dpk’s weblog

Tomorrow’s the big day. I’ve been looking forward to this for some time. Early Friday morning, coincidentally my 30th birthday, I will be having my vas ectomied — lay-speak for a vasectomy.

I’m absolutely certain about my decision to become sterile. I can’t recall a time I’ve ever said to myself: “I wish I had a son or daughter” or “I can’t wait to have kids.” I will not be storing any semen, so I expect the value of existing stock to rise considerably.

However, as the hours tick by I find myself becoming more apprehensive. It’s the pain of the procedure that I am concerned about. At the dentist, I always need to have two shots of carbocaine, else I’ll feel everything. I’ll be sure to let the anesthesiologist know I may require more than most people, but having never had surgery before, I do not have any idea how much I’ll actually need.

I feel like my heart is beating a little faster, and I’m doing that can’t-figure-out-what-to-do-with-my-hands thing. The word “jitters” has never seemed so descriptive.

On my way in to work today I read an article about projects to help the homeless. (I shamelessly copied the title). They made mention of two specific projects: Plymouth Housing Group‘s Plymouth on Stewart and Downtown Emergency Service Center‘s 1811 Eastlake.

PHG’s mission is to provide permanent housing for the homeless. DESC’s mission for 1811 is targeted specifically to the chronically drunk homeless population. 1811 has been controversial since it was planned, with the bulk of the criticism aimed at their policy of allowing tenants to drink in their homes.

The article focuses on the dollars saved by the city and county, but I think there is more to it than that. The amount of time spent by hospital and on-site nursing staff on these homeless-now-with-homes has been reduced significantly. 1811 reports that their tenants are getting drunk less often. The visits to the “drunk tank” tanked (heh).

I think this is all good news. I’m sure it won’t stop the detractors from voicing their standard arguments: “There are homeless in Seattle because Seattle is good to the homeless”, “They spent MY money on THEM”, etc. However, it seems to me that this is another case where the public wealth can help the needy and the taxpayer at the same time: the hospitals are that much less overloaded; the ambulances are that much less busy transporting drunks; the police are that much less busy dealing with the homeless on the streets. More of their resources can now be spent servicing the taxpayer.

This looks like a big win for the region, and at a small price, too.

Full disclosure/shilling: I don’t know if this is necessary (I’m concerned it might come across as self-congratulatory bragging). I am a regular donor to PHG. Although they are affiliated with a church, I think their mission is still sound, and all of the reports I’ve read suggest that most of the donated money goes directly to their chartered services. Check ‘em out.

There was an article in the PI today about a pastor, Rev. Ken Hutcherson of the Antioch Bible Church, trying to get the church members to buy 3 shares of Microsoft, one of which is to be given to a new company, he/the church founded: “AGN Financial Network”. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to have followers buy MSFT stock, but it may be the first time he’s suggested buying shares for the church.

The purported goal is to collect enough shares that AGN (and thus Ken Hutcherson personally) will be able to influence Microsoft company management to stop providing benefits for same-sex domestic partners. Additionally, they will try to have Microsoft cease its efforts to have a law passed that bars discrimination against GLBT people.

The PI did the math. To get even 1% of Microsoft, Hutcherson would have to convince 31,000,000 people that his plan is a good one. Microsoft says in the article that “97% of [their] shareholders” support the existing policy, so that might go as low as 96% in this highly improbable scenario.

Even Hutcherson must be aware that he will not achieve the stated goal. So what “good” will come of this? If he is successful in convincing some to follow the plan, he will have leveraged the anti-gay hatred relished by much (most?) of the Christian community to further increase the church’s wealth. What will all of that additional wealth buy the church? Perhaps some more overseas trips for the White House envoy that never was.

I’d add more, but it would just be a rant about religion and intolerance and how I am intolerant of intolerance.

Edited: I just noticed that my post basically followed the same idea and form as Eli Sander’s earlier post over at SLOG. It’s a coincidence; I didn’t even see the PI article until about an hour prior to my post.

There are sites out there (in the tired “Rick Roll” category) that make it hard to close a tab, by adding hooks that allow for dozens or hundreds of alert dialog boxes to appear, preventing the tab from closing. One is http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com. Don’t go to this site, unless you want to see the bug in action.

I posted a bug on bugzilla, after doing a search. I didn’t see any, but as there are hundreds of thousands of other bugs on there, I didn’t want to spend hours hunting down an exact match, so I just went ahead with it. Turns out I should have searched for “rick roll,” rather than something more specific such as “javascript alert exit loop” or similar. Ah, well, such is the folly of search engines.

So, it got merged in to another bug that’s over 7 years old. Surprisingly, it has only gathered 60 votes in that incredible period of time. I’m asking you, the loyal dpk dot net reader, to use one of your 10000 votes on this bug, and to help raise awareness of this issue, so that it might be squashed.

Looking at the code, it seems like it might involve simply adding another button to the alert dialog box, that would just kill the tab’s javascript context. But, I don’t really know how to do all that. It kinda looks like there’s different alert box code for each “platform.” I dunno. I’m no mozilla pro.

You know how companies will register domains for products they plan to sell in the future? It looks like they just registered “networksolutionsclubscutelittlebabyseals.com”. The poor baby seals. :(

   Domain Name: NETWORKSOLUTIONSCLUBSCUTELITTLEBABYSEALS.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Network Solutions, LLC            domainsupport@networksolutions.com
      13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300
      HERNDON, VA 20171
      US
      1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620

   Record expires on 08-Jan-2009.
   Record created on 08-Jan-2008.

I think I am missing that bone in the brain that allows you to prove trigonometric identities. I just got done with the first half of a final, and I totally botched one of the questions, which was “Prove tan (pi / 4 + x) = (1 + sin2x) / cos2x”. I got as far as changing the left side to (cosx + sinx) / (cosx – sinx), but then I got stuck. Wasted a full sheet of paper trying different ways to solve it.

What really gets me is I know we’ve done this problem (or something similar) a couple of times before, but I’ve been unable to figure it out each time. I know all of the standard identities and half-angle/double-angle/addition/subtraction equations but I can’t make them work here. It’s probably something completely obvious, too.

Update: Yeah. It was obvious.

• tan (pi / 4 + x) = (tan (pi / 4) + tan (x)) / (1 – tan (pi / 4) tan (x))
• tan (pi / 4) = 1, so (1 + tan (x)) / (1 – tan (x))
• Multiply by cos (x) / cos (x): (cos (x) + sin (x)) / (cos (x) – sin (x))
• Multiply by the (cos (x) + sin (x)) / (cos (x) + sin (x))): (cos^2 (x) + 2 sin (x) cos (x) + sin^2 (x)) / (cos^2 (x) – sin^2 (x))
• cos^2 (x) + sin^2 (x) = 1, 2 sin(x) cos (x) = sin (2x), cos^2 (x) – sin^2 (x) = cos (2x), so:
• Finally we have LHS (1 + sin (2x)) / cos (2x), same as RHS.

All I needed was a few days to ruminate over it. Bah.