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The Mutter Masquerade passed. It did as it has every year since it started but this was the first year where I learned that I had “just missed it”. I open my calendar and write a note for September 15, 2017 to look into getting tickets. May this is the last year where I will have missed it. Oh tenses. I note an entry to the left four squares “Ashley D’s Birthday”. Again, tenses. September 11, 2017 would have been her birthday. She’s no longer with us.

Death or at least its pronouncements can form a kind of morbid metronome that hastens as you age but the last half decade has been a respite. In the 2000s I attended about one Boy Scout funeral a year for around a decade. The spread of ages results in no only a steady march of new sons but also the unwinding of fathers. After moving to the city I lost touch with those families and by extension their joys and tragedies. Then earlier this year a friend departed our company. She will be sorely missed.
I don’t want to see that little notifier, a barbed reminder of the arrow of time but there’s no simple way to remove it. I can turn off all birthdays but not just one. I could remove her from my contacts and after a few minutes of staring blankly and bits of information that tie to someone who isn’t there anymore I hit the delete key. I spam F5 and still her name persists. Staring at my screen, I issued a sad little laugh as I went through the indecorous process of posthumously unfollowing her on Google+. So this is where we are now. To Google, she still exists and I’ve simply chosen to not pay attention. She’s probably not sent or received any emails, IMs, Google+ posts, map queries, or made any Play Store transactions. Google doesn’t know if we just had a break up, a large argument, or she’s dropped off the grid. So wise yet so blind. This is a problem that will only build over time. At some point, more users of a given service will have departed than those who use it without appropriate vital hygiene. I guess it’s good for me to get used to this now.

Goodbye, Ashley.

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Some people are rough on cars, other go through toothbrushes at a high rate, I destroy shoelaces.  With the exception of a pair of Italian bootlaces that grace my dress steel toes, I have consistently broken the laces on my main shoes at least once every six months since I was eighteen.  The root cause is my lacing technique where the laces over the stem of the tongue are tightened by the laces being pulled perpendicular to the axis of the eyelet rather than parallel causing undo strain, but just getting nice laces seemed a good alternative to retraining myself how to tighten my laces.

Amazon and Ebay held nothing of interest around queries like “strong shoe laces” “bullet proof laces” and “mil-spec laces” so I just googled “really strong shoe laces” and found oldkook.com, a store run by a fellow that takes his laces seriously.  After looking at their offerings, I opted for their Dura-Force laces which can apparently be used to garrotte a rhinoceros.

Minutes later I received an email of “Thanks dude, how’d you hear about us?”.  I replied with “Google”.  He replied with “Nice. :)”

Even in the world of shoelace sales, there is googlejuice.

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The draw of the computer has been stronger than I anticipated to my dad and I’ve had to relearn some basics about the interface.  For instance:

Dad: Hm… I’ve heard a lot about Google. But every time I search, there’s only two results.
Me: Two results?
Dad: Yeah, look.  It says “results out of 2 million pages” where are they?
Me: Have you tried paging down?
Dad: Hm… Is that what the PgDn key I’ve been eying does?
Me: Yes.
Dad: This is easier than I thought.

On search specificity:
Dad: I’m getting too many results on snowplows.  How can I narrow it down?
Me: Well, add other terms, like a brand, a size, or a region.
Dad: You mean you can search on multiple words at once?  Hot damn.

Sometimes I get drunk with power and search on whole sentences or even a phrase and a name all at once.

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I wanted a sample blueprint that I could show kids as a sample floor schematic.  I searched for vectorized drawings of houses and such but found nothing and started looking for neat stuff with blueprints like fighter jets but also found little so I started looking for hi-res pictures of famous buildings.  I searched around a bit and finally stumbled upon a nice schematic of the White House.  I failed to save it properly and went back to Google to get it again when I noticed Firefox’s history of search terms:

white house blueprints exploded
white house schematics
how to build a missile
missile schematic
soyuz capsule filetype:eps
pentagon blue prints
pentagon schematics
monument drawings
famous building, exploded view

I wonder if DHS takes Cub Scout program into consideration when reviewing search history…

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Gmail now has a task list plugin/extension/addon available through Gmail Labs and as someone who lives or dies by his to-do list, I was a quite happy.  Google Labs items are usually pretty functional with the traditional Google spareness exemplified in Chrome, a browser that almost didn’t have a Forward button.  I transferred my dead tree to-do list and liked checking things off at home or work without having to find my pad or pen or dealing with page changes as the list automatically expanded as new tasks were added.

I started using the organization options that let you group tasks but found that the list wasn’t contracting when tasks were completed or nothing was entered into a task description field.  I fiddled for about 20 minutes trying to get rid of the extra space at the bottom but came to compromise.  I filled the space with a new task “find out how to fix task list”.

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Google Adsense has served up some odd things through Gmail before including bed-wetting clothing and feminine care products.  Today I was served up an ad for Topamax, an anti-convulsant.  Is there something in my mailing pattern or search trends to indicate I’m epileptic?

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One of the benefits of perpetual sobriety is having crystal clear memories of what your friends do while inebriated.

This incident is the delightful intersection of alcohol and technology. My brother has used Yahoo! Mail for years but has hit up against its storage limit and wanted to switch to something, after two 40s I convinced him and he tried registering but was stopped by the CAPTCHA which he fudged a key and had to try again.  Each got progressively harder until he had something like “o0Ol|1q9p” or another of its ilk that so frustrated me when I played Nintendo.

Good to know that Google has systems in place not only to stop spam-bots but also moderates the BAC of those using its services.

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I found a Google ad for Down with Pinatas, a group that advocates against pinatas and their violent heritage.  The statistics page is wonderful.  I’m assuming this is farce but it was a google ad.  Why would someone pay to have a farce site promoted?  Viral marketing?  Bet?  I don’t know.  But if you scroll to the bottom of the page there’s a very small smiley.  Intriguing…