There is an intricate social interaction that occurs when walking down a long corridor, such as a hallway at an office building, where architecture allows you to see someone from a greater distance than volume levels appropriate for polite conversation would permit conversing.  As a result, when you see someone you know on the other end, you realize that eventually you must acknowledge him with some form of greeting.  But at this distance, you’d have to shout “HELLO!!” across the building to do so, which would make you look rude.  So you continue walking, looking at the floor or wall or something—anything to avoid staring at him for thirty consecutive seconds.

Now it’s on.  You have chosen your destiny for the next half-minute, and it will involve a hallway hello.  Sure, you could duck into a row of cubicles, and pretend that was your intended destination until the person passes.  But what if there are people in those cubicles?  They will be all “what are you doing here?”  Unless you are good at making up answers to such questions on the fly, your best course of action is probably to continue walking down the hallway.

Before you know it, you are at last in speaking range.  At this point you look towards the other party, wait for him to look at you (which he is expected to do!), then say something like “Hey, [passerby’s name]” or “Hey how’re you?”   Next, if you are dealing with a civilized individual, you can expect to hear “Hey, [your name]”, or just simply “Hey.”  Note:  do not tell the other party how you are doing, even if he asks; he is asking merely out of politeness.  Finally, any eye contact is immediately broken until you have passed said person.

Whew, that was close.  But now you’ve successfully executed a hallway hello.  That makes you a real people person.  That’s why they pay you the big bucks.  And doggone-it, people like you.

PS: I was surprised that spellcheck didn’t have a problem with “how’re”

I haven’t made a blog post in a while.. I guess I’ve been busy at work and I haven’t really been inspired to write anything.  To help keep something fresh on the site, I’ll share some interesting canine survival instincts I have noticed when taking our dog out:

1.  When she is sniffing around exploring, and sticks her head up to sniff the air (as opposed to following a scent on the ground), she will always face directly into the wind.  This makes sense, as that is where she’d be most likely to find a scent of something to hunt (or avoid).

2.  When she is pooping, she always faces downwind.  I’m guessing this instinct allows her to see any predators that might have been alerted to her presence by the new scent.  In addition, she often (but not always) sniffs into the wind (see observation #1) first, which means she has to do a 180 just before pooping.

I was killing wasting time on Google Maps today, trying to find the Sears Tower without knowing what it looked like or where in Chicago it was.  You know, the kind of thing that’s fun to waste company time and bandwidth on.  Anyway, I came across a place where the satellite images are stitched together in a very interesting manner.  You can’t see the seams, but there are at least three different satellite photos represented here.  The various angles of the buildings reveal the relative position of the satellite when the photos were taken.  You can see the south and east sides of some buildings, the north and east sides of others, and the south and west side on some others.  What it results in is a cool M. C. Escher look to the buildings:

Coca-Cola has recently changed the packaging for Cherry Coke, or Coca-Cola Cherry as it is now called (the “adjective-first” standard usually employed by English speakers is so unsophisticated).  I’m not sure who this is supposed to appeal to, but I don’t think it is men.  I mean, the color is somewhere between purple and pink.  It looks really fruity, in multiple senses of the word.  It looks like it would taste like grape soda mixed with red Kool-Aid.

Anyone else have a similar reaction to this new packaging?

Though it may not be recognized by the American Medical Association (yet!), frigidamanus supermus is a serious medical affliction which is estimated to affect over two hundred thousand Americans every year.  It is common among individuals who spend much of their time operating computers; particularly vulnerable are employees at workplaces that maintain a low temperature due to an abundance of heat-generating computer hardware.  Deriving from the Latin for “cold hand above mouse,” the condition is marked by a significant temperature gradient between the hand which operates the mouse (typically the right hand) and the other hand, with the mouse-operating hand being colder.  This is caused by the tendency of the computer operator to use the mouse more frequently than the keyboard, while keeping the other hand close to the warmth of the face and/or abdomen.  The outlook is grim: a staggering 98 percent of FS sufferers will survive for no more than 85 years after symptoms are first experienced.

A little over two years ago (over Thanksgiving of 2004 I think), I began reading The Baroque Cycle, a series of three novels by Neal Stephenson.  In all, they total out at around three thousand pages.  Last night I finally finished the third and final book.  I’m not sure if I’m just a slow reader or if the books needed to have a lot of useless information taken out or if I just don’t allocate enough of my time to the task of reading.  Probably all of the above.

Part of the slowness is a result of the reading level, which is on par with The Lord Of The Rings, which I spent about a year and a half on (I think I spent a semester or summer on each book, including The Hobbit).  Both were filled with long, descriptive passages where you read five or six pages before anything actually happens.  Which isn’t to say that I disliked either set of books.  But sometimes I would get tired of them and put them down for a month before picking them back up.  Now I’m just looking forward to being able to read other things that are hopefully a little faster in pace.  Next up is The Chronic[what!]cles of Narnia, which shouldn’t take me nearly so long.  We got a single-volume copy of the whole set for Christmas last year, but I haven’t had a chance to read it.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids.  But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal.  The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth.  The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead.  Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron.  Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold.  This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest posits of its precious Element.

Today I am going to review web browsers for Windows Mobile (formerly known as Pocket PC, formerly known as Windows CE).

