It was funny to me.

• me: If you get this job, I have a friend’s resume I want to give you.
• her: Hah, of course you do.
• me: Yeah, I think she’d fit in really well there. She’s got a lot of experience in…
• her: Wait, so your ‘friend’ isn’t you?
• me: No, it’s a friend from grad school.
• her: Oh. Ok then.

I’m not sure why this little exchange affected me as strongly as it did (at no fault of the girl at the other end). Why is it assumed that we’re looking out for ourselves? Are we no longer expected to help someone out simply because we can? This is something I wrestle with quite a bit.

The entire book is written from the perspective of the Bond Girl, with the first third of the narrative describing, in Fleming’s patented TOO-MUCH-INFORMATION-O-VISION, the entire life circumstance of this girl coming to this motel deep in the Adirondacks. The action takes place over the course of just one night. It’s a pretty good story, the villain isn’t super-outlandish (although extremely small-time compared to the likes of the SPECTRE stories that surround it) and Bond’s involvement in the plot is described as much of an accident. I will update my villain ridiculousness over time chart once I finish the next book.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 15:29:53

@lowconcept [15:29:53]: can you get to twitter.com?

@lowconcept [15:29:55]: it won’t load

@lowconcept [15:29:59]: “taking too long to respond”

@lowconcept [15:30:02]: WHAT WILL I DO WITH MY DAY

@lowconcept [15:30:11]: nm it’s back

@lowconcept [15:30:14]: crisis averted

@ElliotRonen [15:48:32]: what’s funny about that

@lowconcept [15:48:42]: it was down

@ElliotRonen [15:48:42]: is that there’s only 9 seconds between all caps and nm it’s back

@lowconcept [15:48:44]: it was not funny at all

@lowconcept [15:48:49]: HAHAHA

@lowconcept [15:48:49]:

@lowconcept [15:49:18]: the internet

@lowconcept [15:49:20]: it taunts me so.

Here are a few of the questions I always get when my chosen pet is revealed:

What is that there and why does it look sharp?

Maru is an African pygmy hedgehog, bred by a breeder in Pennsylvania and purchased at a pet store that specializes in exotics on Long Island. She was eight weeks old when I purchased her. She is now three and a half. Yes her quills are sharp, but her underside is not.

That some crazy name, yo.

Maru is Japanese for circle or ball.

What is having a hedgehog like?

It’s like owning a very sharp hamster.

Why a hedgehog?

At the time that I was looking for a pet, I was living in an apartment directly over a business, so I couldn’t get anything that didn’t live in a cage. I don’t get dogs and while I understand that this isn’t a popular stance to take, they’re simply not for me. My view on it is that I don’t want a pet on whose schedule I’m paying to live and the punishment for failing to live on that schedule is pee everywhere.

As such I’m naturally a cat person, but cosmic forces with a sense of humor beyond my control (read: genetics) decided that my lungs would not share my fervor for felines. So save for rolling the dice on a Siberian or ragdoll, two expensive breeds of cats that people with allergies tend to have more luck with but it’s not guaranteed, I will stick to our friends who live in cages.

Which leaves me with a lot of choices these days:

Hamsters: Too pedestrian

Gerbils: Had many of them when I was young, got them out of my system

Mice: See also: Hamsters

Rats: Extremely smart, but still too pedestrian

Snakes (big): I don’t have control over my thermostat so I can’t properly keep the temperature regulated as I’d need to

Snakes (small): In truth I’d love to get a small snake, but again, the temperature thing

Lizards (all kinds): Temperature thing and they just don’t interest me

Tarantula: Too tempting to kill it every time I see it

Scorpion: Get the heck out of my house demon

Bird (all kinds): Had them when I was younger. Too loud when happy/sad/complacent/angry/disheveled/mildly perturbed

Bunnies: POOP

Sugar gliders: Too loud when angry, need to buy two, cost $250 each

Which left me with hedgehogs. Luckily I find them extremely cute.

Is there anything I should know about owning a hedgehog? (Abridged)

Hedgehogs aren’t the easiest pet to take care of, and there’s a lot they should know. Unfortunately I’m a tad pressed for time while writing this blog post, so I’ll cover only the one with the funny sounding name: poop booties.

What the heck are poop booties?

