The quarter is over, and I have regained most of my original status as a human being. Recent things of note:

1. Somehow I managed to get a parking permit for the Winter and Spring quarters. This was nothing sort of a miracle, considering that I live down the street from a bus stop and that it involved being on line at the Transportation Cashiers Window at 8 am this morning.

2. My new printer is awesome (aside from the intrusive drivers that add a "Supplies..." button to every print dialog box, and no, not every print dialog box is the same - many applications have their own). It is the HP Photosmart 8250. What makes it especially awesome is that every ink cart is separate. And there are six of them. And somehow the ink is cheaper this way, especially if you get the 150 photos pack, which has 150 4x6 sheets of photo paper and enough ink to print 150 photos. Even if you don't include the photo paper, since I don't plan on using it particularly often, the ink is still cheaper. Oh, and it prints ~30 pages per minute, color and black and white, has an LCD, and has various memory card slots. But most importantly, it is shiny and has blue LEDs.

3. One of my new towels, that I purchased in September at Bed Bath & Beyond, dissolved in the drier. It went into the drier as one solid, continuous piece of cloth, but came out as one and a half. Stupid towel.

4. My chocolate mousse cheesecake was a success. It only took five hours to make, during which time Matt almost exploded from not being allowed near the chocolate.

5. It looks as though I'm going to have to take CS 51A. Not just an undergrad class, but an intro undergrad class. It's bascially digital logic, but since I never actually took the class at Columbia, I'm going to get pinned for it here. Moop.

6. Parking in general sucks around here. A lot. Holy fuck does it suck. I still haven't gotten over the whole "validation" thing, and now there aren't even enough parking spots, so you lose [5,30] minutes of your free time (and life) trying to find a damn spot. It completely baffles me that a shopping mall (Westfield-owned) would have the first 3 hours of parking be free, then immediately jump to $7.00 for [3, 3.5] hours, then tack on and additional $1.50 for every half hour after that. Am I the only one that thinks it is incredibly dumb to have a parking policy that encourages people to leave so they won't get ass raped by parking? Sadly, this parking policy is almost sane compared to Bel-Air Camera. They give you 20 minutes free, with purchase and validation. After that, it is $1.20 per 20 minutes. Considering that they sell incredibly high-end equipment, you'd think that a validation from a purchase would give you free parking for at least an hour, but alas. There are so many more ridiculous examples, but I won't subject you to further rants.

denier: noun, the weight in grams of 9000m of the specified fiber

For those of you that haven't heard of it, the stupidity index factor measures a a collective's level of inclination towards stupidity. The basic idea is that when there are more people around, more stupidity arises. I don't remember who's brilliant idea it originally was, but it was probably due to Scottwell and/or Alexandros's consumption of beer.

After some though, prompted by parking lot stupidity, a new formula has been created to approximate the general level of stupidity. A stupidity factor, s, between 0 and 1 is assigned to every person, with 1 being the most serious person and 0 being the stupidest person. The current location is assigned a location multiplier, m, which can range from 0 to 2. A church or temple would have a multiplier closer to 2, while a mall parking lot would have a multiplier of less than .5.

To calculate the stupidity index factor for a group of people in a given location, square the individual stupidity factor for any person that is currently drunk. Then multiply together the stupidity factors for all persons present. Lastly, multiply the product by the location multiplier. The final product is the stupidity index factor. A low number close to zero indicates that something incredibly dumb is about to happen, while higher numbers near 1 (any indices greater than 1 are rounded down to 1) indicate a complete lack of anything entertaining.

For a simple example, take Scott and my presence in his Buick at the Target parking lot earlier this evening. Neither of us were drunk. Assume that both of our individual stupidity factors are .75. The location multiplier for the parking lot is .4.
SIF = m * (sscott * ssharon) = .4 * .75 *.75 = .225
This is a fairly low stupidity index factor, implying that we were very likely to do something inane. In fact, Scott demonstrated what happens when you hit the brake while under the mistaken impression that it is the clutch.

http://bash.org/?525423

For years I have been using sbp2001+label@ or sbprice+label@ to automatically sort email based on who the email address is given to. Many websites, especially tech ones, have no problems with addresses formatted as such. However, I'd have to guess that half of the websites that I have attempted to grace with an actual email address have rejected email addresses of this format. Some of them have come right out and said '+' is an invalid character, and that I should correct my typo. One was even more helpful and just removed the offending character, then asked me to validate the new email address. In a few instances, I've even sent emails explaining this problem and why they should fix it to the webmasters of offending sites. I've also flat out refused to register with a "properly formatted" email address and just left the site on many occassions.

My point is this - how do so many website developers not know about this common convention? Grrr.