Arctangential

Welcome to another episode of “Avi’s Boring Life”:

Avi Goes Shopping

OR

Free Eggs!

First, some background. As you all know, I moved recently. My new place is kind of out in the country. It’s a lot different than where I used to live — it actually gets dark at night, there are deer on the roads, people are polite and there are about 15 places to buy mulch within a mile of my house. I have noticed that the environment has changed me a bit — I drive more politely, I smile at cashiers when I’m buying things, and I even say hello to my neighbors. It’s kind of creepy.

Anyhow, as part of this transformation I’m undergoing, into middle-class-polite-american-male, I decided to get one of those supermarket cards. Back when I was a slacker, I would always see people with their fancy cards, saving all that money, and I would be always a little bit jealous. I would feel ashamed when I had to tell the cashier that, no, I did not have a card. So now I have one! It’s really neat too, it goes on my key chain, which I assume is especially good. Or something.

So this card is a little different from the ones I have seen before. Instead of just letting you in on discounts (which it also does), you also accumulate points when you spend money. For every dollar that you spend, you get 10 points. And then you can exchange points for *FREE* goods. For example, today I saw an offer where you can spend 900 points and get a free dozen eggs. That is, if you spend $90, you get $1.50 worth of free merchandise. That works out (nearly) to a whopping 2% discount on good purchased. To me, this does not seem like a really big deal, but people seem to place a lot of stock on these specials, so who knows.

They also have a fairly impressive customer-specific coupon printing system. I think this is pretty much de rigeur for supermarkets to print coupons on-demand for shopping when they get their receipts — I’ve seen plenty of setups where, for example, if you buy some yogurt, you get a coupon for more yogurt, or if you buy enough pudding, you get a coupon for a discount on stomach pumps. This supermarket takes it one step farther, though. The first time I used my fancy new card, I got a “welcome to the club” coupon. When I just went back for my second trip, I got a special “welcome back” coupon thanking me for my second visit. The coupons are also date-stamped so they seem to always expire either 7 or 14 days from the day they’re issues, instead of at some arbitrary end-of-month date, like most coupons.

Overall, it’s a pretty well thought-out system, even if it is pretty stupid.

Got me a good text message on the phone today (leet speak as in the original):

“Hey girl, this is Mike, the shy guy who asked U 4 your # the other night. I’m 2 nervous 2 talk, but I wanted 2 let U know I am thinking of U. Call me sometime.”

I call upon the collective wisdom of LiveJournal to come up with witty responses I can send back to him.

I had an interesting experience today. I was having my standard breakfast at the local Burger King (#2 w/ cheese, large sized) when a fellow in a ludicrous leather jacket with an even more ludicrous beard approached me, set a CD case down next to me, mumbled something about a “metal fest” and then left. The CD was in a plain case with no backing, and a liner booklet made from two pieces of folded photocopy, and the label looks like a photocopy too, glued to the CD itself. The cover art is just black & white, depicting the silhouettes of 4 hung corpses over some flames, and the CD is apparently a compilation of a number of bands who will be performing at some kind of big concert at a nearby music store / coffee house (yes I’m serious) called the American Music Cafe.

This was all reasonably weird. Especially when I saw, out the window, the guy leaving in an enormous black van with red tinted windows, red grille, etc. Anyways, I went to work. On the way home I decided to give the new CD a listen, fearing the worst. And it actually wasn’t all that bad! Some of the bands have stupid names, like Sinning is our Savior or “Hellrazor”, and the tracks are no different, viz. “Coalition for the Grievous”, but it was actually a pretty good listen overall. The fest itself is 2 weeks from today, and if I’m not doing anything else that night I very well may check it out.

Also, Woody Allen rules.

This is my first ever LJ friends-only post. I’m making it secure because I’m duplicating a company email that my boss sent out earlier today, and while it’s not really sensitive information or anything, it probably wouldn’t be great for me to mock him in a totally open forum. Here’s the email:

< <
All:

It is imperative that every developer unit test their code before tagging it and sending it to QA. Everything should work when it gets to QA. Even if you make some "insignificant" change, it may have wide impact.

Check the entire project. This means that you go through every screen, enter bogus data, click on every link, use every scenario constraint, view every report, etc. If you want a separate set of eyes, besides yours before sending it to QA, then please have the PM look at it and review it.

It is not QA responsibility to be the front-line for this type of testing. They will catch most of the issues, but this delays the process as we need to iterate through the development cycle. I will send out some more guidelines later.

What sort of incentive shall we have for the engineer that has the least bugs in a month? A [company] shirt/apparel item? A dinner out? Whatever it is, it will be something under $50.

Thanks,
- [boss]
>>

I want to let that stand more or less on its own, so I’ll put my direct comments behind a cut:

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Those of you who have been keeping track (and to you I apologize), will be aware that I have a number of “systems” I use in order to keep track of what order I watch my DVDs in. I have quite a few DVDs, and I have a few guidelines that I like to follow while watching them — for example, I like to watch all of the special features on each DVD, but I also like to wait between re-watchings of a DVD so that I don’t get too bored of it. I also like to try my best to watch netflix DVDs as soon as possible so I can get them back (so I can get more), etc. I used to accomplish this by just have kind of a big pile of DVDs and I would sort of grab whichever one I felt like watching at the time. I know this kind of thing is entirely sufficient for most people, but I spend far too much time worrying about optimization in my own life, and it just wasn’t swinging it for me. So, over a period of time, I came up with the system that I use now — a trio of interdependent queues[1], combined with a cascading interleave to form a single queue, from which I select movies one by one.

Let me describe the interleaving part in a little more details, because it’s really the part that makes everything work. The 3 individual queues are each made up of a single type of movie; there’s the Netflix queue, the queue of movies that I haven’t watched yet, and the queue of movies of which I have watched the main feature, but I have not yet watched the special extra features. So first I interleave the two latter queue together to form a composite queue of “movies I own”. I then take the Netflix queue and interleave it with this composite queue to get the final ordering of movies to watch. Movies are removed from the “master queue” in order, and they are added to each sub-queue as I get them. Arriving netflixen are obviously added directly the the end of the netflix queue. When I buy a new DVD, it’s added to the end of the “main feature” queue, and after I watch the main feature of a movie that I own, if there are special features on the disc, I put it at the end of the “special features” queue. When I watch a disc’s special features, I generally only watch an hour or two worth of features at a time, and then put it back at the end of the same queue.

This system affords a number of nice features — I watch netflixen reasonably quickly, twice as often as movies that I own. This helps me keep the netflix flow going at a good pace. Interleaving “new” movies with special features discs makes sure that I don’t get overly bored watching documentary after commentary after documentary. Putting movies back at the end of the special features queue means that I maximize the amount of time between 2 watchings of a given DVD — this way I won’t get bored watching stuff about the same movie over and over. Some movies do go through the queue a lot of times — FotR went through 7 times (one viewing of the film, 2 special feature discs, 4 commentaries), but that’s not bad. At no point did I think “God, shut up about the ELVES already”, and I got to see everything on the disc.

The really nice thing about this system is that the implementation is quite simple — it’s just a pile of DVDs, in order. It’s trivially easy to inspect the pile and determine where a given DVD should be inserted to simulate the system described above. Since I almost always have more DVDs than I do netflixen, they just go underneath whatever DVD is under the lowest netflix. Normal DVD either go between the high pair of DVDs of the opposite type that are adjacent, or they just go at the bottom of the pile. So that’s the system.

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