist
- Canker
- Capitulate
- Cadaver
- Cornhole
- Catamite
- Colostomy
Seriously, though, who thought it would be a good idea to give them all nondescript one-word names beginning with ‘C’?