soapbox

Otherwise known as: Happy Birthday to MBH! Hooray birthday!! Hooray beer! Hooray trucks! Hooray Padres!

So, yesterday was the first time that I didn’t go to work on Memorial Day in a long long time, if ever.  In fact, I wasn’t allowed to go to work (well, not go and get paid for it).  While I appreciate the taking of a day to honor those who have served our country and paid with their lives, I’m not entirely comfortable with how the “day off” has turned into a day of beer and grilling and baseball, much as I like those things.

This NYT article echoes this sentiment and provides a bit of history of the holiday, for those interested.

Having not served in the Armed Forces, I feel like I need to be careful, but my personal feeling about Memorial Day is that I’m not comfortable just not showing up for work, hosting a party, getting misty-eyed during the national anthem shown on TV before the game, but that’s about it.  We as a nation do a shitty enough job taking care of those veterans who make it back with a heartbeat - I think those that don’t deserve a bit more remembrance, y’know?  On the East Coast I would always try to make it down to DC to visit the Vietnam Wall for Remembrance/Memorial Day; somehow that seems more appropriate.

That said, were I to number among the fallen, I would want my kids, wife, family and friends to have the day off and have a good time, maybe place some flowers on my grave while on their way to take in a minor league baseball game.  Hmm, that sounded a bit morbid, but I think the sentiment is clear.

So, even though the major credit card companies do not  concede any wrongdoing, a class-action lawsuit against them is in its final stages, which means that you have ~10 days left to claim $$ from them.

This stems from the foreign currency fees charged by Visa/Mastercard/etc, so click here if you used your credit card overseas between 1996 and 2006.   I haven’t finished it yet -updates today or tomorrow, but I am told that the best way is to call first and get a claim number, then finish it up online.  (But it has to be done/completed by May 30th!)

There are three different options: if you didn’t travel much, then you just get $25.  Or you can total up your time spent abroad, or if you spent a lot and have absurdly good records, you can enter the amount that you spent abroad.

A recent quote from The Superficial:

“… It was sort of magical, you know? Like seeing the Aurora Borealis. Or, no, wait, that’s bush league. I got it: A really awesome chicken wing shaped like Abe Lincoln that you try to tip a stripper with. Swish! Count it! Northern Lights, you just got served.”

- The Superficial

It hurts having my research be so degraded… Then again, maybe the rest of the post makes up for it.

You will be a defense ninja.

From what little I know of the situation, Venkatesan is not as out-there as she seems in the article. That said, it’s a pretty weird situation no matter how you spin it… and there is no way that the College will find against its students, that’s for sure. Faculty members just don’t rank that high on the priority ladder.

I would assume to no great surprise of most of the blog’s readership, the recent AAPL vs MSFT showdown (conducted by Popular Mechanics) had a decisive winner (hint: not the blue screen of death).  Several interesting details of the contest caught my eye, however.

The ease-of-use and subjective ratings for OSX and Vista were surprisingly similar; it was in the hardware performance categories that OSX destroyed Vista.  The Mac benchmarks for Vista (while running bootcamp) were slightly but consistently better than those of the PC-Vista benchmarks, but even if you subtract the Mac-PC hardware difference, Vista is, as we all know by now, and ugly beast.

Another funny thing - check out the reader comments at the bottom of the article.  The Coke vs Pepsi analogy was made, and it’s an accurate one: the stereotypes still persist and Mac people make fun of PC people, and PC people make fun of Mac people.  I choose to use Mac products because they don’t suck, but that doesn’t mean I blindly follow whatever line Steve Jobs tries to sell me.  anyway, good times.