they see you when you’re sleeping

Posted on Tuesday, 2002 October 15 by Anton

I go to sign up for a Berkeley Extension course and find:

The University is required by federal law to report your Social Security number and other pertinent information to the Internal Revenue Service pursuant to the reporting requirements imposed by the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. The University also will use the Social Security number you provide to verify your identity. Social Security number disclosure is mandatory. This notification is provided to you as requested [sic] by the Federal Privacy Act of 1974.

The IRS wants to know who’s taking “Unix System Administration I”?

I’m tempted to take the money I was going to spend on the course and send it to Ron Paul.

Next day: The course is taught by a private firm, though under UC auspices; so, on my One True Ex’s suggestion, I contacted that firm directly. Problem solved, so long as I don’t care about formal university credit.

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render unto pixels

Posted on Saturday, 2002 October 12 by Anton

The Virtual Terrain Project collects links about the state of the art in realtime simulated environments, from “why can’t you make better trees?” to “how do you decide when part of the field of view can be rendered more sloppily?”.

Posted in eye-candy, technology | Leave a comment

a name

Posted on Friday, 2002 October 11 by Anton

I was thinking about English spellings of Indian names when this hit me:
Does Chatterjee mean something like quadruply honored ?

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shopping for a [car]

Posted on Friday, 2002 October 11 by Anton

Oh, this just fills me with confidence. I responded to a car ad on Yahoo and got this:

DEAR [name]
THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING [source] TO PURCHASE YOUR NEW [vehicle] .I AM EXCLUSIVELY DEDICATED TO WORKING WITH [source] CUSTOMERS LIKE YOURSELF.AS WE WORK TOGETHER ON YOUR PURCHASE REQUEST YOU WILL FIND THE [source] PROCESS VERY ENJOOYABLE WAY TO PURCHASE YOUR NEW VEHICLE.I WIIL BE CALLING YOU SHORTLY TO INTRODUCE MYSELFF .I LOOK FORWARD TO EARNING YOUR BUSINESS BY PRESENTING YOU WITH A PROMPT,NO-HAGGLE AND NO -HASSLE BUYING AND DELIVERY EXPERIENCE.

The brackets are his, not mine.

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les pissoirs du monde

Posted on Thursday, 2002 October 10 by Anton

The urinals of the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory at the South Pole:

When [the barrel] is full, . . . it is shipped to Port Hueneme, California, for disposal.

Who’d have thunk. I wonder, though — is it only because I’ve read Dune that I feel someone, somewhere in the world, ought to have a use for the stuff?

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words on planets

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 October 09 by Anton

I did not know that Astronomy Picture of the Day is mirrored in multiple languages. (That list misses at least one: romanised Russian.) I stumbled onto the mirrors while seeking the origin of the name of a feature on Venus. Ought to have remembered to try the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, which says Atete is a fertility goddess of Ethiopia.

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one foot in the cradle?

Posted on Monday, 2002 October 07 by Anton

Turns of Phrase: Meldrew

Last week [August] a poll by the survey firm MORI identified Meldrews as a new social type — aged between 35 and 54, rebellious and with little time for authority, unhappy with their lives and the world around them, whose attitude can be summed up by “life’s a bitch and then you die”.

Posted in humanities | Leave a comment