Adventures in Dorkdom

So today my officemate noticed on Slashdot that somebody had found a prime number of 10 million digits. We were thinking "that's a lot of digits." and we wondered, just how big IS that number? so we decided to see if we could possibly post such a number in newsprint on our walls.

Dave posted the details of our calculations (and a link to the aforementioned Slashdot article) on his blog, here: Empirically Proven.

It turns out that, wrapping the number around our office using all available space (ignoring the presense of doors and other objects in the way) we would be short about 4 feet of room height to fit the entire number. Wow!

Joe, the awesomest Stylist, Ever

I would just like to share the fact that my hair stylist, Joe, is totally awesome. I went in with a picture that I'm pretty sure wouldn't work on my hair length anyways, and only the vaguest idea of what I actually wanted. I told him I was trying to grow it out but that I couldn't stand the way it was. Basically, it was a plea for him to "just fix it."


And Joe went to work. I have to confess, I was doubtful. As I watched my hair gradually become transformed, I must admit, I was dubious. I thought "For the first time, Joe is going to disappoint me." I am sorry; I repent my lack of faith. For lo, by the time Joe was finished, my hair had been saved. From the depths of nappiness and breakage (likely resulting from my questionable foray into the realms of black hair styling- aka cornrows) my hair was recovered. Joe did not let me down.


Somehow, my hair doesn't look exactly shorter. He preserved the length I had been working at growing for months. Yet my hair was exactly how I wanted it to look. Yet again, he had read my mind- giving me the exact style I liked- maybe not what I'd pictured, but better- even though I hadn't really even known what I'd wanted. As Joe twirled me in the chair so I could admire the haircut from various angles, he reminded me "this is a wash-and-go cut." I could have kissed him. Joe knows I'm not going to make anything beyond the most rudimentary efforts at styling my hair each day. Joe recognizes this fact. He doesn't fight with me about it- he works with me. He cuts my hair in such a way that it doesn't need to be styled each day. And for this, I am grateful.


If my mom and my friend Alissa ever read this, I hope they know that they should be thanking Joe. Everyone who's ever criticized my hair or encouraged me to "fix yourself up a little- why don't you ever do anything with your hair" I invite you to congratulate Joe. He has enabled me to have decent-looking hair without spending more than 1 or 2 minutes on it.


Joe is not cheap. He's the 2nd most expensive stylist ever to cut my hair, but he's worth every penny. In short, Joe is totally awesome.

Express your "hoodz" feelings in a card

I know a lot of people have been looking for this:
Official Street Cards

Ghosts, etc

earlier this afternoon, i saw a ghost. i was walking with a friend, chatting and planning to go get some coffee in the brief window of time i had before needing to catch a flight, when i glimpsed him out of the corner of my eye.

a jolt of electric shocks reverberated through my whole body. of course, i looked away instantly. i even kept on talking, as if nothing had happened. my mind was reeling. i was totally unprepared. despite my prior history of feeling haunted by visiting certain places, on this particular occasion my mind had entertained no thoughts of ghosts at all that day. in fact, i probably hadn't thought of said ghost in at least a week.

a few minutes later, my feeble attempts to sip a chai latte were revealed to be sorely inadequate at masking my discomfort. i was forced to admit that the sighting had shaken me, and, even more surprisingly, that i was filled with a strong and dreadful desire to try to catch another glimpse.

i realized later that the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was fear. evidently, i have a penchant for facing my fears. this feature of my personality has presented itself in the past through a variety of bizarre, entertaining, and sometimes dangerous escapades. you know, stuff like exploring abandoned houses by myself after dark, jumping off 60+ foot cliffs into water, making eye contact with people that are obviously crazy, etc. (aside: this is one of those "don't tell Mom" blog entries.)

at any rate, the fear was for naught, as there was no longer any sign of the ghost. i sighed in relief, but not without a twinge of disappointment.

later tonight, as i was sitting on the plane, listening to music and pretending to sleep, a stray thought crossed my mind as i fiddled with the celtic ring on my right hand. the ring i wear most of the time, which i've lost numerous times yet it keeps coming back to me. i suddenly remembered that it was not the original. i used to have a similar, but slightly different ring. i think somewhere in the back of my mind i'd gotten the idea that i'd lost the original ring, but that's false. i didn't lose it.

i sat and wondered about the ghost, and pretended to sleep.

