MIT now officially allows cats in certain dorms. It’s a pilot program allowing 26 cats in four of the dorms. Before this new policy, they had started cracking down on the many clandestine pet owners. Previous to that, the rules were not enforced and many students had pets. I remember meeting a happy little ferret named Biko (ferrets are still officially illegal). I was curious about the regulation that the cat owner must “buy a special collar from MIT”. But it’s media filtering at work. The official policy specifies that the cat wear an “identifying collar tag”, issued by MIT. That makes more sense. The most appropriate policy is this one “Student will not permanently alter room doors, windows, or walls to allow for cat entry or exit.” It’s MIT. Automatic, electronic cat entries are practically a no-brainer. The trick now is to camouflage them. (article via LTSeek)

‘Tis the season to dust off Ralph the Elf Gets a Job. This site (lamely designed, with rudimentary HTML skills) was the product of an evening at the mall last year with an elf decoration that was part of the holiday decor of the building I worked in. It is probably time for a sequel, something like “Ralph the Elf gets laid off from a dot com”. But we’ve lost track of Ralph. I assume he’s been rotated into another building somewhere. Hopefully they gave him a better view this year. But he probably asked for a higher salary instead of stock options.

I liked this CNN headline “Weird, wintry weather in much of U.S.” The word “quirky” is also used in the article, wherein a meteorologist says “Normally, we don’t start off with the copious amounts of precipitation and the numerous thunderstorms. This is very atypical weather for December.” Although I’ve been in Silicon Valley for almost ten years, I’m still not accustomed to being left out of the winter weather. I feel that wind-whipped chill on my face when I see the photos of people outside in the cold, digging out of drifts, and my once-twisted ankle gives a sympathetic twinge. And I wonder if my four wheel drive Subaru will ever get to dig its tires into any of the white stuff. Of course I am enjoying the mild climate here and my blood has thinned out enough that I actually bought a wool coat for this winter.

Articles and discussions about the effects of video & computer games on children, especially girls, often come up these days. My feeling is that we can’t stop the sexist potrayals and the violence, however we should make efforts to educate children about real life versus fantasy. But sometimes I see examples of this that are so subtle that I worry about the pervasive and cumulative effects of all the media kids are exposed to. I was reading a graphics card package and there was a set of photos touting its amazing features. One picture showed a graphically generated woman, nice and curvy. The caption underneath said something about how in order to render all the curves effectively, you need lots of polygons, which of course this card would do. So, buy this card, you’ll get better boobs on your screen. Woo hoo. I guess that should be more palatable marketing to me than connecting beer with bikinis and sex with violence. But it still gives me cause to pause — and think about society and what should be healthy and what shouldn’t be. What messages should I fight back against and what ones are OK?

I read somewhere (can’t find it, of course) that a Singalong Sound of Music will be opening in San Francisco next year. It’s been a smash hit in London and New York with people arriving in nun and window curtain costumes to sing along with Julie Andrews and the rest of the gang (hmm maybe some of the nuns aren’t in costume!). With a San Francisco venue I’d be disappointed if I didn’t see a wide selection of male nuns and “going on seventeen” cross-dressers. This Australian article gives a view of the raucous London audience. Apparently, you can bring alcoholic bevvies into British movie theatres.

A new programming term to me from a Technology Review article: aspect-oriented programming. It’s a concept that has made it out of Xerox PARC and into an actual Java language extension, AspectJ (yay for research from PARC that makes it in the real world! ;-). If you want to duplicate and enforce a behavior for all instances of a specific situation, you can create an aspect to help propagate and maintain that behavior. These would be behaviors that aren’t easy to modularize because they need to occur over many disparate modules; some of their examples are design patterns, error-checking strategies, and resource sharing. If you’re like me and need an example to actually figure out what this all means, see the short AspectJ overview. (Apologies to the non-programmers out there. I’m sure this is as fascinating as more election coverage.)

I had to be at work early (for me) this morning. I was able to verify that even if you live close to work, it still takes twice as long to get there during rush hour. I think living close enough to walk over is the only solution.

Last year, friends who weren’t in the computer industry had a common sentiment for me in their Christmas cards: “I assume you’re busy dealing with Y2K problems.” This year, I’m expecting concern about dot-com failures affecting my livelihood. Neither are true. I hope.

True to form, Media News has gathered many links to commentary on the live TV coverage of the Supreme Court decision. Comments include “It was not television’s finest hour“, whatever happened to “Figure out what happened, then tell people?“, nowadays “when it comes to election results and breaking news, any reports should be taken with a grain of salt” and my favorite from Tim Goodman: “much of what passes for news or discussion is little more than gaseous, opinionated air spurt out in sound bites with no introspection or real thought attached.” Ahh, but it’s those who are intelligent and quick enough to make their opinionated air carry weight and meaning who win my attention.

From a NY Times article on TV coverage of the Supreme Court decision, Peter Jennings reassured Jackie Judd as she tried to make heads or tails of the document: “Nobody should be embarrassed about working through a Supreme Court decision [before a national audience].” I was amazed to find, as I drove home listening to the radio, and then channel surfed for the few minutes I had, that in the interest of being as fast as they could with the news, all the live news outlets placed their reporters and legal experts on the air immediately, reading and trying to figure out what they were reading. It was a real mess. I suppose they were expecting to find a summary statement they could just pass along. Or, as usual, they were milking as much drama as they could out of the situation. It was reality television, the latest fad. And I bought into it, because it was a lot more gripping and relevant than that thing on the island.