How many engineers does it take to design a toilet paper holder? You wouldn’t think such a seemingly simple device would be difficult, but it’s apparently impossible. Think about it: when you go to a public restroom and there’s the big container of toilet paper rolls in the stall, how often is there just the right amount of friction in pulling off the toilet paper? For me, it’s always one of these two cases:
- You have to keep pulling at the toilet paper because it’s stuck, and you just keep ripping off one sheet at a time because the roll barely turns; or
- You give a slight tug and you not only get all the toilet paper you need, but there’s also a little pile of it in the floor because there’s no stopping the spinning!
I commented on this to Jess today as we were leaving Macy’s restroom. This is why people like her and I (both in UK’s College of Engineering) have jobs, I tell you.
I’ve hit an annoyance with work, specifically with Perl and sessions. Depending on how I change the application, it requires the user to log in twice before they’re authenticated, it lets them log in once but then going to any restricted area tosses them back to the login screen, or it logs them in on the first try but immediately puts them back at the login page. It’s driving me nuts. I keep thinking I have it fixed and then another permutation of the problem comes up. I didn’t have any of this when I was developing on my Powerbook, on which I’m using mod_perl with Apache. The system it’s on now is in Dr. Jaromczyk’s lab and it doesn’t use mod_perl. I can’t change Apache on that machine because I don’t have permission; I might be able to get the admin to do it, but I want to exhaust other possibilities before doing so. Initially the problem was that the session was getting deleted but the cookie was not. Now the cookie gets deleted on logout as well as the session. Then I thought the problem was that I was setting a cookie path other than ‘/’, the default, so I changed that, but there are still issues. I’ll keep plugging away at it, I guess.
That toilet paper holder thing has got me cracking up. A problem I’ve noticed many times is that the TP roll itself (the cardboard thing) isn’t perfectly circle, which causes the roll to wobble around rather than roll smoothly, thus not letting you rip more than a few squares at a time!
So funny that you mentioned the toilet paper roll. I had to go during the night last night… when I tugged at the paper the whole dang roll popped off! :P
Haha, that’s a third problem I should add to my list!