Technology Sucks

I would like to take this opportunity to discuss (ok, rant about) a few things. Why do I spend everyday surrounded by mostly non-functioning technology? I live in a veritable graveyard of good ideas gone bad.

Case in Point:
My wireless HP color printer.

I know what you are thinking. You're thinking, "Laura, why did you buy an HP printer? What were you THINKING?!"

True, and I'll admit I really can't argue that point. HP printers are known worldwide for their suckiness. I've had an HP printer before, and it sucked. Nevertheless, it was such a good idea. A wireless networked printer! I could print to it from my laptop, from anywhere in the apartment! And it had a higher resolution than my old craptastic HP printer, so I could use it to print out my digital photos.

But the real reason why I bought THIS printer was because of the great deal. Since I was already buying a laptop from Apple, they had this deal where you could get the printer for just $49 after the hundred dollar mail-in rebate. I figure even if it sucked, I'd only be out 50 bucks and could probably resell it for close to that.

Well, as it turns out, I never got that $100 rebate. Why not, you ask? Because I sent the form in a day or 2 too late. Why was I too late? Did I forget about the rebate? No, my dear friend, I did not forget. I was hesitating because during the 30 day period I STILL HADN'T GOTTEN THE STUPID PRINTER TO WORK CORRECTLY. I finally got it working, cut out the UPCs and mailed in the rebate form. Apple sent me a sickenly polite letter informing me that they could not process the rebate. Meanwhile, I'm stuck w/ a lame-@$$ printer that I now CANNOT RETURN because I already cut out the UPC symbols. You can imagine how thrilled I was with that.

I'd like to give the printer a little bit of credit at this point. It did in fact, join up with my wireless network the first time I tried to get it to right away, with no problem. The only thing wrong with it at the time was that it printed photos with nasty black streaks in them. It was fine for my usual printing needs (e.g. boarding passes, directions to a restaurant, etc).

Well, after fruitless efforts to get tech support from their online chat (a friendly but totally unhelpful HP representative whom I was certain was a robot until she mispelled something... then again, that might've just been a clever little twist in the algorithm used...) I finally found time to call up HP tech support during the brief window of time after work during which Mac support is available. THe lucky thing about Mac support is I'm pretty sure it starts at Level 2. Ie, the person on the other end of the phone line not only had a pulse, but there was actual brain wave activity as well.

After an hour and a half of jumping through hoops to reinstall the drivers (incidentally, removing the bad drivers required an arcane sequence of file removals from odd hidden places, since the uninstaller apparently doesn't do ANYTHING), I finally had the printer correctly printing out pictures. I was overjoyed! I was still reasonably upset about getting screwed out of the rebate, but at least I now had a printer that didn't suck.

Well, in the time since then I've been in and out of some other wireless networks. In the in-between time, the printer has somehow managed to get itself into a totally fubar'd state, wherein it insists its IP address is something ridiculous (think 179.13.1.666). (Ok, I know that's not really a possible IPv4 address). The printer refuses adamantly to join my home network. A while ago, before I had the wifi set up, I had managed to get the printer to work for me by hooking it directly to my laptop via crossover ethernet. (Of course, it behaved suckily- I was attempting to print some nice classy invitations to a wedding shower but the printer flat-out refused. In the end I had to make an extra trip to another store to buy regular-sized paper, not as classy, and YET ANOTHER trip to the original store to return the nice invitations. I just love paying all this gas money, ya know?).

Anyways, now that I have the wifi setup, it would be kind of nice to actually get the printer on there. after all, that is the WHOLE POINT of owning a wireless networked printer. But no, it insists on its ridiculous IP address. So I finally found a USB cable and hooked it up w/ that. I had discovered from my lengthy tutorial with tech support that most of the printer's configuration utilities can only be accessed when you're connected via USB. However, at some point, the drivers must have become screwed up again because I couldn't talk to it over USB at all. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, but since I dont' remember the voodoo-like rituals which the Tech support person had walked me through, there's little chance I'll ever succeed with that.