Poop booties are a phenomenon known to hedgehog owners who have a wheel in their hogs’ cage. Hedgehog’s feet are different from a hamster’s feet, so when buying a wheel you have to avoid those wire wheels; a hedgie’s feet can get caught in them as they run and that could lead to an injured hedgie. Instead, if you can’t give the hog a place big enough for it to run around all the time, you need to give it a wheel that’s solid. This is great, as Maru loves her wheel and runs for hours each night. While running she consistently stops, looks around, runs runs runs, stops, looks around, runs runs runs.

This is fine until she adds one more action into the mix: runs runs runs, stops, looks around, poops in the wheel, and keeps on running. The result is a wheel coated in poop (it’s easy to clean off once you get the hang of it; baking soda is your friend) and a hedgehog whose feet are covered in poop. Nothing a long bath won’t fix.

Maru has since grown out of poop booties (she’s a smart girl) but if you’re considering a hedgehog, consider yourself warned.

What was buying a hedgehog like?

I did a lot of reading on hedgehogs prior to deciding to go ahead with the purchase and, in the end, it was a spur of the moment decision. I read that they like warm rooms and surfaces (if it gets to cold they can try to hibernate which unfortunately often leads to death), they’re insectivores with a voracious appetite for mealworms, crickets and anything else small and crunchy they can get their tongues on and, like hamsters, their eyesight isn’t very good so they operate mostly on smell.

I used to live just a few blocks from an exotic pet store, so I went in one day and much to my surprise they had a brand new litter of hedgehogs, both girls and boys. I asked one of the employees if I could take one of the hogs out so feel what they were like, as I had never met one in person before. The guy slid the female cage out and all the hedgehogs rolled into a ball and tensed up.

Now, when a hedgehog is calm, their quills lie flat back like fur and it’s easy to pat them in a way that you won’t get poked. When they’re tense or scared, they shoot up and stick in all directions (imagine giving yourself goosebumps, with sharp sticks poking out of your pores).

If you absolutely must pick up a hedgehog as it’s freaking out, it’s recommended that you either wear thick gloves or just pick up a handful of bedding underneath it. The guy did the latter. He picked up one of the hogs and placed it on the top of the cage. This hog stayed in the ball, not trusting anything in the outside world. He picked up another one and put it on the top of the cage next to the first. Now two hogs, all balled up, lay quivering on the cage top. He reached into the cage and picked up a third, slightly smaller female. When he dropped the third onto the top of the cage, this hog instantly uncurled, looked and sniffed around for a second before diving face first back into the cage.

“I’ll take that one,” I said.

And here we are.

Click through to read the somewhat in-depth analysis.

The Bond novels, for the uninitiated, are simply 1950s and 60s trashy romance novels for men. There’s no getting around this. I don’t want to give too much away because the original books aren’t very long and are a hoot to read. It’s easy to forget that these books were written 40, 50 years ago while making your way through them (until something unbelievably racist comes out of Bond’s mouth or, as in Casino Royale, Bond slams on the accelerator of his car and hears “the screams of his Aston’s 25 horses”).

Click through to read the somewhat in-depth analysis.

For the sake of this post I’m mostly going to discuss the country behind the villain in each book and how they contribute to the ridiculousness levels, with little details thrown in here and there to justify my rating.

CR (Casino Royale): The very first James Bond adventure introduces SMERSH, a secret wing of the Soviet government intended to kill dissenters and opposing secret agents. SMERSH is a recurring villain in the first few 007 novels.

LLD (Live and Let Die): Bond is sent to New York to deal with a voodoo-centric mobster in Harlem who is actually an agent of SMERSH.

MR (Moonraker): SMERSH is nowhere to be seen in this novel, which instead focuses on some WWII bitterness as a team of German engineers executes a diabolical plot.

DAF (Diamonds Are Forever): Back to America, still no SMERSH. American gangs, diamond smuggling and trains.

FRWL (From Russia With Love): SMERSH is back! And so angry about being left out of the previous two novels that James Bond doesn’t actually appear in FRWL until nearly the second half of the book.

DN (Dr. No): Bond is sent on vacation after having a very close brush with death at the end of his previous adventure only to encounter a Chinese man with no hands who lives in an underground mountain lair.

