Mom Makes Mittens

(For anyone unfamiliar with the saga of the Texas Perimeter Hike Mittens, please refer to my blog post about right here.)

A while back, my mom made me some mittens while I was freezing my butt off walking east to west along the Red River in North Texas.  The mittens, truth be told, were very warm, but there was one unfortunate, aesthetic problem: the thumb was about as long as a donkey's dong.  My thumb, poor thing, couldn't even reach the hole that was made especially for it.  Anyway, I figured out a way to make the mittens work but retired them after that winter.

Well, there's good news for those who loved them the first time around: They're baaAAaack!!

As you can see from the above picture, she has remedied the obvious problem of the elongated thumb by a procedure that those in the industry would refer to as "slice and dice."  Unwittingly, she has made a curious new aesthetic mitten with which one must pause to fully appreciate.  Turning it sidewise, you might see what I'm talking about.

It looks like Moby-Dick!!!!  I swear, I didn't think it could get any better than the Pac-Man ghost (as seen on the TPH blog), but my mom's got some tricks up her sewing and knitting sleeves.  

Up close, you can really see that the sewing and cutting that she had to do to "fix" the thumb was necessary to create this unusual effect.  There aren't any teeth, but the shape lends itself to the idea of teeth.  And this got me thinking about it once more: What else do the mittens remind you of?

Yes, my oh-so-innocent mother has given me a pair of Alien mittens.  I know they're not familiar with that movie or that super famous cinematic scene, so I'm throwing down a link for it.  Frankly, I prefer this version.

So you might be wondering why I've included this post on The Idea Train.  It's pretty simple, actually.  I don't think my mom should stop making mittens.  The best way to get better at something is through trial and error.  But these mittens, the former Pac-Man/Moby-Dick/Alien mittens cannot be saved.  I will use them and keep them, maybe even mount them on the wall next to pictures of me spearing them in the Corpus Christi Bay.  But altering them further will not bring them back from the brink.  I think they should stay the way they are.

HuffPo Needs a Better Algorithm

There's a lot of complex math going on behind the webpages we all visit.  If you receive an email with the words book or novel in it, you're instantly targeted with ads ranging from book publishing to Amazon.com's latest bestseller.  That's pretty insane when you think about it.  How in the world does Google's software pick "book" from an email in which the writer might have also included other important nouns like "mother," "homework," "baseball," or "car"?  I couldn't tell you.  The fact is that we've got a lot of really smart people writing really smart programs that essentially govern the media we're exposed to.

So it begs the question: if these people are so freaking smart, how is it possible to stumble upon something as blatantly STUPID as the above shot, taken from today's Huffington Post website.  The Huffington Post, or HuffPo as it's sometimes referred to, is an internet-only news source.  It's liberal, so if you've been plugged into FoxNews your whole life, you might not have heard of it.

So back to the shot.  Take a really close look.  The title of it reads "HuffPost's Big News Pages."  That's a good start.  It gets you wondering what is going on in the world.  There are some obvious ones, of course -- "Energy," "Election 2012," "September 11 Anniversary," "Hurrican Isaac 2012," "Libya," and "Taxes."  But wedged in there are some real losers: "fish" and "Bacon."  If you've got a puzzled look on your face, that makes you a normal human being.

What the hell is bacon doing up there with September 11 and Taxes?  Seriously.  This is evidence of an algorithm, some fancy piece of mathematical software, gone very very wrong.  Obviously, the HuffPo's software has grabbed all the websites that have gotten the most hits.  That's fine.  But they can't forget that there are actual HUMANS reading their website.  It's more than a little offensive to see BACON up there with a NATIONAL and WORLD TRAGEDY.

In chess software, you can't just tell the computer that the King is the most important piece on the board.  You have to assign it a value.  From what I've been told, you give the King such a high value (like a million versus the Queen's value of 9 or the Pawn's value of 1) that the chess program understands as a byproduct that the King is to be guarded at all costs.

It seems to me that if it's that easy to do that in chess software, it should be equally easy to do that with this.  Just assign Bacon a negative value in relation to Big News.  It's that easy.  Take it off the list.  People who are into bacon won't be offended, just like people who like comic strips aren't offended that they aren't on the front page of the newspaper.  Seriously, this one is a no-brainer.

