Exasperated Calculator

Weight: 111.3kg Breakfast: Vegemite on toast Lunch: Vegemite Sandwich Dinner: Chicken fillo Exercise: 15 mins cycling Rung: 1 Snacks: None

So which special occasions do we (well, the US) spend the most money on? The National Retail Federation has the breakdown (via Snopes):

1. Christmas (’winter holidays’): $438.6 billion.
2. Back to school: $54.2 billion.
3. Mother’s day: $13.8 billion.
4. Valentine’s day: $13.7 billion.
5. Easter: $12.6 billion.
6. Father’s day: $9.0 billion.
7. Super Bowl: $5.3 billion.
8. Halloween: $5.0 billion.
9. St Patrick’s day: $2.7 billion.

A few surprises there. Firstly, why so much on Easter? Mother’s day and Valentine’s day are both going to have a lot of gift giving in there. Are there social/religious groups that give out presents at Easter? And secondly, clearly fathers are getting the raw deal, with a $4.8 billion shortfall! (Although you could argue that it still doesn’t make up for the $5.3 billion on the Super Bowl).

Finally: St Patrick’s day, $2.7 billion? That’s enough to buy about 3,070,000,000 litres of beer, or around 10 litres for every man, woman and child in the US. Good going!

(Although that’s American beer, so it would have the alcohol content of about 3 Australian beers…)

While at Harvey Norman today I found this piece of inventive advertising:

A Choice award? How fantastic! Let’s investigate…

The CHOICE 2006 Shonky Awards Ten products to make you weep in despair. [...] The CHOICE Shonky for Best Dirt Redistribution Goes to the iROBOT ROOMBA robot vacuum cleaner (CHOICE, November 2006) [...] But what really made us doubt was its dirt redistribution function: when the small dirt container starts filling up, every time the iROBOT bumps into a wall or obstacle, a little heap of collected dirt falls out again. iROBOT? iDon’tthinkso.

Hmmm. Perhaps not quite what they suggested?

(As a disclaimer, I should note that I own a Roomba, and am extremely happy with it. I’m not sure exactly where Choice got its take from. Ditto their attack on the iPod in the same article, which seemed more designed to generate press coverage than actual consumer information).

If you’re currently somewhere where you can make a bit of noise you might want to have a look at this music generator.

Some very strange, yet in its way beautiful, algorithmic music. Well done, with very pretty animation. Kind of reminds me of the soundtrack for Dr Who back in the 1960s.

(The quote is from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Shame on you for asking!)

Via Boing Boing (and many others) is this brilliant project from Wired magazine. Ask a bunch of famous writers to tell a story in six words:

• Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. (Joss Wheedon)
• Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time (Alan Moore)
• Kirby had never eaten toes before (Kevin Smith)

Awesome stuff! (Although that last one is more like the first sentence of a short story I’d really like to read…)

Found via some source I cannot now remember (sorry!), is this collection of 100 scanned issues of Computing Gaming World. The collection covers from 1981 to 1992, so it’s a pretty dramatic period in computer games. The first issue covers mainly computer based wargames (with a very prescient essay about the advantages that computer war games have over table based games), all the way through to reviews of Links 386 (which I remember playing) and Wolfenstein 3D.

Fortunately for my productivity at work, I can’t access the actual PDF files from work, so I’ll have to read them from home.

Via The Daily Show, I give you the Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick:

There are just no words…

From smh.com.au, a Harry Seidler designed home is up for sale, and apparently:

the new owners would probably demolish the house

The price is $3.5m. To knock down something by Harry Seidler that sounds like a bargain. How much for Blues Point?

From The Courier-Mail (via Boing Boing):

THE United States has slapped a ban on Vegemite, outraging Australian expatriates there.

I don’t feel that I’m exaggerating when I say that this is the greatest outrage ever! Where’s Mark Latham when you need him?

From MSNBC.com:

The Kazakhstan central bank has misspelled the word “bank” on its new notes, officials said Wednesday.

Hee hee hee! Although, has anyone checked our bank notes carefully?

In fairness to the central bank, it does sound like a pretty small typo:

The Kazakh word for bank is the Cyrillic form of “bank.” On the new note, the word was written with an alternate Kazakh form of the letter K, which has a slightly different pronunciation.