Let’s stop here for a second. So far our villains are Soviets -> Soviets -> Germans -> Americans (with voodoo) -> Soviets -> Chinese man with an underground lair. Where exactly did that last one come from? The villainous plots of every 007 book is ridiculously thought out to the point where you can easily imagine someone actually going through with it. However, taking into consideration that Dr. No’s actual business is selling guano (on the side of just being a rich guy with steel hooks for hands living in a mountain), it sounds like Mr. Fleming got a little too much sun during one of his stays in Jamaica. I’m fairly sure that Dr. No’s sheer ridiculousness is the reason that despite being the sixth book, it was the first movie produced.

Moving on.

GF (Goldfinger): A villain with not one but two names that reference gold (Auric Goldfinger) and happens to be working for SMERSH.

FYEO (For Your Eyes Only): Despite there being a Bond film of the same name, For Your Eyes Only is actually a collection of James Bond short stories, one of which bears the title of the collection. The five stories in the collection are From a View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, Quantum of Solace, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity.

• From a View to a Kill: small team of spies (assumed to be Soviet)
• For Your Eyes Only: Cubans
• Quantum of Solace: Boredom
• Risico: Soviets
• The Hildebrand Rarity: A drunk guy

A few elaborations: they never really say who the spies in From a View to a Kill work for, but they are spied speaking something that “sounds like” Russian at one point so there we are. Bond doesn’t appear in the actual story of Quantum of Solace. It is presented as a story being told to him during what he describes as a “boring dinner party”. Despite this it actually ended up being one of my favorite Bond short stories. There’s no real villain in The Hildebrand Rarity (this story could also be called Bond and Friends Catch a Fish) but the drunk guy is a real jerk, so I put him down anyway.

TB (Thunderball): SMERSH is dead, long live SPECTRE! SPECTRE is introduced as Bond’s new rival. They’re an incredibly wide reaching yet noble evil organization.

By the time SPECTRE rolls around, it’s obvious that the world is incredibly lucky that Fleming never decided to go into the supervillain business for himself: the detail with which the plot is described is quite remarkable, right down to each individual screw on the stolen plane full of nuclear weapons (an actual 007 plot device). Imagine if the guy actually wanted to build an underground lair in a mountain. I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that he could. reading through any of these books forces the reader to think “Holy crap, this guy has given this a lot of thought.”

This is as far as I’ve read in the series. I still have a lot more to go, including The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun, not to mention a few more short stories. As I work my way through them I’ll update my graph with their relative plot ridiculousness.

So I have a question. have you every read James Hadley Chase? Or Modesty Blaise? I loved James Hadley Chase when I was growing up – real pulp fiction with just enough sexual crap to keep a teenage me excited. Modesty Blaise is just awesome. At least I think so. If you haven’t every real any Modesty, please at least try one and let me know what you think =) The author is Peter O’Donnell, by the way.
one year, for my Dad’s birthday, I bought him the entire series on DVD. I grew up watching Bond, not so much reading, but I have some of the books back home in India… And, to be honest, I do like the last few Bond movies, unlike a lot of people. Ok enough, back to my readings for school!

Anyway.

I’ve chosen a light-hearted topic with which to slowly thaw the frigid edges of this blog. As with this blog when I originally started it, I make no promises for regularity; this post may or may not rekindle my blogging habits. We’ll see. The topic at hand today is, of course, spelling. Specifically, it’s how you spell my name.

I love my name. Elliot is not a particularly hard name to say, although watching what the people at Panera put on my receipt when I use my name is always interesting. It also seems impossible to get over the phone. When ordering food I consistently give my father’s name as it’s one syllable and there’s much less chance the person on the other end will reach for something that isn’t there.

As far as the spelling goes, there are four possible ways to spell Elliot: ELIOT, ELLIOT, ELIOTT and ELLIOTT. In the following paragraphs I will describe for you why there is only one correct way to spell Elliot and that is the way my parents so brilliantly decided to bestow upon me.

ELIOT – In order to pronounce my name, you are slurring two L’s together. This is unavoidable. The name when properly pronounced is EL-LEE-IT. It is not EH-LEE-IT. You are free to pronounce it as EH-LEE-IT but that won’t make you any more correct (and don’t think that we won’t notice). Due to the innate pronunciation of the slurred L, ELIOT cannot be right as it is lacking the proper amount of Ls.

