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Lunch With George!
March 21, 2003 - Grilled Expedition
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Agenda
I Never Forget a Face
I was telling George about an article I read at NewScientist.com describing the results of an unusual study. The researchers found that men who are car fans use the same part of their brain to identify vehicles that they use to recognize human faces.The most interesting detail to me was that car fanatics had difficulty identifying automobile models from photos of isolated details, suggesting that they recognize them "holistically." They also had difficulty identifying images that mixed faces and cars, suggesting that the same brain circuitry is used for both.
More Browncoats
You may remember our discussion of Firefly, the short-lived science fiction/western television series on Fox. George and I were both disappointed that it was canceled before it even finished it's 13-episode run, and hoped that it could be resurrected on another network.
One day a week or so ago, I took a look around Ebay to see if there were any DVDs or Tapes available. To my surprise, I found an auction selling official Fox version of the show on VCD, made for the Asian market. I bid and won! Right after winning, I received an e-mail from the seller telling me that the VCDs were in fact not official copies-- he just had to say that because otherwise, Ebay kept removing his auctions! He gave me the option to back out of the sale, but hey! I wanted them.
A week later, I received a set of VCDs containing the 2-part pilot, and all the regular episodes which actually aired. they are surprisingly highh quality (although the audio is rough at times), and the seller did a great job of editing out the commercials.
I surprised George, presenting them to him as a gift. Now I just gotta get him to lend them back to me!
Whoa. Good Myth is a great Firefly resource site.
Wiley Sucks
George found himself pretty irritated this week at the publishing company of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
George had borrowed this horrible book on XML from me: XML for Dummies (it gets 2 out of 5 stars on Amazon), and just had to find a good one. Reviews on Amazon for XMLSpy Handbook were glowing, and George simply couldn't wait-- he ran out to Borders and bought it for retail. To George's horror, the CD in the book was labeled for XMLSpy, but the contents of the disk were for the book XML for Dummies!
When he called Wiley, they said they would send out a new CD. He was so anxious to get it that he returned the first copy to Border's and picked up another at Barnes and Noble (assuming that a different chain would get books from a different lot). Was this CD a good one? Nope! Same problem.
At this point, George sent me an e-mail entitled "Wiley Sucks", since he believed that they were aware of the problem, but instead of recalling the books, they were just waiting to replace the CDs as each buyer complained.
George later thought he had been too harsh in his assessment, as a Wiley represnetative posted a message to the Amazon Customer Review listings for the book, indicating that books were being recalled and replacement CDs were available. George immediately ordered a copy from Amazon, and it arrived with the correct CD. So maybe Wiley doesn't suck!
But wait... there's more (it sometimes pays to delay the posting of these notes by several months!!!). It did take several weeks for the promised replacement CD to arrive, and it seems George doesn't even like the book very much. He is now suspicious of the "'glowing" reviews on Amazon... they're all anonymous, and appeared immediately after the book's release, and not one complained of the CD problem... fishy!
George instead recommends Learning XML from O'Reilly. He said it provides a far superior explanation of XML. And maybe Wiley still sucks.
Google Mirror
I found an interesting website named the "Google Mirror." Now it's not just another site which provides access to the same data as Google (although it does function in that manner)... it is also called a mirror because everything is backwards! Everything reads from right to left, although using a physical mirror would not help since the letters themselves are not reversed. This site even requires you to enter your search strings in reverse order! "Lunch With George" returned no matches, but "egroeG htiW hcnuL" yielded the correct results (although they were pretty hard to read).
The U.S. mirror is currently off line, but they're trying to re-launch. Never fear-- there is a mirror of the mirror running in Germany! Take a look.
Eastern Red Cedar
George also surprised me with a wonderful gift-- it's a hand-crafted hiking stick from Eastern Virginia Hiking Sticks! We discussed Nathan Nelson and his sticks during the June 13th and July 18th lunches last year.
This fine piece of wood is made from the branch of an Eastern Red Cedar. It is about five feet tall, and has a nice feel to it. It is unfinished, and even needs quite a bit of sanding. I'l really enjoy doing this work myself, getting to know the stick. And when it's done, it should be the finest trekking pole I've ever seen. Thanks George!
Copyright © 2003, Paul Wren. All rights reserved.