punchline

It’s been a year since I last posted on tumblr, so I guess I should check in with some interesting inside info we learned last weekend from a Costco employee.  This may in fact be common knowledge, but it was new to us:

• If a price tag has an asterisk on it — they are pretty large so you will know it when you see it — then that item has been discontinued.  Get it while it lasts!
  
  
• Most of the prices in Costco end with 99 cents.  If you see a product that ends with 97 cents ($XX.97) then the price has been discounted from the original price.
• If the price is in whole dollars ($XX.00) then it is a markdown local to that store (liquidation) and a rock-bottom price.

Isn’t that interesting!

I have 64 oz. of animal crackers with a date of 10/04/2008 and 40 oz. of Organic Cold Milled Flax (wtf is that anyway) with a date of 9/30/2009.

In the trash.

One of my favorite features of the trackpad on my laptop is the ability to scroll a page using a two-finger swipe.

It is very intuitive: with two fingers on the trackpad, drag them downward in order to scroll down the page.  Likewise for up, left, or right.

However, I was thinking about how this function translates to a real-world action and it seems all backwards to me.  If I am looking at a piece of paper on my desk and I want to see more at the bottom of the page, don’t I slide the paper UP?  Quite literally I would use two fingers to push the paper upward in order to bring the bottom of the page into view.

The other scroll metaphors do seem to make sense.  The scroll wheel on my mouse operates in a “realistic” way, as long as you imagine the wheel is sitting on top of the page and not underneath (as in a conveyor belt).  The slider bar on the side of the window makes sense as compressed representation of the very long document, where the slider appears at the relative position of the current view.

I wonder if I could get used to a two-finger swipe where the direction was reversed?  I wonder if that would make the experience more “grounded” in the physical reality of moving paper around on a desk?  It currently feels very natural as an extension of the scroll wheel and slider bar actions that I am used to.  Perhaps forcing the “natural” metaphor would make the experience (ironically) feel very alien.

Found this shopping list in the parking lot of Costco.  It has an untitled section (presumably Costco) and a separate section for Whole Foods.

Untitled:

water, trash bags, TP, PT, pullups, nuts

Whole Foods:

drink, raisins, mr. cuspers (???), pretzels, bananas, peppers, spinach, 2 chicken, frozen blueberries, coconut milk, tortilla chips, chicken chiilia (???), avacados, onion, cilantro, carrots, salami, eggs, milk

Don’t get me wrong — Costco has a lot of great products.  Some of them, however, just don’t make sense for a bachelor who lives alone.

The quintessential regrettable purchase is, hands down, the box of 3,000 individually wrapped plastic drinking straws.  I got this around the same time as my “Magic Bullet” blender kit and frozen fruit smoothie ingredients.  I think you see where my mind was.  Needless to say, I did not follow through on the intended smoothie lifestyle.  (I also got a giant tub of wheat germ which turned out to be disgusting.)

For a while I was pretty into my rice cooker.  There was a period of several weeks during grad school when I routinely cooked a healthy meal of rice, salmon, and some mystery ingredient.  At some point I decided to purchase a 25-pound bag of rice.  I think it was during the steepest part of the economic downturn, when reasonable people were stockpiling canned goods and ammunition for the inevitable apocalypse.  Today I pulled it out of the pantry, unopened, to discover that it expired in early June of 2009.

Please don’t judge me for my wasteful and conspicuous consumerism.  I am fully aware that the money would have been better spent on tsunami victims or what-have-you.  DON’T YOU JUDGE ME!

I remember seeing the “Wild Wild West” (The Escape Club) music video on tv quite a bit when I was 8 years old, and at the same time the box for Westworld (with Yul Brynner) really intrigued me from seeing it at Blockbuster.  Somehow in my mind these memories have become intertwined so whenever I hear reference to the song, I think of cyborgs with six-shooters.

In Castle Age (a silly game on facebook), I can expend 1 stamina point and attack a monster for approximately 500 damage.  Alternatively, I can expend 5 stamina points and attach a monster for approximately 2,500 damage.

Suppose there is a 10% chance of landing a “critical hit” and inflicting double damage, i.e. 1,000 and 5,000 damage points respectively.  Is it better to attack the monster 5 times or “power attack” for 5 times the damage?

I submit that it is actually better to engage in 5 individual attacks.  First let me say that, as a matter of probability, either strategy is equivalent in the long run.  Either way, approximately 10% of attacks (in a large number of attacks) are going to be critical hits, so the total damage will be the same.  Say you only have 5 stamina points, though.  If you “power attack”, you have a 90% chance of doing a mere 2,500 damage.  On the other hand, if you attack normally 5 times in a row, your chances of doing only 2,500 damage drops below 60%.  You have better than 30% chance of getting one critical hit for a total of 3,000 damage.

Either way, after spending 100 stamina you are going to have accumulated about 275,000 damage points.  The reason I think it is better to have 100 individual attacks (10 of which are critical hits) versus 20 “power attacks” (2 of which are critical hits) is purely psychological.  They only let you have, say, 20 stamina points at a time.  You can exhaust them with 20 clicks or with 4 clicks, but it only takes a couple of minutes either way — then you have to wait several hours for them to recharge.  In that case, it makes a big difference how frequently you get a critical hit.  If you have 20 attacks per session, you are extremely likely to get at least one critical hit.  If you only do 4 attacks per session, the odds of getting a critical hit each session are not in your favor.  You’ll feel luckier if you get at least one critical hit every time you sit down to battle the monster.

If you play scratch-off tickets, the same argument applies.  Wager less per ticket, buy more tickets per day, win every day, keep coming back.  Wager more per ticket, buy fewer tickets per day, lose most days, possibly lose interest in the game.  I wonder if they have researched the optimal price for a round — maybe the slot machines have it right at a nickel.

Mr T got sick this past week.  I took him to the vet and now he is back to normal.  They said he had some allergies or something — I noticed he was licking his belly too much and then started coughing about once a day, probably from hairballs.  The vet gave him a shot for allergies (plus his annual vaccinations) and he spent a day being all lethargic but now is back to his normal, energetic and talkative self.  Hooray for the vet!