I got this email today. Does anyone else see the sweet delicious irony in this?

Good Afternoon All,

We just received the following message from the Center City District regarding a scheduled protest. For Your Information:

Although I complain about septa a lot, there is one thing for which I cannot fault them. They currently have an advertising campaign (which is costing them $600,000), which features Septa employees telling their customers about some of the uniqueness of Philadelphia of which Septa is an integral part. Most advertising campaigns, even ones that use “real” people, chose model-thin and classically beautiful people to be spokespersons. Septa has actually chosen normal people. Of the three ads I see most frequently on the subway, 2 are borderline obese and the third has a face only a mother could love. It is nice to see that they actually did get real employees and not a model they hired for a day.

Why is this (also in the LA Times) even considered news? It’s a virtual world! get over it!

I took the BBC’s brain sex ID test the other day. I found both my results and the commentary explaning the tests and what they mean to be fascinating. Unsurprisingly my score which was the most “out of the ordinary” was the empathizing v systemizing test. I was very high on the systemizing scale. (Not really surprising when you think about it). Overall though, I scored exactly average…. for a woman! Honestly that did surprise me. Of all the things I’ve been accused of in my life, thinking like a woman is probably the last one I would have expected to hear. (Apparently, being able to spot differences and read emotions make my brain more “female”. I personally think it may just be me findings ways to game the system).

As promised, here are the footsteps of the idiot who decided to jump a fence and steal a bike from under my back porch a few days ago. Had he waited a few days, the snow would have melted and I wouldn’t have had any interesting stories to tell.

The picture is taken from the back porch. The bike was under the porch, slightly to the left of where the picture was taken from. In the upper right corner of the picture is a very old 6 foot high chain link fence that separates us from our neighbors. Because we live next to the corner, it’s sort of an open area which can be easily accessed by the residents of several building both on our street and the perpendicular street. Following the footsteps (and tire tracks) on the other side of the fence, it is clear the theif walked the bike around our neghbors house and out onto 42nd street (the street we live on), and from there I don’t know.

We’ve managed to collect about 16,000 individual pieces of image spam, of which we have about 3400 unique images. Although we could continue to collect more, at this point I think we’ve all decided we have enough spam (our goal was 1000 unique images), and collecting more would be pointless. Thanks to everyone who sent in spam – the variety of sources is one of the things that has really helped us in acquiring a realistic spam corpus.

It seems that every year, nerds find new, creative, (and occasionally bizarre) methods of proposing to their girlfriends. Somehow I missed this for the past 2 years, but geek love went to new levels in August of 2004. I present to you, the heart shaped perl code which spells out “kristen, will you marry me?” when run. Both the proposer and proposee are perl enthusiasts and grad students at Carnegie Mellon, where they were even caricatured by PhD comics (although Jorge Cham got one thing wrong – everyone knows perl isn’t compiled).

For some reason I have never posted the saga of “the bike” here, so for those of you who know it this will be funnier. For those of you who don’t, I promise to tell the whole story later. For now though, know this:

Some time between wednesday night and thursday evening, a person jumped over the fence seperating our backyard with the neighbors, made a beeline for the bicycle under our porch, freed said bicycle from the snow and ice, made a beeline back for the fence, tossed the bicycle over the fence, jumped over the fence himself, and walked the bicycle around the neighbor’s house to the street.

How do I know all this? Simple. There’s snow on the ground and the crook left very clear tracks! I took some pictures which I’ll have to post later.

For the record, it was not actually our bike, so I’m not very upset. And yes, the back door has a lock on it that could keep marauding orcs at bay.

It turns out that noted security expert and commentator Bruce Schneier pretty much agreed with what I wrote below, however he did so much more eloquently. He also included this wonderful line I entirely missed:

“It had a very sinister appearance,” [Massachusetts Attorney General Martha] Coakley told reporters. “It had a battery behind it, and wires.”

For heavens sake, don’t let her inside a Radio Shack.

I have fulfilled a life’s dream by making the New York Times without having to resort to crime! woo!

Am I the only one who thinks that The authorities in Boston are going about this whole thing a little ass-backwards? Instead of arresting the two (entirely innocent) men who were running a marketing campaign for TBS, and threatening to sue TBS, they should be arresting the detectives and suing the police department for wasting valuable taxpayer dollars on something so trivial. TBS is not the culprit here – Boston’s public officials are.

The only crime TBS has committed is exposing public officials as fools, and for that the public officials are attempting to use their power to retaliate. This precident is atrocious and potentially damaging. Since when is crying “the emperor has no clothes” a crime? Since when is doing something that looks like a crime akin to commiting a crime? The fact that there is no public outcry over this issue is mind boggling.