Adam Schabtach's Blog
General blog stuff.
I’m trying to log into my YouTube account, and it’s not accepting my password (even though I logged into the same account from a different machine using the same password a few minutes ago), so upon the advice of the help screen I asked for a password reset. Partway through the process I was presented with this:
Wow. ‘Fraid I can’t answer that, Google. As much as I’d like to be able to read questions presented in Japanese, I can’t.
Thanks, once again, to our friends Richard and Rafael, I recently sampled another one of the mysterious special-edition Pepsi products from Japan. This post is rather late in its arrival since it covers a product which is no longer in production. I confess that I sort of forgot that I had the bottle tucked away in the back of the refrigerator until I noticed it recently.
It’s called Shiso Pepsi, and it’s a nice shade of green:
The label says “Japanese Refreshing Flavor” and that’s pretty accurate. It’s refreshing and it does taste oddly Japanese. It has a very herb-like flavor and is somewhat sweet (as you’d expect for a soft drink). Imagine if you’d rarely or never tasted an herb like basil or oregano, and you tried a beverage sort of like 7-Up flavored with basil or oregano–that’s pretty much the impression that Shiso Pepsi gave to me. It was quite good; I understand why Richard wanted a case of it after he tasted it.
Strange but true: Barbie has a new career as a computer engineer:
Yes, this looks like yet another Photoshop job, but it’s the real deal. Barbie’s 125th career, determined for the first time by public vote, is as a computer engineer. The press release doesn’t say whether she’s in hardware or software engineering; her shirt seems to have suggestions of both.
[From Gizmodo]
Here’s a pair of essays that go together nicely: author Charles Stross examining the widespread misinterpretation of the phrase “information wants to be free” and dangers and fallacies therein; and songwriting legend Paul Williams reflecting upon a specific instance of these dangers.
Case in point here.
There’s a nice animation here that illustrates the size of Earth relative to the rest of the known universe. I should say that it attempts to illustrate that, though, since the scales involved are rather beyond our comprehension. Watch it in full-screen HD if you have the bandwidth.
(Thanks go to Chris for this one.)
There’s an hour-long BBC interview with Brian Eno posted here. I haven’t watched more than the first four minutes so far, but Synthtopia described it as a “must see”. If, like myself, you don’t happen to have time to watch it right away you might want to download yourself a copy. The last time I looked at BBC documentaries posted on Vimeo they didn’t stay around long before the copyright police impounded them.
Eno’s one of my biggest–if not the biggest–musical influences and inspirations, so I’m looking forward to watching this interview.
Today is one of those rare days on which the weather conditions are just right for producing beautiful snowflakes. There is some magic combination of temperature, humidity, still air, cloud formation, etc. that produces big, symmetric crystals that accumulate without damage. Here is a photo of the front step:
Click that photo to see a larger version, and click here to see several others taken at the same time and location.
Many years ago, as a youngster living in Oregon, I found the following inscription on a jar of Best Foods mayonnaise:
This seemed faintly odd to me at the time. Why would one brand of mayo have two different names, and why would one name be chosen based upon what part of the country it’s being sold in? And besides, who cares? It’s just mayo, right? “Gee, honey, I love living in California, but I really wish we could still buy the Hellmann’s mayonnaise I grew up with in Rhode Island. All I can find is this Best Foods stuff.” Now that I’m a bit older and run two businesses, I’m somewhat more appreciative of the importance of brand recognition. As a kid it just seemed silly that they’d go to the length of mentioning this on their labels.
A few friends and relatives have expressed interest in learning why this site disappeared altogether earlier this month, then reappeared only to be replaced by a placeholder page for several days. Here’s the story as it unfolded.
On January 2, Saturday morning, we discovered early in the day that we couldn’t retrieve our email, nor was my web site online. This wasn’t an unprecedented situation–anybody who spends any amount of time online knows that there are the occasional outages–so I didn’t think much of it at first. After an hour or so I became disconcerted. I managed to find a status message at my domain host’s site that said the server which hosted my site had experienced a RAID failure, that restoration was in progress, it might take until 11:00AM on Monday for everything to be fully restored, but that I should check my site occasionally because they expected to have most accounts restored within a few hours.