All About Eve
1. All About Eve
The Eve used as a character in cryptography texts is short for “eavesdropper.” All Eve wants to do is listen, but occasionally she is up for a man-in-the-middle attack.
“Mallory” is a name for a generic malicious user, which makes you wonder if cryptographers have unresolved issues towards women. “Malachi” is a cooler name that cryptographers would use if it were up to me.
Alice and Bob are joined by Casey and Dawn as the people who only want to communicate with each other unimpeded. Don’t we all, really?
2. Two spaces after a sentence
Personally, I don’t like seeing two spaces after each sentence. It’s tantamount to writing “I learned to type on a typewriter!!!” at the end of each sentence. Now I understand that for fixed-width fonts, such as on a typewriter, putting two spaces after each sentence increases readability. But for email or the web most text is displayed in a proportional font. I suppose that some people are still using emacs or pine for email. I can’t help that, so I will just assume that these people are so smart and individualistic that they were born with supernatural sentence-parsing abilities.
It really dates a resume when it has two spaces after each sentence. It makes me think, “Shit, this guy is around my age — or maybe even a Baby Boomer. Pass.” (Ha ha! Actually age discrimination is a terrible thing, and it is to be condemned. I certainly deplore it, even though most people younger than me are a lot smarter and will work cheaper.)
If one really wants to bypass the browser’s ignoring duplicate whitespace, one can always use , I suppose.
3. Changing tires
A week ago I got a flat on my Saab, just like this guy did. I’m still kicking myself because I forgot to pull the emergency brake and put it in gear before jacking it up. So I got the flat off, and I was jacking it up more to get the weenie wheel on when it lurched and fell right on the rotor. Oops. I’m lucky that I didn’t chop my foot in half or crush Sparkles’s foot.
So S., Sparkles, and I spent a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the sidewalk on Guerrero between 15th and 16th. The AAA guy was confused about how to jack up the car when it was an inch off the ground, but the three of us (I’m not including S.) figured it out and soon we were on our way.
I’m still a little uptight with myself. Frankly, this is the kind of stuff that guys are supposed to know instinctually. I’m amazed I’ve managed to stay alive for 35 years so far with no fucking common sense whatsoever.
4. Fear of success
…which brings me to my next point: Fear of Success. I have a theory that the natural state of people is to be happy, unstressed, and successful in what they do. But people are the victims of their neuroses, which prevent them from achieving (or atchieving as Edward Gibbons would write) this natural state. These neuroses include — but are not limited to — feelings of unworthiness, fear of abandonment or rejection, intense awareness of mortality, illusory beliefs leading to perverted values, idealization of the deceased, and constant feelings of being monitored by extraterrestrials. Just FYI.
5. Honest Engineers
Whoo-boy! Those engineers are honest folk. I brought in a prospective customer to have a little talk with the guy who runs our QA lab. Right in the middle, he launched into a story about some customer’s computers that our service crashed. It went something like this:
QA guy: “Yes, we crashed a lot of their systems.”
Prospect: “I see…”
Me: “But then we modified our tests to make them not crash any more.”
Prospect: “Good.”
QA guy: “Actually, no we didn’t. It’s up to [the company who made these systems] to fix these problems, not us. We can’t help it if they have a bug in their systems.”
Prospect: “Well… We use a lot of [another maker of systems], and I don’t see any in the lab here.”
QA guy: “Well, I’m still trying to find one on eBay.”
Me: “Would you guys like some polo shirts? Right this way.”
The crazy part is that I prepped him, but I figured it goes without saying not to talk about crashing a whole bunch of customer’s machines and then not to blame it on someone else. Oh well. It was certainly eye opening for me, if not the prospective customer. It took over $100 worth of sushi to recover.
6. Altoids
Got ham! Did you know that Altoids aren’t vegetarian? The ingredients list gelatin. Ew!
7. Ralph Lauren furniture
I saw a bunch of Ralph Lauren furniture in an ad the other day, and there is something about it that says (in a British accent), “This is the furniture we managed to save after the colonists rioted and tried to kill us all.” Look at this, this, this, this, this, and this.
I like it, but it somehow makes me think of some sugar plantation in Jamaica being torched by natives.
December 2nd, 2002 at 10:27 am
Todd, I feel for you. I once tried to change a flat tire . . . ON A HILL. I cranked the jack up and then heard an onimous creaking sound. Fortunately, that alerted me to the next sound, which was the thump of the car hitting the pavement after the jack fell in the downhill direction. (I had the parking brake on, but who knew that parking brakes don’t work when your back wheels are off the pavement?) Luckily, I was able to leap into the still open door of my car and smash down the foot brake. I then let the car roll until I found a flat spot.
I forgot to mention, though, that I was 17–half your age–when this happened.
December 2nd, 2002 at 11:26 pm
SNOW!!! 4 inches of the white stuff. Went Christmas shopping in 4 wheel drive. Winter wonderland!!Couldn’t find the drive when I got home; barely made it into the garage. Love it!!
As for flat tires, how about changing a flat tire on a six horse trailer about 3AM somewhere between here and Texas in the rain?
December 3rd, 2002 at 5:18 am
As an example of how Japanese people 1) will easily defer to an “expert opinion” and 2) will gladly pay to avoid getting their own hands dirty:
While teaching English in Ibaraki, I one day notice that the school car I was driving had no spare tire in the spare tire space in the trunk. I asked the school president about this, and he assured me that if I ever got a flat he would call a service station and have someone qualified fix it for me. And this was even before cell phones were common.
December 3rd, 2002 at 3:46 pm
Perhaps the kind people at Altoids are thoughtful enough to use one of the kosher/vegetarian gelatin options. This is doubtful since they *do* originate in a land that adores bacon and pickled cockels (Please note item 4 of this very odd definition. )
December 4th, 2002 at 11:13 am
I knew you’d still be beating yourself up over the tire incident. Stop it: It was a cheap jack and would have failed in some way or other.