I read an interesting article that my mom sent me. She sent me the paper copy from the AARP bulletin that she (apparently) receives. The gist of the article (authored by Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz) is that the free market is good at giving consumers choices, but an abundance of choices can cause decision paralysis and dissatisfaction. These are primarily afflictions suffered by “maximizers” — people who’s goal in decision-making is to get “the best” as opposed to “satisficers” who’s goal is to be satisfied.
[I started this post trying to talk about free market vs. central planning in the realm of garbage collection in Altoona. It started out a little off-topic as I wanted to talk about the environment of discourse at PSU Altoona before delving into this specifically. It went wildly awry from there and never returned. I’ll have to try again later.]
What kind of person actively listens to positions that they disagree with? I think that more people feel like they fit that category than actually do. I’m similarly confident that I also think that I fit that category more than I actually do. I also think that I fit that category more than most.
I’m going to tempt fate again. Carolyn (wisely) suggested “Why don’t you write it offline first?” And that really was a good suggestion. Only, I like to tempt fate — at least with small things that don’t really matter. And while I’d like to tell you about my motorcycling, It’s hardly really important. So, here I am again; in the blogger window, writing about motorcycling.
(For those of you who are wondering what the fuck is he talking about?, see Doomed, I tell you! Doomed)
The onslaught of spam bounces continues. After a little further exploration, and discussions with the folks on the chuug list, we’ve determined that a spammer is using randomstring@accapehart.com as the “From:” address for spam that he/she is sending out. As a result, for every message that is not successfully sent, I get a bounce back from the friendly MTA saying that they couldn’t deliver the message I was trying to send. As a result, all legitimate mail to accapehart.com, carolynfay.com, santaal.com, and the rest of my vanity domains has slowed to a crawl.
Joe, the author of Dadblog — one of the 2 blogs that I read where I don’t know the author — wrote to me today. Apparently, he was looking through his web log analysis software, and saw a referrer he didn’t recognize (my blog). He checked me out and correctly deduced that we have a common friend in Clinton.
This spurred me to check my own logs. 
Almost everything was as I expected but for 2 things:
The universe doesn’t want me to tell you about my motorcycling. Now, for the second time, I’ve started a post about my history motorcycling only to have the process fail unrecoverably.
The first time, submitting the completed post to Blogger, I got a server error page. Pressing the back button, I was faced with an empty page.
This time, I was looking for a web image of a Suzuki GS 550 ES (the first bike I bought), and clicking back in a separate tab caused FIREFOX on LINUX to just disappear. Firefox, people! On Linux.
I need to learn to draw. My website needs art. And I need to stop stealing it. :-/ I would love to be able to draw in an anime style. OK, I’d love to be able to draw in any style. I just love how anime seems to be able to do so much with so little. I want to learn to be better with my camera too.
As far as music, when I was in middle/jr/high school, when people asked “What do you play?” I would answer “The radio.” I made it a little more true when I became a DJ at the only station around foolish enough to hire minimum-wage teens to sit behind the mic — WTIK — 1310 on your AM dial. At the time, it was mostly a country/western station which also broadcast NASCAR races and Atlanta Braves baseball games. There are some stories there I need to remember to jot down here too. The reason I don’t play the trombone is that I accidentally got put in the “wrong” (IE non-band) home room when I entered middle school. They/I didn’t figure it out until a couple of weeks in to school, and by then, I’d made friends and started to feel comfortable in my new situation. I didn’t want to change. I’m not sad that I don’t play trombone. But I’d love to learn to play the saxophone.
Every now and again, I’d been seeing little bits of Spanish on the web. But it didn’t occur to me as to why until I was publishing my last blog entry.
There is a designer in the Neon Guild1who is proposing to do a site for a client. The designer talked to Jack about doing internationalization for the client. Jack talked to me. I experimented with it (here) to make sure I knew what I’d do. I figured it out so long as most of the design is in CSS. Apache actually handles content negotiation quite nicely behind the scenes.
It’s been a little slow the last few days. Monday night I helped Carolyn arrange her desk in her new office. She switched buildings because they are going to expand the library to use both floors — including the one her office was in. Her new office is smaller than most of the rest, but has a double-expanse of window to make up for it. It’s certainly a step up from the closet they had her in before!
Yeah. It’s the Sunday before the last week of the “spring” semester, and it’s snowing. SNOWING! To be fair, it’s a light, blustery snow that’s not sticking to anything. But, c’mon already. We were having a BEAUTIFUL spring.
In Charlottesville, it seemed like there was always a week or so every winter in which it was balmy and beautiful. Don’t tell me that in Altoona we’ll get a week or so every summer in which it’s DARK AND SNOWY!
