Tuesday 2/1
Having a warm fuzzy bathrobe really does not get old. I did have some trouble locating my red interview sweater for the interview, and eventually went with something else. I did break a shoelace.

I showed up early and nervous. The interview went well. denise was a reference (also Kat and Management from the Call Center Hell) and D was a totally excellent badass reference.

Wednesday 2/2
Twitter was talking about the stigma associated with mental illness. Some things, like my presumed-depression (wreaked hell on my life, never formally diagnosed, kept under control by St. John's Wort, assumption not challenged by my AZ general practitioner) are chronic and I can't assume that when they stop bothering me they're OMG CURED and I can stop treating it; if the St. John's Wort is not in my system, my ability to bounce back from routine mood-dips is impaired.

I got the call confirming the temp job, ending my way-too-long time out of work. So relieved. Then Tif and I went to a Silicon Valley Google Technology Users Group meetup for Google Refine. We've got a fairly large spam dataset...


Thursday 2/3
First day of the temp job. I had a hell of a time actually locating the building, as the buildings in question are part of an office complex where all the buildings are on the same large chunk of property, all of the buildings are sequentially numbered with street numbers that the property has a right to, but they are arranged in a ring that means that the street numbers have little to do with their actual orientation to the street.

The office was interesting, painted in bold colors (lots of lime green and white) and decorated with various Delightful Swag.

I came in just a bit early, and the receptionist had me wait. The guy overseeing my position ran past (literally ran), was hailed by the secretary, she explained that I was here, I think he jogged back to shake my hand, and then ran off again. She accepted this with a very this-is-all-part-of-a-normal-day sort of demeanor, so I got the idea that he did this a lot.

My cube was right by the small kitchen, making it very easy for me to get tea and coffee. Tea and coffee are good. They had a nice array of tea choices, which I found delightful compared to Arizona office tea, which is basically the cheap black tea. (There's a place in my cup for cheap black tea, and this is made 2:1 with strongly flavored orange tea, brewed too strong and too sweet, for use while writing.)

The commute was, of course, hell both ways. 101 is a pit during the 8-10 & 4-6 commute windows. Lucky me.


Friday 2/4
After work, I went to see my aunt. There was hilarity and also shortbread. She took frozen butter and used her handy-dandy crank-driven rotary shredder to cut it into tidy little bits, making the shortbread process amazingly fast. Tasty shortbread, too.

I speculated on Twitter about a vaporware-y technique in mental health care, which assumes enough resources (monetary and available people) to carry it out: ( Read more... )

-some social networking features, for mods, players, and characters.
-public, protected, group-protected, and admin-protected features
-Categorization features
-feed features
-filterable feed
-character profiles
-character profiles controlled by a player profile
-character profiles must be able to be set collectively, identically at once, or a mix of the two.
Separate player and character environments.

Technical support level.
Moderation level.
Player level.
Character level.
Audience level.

Ability to restrict OOC contact between character personae
Ability to restrict audience/player contact from characters.
Ability to restrict character contact to characters from the same game without showing a friendship between the characters.

I want a web service that takes my address and presents me with a list of categories of foodstuffs (and optionally, non-foodstuff grocery store consumables like kitty litter, toilet paper, and the like). I would drill down from the categories of foodstuffs to the class, exact type, and perhaps even the exact brand, size, and packaging that I was interested in. I would subscribe to my favorite items (I might subscribe to gala apples, cherries, strawberries, Ball Park brand all-beef bun-size hotdogs, frozen pizza family size, and bagged Caesar salads). I would either accept the default thresholds, or set custom thresholds.

The web service would monitor advertised prices on things all over the place.

When an item/price/location combination in one of my thresholds for a subscribed item or class was triggered, I would be notified. Cherries are on sale for X here, Y there, and the current not-on-sale average price for N radius area working from M number of stores listing this is Z. Each of the locations would be flagged on a map, and my location would be shown on the map as well.

I could generate a shopping list from the service, in classic Web 2.0 format where I get to pick what goes on the list, how the list is organized, and how much detail is printed for each item.

I could text-message shopping list items to my account, and organize them when I got back to a computer. I could ask to get my current shopping list text-messaged back to me if I forgot to print it. I could ask that I get a text message for alerts on any given subscription category. There would be support for multiple individuals in a single household account, so all members of the household could add things to the list, and all members of the household could retrieve the list on all registered mobile devices.

It could either be ad-supported, subscription, or both. There are enough free sites out there that people might balk at having to have an initial subscription to join the site, but I don't know if it could support itself on ad revenue. Perhaps some of the more advanced features would be subscription? or have a limited subscription list for free users?

The site would need dedicated part-time employees ad-hunting all the local papers and flyers for the current advertised prices. This would be a tedious and huge job, but would be perfect for coupon-clipping homemakers with that much spare time on their hands. There would be a need to avoid duplication and verify the input. This sounds like the sticking point. One solution to that would be to partner with the stores in question and get them to send the flyer electronically to the site, where it could be distributed to whichever person had time to either enter manually or verify that the auto-capture had done its thing.

Now I want the option of my cellphone transmitting its current coordinates to LJ when updating via text-message, and put that in a private thing -- like, only I can see the IP address on comments. (Well, maybe the poster can.) I wanna see my own coordinates on a map when texting in from AzureGhost.

