I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Two DEC-20 cartoons
December 20, 2025Today’s catch-22
June 3, 2025Getting prescriptions (re)filled through CVS Caremark turns out to be a constant unpleasant adventure. My password keeps needing to be changed, for no reason I can see, and what happens when I get to the “manage your prescriptions” page is always something different from all previous log-ins. Sometimes I can find no way to get the list of my (alas, very many) prescriptions, or get the list from two years ago, or some list that probably belongs to someone else, so I just abandon the task and try again the next day. Twice I’ve been told that that resource is not available.
Today my problem was a prescription for prednisone 5 mg tablets, which I put in weeks ago, got a message saying it had been processed, and then no news whatsoever. So, after elaborately proving who I was and then changing my password, I found the “track your orders” resource (sometimes it just vanishes and I’m shit out of luck, but it was there today. And told me that instead of being mailed to me (as I had instructed), the rx was sent to my local CVS, held for two weeks without being picked up, and returned to the warehouse. All without any notification to me.
Oh, you say, that should be no problem, just put in a new order. The “submit an order” option was in fact available. Joy.
The Google grant
May 12, 2025Junk and spam e-mail and blog comments continue to stream in, but the automated resources filtering these out for me (and leaving me with some considerable residue to judge by hand) have altered. I’m now getting versions of the Nigerian prince scam, in languages the filters don’t know what to do with (German, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic). And then, in my Junk mailbox (where the filters put stuff they judge might be junk, but leave the final judgment to me) on the morning of 5/6, this fabrication:
(This is a photograph of the mailing, so you can’t link to the Google.org site on it)
There’s a lot of real stuff alluded to in this mailing: the Google address is correct; there is a Google.org charitable arm of Google; that’s a passable reproduction of the Google.org logo; Google.com does give awards (the Google Cloud Partner Awards); “Google Gives Back” was the title of one of Google’s charitable efforts (though the name doesn’t seem to be used any more); and Sundar Pichai is indeed the CEO of Google.com. Some details follow below. But all of this anyone could have looked up. In any case, it smells bad, and the current filters picked up on that, I’m not entirely sure how.
Happy happy joy joy
February 14, 2025A report from yesterday (2/13), a day that began with painfully low barometric pressure and included deluges of cold rain, but brought two occasions for real joy: brilliant hearing and the magic clock.
Goodbye, Jim
October 23, 2024Jim Martin, a friend for 66 years, died on 10/21, at home in Kalua-Kona HI, with his wife of 43 years, Deb (Deborah) Hayes, and his brother Ross Martin to see him off as he succumbed finally to kidney disease. Jim — James Littell Martin III, but he was Jim to everyone, always — was 84 (born 8/7/1940, just one month before me, 9/6/1940, so on August 7th he regularly twitted me wryly on being my senior). The eldest of the five children of James L. Martin Jr. and his wife Helene, of Tulsa OK, Jim was one of my roommates at Princeton — we were in the class of 1962 — where he graduated with a major in biology. And went on to jobs in California, Texas, and Colorado before retiring to Hawaii.
I’ll provide further standard information about Jim’s life in a little while. But first some words from Deb and from me about his character and nature, as explanation for why we so lament his death.
Briefly: from the annals of e-commerce
September 7, 2024I interrupt the outpouring of post-birthday material to report on today’s remarkable e-mail from the world of e-commerce. As it appeared in my mail, only slightly edited, and without comment (never mess with perfection):
from Amazon.com Customer Service:
You saved $0.01 with Amazon.com’s Pre-order Price Guarantee! The price of the following item decreased after you ordered, and we gave you the lowest price.
[item] XXXXX
Price on order date: $23.75
Price charged at shipping: $23.74
Lowest price before release date: $23.74
Quantity: 1
Total Savings: $0.01
From the annals of kerning
June 9, 2024(entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest, even after some judicious fuzzing of body parts in the visual)
Very briefly noted, a spectacularly bad kerning in a Gay Empire e-mail ad (this very morning) for video on demand; background from NOAD:
noun kerning: the spacing between letters or characters in a piece of text to be printed: I am very concerned about the kerning as it just looks awkward.
Today’s hybrid mail
June 3, 2024A flyer for a 2025 concert series — Chamber Music San Francisco’s season in Palo Alto — which I was about to toss without further attention (it’s been many years since I’ve been able to go to concerts), when I looked at the address: it was mailed to Conrad Zwicky at my home address in Palo Alto.
How did that happen?
A custom-made eggcup
May 4, 2024Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)
But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.
The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.
A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:
In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup
Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.
I am a camera
April 6, 2024No, I’m not roaming inter-war Berlin like Christopher Isherwood, passive, recording; I am not a figurative camera. But I now wield a camera, an alarmingly small digital camera that does so many things it’s hard to figure out how to just, as they say, point and shoot, and then download the pictures to my computer so I can show them to you. It’s taken me several days, but I have managed two photos on subjects of interest. A bright red amaryllis blooming on my worktable (one of five waxed amaryllis bulbs I got in a post-Valentine’s Day sale at Holland Bulbs of Holland MI). And five tiny (just over an inch long) brass castings of motos-couples getting it on in an assortment of positions (tiny, but with fingers and simple facial expressions) — entertaining artwork, shown here watched over by a fabulous portrait sketch by John Singer Sargent (which has its own sexy story). (But definitely sexy, so I suppose that #2 is off limits for kids and the sexually modest.)
Here are the shots, and then very brief commentary.