As I mentioned a few days ago, I got a Zune for the holidays from the consulting firm I'm subcontracting through. I've had it for a few weeks now and it's a decent enough device. But, there's this strange behavior that leads me to the conclusion that the ghost of Johnny Cash haunts my Zune.

I added about 20GB of my favorite music to the Zune, including 2 Johnny Cash albums. Now, I've got your basic Super Deluxe Pattern Recognizer (SDPR) installed in my skull, otherwise known as a standard human brain. As such, when a strange pattern of Boy Named Sue and Ring of Fire started popping up in the midst of nearly every listening session, I couldn't help but notice.

Fully aware of the fact that my (and your) SDPR tends to fabricate patterns in the absence of real ones, I chalked it up to strange, but random behavior. Even when I tracked such streaks as 5 out of 8 songs coming from the Man in Black.

Then, I got sick of it and decided to pull the albums off. I figured if I ever got the craving to hear "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die", I could just put them back on. That's when things got strange.

I've since attempted to remove the albums themselves, the individual tracks, all songs by artist, etc. And yet, the stream of Johnny Cash inclusions in shuffle mode continues.

So, I give up. This thing must be haunted and I'm just going to have to live with the ghost.

Photo: borghal

About a month ago, Aaron and I had a conversation about that evil little voice in your head that makes all kinds of impulsive suggestions. It was prompted by the episode of This American Life that I'd listened to the day before.

While not literal enough that I need psychiatric help (just to clarify), I often feel like I've got a virtual pantheon of evil little guys hanging out in my head that suggest all kinds of stupid things. I certainly can related to Ira Glass' intro to that episode.

The conversation quickly focused on one particular voice from the gallery that pretty much embodies my lust for gadgets and neat tech. I call him Steve.

I call him that because that's the part of my brain that reacts to the presentations that Steve Jobs puts out. My inner Steve sees the iPhone and goes,

"Hey, that's neat. J, we *really* need one of those. It's shiny and stuff."

Fortunately for my pocketbook, my inner economist Eugene is pretty vocal himself and manages to put Steve in his place,
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Photo: Fanch

At the moment, I'm inclined to pretty much put my DIY electric bike on hold. This first appeared to be a simple project.

1. Buy a cheap bike
2. Buy a hub motor kit
3. Install the wheel and connect the basic connectors.
4. Ride away.

First, the original bike didn't have enough room between the forks, so I bought a replacement bike after measuring quite a few.

Then, today, I finally had the time to put on the tire, install the motor, and hook it all together. My mom, Shelly and my sister headed out shopping for the day and the garage is mostly cleaned out after last weekend.

I got the wheel installed, and then wired the controller, the motor and the throttle together (they were just clip-together connectors) and went to hook the charged up batteries.

It was at that point that a bright flash of light blinded me. The smell of ozone filled the air and my fingers, newly scorched black and burned by the arc, dropped the connectors. Despite there really only being one way to hook this all together, something is apparently very wrong with one or more of the components.

Then, apparently proving which side of the scientific divide I'm on, I tried it again.

I think there was more ozone, but less scorching the second time.

This, combined with the fact that I nearly lit my pants on fire by casually tossing a couple of AA batteries into my pocket along with my keys a couple of weeks ago, thus shorting them out has me thinking it might be time for a refresher course in battery safety. Does anyone have some aloe vera?

If marriage was strongly typed, then asking my wife what time she's going to be home would return a timestamp. Similarly, asking if she'll be home for dinner would return a boolean. However, since marriage is a loosely typed language, both questions usually return an array. In the array is a list of the things she has to do before she can come home.

To properly parse this response, you actually need to estimate the duration of each item on the list, total the estimates, tack on about 20% for overrun and factor in the commute. Only when you've run the response through this wrapper method can you actually get the timestamp you were looking for. And, if you were looking for a boolean, you need to then compare your timestamp against the timestamp for dinner and see which is greater.

So, in essence, having a good marriage is like working in a loosely typed language and you've just got to have really good exception handling. Once you've built up a good library of wrapper methods for how your spouse communicates, things can just cruise right along and work smoothly.

Or I guess you can throw an exception to be handled by the divorce() method. But that seems like a pretty bad approach.

This morning, I was reading something and got linked to an old posting on the Dilbert blog about the formulas in humor. One of my favorite classes in college was humor writing and "getting" some of these very constructs unlocked a lot of humor and jokes for me.

Anyway, in the midst of a giant pile of comments on the posting, were links to several comic strips. I noted a few of them to check out when I got home. A few were duds, but I think I've got a pretty good evening of laughs ahead of me when I discovered this one.

First of all, it features a wide variety of visual styles. The strip is beautifully drawn and often relies on the visual for the joke. The topics are often disturbing and biting, but very funny. More than one is just plain *wrong*.

They do often take a bit of thought to get, but that's part of what makes them worthwhile. I'm a huge fan of a joke that takes 2-3 leaps before you get the payoff. Basically, if you don't get the joke in the one I'm posting, you probably shouldn't bother.

And, many are not safe for work. You've been warned. However, if you're looking for some non-family-safe humor to make you laugh, give it a shot.