Walt-O-Matic

My wife was driving down a highway in Pennsylvania and looking out the window I saw a scene before me that made me say out loud, “Oh, that’s just not right.” I instructed my wife to make the next available U-Turn and pull onto the shoulder. I needed a photo.

There before us was a sign that said ‘Help Wanted’ ‘Lead Carpenter’. And, behind it, a set of three crosses, one that belonged to a carpenter. Either way you look at it, that something happened to their last one, or that the need make more crosses, that’s most likely not the best location for this particular help wanted sign.

So I decided to make some business cards using Pages, however after adding a few tiny JPGs, I started getting the spinning beach ball — you know the one, the one you’re never supposed to get in OS X.

So, I decided to open Activity Monitor to see what was up.

Pages had allocated 16 Exabytes of memory. My computer has 6 Gig.

Remember, it goes from Megabytes, to Gigabytes (1,000Meg), to Terabytes (1,000Gig), to Petabytes (1,000 TB), to Exabytes (1,000 PB).

Apparently because I like John Clease’s comedic timing, cursing magicians, and canceled 80s comedies, that means I like Carl Sagan’s COSMOS.

Here’s the sad part: they’re right.

Went to submit a bug report today, but was denied for a very interesting reason; the system had no one to hand it to.

You know how TGI Friday’s has all that junk nailed up to the wall?

Well, while we were eating, we happened to notice some kid had long dropped his sun glasses on the floor. Rather than have them thrown out by staff, I social engineered our waiter to put them on Nixon.

Let’s see how long before someone notices.

When I see a nozzles up high, I want to turn them to see what they’ll do…

So, I’m driving down Waxpool in Ashburn, VA on my way to work, and there’s a truck in front of me with a huge spool of wire on the back.

What’s more curious to me is the way the tools were being transported. Someone had tied a bucket to a rope and put their tools in it hanging off the back of the truck.

This can’t be safe. Well, I guess if there’s no room on the passenger side…

While visiting Ted’s in Sterling, VA, I noticed that their bathroom was either missing a very vital component, or that the place was very accommodating for drunks used to using an alley.

I keep trying to explain there are differences between men and women’s bathrooms. Women have it better. In this case, men just have a wall.

Not retouched.

While hanging out at Potbelly in Ashburn, VA, I found they have a little used book area in the back. I love going through used books, primarily because you find interesting hand written notes.

Here’s one from a dad to his daughter. Not only does the title of the book convey the dad’s impression and confidence, but we also get a peek at his spelling. One fears that it may be possible to piece together a little bit more about this family than we wanted to know.

A while ago, I thought it might be fun to conduct an experiment and rank anything and everything that Amazon showed me. In fact, the rank wasn’t necessarily even important, I just wanted to see what would happen as recommendation after recommendation was ticked off. Would Amazon’s suggestions get better? Would it run out of suggestions? Would it result in an overflow message?

Well, I ranked over 10,000 items over the course of several months, ranging from computer books to perfume. What I found was that in the short term you could get Amazon to run out of things to recommend you. In the longer term, it got a little better recommending things, though the categories get broader, and if you stumble into a new kind of category, it leaps at the chance to have options again to show you. And, finally, nothing spectacular happened numerically when I crossed five digits.

That said, every so often, Amazon makes some amusing recommendations choices. However, this time it was the presentation that was amusing unto itself that I took a snapshot.

Know those split-books you had as a kid, where the page was divided? You’d get half an animal on top, and half an animal on the bottom. Allowing you to make a giraf-o-potamous, an elepha-gator, or a kanga-mander.

Amazon selected two products and presented them split-book fashion. Order, it turned out, was important:

It’s the top of a woman from 2002, and the bottom of another from 2007, put together it looks like one woman standing behind two cut outs on the product recommendation page. I couldn’t help but give each half five stars for creativity.