ELIOTT – Pronouncing two Ts at the end of a word is incredibly awkward and simply isn’t done. If you aren’t going to pronounce it, let’s just not even put an extra one in. I’m all for simplicity.

ELLIOTT – This variation is simply too repetitive: two double letters on both available consonants throws the balance of the word all off. More on this in the next bullet.

ELLIOT – This, the correct spelling of the name, not only addresses the underlying pronunciation issues on both consonants but it’s also the only balanced spelling where every letter is pronounced. Six letters, three vowels and three consonants, every letter contributing to the health of the word.

To any Eliots, Elliotts or Eliotts out there, it’s not too late! You may have come to terms with the inaccuracy of your spelling but it can always be rectified if you desire.

Today was a really long day. 7:45am-6pm at work, hopped on a train, 7pm-8:30pm at the New York Tech Meetup (awesome), 8:30pm-10:30pm at Microsoft Bizspark Ignition event, 10:45pm-11:30pm on the train, then a 20 minute drive home. I was planning to pass out the split second I stepped through my door.

But during my drive home I called a a good friend of mine. We hadn’t spoken in a while so we were just catching up, talking shop and a bit of business, but mostly just a heartfelt periodic update (which we both agree needs to happen more often).

And now it’s just before 1am and I cannot sleep. I’m wide awake. I’m so energized just from talking to her that even if I tried I wouldn’t be able to. The programs she tells me about, the things she’s doing, the things she’s influencing; it’s a whole world I can’t even begin to imagine.

I’m going to be a wreck tomorrow. So it goes. It’s totally worth it.

Alright. That’s enough sappiness for one post. I’ll post something funny tomorrow.

Anybody who knows me (and even some who don’t) also know that I’m a huge Apple fan. I’ve got lots of Apple stuff and, more importantly to the fanboy, I have immense faith in the Apple design process. Yet despite my love for their design philosophy and their (usually) quality execution, I derided the iPhone for most of its first year of existence. The little things (expensive for a 2G phone, no video or voice recording, lack of enterprise features) prevented me from liking it. I was not drinking the Kool-aid on this one. However, despite my own dislike of the original device, I regard the original iPhone as “an excellent first effort.” I appreciated that it boiled down the most basic features of a smartphone and molded them, as only Apple could, into a form that made it easier for Joe User to understand and take advantage of. I liked that Apple, a firm that had previously had zero experience with designing phones, came out swinging with their first mobile device. And I knew it would get better.

And better it got. The iPhone 3G improved on all of my complaints. It still didn’t get me to switch (I instead replaced my E61 with an E71), but it definitely moved the device well into “strong contender” territory.

Alright, so today, T-mobile announced the G1, the first phone to ship with Google’s new Android operating system for mobile phones. The New York Times was quick to laud the G1’s features as being “PC-like” and by all standards, the software demonstrated so far has been pretty impressive. You can read on tons of other blogs about what the G1 has, so I’m going to talk about what it doesn’t have and what that means for the G2 or G3 or what have you.

The G1 does not have a headphone jack. It’s not recessed, it’s not 2.5mm instead of 3.5mm; it’s just not there. Instead you have to use an adapter through proprietary port called ExtUSB (that until today I had never heard of) and the adapter won’t be available immediately at launch. Now let’s look at the history here: HTC, who produces the G1, is one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers in the world and regularly makes some of the best phones available on a wide variety of platforms. And even before they produced and sold phones under their own brand, they made handsets for Samsung, among others. These are not new people to the world of handset manufacturing. They know what makes a good handset and what people look for in one. How could HTC, regularly regarded as one of if not the best handset manufacturers in the world leave off a standard headphone jack?

I don’t have an answer for that, of course. Instead I offer some speculation. HTCs line of high end Windows Mobile phones, while high quality, aren’t exactly stellar performers in terms of sales. The G1, like the original iPhone before it, is an excellent first try. If Android really takes off and Google’s own App Store explodes like Apple’s did, we’re going to see demands, from both users and developers, for more standardized hardware. HTC is in an excellent position to create a really flawless device: the G1 is just testing the waters.

Now if only they’d do something about that pesky Apache license…;