Apropos of the new "location" field on the LJ update thingy: Put in location! It makes Google map search automatic! Not good for secret spies or evading stalkers. Hilarious if out of context words and then the city/state/country [whatever it prefers] are put in! Is new feature! Welcoming our new Google overlords am I! In Soviet Russia, Google searches you! OMFG tired am I!

I guess it's mostly that I'm not used to anyone thinking seriously of my little bits of vaporware. It's immensely flattering. I would be exceptionally happy as a part-time designer, I think.

Vaporware: earthwalker photo database. Landscape & cityscape photos DB with coordinates & compass orientation.

Phone app queries 2 things every ~minute: GPS and signal strength. Lists corresponding GPS & signal strength along with time of query. Files this. Intermittently, either automatically or at user's direction, app files this off a la distributed computing batch processing. File is headed up with service name & make/model of phone?

Mothership gets transmission, anonymizes user (do not want to be able to track a person's location with the phone signal strength map data, ever), and collates map in near real time based on time, service, and perhaps time of day, phone model, and gods know what else. Plots to map, either real time or to user query. (Free users, map refreshed daily with new info; paid users, map shown as real-time as we have it?) Needed: a corresponds-to-c'thia map, either sattelite imagery, street, or both. (Both, please -- does Google want in on the fun?) ( Read more... )

A fun-filled fantastic dream involving disparate elements such as my high school nemesis (the chronic liar who punched me when I was in 6th grade), searching for websites, Hogwarts, my ex living with her parents and three kittens from school, a store at home, repainting a house on the outside, and gods know what else. Oh, a math game for the PS2 much like DDR except math.

That might actually go over well, with kids' thing for computer games, as long as it was shiny enough and had a good soundtrack. There was this music game that danceswithunderwear had. You were singing or playing the guitar, and you pressed the buttons like DDR only on the controller, and if you got it right, the thing that was happening kept happening -- you were on a plane, and it stayed up in the air (or did neat tricks if you were really doing well); you were baking a cake; you were actually playing with the band -- if you had a math game that you could play in racecar mode, in fighting mode, in airplane mode, and probably a selection of other things, that might really catch on.

The Schro incident was an object lesson of the scamming possibilities of charitable solicitations for pets, as well as the random other causes that people solicit donations for. Online panhandling is so much fun, eh?

The solution to not getting taken in by scams is simple: don't give money. (In any case, NEVER give anything beyond what you yourself can afford. You're not helping anyone else by putting yourself in the hole.) But if no one gave money that they could afford to any of the assorted disasters talked about online, for fear of a scam, there would be people in needless difficulty.

ataniell93 has mentioned in the past that she prefers to give money directly to a trustworthy charity, when people are soliciting donations for a particular disaster-related cause online. There's very little way of telling where the money is actually going when it's an individual effort with no paper trail; there's more assurance that the money has gone to help those in need when it's given to an organized charity.

This made me think about how one would go about verifying a particular veterinary case. One would, as city_glitter's now-former friend did, call up the clinic in question and check and see that there was such an animal there, and that they were suffering from such a condition. But in the case of a popular thing like the infamous "my cat was set on fire" incident here, it would take up a great amount of administrative time on the clinic's end to answer all the phone calls -- and not everyone is willing to afford long-distance calls. It would also take a larger amount of administrative time to process multiple micro-pay donations from across the globe.

"What we need," I thought in the shower, "is for vets to simply start accepting PayPal."

Then my mind made the leap. That wouldn't, after all, be much better than just doing checks, cards, and cash -- there would still be an immense amount of administrative work for a relatively small vet bill being split up with multiple payers.

What about a VetPal website? Veterinary clinics verified by VetPal to be on the up-and-up (doing this would take some legwork, but it would be easier than verifying each individual case) could post their charity cases to VetPal; VetPal could list information such as animal name, city, state, and zip code of the clinic, clinic name, ailment of the patient, species of patient, description (perhaps photo?) and case number.

(Obviously, some people would not want to fill in all this information for privacy reasons.) VetPal would also show current charges for the critter's account, and how much had been paid into it so far. (This, to avoid people attempting to over-pay the account.) VetPal would not allow overpayment (on the tech end of it, you'd lock that record when the first donor submitted their attempt to pay, and not unlock it until the transaction was done processing, and then the next person would be informed if their attempt to pay would wind up overpaying).

I actually have absolutely no clue how VetPal would wind up paying for itself. It would have to pay fees for hosting, possibly partnership fees to PayPal (I'm thinking it would take PayPal, because that's the common online payment method; other methods could be discussed/negotiated), and there would be some administrative costs associated with verifying that each vet clinic was in fact legit. Ad banners might not cover it. Possibilities include taking a very thin percentage from each donation, or a very thin flat fee from each donation, and using that to cover costs, and use any overage to donate to a) all cases, b) cases in most need, c) a randomly selected case, d) a popularly selected case. Other possibilities: charging clinics to register, charging individuals to be listed (seems counterproductive), asking for donations to cover the site (from individuals and/or other animal charities).


Utter vaporware, of course, but it's something that fits the times.