The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera web browser

Do you ever remember that you forgot something, then wonder what else you've forgotten? Or, do you remember that you forgot something, but you forget what you forgot?

Yeah, me too.

A joke from my dad:

A fisherman with two ice chests full of fish was stopped by a game warden after leaving a river well known for its fishing. The game warden asked the man, "Do you have a license to catch those fish?"

"Naw, my friend, I don't have a license," said the man. "These here are my pet fish."

"Pet fish?" asked the game warden.

"Yep. Every night I take these fish down to the river and let 'em swim 'round for a while. Then I whistle and they jump right back into this ice chest and I take 'em home."

"I don't believe that for a second! Fish can't do that!"

The man looked at the game warden for a moment and then said, "It's the truth. I'll show you. It really works."

"Okay, I've got to see this!" exclaimed the game warden.

The man poured the fish into the river and stood and waited. After several minutes, the game warden turned to him and said, "Well?"

"Well, what?" asked the man.

"When are you going to call them back?"

"Call who back?"

"The fish!"

"What fish?"

Here are some of my favorite April Fool's Day jokes this year:

• Apple founder Jobs joins IKEA
• Google Gulp
• Requirements for Morality Sections in Routing Area Drafts
• UTF-9 and UTF-18 Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode
• P2P Revolution: Opera Announces Platform-Independent Real-Time Speech Technology
• Microsoft bought up CreativeBits

The other day, I fired up my test install of Opera, fiddled around with the some settings, did some testing, and went about my business. I later installed a new build with some experimental changes, fired it up, switched to another application, and went back to Opera. To my surprise, five new home pages had opened and Opera was trying to create a new e-mail account. Baffled, I closed Opera and decided to give it a try again with the next build before filing a bug report.

After installing a new build, the problem persisted. The Desktop Manager (Johan) happened to be in my office, so I asked if he had seen the problem. He hadn't and once we looked at my keyboard (Kinesis Advantage) and mouse (Wacom Tablet), he was convinced it was one of my funky input devices causing the problem.

When I told Johan that Opera kept going home for no apparent reason, Opera would dutifully go home. And when I told him it was trying to create new e-mail accounts, it brought up a dialog to create a new e-mail account. Someone else in the office had even seen the same thing, so I knew I wasn't nuts. Johan was stumped, too. On a hunch, I disabled voice and the problem stopped immediately. Johan had been right, but it wasn't my mouse or keyboard causing the problem.

While testing voice the other day, I had enabled the key not required to talk setting. From that point on, the headset sitting on my desk was doing its best to interpret my commands. What first seemed like a serious malfunction turned into a good chuckle. So, any time you think Opera is trying to mess with your mind, check your voice settings first.

To this day, I can't properly shop at unisex stores. As a youth, I feared going into one of these stores (Gap, Abercrombie, etc.) and thumbing through racks of clothing to be interrupted by a sales associate or giggling classmates informing me I was looking at the women's clothing. Department stores are nice enough to have large signs telling you which section belongs to which sex. At the Gap, I have to rely on mannequins, posters, and vague clothing style tips to point me in the right direction. Until they provide more adequate clothing sex clues, I will not frequent such establishments. It's their loss.

Beauty. Helen of Troy in causing the Trojan War was said to have had "the face that launched a thousand ships". Therefore a face beautiful enough to launch one ship would be 1 millihelen.

Alternative answers and thoughts:

• A millihelen is a face that can launch a single ship. I think the phrase was coined by Larry Niven. My life however has been full of women who could be measured in nanohelens, i.e. they could launch 2 lengths of deck planking and six rivets!
1 Helen (H) is a huge quantity of beauty, and is thus inconvenient to work with. The smaller unit, the milliHelen (mH), representing the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship is more workable. Even this has problems, since the amount of beauty required to cause the spontaneous launching of ships must be large, since verifiable instances of beauty-induced ship launching are not commonplace. Also, there is no explanation as to how beauty could be "used up" in launching ships in such a way as to allow the count of successful launches to be able to be related to the total beauty.
• Are there negative measurements (ugliness) and how are they measured? Spontaneous sinking of boats? Or the launching of submarines? With the reported problems of the Collins class submarines (a seriously ugly boat) probably resulting in extended times in dry-dock, their multiple launching could soak up a lot of ugliness in the world.
• Is there a factor that needs to be applied to different classes of vessels to account for size, displacement, crew, etc. e.g. does a Trimaran require 1mH, 3mH, or some other amount of beauty to spontaneously launch?

I've had this sitting around for a while. I hope you got a laugh out of it, Helen.

Foxtrot comic originally published October 31, 2002. Copyright Bill Amend.

conniption

a fit of rage, hysteria, or alarm

Apparently, I went into one of those last night. Helen describes conniptions as a temper tantrum standing up. I believe I was imploring my fellow Movie Club members to shhhhh! Oh well.

<This Space For Rent>

Another quote from HGTTG:

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right?