Why not?

Because there is a logical connection. I choose to eat one cookie a day, I eat one cookie, I have nothing left in my cookie quota for that day. You don't need the concept of "deservedness" to deal with that situation.

So let's look at a situation where the concept is used. "You don't deserve a cookie," your parent tells you. "You left your toys out again." Aha. What is the logical connection between the punishment of not getting a cookie and the mess? None. Yet, the concept of "deservedness" is used to bridge the gap. How does it do so? "You don't deserve a cookie (because you are a bad kid because) you left your toys out again."

Even if it were positive it would be no better. The problem with the idea of deservedness is that someone can be inherently good or bad. Actions have consequences that are desirable or not. Perhaps it may be meaningful to label the actions "good" and "bad", although probably not. But making people good and bad is massively problematic.

Currency is a decoupler. If I have a sheep I might not be able to exchange it for a bale of hay. But I can get currency for a sheep, and exchange that currency for the bale of hay. Deservedness is also a currency. Listen for it. "You deserve a cookie because you picked up your toys." In other words, by picking up your toys, you earned 'deservedness', which is redeemable for a cookie. By not cleaning up, you lost 'deservedness', so you cannot redeem for cookies.

And there's no dividing line between "I don't deserve a cookie because I didn't brush my teeth yesterday" and "I don't deserve cookies." It's all the same scale.

Deservedness is the currency of shame.

There is no way to decouple actions from their consequences without the use of shame as an intermediary.

Positive shame is no better. You can't be a good person without there being a possibility of being a bad person. You can't be inherently worthy without there being a possibility of being inherently not worthy.

Even if there is a logical connection it's still problematic. "I worked hard on that critical project and made my company a million dollars. I deserve that raise." The disconnection is still there. Is the consequence of working hard a raise? Perhaps. But you have changed the raise from being a consequence of your actions to being a consequence of who you are. You have given yourself inherent value.

And inherent value cuts both ways.

Yes, Time Warner, I am flat-out accusing you of theft. Sue me for libel/slander. I dare you.

On 12/11 my service was switched to “Wideband”. On my Dec bill I was charged the $99.95 for service from 1/5 to 2/4. OK. I was charged $80.59 for a partial month from 12/11 to 1/4. OK.

Where is my refund? Where is the partial-month credit for the original service, paid until 1/4?

Missing.

I just spent an hour on the phone with Time Warner. The first rep was Stacy who was clueless, and said that when you upgrade to a higher plan you won't see a credit. I asked to speak to her manager and got Chris. After lots of discussion he finally figured out what I meant. But he calculated my refund as if the start of service was 11/25, when I was billed on the November bill, rather than the 12/5 that the service began.

Which meant my credit was $27.57 rather than the $36.76 that I was owed. The connection went bad between us so I couldn't argue further (I could barely hear Chris) so I took it.

Keep my $9 you fuckers.

Morals:

• Time Warner, when you upgrade service and have to charge a partial month, you also need to credit the same partial month for existing service. Stop robbing people.
• Customers, either change your service exactly on the billing cycle date, or explicitly cancel your old service before getting the change.

First, the puzzles are horribly easy. Even the 20×20 ones, the “tough” ones, are filled with row after row of large numbers of marked blocks. This is a challenge? But I shouldn't speak, since if you got a difficult puzzle, there are no tools to handle it.

No tools at all.

In PictureLogic you had

• indicators that you could deduce block positions in a given row/column
• indicators of not just entire rows/columns being solved, but individual runs within the rows/columns being solved
• four pen colors
• a puzzle solver

If you haven't done any serious puzzle solving, you won't get the whole pen color thing. What happens when you hit the wall, and you don't have anything that you can deduce? You switch pen colors, make an assumption, run until you hit a conflict and then revert having deduced that your original assumption was wrong. That's a required feature for solving any seriously-difficult puzzle. Even the pathetically-easy Shady Puzzles has multiple pens. Pixelogic? None.

Pixelogic also boasts that you can create your own puzzles. Yet it has no solver. Why does that matter? That means that it can't verify that your puzzle has a unique solution. The fact that a puzzle has a unique solution is an important tool useful in solving it. Without verification, it's a joke.

I'm still looking for a good app. In the meantime, I guess I remain spoiled by the old-school Palm. Here are two puzzles I composed in PictureLogic. Yes, they're both solvable. Yes, they're difficult. Good luck in doing anything like them in any iPhone picross app out there today.

Sorting through my pictures in iPhoto, I got this:

Technology for the win. How do they do that?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>com.apple.Safari</key>
	<dict>
		<key>HomePage</key>
		<dict>
			<key>state</key>
			<string>always</string>
			<key>value</key>
			<string>http://google.com/</string>
		</dict>
	</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

3. Install it for the user:

sudo dscl . -mcximport /Users/[username] /path/to/that/file.plist 

4. Log out/in.

When you're done, kill it with a

sudo dscl . -mcxdelete /Users/[username] com.apple.Safari Homepage

As a bonus, in the Accounts pref pane, the user will be tagged as "Managed".

Perfect for your next April Fool's joke.

A coworker bringing in Custard Squares?

Or another coworker replying to the email:

Stop, collaborate and listen
Ben is back with his brand new invention
Cake that grabs a hold of me tightly
Flows like cream filling both daily and nightly
Will it ever stop? Yo -- I don't know
Turn off his oven, he'll still glow
To the extreme, he bakes a cake like a vandal
Heats it up with his brain, doesn't even need a candle

Slice Slice Baby Vanilla Slice Slice Baby

Then it all cleared. Saturday and today is just totally clear. Well, yesterday was clear, and today's been occasionally punctuated with blurriness. But it's awesome, a hint of what's up.

