Can I get a “hells yeah!” for the inventor of clumping cat litter?

I wonder to what other human (or feline) endeavors clumpitation can be applied?

I’ve been thinking about packaging lately… not sure why, exactly, but I think it’s a side-effect of my move, where I’m dealing with a lot of boxes and also buying new things for the new place that come in, well, packaging.

I just bought some cookies, and when I got ’em home I realized they have the super-cheap plastic packaging that you can’t reseal. The cookies are pretty good, but I’d go with another brand just to get a resealable package, because when I eat cookies, I eat a few, put ’em away for a day, eat a few more, etc. They’re around for a week or more, and I want them to have a chance of staying fresh.

This is either public documentation of the fact that I coined this usage, or a call to prove that it’s already been coined :-). But, according to a quick search of the web with Google, which, as I understand it, contains all phrases that anyone’s ever said, and hence all phrases that have ever been coined, nobody’s said this before. It kinda surprises me.

Anyway, what I’m trying to convey with ‘mixin brand’ is that kind of brand that doesn’t encompass the whole product or service, but only some characteristics of it. For example, you don’t buy a Microban keyboard, you buy a Fellowes keyboard with Microban microbial protection. You don’t buy Thinsulate mittens, you buy L-Bow mittens with Thinsulate insulation. If you’re the sort of person who buys mittens, ya know.

I often think that I’ve coined something and immediately find thousands of uses of it on the web, so it’s sorta cool that this one is at least not quite as obviously already out there…

This all came from pondering a mixin brand that I think would have some sales potential, if done right. Maybe I’ll blog about it at some point, but right now it’s just a baby in my brain.

I dig campusfood.com; they enable internet orders from some places that otherwise wouldn’t do it, have a nice interface and all that… But, there’s this weird little quirk I just noticed. If you type parenthesis or quotes in the ‘notes’ field of an order item, they get scrubbed out. I’m guessing that’s some lame way to prevent SQL injection attacks… Given the overall quality of the site, you’d think they could be more sophisticated about that. Also, you’d think I’d have something better to do right now than complain about such a dumb thing on my blog for no reason. Just goes to show that anyone can be wrong…

(Not, like, this, though.)

I’ve recently become a Mediacom cable-modem user (in my new apartment, where it’s ‘free’). And my modem and router are talking to each other non-stop. Needless to say if you already knew it, I had to find out what the noise was about. Turns out the network is making about 20 ARP requests per second.

Ah, yeah, I remember this from the days when my DSL was in bridging mode rather than routing mode; gettin’ ARP requests for the whole damn city or something.

I guess it’s not a big deal, but it’s weird and annoying. I think I would have a network architecture that allowed me to filter these out before they went down the wrong pipe…

If you don’t get this, you’re either slightly younger or slightly less geeky than me.

Isn’t interesting that when people say “X cannot be overstated”, that statement in itself is surely an overstatement? And while we’re on the topic, the less said about “…, literally.”, the better.

I wish my Java debugger could catch an AlmostStackOverflowError. Catching the StackOverflowError is nice and all, but when I go to try to see the values of variables in the stack frames, I get errors that I presume are because there’s no stack left to evaluate the values. I’d sorta think that evaluation would be done somewhere outside the overflown stack anyway, but then, I don’t really know a thing about Java debugging internals, I just know when I’m stuck…

Have you ever had the situation where there’s a song A, and a cover version B, where B is quite a bit better than A, but because you’ve heard A a lot more often than B, whenever you hear or think of B, A sorta takes over in your mind, and you get annoyed, so probably the only thing you can do is listen to B a lot of times, even if you don’t really love it _that_ much, just so that you can wipe A out of your mind? c.f. “How Deep is your Love” by the Bee Gees and The Bird and the Bee. See what I mean?