Minimo
Mozilla’s attempt at a mobile web browser is in version 0.016, so I think it is more of a proof of concept than an actual, usable web browser.  The website claims that “Minimo has been focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, small screen usablity, and porting to small consumer devices.”  Well I think it fails, fails, and fails, respectively.  The install file is larger than the Opera install file (8MB vs. 6MB).  It takes a good 30-45 seconds to launch.  The browser takes forever to load pages.  Scalability to my 240-pixel-wide screen is handled poorly: fonts are left much too large, and God forbid there be an image on the page.  And worst of all, it will invariably crash after viewing about four or five pages.  I stopped using it after the second time it crashed and took down not just Minimo, but my whole OS (with no Control-Alt-Delete, I was forced to let the battery die in order to use it again).  On the plus side, it is the only browser that works with Google Maps (although it uses some kind of proxy site—it’s not actually connecting to Google Maps).

I give Minimo a rating of 0.016 out of 10.  Maybe in a few years it will be a usable piece of software.

Opera Mobile
Opera is the web browser known for running on lots of different devices (Wii and NDS included), so it’s no surprise that they have put together a nice little browser for Windows Mobile.  It is much faster than Minimo, although I can’t say that it’s faster than Internet Explorer (unlike its full-size cousin).  I have mixed feelings about this browser.  There is a weird thing where zooming to 100% causes the browser to go into a completely different rendering mode.  On the text-only version of my site, for example, putting the size to 90% shouldn’t change much, but it actually causes the margins and borders to be rendered completely differently.  It seems the default (100%) zoom level is going through some special optimization, while 90% just resizes the text and renders everything else as-is.  This makes 90% zoom-level better for sites that are designed with a mobile device in mind, and 100% is better for the rest of the web.

Other than that, I have a strong suspicion that images are cached in their full-sized form, rather than caching the resized version (which would generally have made the program faster).  In general Opera seems to do a slightly better job than Internet Explorer on most pages, but it is slower and has some rendering issues.  The real question is this:  will I pay $24 for it after the 30-day trial period is over?  Probably not at first, but if I miss it strongly enough after a while I might.

Pocket IE
Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile is actually pretty good at what it does.  It has some rendering problems, just like any Internet Explorer, but I’ll take those over the stability problems of Minimo any day.  The best thing about Pocket IE is that it is much faster than the other options.  I guess working in the same building as the people who designed the OS will help you stay a little bit ahead of the game.  However, the browser does have some real problems dealing with long pages (Wikipedia is almost unusable on Pocket IE).  In the past I have avoid this by using Google’s mobile proxy, which basically strips sites down to just text.  Overall though I haven’t had too many problems.

So to conclude all this, the ideal would be to have both Opera and IE available, as they have different strengths.  But I’m not sure if Opera is enough better than IE to justify spending any money on it.  And if you value your life at all, stay away from Minimo, at least until the most significant digit of the version comes before the decimal.

Disclaimer: these tests were all conducted on a Dell Axim, running Windows Mobile 2003.

I have a couple of unrelated topics to discuss today...

I’ve made several little updates to my website lately, most of which I have mentioned on the homepage.  Most recently I’ve given the photos page a new feature, where each directory now has a thumbnail, made up of four photos beneath it.  I’m still not totally pleased with the way it looks, and part of the problem is the dark background.  I got the inspiration from this article, which produces some impressive results.  Only problem with that method is that the height of the thumbnails will depend on the images involved, and I wanted them to be all the same size.  I may just get over that, or write some code to crop the images.  I’ve also encountered a problem where PHP crashes if I try to generate too many images at once.  I think I know what the problem is, and in C++ I’d just use a pointer and be done with it, but I don’t know that PHP has those.

Firefox has been crashing a lot for me since the last patch, usually when I load several pages with Flash ads.  Penny Arcade and Joystiq in particular would consistently crash Firefox.  Has anyone else had this problem?  It doesn’t seem to happen for me at home, but happens a lot at work.  The only two differences between home and work are: 1) I leave my Firefox session open for about a week at a time, so that it will remain the first icon on my taskbar and so that I won’t have to reenter a bunch of passwords; and 2) I am going through a proxy server at work.  I tried updating my flash player but that didn’t do anything.  I did find an extension called Flashblock, which (you’d never guess this from the name) blocks flash content.  Since I’ve used it I haven’t had any problems.  I’d recommend it even if you’re not having problems.

One last question—does anyone have any recommendations for video editing/DVD making in Windows?  I’d like to be able to create simple menus, just a jpeg in the background and a list of video clips to jump to.  Nothing fancy really.  I have just never gotten around to transferring our videos from the wedding and Hawaii to DVD, since my old PC just didn’t have the power to do it.  I’ve used Adobe Premiere before, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.  Any other suggestions?

<--- THIS IS NOT LONDON BRIDGE!

Today while making my lunch I had Fuse on in the background, and I saw a video by the girl from Black Eyed Peas called “London Bridge.”  Only, in the video she is not in front of London Bridge.  She is in front of Tower Bridge.  There have been three London Bridges in London.  The first one was the famous one and no longer exists.  The second one is currently located in Arizona.  The third one still stands, but there’s nothing special about it.  You’d think someone involved in the photo shoot would have said “You do realize that’s not London Bridge you’re posing in front of, right?”

Yesterday afternoon there were these two ridiculously huge moths on the railing right next to the door of our apartment.  So I snapped a few pictures of them to share:

This morning the yellow one was still there, although it had moved to a wall nearby.  They are kind of creepy—like they are omens from a horror movie, indicating that we won’t live to see next Tuesday.  So if Stephanie and I die in the next eight days, blame it on the moths.