Tomorrow I go in to get my bandage contact lenses out, and I can stop taking the Vigamox. Still have to keep taking the Omnipred, and the Vitamin C is going to be going for a year.

I just want to know how much longer I have to wear sunglasses.

Middle of last year, though, they changed the formulation. Now they're called Air Optix Night & Day, but as soon as I put them in my eyes my eyes had what, as far as I could tell, was an allergic reaction. Watery, mucus, it was just terrible.

And I loved having contacts, to have the whole world available to me, to not hide behind a big lens.

So Monday I got laser eye surgery.

The kind that everyone gets is LASIK. It's quick, no pain, you go in, they slice and dice, and you walk out all happy.

My problem was that one of the machines didn't like me. For half an hour they were putting eye drops in my eyes and trying to convince the machine to read my eyeballs. Nope. Finally they switched to the Pentacam which spit out the report they wanted.

Dr. Mandel decided to go with PRK for safety's sake.

Went in, got updated readings. They gave me a piece of paper with the pre-surgery curvature of my eyes in case my cataract surgeon will need it 50 years from now:

K reading OD: 42.00 42.87×3
K reading OS: 41.25 42.12×172

Um, OK. I don't know if I'm going to be able to hold onto a paper for fifty years. “Can't I just have them call you?” “Well, depends if we're in business fifty years from now.”

Chatted with a fellow patient in the waiting room, and was surprised to find out that she didn't want to know what was going to happen. I find that so weird; if I'm going to sign up for something to be done to me, I need to know the details.

I'll spare the details here. Surgery over they sent me home. Went to bed.

Came back the next morning. Things were a bit blurry, but managed to just eke out a 20/20 result. “That's better than we expected. But it's going to get worse before it gets better. Here's some anesthetic eye drop. For when it starts hurting.”

It's Wednesday now. It's hurting a little, but it's fuzzy as hell. My computer screen magnification is easily 2×. I see double and triple images. But this is all normal. So they say.

It's a hilarious self-aware parody, and I love the kissing couple homage in the hotel lobby scenes. If you dig around, you'll find the original commercial this is based off of:

Not only is half of it a shot-for-shot remake, the music is note-for-note the same. I didn't realize (until digging around) that you can date these ads by the music (this one and that one share the music and are from the '80s, while this one is much newer, this one goes for a harder rock sound, and this one is a horrible retro abomination).

There haven't been too many good places I've been to here in NYC. Here's a brief overview:

Arthur Treacher's
251 E 14th St
★☆☆☆☆
A sad joke. The fish is a rectangular block that mocks the natural shape and taste of fish.

One and One
76 1 Ave
★★★☆☆
The fish is good, but someone there needs to take Batter 101. Presentation is nice but the slightest touch causes the fish to fall to pieces and the batter to slide off. Redemption comes from the 2-for-1 special on Sunday nights at 7pm.

A Salt & Battery
112 Greenwich Ave
★★★★☆
The star off isn't from the awful name, but the prices. The meal is good, but rather expensive. And how can you sell fish and chips separately?

Chipshop
129 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn
★★★★★
Yes, to get awesome fish and chips you have to go to Brooklyn. Suck it up. The price is reasonable, the serving size is large, and the taste is great.

I started using a new kind of wick about four nights ago, and it's working out well. It's the type with a metal tab at the bottom with a wick sticking straight up. You fill the little glass with oil, drop the wick in - make sure there's some wick above the oil - and light. Thank goodness.

All is well here. Hope all is well with everyone out there.
Shira

It's the third night of Chanukah - and they did it again. I had changed the oil (in case it really was the oil) but I'm thinking it's the wicks. I used these wicks last year, so I didn't expect trouble. Tomorrow I'm going wick shopping - we'll try something else.

I didn't want to change the oil and the wick at the same time, otherwise I wouldn't know what worked. So one thing at a time - oil today - we'll try wicks tomorrow.

I'll let you know!
Shira

I'm in Toronto (shockingly enough) and thank G-d all is going well.

Immigration Front - we've received a notice that Jeff has given the okay to be my sponsor. The rest of the permanent residency application has been forwarded to the Canadian Consulate in Buffalo, New York to be reviewed.

The Apartment - it's finally shaping up. We're due to put up pictures (hopefully) this week. Yay!

My Writings - not to worry, I'm still involved. I have two websites:
http://shiradrissman.com - political musings
http://shiradrissman.org - Jewish musings - new article up on Chanukah!

That's my life. I'm still not allowed to work, but various projects are keeping me busy and out of trouble.

Wishing everyone a very Happy Chanukah!
Shira

Twenty two minutes into the movie I learned a new logical technique I'm calling Advanced Logical Bullshitting. It goes something like this:

1. Make a bad analogy: “In empty space, matter flits in and out of existence. Kinda like thoughts do.”
2. Turn it into a simile: “Matter is like thought.”
3. Assume it to be literal truth: “Therefore, we've established that thoughts create matter.”

I'm not joking. That's the actual argument made by the movie 22 minutes in. That was enough for me; I turned it off.

This seriously angers me. I've seen girls on Facebook who list “Quantum Physics” under “Interests.” Nuh, uh, honey. Not with nothing else in your profile listing the slightest bit of scientific interest. (And no, random quotes from Einstein about God don't count.)

If you want to claim that you create your own reality through your thoughts, fine. That was done in the 70s by Jane Roberts and her Seth books. But don't defend it by making a mockery of logic and science.

Bounce a check and you're Dubai, well, too bad.