So my only hope of ever getting this thing working again is another long phone conversation with HP tech support. However, I have to be at home, with the printer and the computer right there to talk to them. And wouldn't ya know it- my piece of junk LG mobile phone doesn't work at the house I just moved into. In fact, the phone is getting more and more finicky each day about whether it will work ANYWHERE.

Anyone know of any Amish farms looking for another pair of hands?

I wish I could summon Tupperware the way Ludo, the giant but friendly monster from the 80s movie Labyrinth (starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly), summoned rocks. I would cry out my clarion call, and from the homes of my friends fair and wide, and probably some of my friends' friends' homes, my Tupperware would return to me. I've started writing my name on it but so far it hasn't helped.

In an unrelated sidenote, Gmail is being really retarded today. Their stinkin' servers have been down all morning.

Ok i'm about to reveal the extent of my dorkdom. Today's big excitement was discovering that typing "240 in hex" into Google search returned the value in hex!!! w00t! (fyi for those of you who are as bad as i am at converting anything over 128 into hex mentally, it's the nice clean value of 0xF0).

wow, today i have 3 gray hairs.

At first, i was alarmed. because starting today, i seem to adding a gray hair per day. However, with some research (aka a google search) i discovered that the human head, on average, has 100,000 hairs- then i realized that at the current rate, my hair won't go completely gray for about another 274 years. Which i guess i can live with.

This all just goes to show it's true- stress really DOES give you gray hairs.

i've been too sick to do much of anything. But i wanted to share a haiku I made up at work today, inspired by some code, the authors of which will go unmentioned (for now)

You drive me crazy
with your crappy, crappy code
I'll do it myself.

In other news, I now have 2 gray hairs.

Well, Google hates me again, apparently. I seriously don't understand their vendetta against me. Just checking out a few other search engines (Altavista and Yahoo) revealed that clearly, Google alone has something against me. Well, fine. I don't care anymore. Maybe I don't need their stinkin search results anymore

yay, i'm back in Google's good graces!

Well in the ongoing saga w/ Google, now my page isn't coming up at all. This is total suckiness, and I'm really perplexed as to what the reason is. After about 3 days, the new site was coming up as the 2nd result when you googled my name (the old site was still the number 1 search result, even though it no longer existed). I had no reason to think matters would do anything but improve. Yet, now my site is like, totally invisible to Google. What's the deal? I seriously don't get it. there must've been something magic about being hosted in a .edu domain or something.

Google is so much more than a search engine. It's like an on-line concierge service. With their plan to digitize huge portions of several libraries and make it available and searchable online, Google is once again making a reality something that I (and likely a lot of people) have long wished for. Just the other day I remarked to a friend in an email about how I had once wished Google had a dictionary feature, and upon closer inspection, discovered that they already had it.

With all the good things they keep doing, I can't help but wonder where and when we'll discover Google's dark side. Will it be found in the insidious text-based ads, that sometimes appear in inappropriate ways? Does it lurk behind the conspiracy-theorists' fear that gmail can never be deleted? Or is it in my coworker's theory that one day Micro$oft will buy out Google and nothing will seem clean and pure anymore?

On a more personal level, I am waiting to see how long Google will take to find my new web page. I recently migrated the page to new servers, and to my dismay, my old hosting service (through the university where I went to college) has removed the forwarding page I had put in place, despite the fact that I'm still paying for this month's service. Currently google still finds the old page, which of course, no longer exists. I'm intrigued to see how long it will take for the page to attain to its former position as the primary result from googling my name. I can only assume that, because it has all the same material as the first site, it will eventually reclaim its former grandeur, when Google's spiders finally find it.

I think it's funny that if you type "slash" into the Mozilla Firefox address bar and hit enter (like, for example, if you were about to go to slashdot, but your hand got lazy on the tab-completion) you go to Slash's official fan site. I would tell you the URL, but it never showed up in the address bar. I'm not sure what mechanism is at work here, but I suspect it might somehow be related to what happens when you Google search and hit the "I feel lucky" button.

Best interview I've read in a long time-

Neal Stephenson interview on /.

