Look you stupid jerk
Don't crowd the freezer case, I
can't see the flavors

If you ever want to know what the bay area would be like with affordable rail transit, you needn't look any further than today's Spare The Air Day program. Every year the city pays for a few days at $2.3 million a pop, during which all public transportation is free to encourage commuters to avoid driving their pollution-causing cars.

At the beginning of the day, I thought it was great to get more people to ride the trains that I already ride every day. But by the time I rode the free train to work and back, crammed into an un-aircondiitoned car, with no place to sit, everyone stinking of cigarettes, body odor, and pot smoke, I see that having the train be too expensive does have its benefits. In part I'm being class-ist, yes, but to a certain degree I feel like almost anything can be ruined by too many people.

So if CalTrain hopes to get more commuters, I hope they add more cars, more air conditioning, and more cleaning staff. Until then, next time the city has an "Unwashed Homeless People Come Out Of The Woodwork And Make The Train Smell Like A Toilet" day to help protect the environment, I'm going to drive my car to work.

As I see it, the universe is pretty much divided into two groups. First, there are those people who feel that their teeth are already whitened / protected / cared for / enameled / calcified sufficiently. Then there are the people who sit in Proctor & Gamble focus groups and expound their dental anxieties to credulous marketing executives, who in turn produce products like these:

I mean, let's get a grip, people. I think we've all been subconsciously aware for some time that the "whitening" craze is out of hand. But the Baking Soda product already had its wild snake-oil claims out of the gate, and so to pile on with "Enamel Luster", "Liquid Calcium", and "Breath Defense"--- well that's just wrong.

For the record, I've had 3 different dentists tell me that there is no statistically significant toothpaste on the market--- other than the well-established benefits of flouride treatment, which all toothpastes have, none of them has ever been shown to do anything for teeth. It's actually just the mechanical act of brushing that has most of the benefit. (One notable exception is Listerine--- it is clinically proven to reduce gum disease. Thank you, science!)

As a veteran of years of a hair-product-dependent lifestyle, I've tried a lot of gel. And since my hair is violent and uncooperative, I ended up having to use the gloppiest, trashiest brand of gel, which is "Dep". And not just any Dep but the maximum strength that they make, which is "level 10".

But in the store the other day I discovered that Dep hair gel now goes up to 11. I'm not sure I'm ready for the "intense hold" offered by 11, but my last bottle of "level 10" is almost gone, so the issue will be forced before too long.

After years of neglect and half-assed maintenance, I am forced to acknowledge that I no longer have the energy to keep DevWiki ahead of the spammers, who have only pounded the site more and more with every passing month. So as of today, DevWiki is no longer running at devtools.org.

Maintaining an open source project that you've lost interest in is pretty unpleasant, and I haven't had the stomach for it in years. Fortunately, I now have an excuse to drop it, which is that continuing work on it actually competes with my current employer, so I may as well.

But even so, it was a nice thing to keep around as demo-ware. Unfortunately, though, the fundamentally evil nature of humanity has brought it to its end. The home page was getting destroyed more and more often, and I just can't keep up. (Even JotSpot is being threatened seriously by spam traffic; if a full-time company can't keep up, how can I?)

I've grown special brain cells that are devoted to ignoring the infuriating "Office Clipboard" window, that pops up constantly, has no value that I can discern, and that can't be disabled.

But the other day, Office 2000 grew tired of being ignored and decided to take it up a notch, by interrupting my work with a dialog asking me to answer a question that I could not possibly care less about, and that a better product wouldn't have needed to ask in the first place. "TWELVE! Why that's an impossibly high number! No one could possibly need TWELVE of anything!"

I wonder if Microsoft's designers do a lot of heroin?

If you are in the market to remodel a bathroom, you might have noticed that all of the vendors are extremely excited about giving you ideas for what of their expensive line of products you should buy. A typical remodelling idea book might inspire you with helpful models like these:

Unfortunately, my bathroom looks a little more like this:

And frankly, I am not fucking inspired. The world does not contain enough polished brass fixtures and recessed lighting to turn my bathroom into one of these "models". Or to put it another way: If my bathroom were 500 square feet and had six bright windows in it, do you really think I'd be sitting in Home Depot wondering what to do with it?