So to-day we learned that when I am very tired I might leave the Woman of Interest a long rambling message about problems of combinatorial mathematics.

Combinatorial mathematics is, on the whole, extremely useful; but it is deathly dull. And, while its usefulness obtains on the whole, some problems — such as that about which I left my message — are utterly unimportant.

In other words, I rambled about boring, useless math.

I am going to respect the LJ content strike to-day by avoiding even visiting any LJ sites.

I believe that the strike comes far too late. I believe that mere strikes of any length are insufficient measures. I believe that this particular strike was announced with far too short notice (something like five days). And I believe that a one-day strike will produce unimportant statistical results, as it will be followed immediately by a surge of postponed entries and comments.

I also believe that, in response to any action that either seems serious or looks as if it might lead to something serious, the LJ administration will emit more unmeant pieties, and that a substantial number of those who engaged in the action will be all too eager to believe the pieties, rather than to extract genuine and significant commitments.

None-the-less, one forgoes very little not to under-mine this effort. Vayáis con queso.

My latest three entries to the Jelly Belly® Dream Bean Contest:

• Ginger Beer — This was really just a riff off the submission by the Woman of Interest of Ginger Snap, to which I made explicit reference in my submission.
• Oatmeal — This bean goes for the pity vote.
• Peach Vanilla (though they already have a Peach)

Yester-day, the Woman of Interest alerted me to

the Jelly Belly® Dream Bean Contest

One is allowed one suggestion per diem. My two entries so far are

• Cinnergy (red shell with yellow speckles around orange-colored center) — Cinnamon and tangerine.
• Hillary (pink shell around red center) — Stale and bitter, yet preferred by many people to chocolate.

Last night, at David's Coffee Place, a large, odd fellow came and sat near the pianist. He began aggressively coaxing the pianist to play this-or-that in particular manners, paused in doing this to talk loudly for a while over his cell phone (it perhaps did not occur to him that the he could step outside for a while, and that the rest of us might not want to hear his part of the conversation), and then returned to the dominating of the pianist. The large fellow did put some money in the pianist’s tip jar. But his manner was still odd and very pushy. I tentatively mapped-out how to forcibly intervene if things got clearly out-of-hand.

After the fellow left, the pianist noted that the interaction had been difficult. I noted that I'd been wondering whether I might have to bail-in, but hadn't seen real signals of impending violence. I suggested that the pianist work-out a signal that regulars would recognize as a call for assistance. He tried to think of an appropriate tune. Since he plays a lot of show-tunes — yeah, it’s Hillcrest — and indeed songs from West Side Story, I suggested Jet Song. He liked that.

I don't know whether he understands that I would, indeed, bail-in.

The Woman of Interest and I each noted that our websites had been slow and unresponsive, so yester-day after-noon I contacted technical support at FourBucks.net. A technician got back to me, reporting that he’d found nothing amiss on their server but noted that our sites draw upon resources on other servers, and suggesting that perhaps the problem was there. This explanation seemed plausible, except that shortly after I received it we found that first cpanel and then simple FTP were slowing to an effective halt. When I checked a few hours later, the sites seemed to work fine more generally. So I think that our support query was vindicated.

Half a block from where I live is Bronx Pizza, which looks like a hole-in-the-wall place, but has a really great pesto pizza, usually available by the slice. One can get two large slices and a soft drink for US$6. (The soft drink choice isn't great, but it's passable.)

To-day, I was there to get dinner. At a near-by table sat three blue-collar guys, my age or older. They looked as have white blue-collar guys for most or all of my life. But they were talking sincerely and unaffectedly about fighting a problem of sexism and racism at the place at which one of them worked, with the victim of the sexism being a woman. That's not the sort of conversation that such men would have had in my childhood.

The sun was going down, but my day brightened a bit.

eBay is one of those institutions that tries both to stream-line and to impair the complaint process by requiring that complainants use forms. In spite of eBay's efforts at impairment, I managed to use one of their forms to clearly report a pattern of shill feed-back, with demonstrating evidence. Thwarted, they fell-back to asking me for details in e.mail that were already provided in my initial report, as if they were lacking. At such point, many people of course give up, and others write an outraged response that eBay can then dismiss as the work of someone irrational. I instead took advantage of the fact that I was no longer confined to the earlier format, restated the case more as I would originally have stated it (if not confined by the form), adding new information that had arisen. And I concluded by making reference to the civil liability that eBay would develop by failing to act.