Remote Control Ball?

Who knows why dogs love fetch, but they do.  A lot.  My dog goes after the ball like she's going to save the world.  And then she'll do it again.  And again. And again.  As long as you're willing to throw it, she'll go after it with all she's got.

Fetch is a great game, but it's not particularly satisfying on the human side of the equation.  If you don't have a ball gripper, it's even worse, what with saliva and dirt and whatnot.

What I propose is a new form of fetch in which we humans have some form of control over the trajectory of the ball.  It doesn't have to be hi-tech like a remote control ball, but I admit that would be pretty awesome.  I have no idea if this is even possible.  Would you have to use magnets or wind or electricity in some weird never before thought of manner?  You figure it out, brainster.  I'm just telling you what I'd buy as a dog-owner.  Woof.

Clips I'd Like to See

When I'm walking around town, I sometimes amuse myself by singing new song lyrics to old songs, matching normal people's faces to actors, politicians, or other famous folks, or by playing the "what if" game.  Most recently, I've had a couple of funny "what if"s, so I decided to share.

The second was about The Matrix Reloaded.  The famous fight scene between Neo and an increasing number of Agent Smiths was really fun to watch, but I started wondering if I could fend off a whole group of little kids.  This made me chuckle, reimagining the entire scene with little kids instead of grown men.  It's akin to the humor in Billy Madison in which Adam Sandler plays dodgeball with a whole bunch of little kids.  Anyway, if you want to make an internet meme, make this clip!

The first was about Aerosmith's Crazy video that came out while I was in high school.  For those not in the know, that's a younger Alicia Silverstone slipping out one of the windows of her prep school.  It's memorable for just about every dude my age because, at least in those years, she was the epitome of hot.

So, oddly, I found recreating this fun, sexy video into a hilarious one featuring a couple of nerds.  Imagine instead of Silverstone a guy slipping out the window and getting his shirt or underwear caught on the latch as a fun beginning.  It only gets better when he meets up with his other dorky friend, and they take off for a day in the town.  If you're a RTF major, this would make an awesome final project.

So that's it.  No ideas today about solving world hunger or the energy crisis.  I'm just excited to see a couple of potential memes that have floated around in my mind and made me laugh.

Comment Consolidation and Nazis

My friend mentioned Godwin's Law to me one day during a chat, and I confessed I'd never heard of it.  Godwin's Law states that the longer an online discussion goes the closer the discussion comes to the mention of Hitler, Nazis, and the Third Reich.  It's meant to be serious but also to poke fun at the way we interact with one another on the digital platform.

This got me to thinking about how much people like to leave commentary.  I do it every so often, just throwing out my two cents for the sake of getting it off my chest, but I never get into a sparring match, as there doesn't seem to be any point.

However, for some reason, I love reading what people say almost as much as what an article says.  If you want to know what America thinks, go to a controversial article and skip straight to the comments.  You'll find the bloody beating heart of America right there.  Without the inhibitions of a face-to-face encounter, people put it all out there.  It can get nasty quick, and comparisons to Hitler are the least of your worries.

Every site has their own system.  That is, generally, if you want to leave commentary, you have to have an account with that particular site.  If you love leaving commentary and you love reading ten different sites, this usually means having an account with every single one of them.  In short: this blows.

I would like to see a consolidation of commentary.  What Huffington Post does within their own web content is excellent by the way: they reward people who post a lot by highlighting their names, allow others to follow them (digitally, of course), and keep track of them overall.  I would venture to say that their system is the best one out there right now that I've seen.

It's this system that I would like to see used across the internet, a stand-alone company whose sole job is to provide commentary support for all internet content.  I want to know what people are saying across the spectrum.  I want a history of their writings across all sites; in short, I want whatever users write to create a history.  Like a credit card, it's their choice to create a good history or bad history.