A quick primer for beginners:

• Yes, genocide: the premidated, state mediated murder of over 5.7 million members of a single ethnic group.
• No, not genocide: criticising $350 million in relief payments to farmers.

John Cobb describes [comments made by Clive Hamilton] as “agrarian genocide”.

Any questions?

Via Peeve Farm is this video from the 1997 MacWorld, with Steve Jobs announcing the deal with Microsoft.

It’s fascinating watching Steve - he’s so clearly hating what he has to announce, but he has to as it’s the only way to save the company. When the introduction of Internet Explorer as the default browser is announced the reaction from the crowd is almost savage. And how often does ‘non-voting shares’ turn out to be a big applause line?

(Of course, the reaction to Bill Gates makes anything for Steve look kind).

Really interesting to compare this to the Intel announcement, which was (in some ways) as big a cultural shift, but it didn’t cause anything like as much reaction.

It is now 52 days to go until the release of the Nintendo Wii, the most interesting looking of the nextgen consoles.

Personally I find it hard to get excited about the PS3 or the Xbox360 - they’re just a lot faster and prettier. But the Wii brings a whole new way of playing games. If you haven’t seen the demos the console works using a wireless controller that detects motion. So it’s possible for games to be played in a completely new way.

Well, it was enough to convince me at least…

I’ve been watching (via the magic of the internet) a few of the new TV shows for this year from the US. A few thoughts (in order from worst to best):

• Jericho: Interestingly enough being aired the same week on Channel 10 here in Australia. Sadly, that’s the only interesting thing about this derivative bit of post-apocalyptic junk.
• Vanished: Because what the world needs is another CSI clone that only does kidnapping. Didn’t even watch 5 minutes worth.
• Smith: A nice ‘thief’ drama that was a bit too complicated for its own good. Got canceled, but I gave up first.
• The Class: Sitcom from one of the producers of Friends, where a group of people meet up years after they were together in primary school. Only just hanging on to my ‘watch’ list so far - it has the glimmer of something good, but there’s a lot of bad in there too.
• Men in Trees: Northern Exposure meets Sex in the City (I’m willing to bet that it was pitched to the network like that). But well made, with some good performances.
• Help Me Help You: A sitcom about people in a group therapy session. OK, with Ted Danson doing some interesting stuff.
• The Nine: Nine people who survive a bank robbery gone wrong deal with the aftermath. Nice stuff so far, with some good mystery set up. But it’d better not go all Lost and start to build more mystery than it resolves.
• Ugly Betty: Very strange, almost surrealistic comedy-drama set in a fashion magazine. Entertaining, but very very odd.
• Heroes: Unbreakable done for the small screen. Excellently paced and shot, with just some slight uncertainty about how well they’ll be able to deliver the plot developments that need to show up later.
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Aaron Sorkin’s latest show, set in a Saturday Night Live clone. Smart, well written, with snappy acting. Just not much new, as we’ve seen it all before in The West Wing and Sportsnight.
• Friday Night Lights: American high-school football in Texas. Stunning stuff, brilliantly shot and acted, with a rawness that you normally only see in independent cinema. Easily the best new show of the year.

Not yet rated: 30 Rock (not looking good) and 20 Good Years (maybe), which I’ve only seen one episode each of.

I’ll come back to this in a month or two to see which of those shows still survive - at least 2 will be culled, maybe 4.

I’ve made up a fun new game to play on Wikipedia, called Wiki-nteering. First, you decide on an article that’s the target (let’s say the orienteering page). Then you hit the ‘Random Page’ button, and try to find your way to the target page using the fewest clicks possible. You can only use the main article text - you can’t use the main menu, and you can’t use the category or link box links.

For instance:

• Allyson Swan to
• Running to
• Orienteering

(OK, that was a pretty easy one. I didn’t cheat, honest! And to clarify, ‘See Also’ links are OK, just not the ones like you get at the bottom of James Bond, among many others).

Another run:

• Aq Bars
• Bulgar
• Bulgaria
• United Kingdom
• Olympic Games
• Olympic sports
• Orienteering

Hours of fun!

Winston with a shoe Originally uploaded by Exasperated Calculator.

Here’s another picture of the kitten, as well as a quick test of a new way of posting photos to the site. Update: Hmmm, the picture seems to be blocked from Treasury, but everything else works well.