As I left David's Coffee Place to-night, there was a group of men out front, hugging and talking. Across the street, a drunk yelled impotently at them that they were disrespecting the male gender. At the time, I was amused enough that I laughed aloud for a while.

But it does irk me that many people think that they are entitled to invoke respect as a justification for oppression.

I went downtown for jury duty to-day.

I took the bus, in order to save on the expense of parking. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about having various knives and multi-tools on my person. There were no lockers at the court-house or otherwise nearby, and my car was back in Hillcrest. So I decided to ship my things at the nearby UPS Store. I didn't want to have to wait until to-morrow to retake possession, so I asked if I could ship them for pick-up at that very same store, and found that I could. That cost me a total of US$6.60, including the envelope.

I got to the juror waiting rooms in time to see the final seconds of the orientation film. I'd seen it once before to-day, and once is one time too many; I was glad to have missed it.

I parked in the reading room, and watched Dark City (1998), to indeed see whether there were any SC 1243 subscriber sets in it. I didn't spot any. (I did spot a Model 500, most of which were made by Western Electric, and sets or bits of sets that I couldn't identify without checking references. Also, I am no longer quite as certain that the set at 4:40 is a WECo Model 302, though there's a Model 302 at about 55:55.) Actually, as I noted to the Woman of Interest, it was probably wise not to include a SC 1243 subscriber set. The design of the 1243 was clearly influenced by the 302, and the sets are normally black like a 302; but their appearance is less utilitarian and more overtly art deco. Dark City is thus a bit more dark for their absence.

Shortly after I finished this peculiar cataloguing of Dark City, the Woman of Interest called. We chatted until about 14:00, at which point she went out with a friend for dinner. In all this time, no one in the jury pool was actually summoned to be seat as a juror. In fact, by the end of the lunch period, the jury services office announced that only one remaining court might need a jury. So, by the time that the Woman of Interest got off the phone, I was expecting to be dismissed soon.

At about 14:15, announcement was made that there was going to be an evacuation drill at 14:30, that we would be directed out of the building and to a public assembly place by sheriff's deputies, and that afterwards, those who were not present as alternates (selected on a previous day) would be free to leave. This announcement offended most of the jury pool. It is one thing to serve on a jury or to stand-and-wait for such service, another to be convenient subjects to teach deputies and others herding techniques. (After all, almost none of us would expect to be back in the court-house for at least another year, by which time the protocol would probably have changed anyway.) Most jurors simply left. I decided to go through with the drill, as perhaps something interesting might happen.

However, once we were directed out of the building, deputies did not direct us on to the alleged place of public assembly. So we milled-about in front of the building until, after some time, a deputy told us that the place of assembly was at the intersection of Union Street and B Street, and we headed thence. But at C Street, a block south of B Street, we were rerouted eastward by a deputy. No indication was given as to just where were were actually going; I had 15-to-20 pounds of computer on my back and large book and what-not under my arm; and the UPS Store was in the opposite direction. After a bit more than another block, we hit my Fuck you too! point, and I left the herd.

Shipping my knives and tools 0 feet did not work as well as might have been expected. There was different staff at the UPS Store. They struggled with the concept of my having shipped from the store to itself, and kept telling me that the delivery truck had not yet arrived. Apparently, I was the first to use this trick. (Too clever by half, perhaps.) When one of them finally understood that the package should be there without having arrived on a delivery truck, they still couldn't find the thing. The fellow who had taken the package in the first place was out on an errand, and I had to wait for his return before I could recover my things.

In the context of some construction work, I had trouble locating the bus stop for my return trip home, and ended-up carrying the d_mn'd computer and what-not for an extra four-to-six blocks, in the course of which I got jostled by a hulk who had a commitment to walking slowly and otherwise in such manner as to block everyone behind him. It was apparently during this brief incident that one of the two bus passes that I (qua juror) had been given fell, unnoticed, from my pocket. Although I might never have used it, I regret the loss.