Compartmentalization of comments, which is what we have now, allows for people to say whatever they want.  The goal of commentary should be to achieve a level of mutual respect that exists in the physical realm.  Obviously, not all interactions are positive in the physical arena, but those people who act out do so with the full knowledge that they alone support their words.  Comment accountability does not really exist in the digital realm, but it can and should.

A few days after my friend told me about Godwin's Law, he said that he had gotten into a heated online discussion.  After a few back-and-forths, the person he was debating used a reference to Hitler!  Godwin's Law was illustrated to full effect!  My friend was both pleased and disappointed.  The comparison (I don't recall which two things were being compared) effectively terminated the conversation because to play Devil's Advocate at that point would mean to side with Hitler.

It's this kind of stuff that one would hope to avoid while creating a history.  A user might even see patterns in his own way of debating things and make improvements upon himself.  But really, it should give a commentator a moment's pause before posting: this is going down in my record forever.

Multiple Windows

I open multiple windows on my laptop all the time, everyday.  Sure, I'm a fan of tabs.  Who isn't?  But sometimes I like a movie to be playing, a game of backgammon to be going, and a word document that I'm supposed to be editing open, and I want them all on the same screen.  Is this too much to ask?

Sure, I can fiddle with the windows.  Make them bigger, make them smaller, make them thin or fat or wide.  What I want the brainstinks at Microsoft to come up with is an automatic program that gives me the option of auto-sizing my stupid windows.  Call me lazy, whatever.  When I open a new window and this option of auto-sizing is already turned ON, I want the two windows to fill my screen perfectly.  No fiddling required.

Seriously, am I the only person who wants this?  I couldn't be.  There's got to be someone else as scatterbrained as I am who seriously wants half a dozen windows open at the same time.

So here's my vision.  Let's say you have three windows open at the same time.  The auto-size option has them fill the screen.  Let's say one window is the dominant window and fills up half the screen; the other two are smaller and lay on top of one another.  Perfect.  But when I manipulate one screen - that is, make it wider or taller - I want the other screens to auto-size accordingly.  I mean, come on!  This isn't rocket science here.  Figure it out and get back to me.

I *love* how I can swap tabs in certain internet browsers.  I want this swapping feature in conjunction with the auto-size option.  I want to be able to drag one window on top of another to swap them, to make a quick change up.  For someone working on multiple projects at the same time, this would be very very handy.

So do it!  Get someone on it.  Figure out this little itty bitty option.  It would make a lot of us really really happy.

How to Fire an Employee

So it happened.  I finally got fired.  I've been alive for 35 years, have had over a dozen different jobs, and I finally know what it's like to hear those words "You're fired."  And I've had all day to think about it, too, because I got fired from a midnight baker's job.  Yep, got the news at 3:45am.

First of all, I deserved it.  I'm not complaining about my sentence.  My former boss was a good guy.  I just wasn't up to the task of waking my ass up at 12:30am to get to work by 1am.  Justice has been served.

Maybe there's just no way to make this easy.  Maybe it shouldn't be easy.  I've had all day to think about this, so allow me a moment to share with you some of my revelations.

First, I looked at the syntax.  "You're fired" is a passive statement.  Technically speaking, the whole phrase is "You're fired by me."  So if this is passive, then why the hell does it feel so active?  As a boss, I can't imagine getting all revved up and saying "I fire you!"  That just doesn't work for some reason.  As for the present progressive "I'm firing you," that just doesn't make any sense unless the employee in question seriously does not know his ass from his elbow.  I mean, it happens.

So then I looked at corporate culture.  They hire an outside consultant to do the dirty work of appraising employees and firing them.  Not that this has happened to me, but I've seen Office Space.  This seems worse than being told to your face.

 I suppose there are some creative ways to do it.  My boss back in college told me the following story: "So I met this old-time business owner.  He told me that the way you fire someone is to give them a hefty raise for two weeks.  At the end of the two weeks, you send them packing.  After that, they'll never get a job asking for the wages they had at the moment you fired them."  Pretty wicked old man.

So in short, while an employer can get creative, I think the best way remains to fire someone to his face using the passive voice (which sounds active).  It's tense for a few moments, but then it's over.  The way I see it, my former boss did both of us a really big favor sticking to what's tried and true.