An unexpected thought occurred to me this morning. I am pretty sure the post man is stealing my Victoria's Secret catalogs. What leads me to this conclusion?

Well, I recently moved and registered my change of address with the Post Office. I've been receiving bills and quite a bit of junk mail forwarded from the old address. Victoria's Secret has been sending me up to three catalogs a week for the past several years. I buy just enough things from them to ensure that I will probably remain on their mailing list for the rest of my life.

Yet, I just realized that since the move, the seemingly endless stream of glossy pages filled with ridiculously slender, famously lovely, and frequently scantily clad women has dried up. Where have all the catalogs been going? You do the math.

Just an announcement, I'll be playing my guitar and singing at

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La Tazza Fresca @ 37th and Guadelupe
10 PM Sat October 15, 2004
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Ok, so I've made the startling discovery that I am an abnormally good conductor of electricity. (Yes, i know- it's shocking!) (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

I came to this conclusion after my new PowerBook G4 (it's so CUUUUTE!!!) shocked me last night. It was a new experience in that mostly I don't get shocked by direct current. So that was a little different. I was rather taken aback by it, and rather disappointed (tonight I'm calling up Apple tech support).

Anyways, so this episode got me thinking- I seem to be shocked by a ridiculous amount of things. Like this one time, I got a brilliant idea. I wanted to play my guitar down by the lake. (This is when I lived at home, with my parents. It was also in my pre-acoustic days.) So I dragged my amp down by the shore and plugged it into a loooooooooong extension cord. Since it was summertime, naturally I was barefoot. Apparently the ground was slightly moist. Suffice it to say, within the space of about ten minutes, I had managed to get shocked by 1. the amplifier, 2. my effects pedal, and 3. (the crowning moment) the guitar itself. I'm pretty sure my guitar has shocked me on at least one other occasion, too.

My old car, a '97 Geo Prizm, used to shock me every time I got out of it. On one occasion, it shocked me so hard, there was an arc of blue light about a centimeter across. My arm was sore for a good half hour after that. I'm pretty sure it's not normal to get shocked that badly.

I've been shocked by a lamp (that was... just stupid...), shocked by a dog's "Invisible Fence" collar (I had to test it out on myself before I would subject my dog to it), and zapped by touching various metal objects. I suppose it's only a matter of time before I'm struck by lightening.

Perhaps this is some kind of karma-like payback for all those times when I was little, on Tuesday nights after the book study, when I would shuffle around downstairs on the carpet in my socks. There was a nail that stuck out of the wooden paneling on the wall in one place, maybe a quarter of an inch. The goal was always to see who could generate the biggest spark.

I wonder if my bizarre ability to conduct current might be related by my ridiculous propensity to break things, usually simply by using them. It's amazing I can get my computer to work at all.

sometimes i think i was born in a slightly different dimension from everybody else in the world- i can see the normal people and interact with them, but i'm not really part of their world, and everything I try to do or say gets distorted, the effects of my efforts altered by the slight shift between my world and the regular world, sort of like the way light refracts on the surface of water.

Well, as most of my readers are likely aware (both of you, even), I got a gmail account. I finally had to give up on hotmail because the quantities of spam were getting out of hand; and I was too lazy to retool my filters.

Anyways, this morning I had a brief discussion w/ my office mate that I found humorous, because he is against gmail, but not because it's another method by which google is achieving World Domination. (He agreed w/ me that Google is a benevolent dictator, and at least better than Microsoft.) His complaints with gmail are summed up here:

http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/

Since I've never considered email to be a form of communication that offers anything in the way of privacy (unless encryption is used, and even then I have some doubts... which i won't go into detail about here) and i was surprised to learn we supposedly have ANY rights at all w/ regards to the gov't reading our email, none of these things particularly bothered me. As far as I'm concerned, the gigabyte of storage is a boon. I really really hate the way Lotus Notes (which i'm forced to use at work) deletes my email after a coupla months; i can't tell you how many times I've gone back to look for an email about an issue that resurfaced, only to find the email had "expired" and been automatically deleted. As far as email goes, i would really prefer to never have to delete any of it, ever.

I could say more on this but i have to get to work.