November 30, 2006
links for 2006-11-30
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I want to see a list of the most interesting lost technologies.
November 28, 2006
Adulthood
Well, I have now been accused of having "real furniture" and an apartment that feels like an adult's place. There is no hope for me anymore! I will begin hiking up my pants, complaining about the kids these days, and telling really boring stories about how things used to be... I'd start watching Matlock, but I don't think we get it on our TV channels (not even dubbed in spanish!)
Well, at least the pants-hiking will be new. Not sure much else needs to change. And here I was trying to blame the apparent bald spot in pictures from a particular angle on the short haircut. I am just trying to deceive myself, apparently. I thought this marriage thing might make me feel like an adult, but we are as silly as ever so it didn't happen. Buying a house was supposed to be the next big test - or maybe having kids. Not simply having houseguests comment on how nice the apartment feels...
The real question remains: Does any of this mean I can retire anytime soon?
links for 2006-11-28
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In my copious free time, I should update my blogging software. And switch hosting providers. And create world peace.
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I had no idea Euless has a significant Tongan community. I guess the key to being accepted in Texas is to improve the quality of the local highg school football team.
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“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” It's not really a class war until the poor start fighting back.
November 27, 2006
November 25, 2006
links for 2006-11-25
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Happy Thanksgiving!
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Reason number 7312 not to work in a big company.
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Ha, Sony is screwed.
November 24, 2006
Today's Horror Movie Idea
I dreamed last night about a movie with a killer blanket. It could slowly move around on its own, and it liked to reach up and turn down the thermostat so it would get really cold. Once someone pulled the evil blanket over to warm up, it would suffocate the person.
OK, maybe it should be a comedy-horror movie.
November 23, 2006
links for 2006-11-23
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This isn't on the agenda for the near-term, but I can see it happening sooner rather than later.
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I can't wait to make the switch.
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Make sure to read the comments.
November 22, 2006
November 21, 2006
Vacation
Ugh, missed 3 days from the vacation, although there is no real excuse for yesterday. I need to think of a new strategy to make it through this!
November 17, 2006
Traveling
We are heading back to Wisconsin today, so I am not sure about the updates for the next two days. I will try to make up for it when I get back, because I am sure you are all sad not to have more posts to suffer through here.
This post is also a check to see if I succeeded at putting full text of the entries into the RSS feed. Man, my blogging tools are so 2003. Why don't I have time to upgrade them? Oh right, because it is boring and I would rather do other things.
November 16, 2006
Enmoosing
Sometimes I am very happy to be married, especially when my wife teases me about calling something "endearing" by using the word "enmoosing". It is the little things that I enjoy the most.
November 15, 2006
shared del.icio.us
OK, I think I am liking using the del.icio.us stuff more than the google reader shared items feed since it lets me include links to things I am not subscribed to, and I can include my own little notes on stuff. Let the linkblogging begin! Just need to have more time to read things.
Excuses
Yeah, I missed a post again yesterday. It was our six-month anniversary, so I think I should get a pass. The time has flown by! If only we could have a honeymoon every six months...
Yahoo Messenger 8.1 Won't Shut Up
I was having serious issues logging in to Yahoo Messenger, our IM network of choice for work. Everytime I logged in, it would log me right back out. Eventually it started saying my password was incorrect. Reset password, still no luck. Fine, I will upgrade and see if that fixes it, since when it crashes the little link on the windows crash dialog tells me Yahoo! recommends an upgrade.
What a terrible mistake! Sure, I can log in now, but the new version is so damned annoying. Everytime I chat with someone, a message saying the person I am talking to "is using an older version of Yahoo! Messenger and certain features may be unavailable." and includes a link to invite them to upgrade. Fine, whatever, a little viral push to get people to the latest version. But this message keeps reappearing after any pause in the conversation! So I, the person who actually has upgraded, am forced to see this message constantly. No way to turn it off! Well, there is no way I am going to invite someone else to have to suffer through this.
If that weren't enough, the main window has animated ads on it, too. Thank you for that! I guess it is finally time to try one of the non-yahoo clients, since this is now a constant annoyance.
November 13, 2006
Today's Travel Lesson
Flying to Taiwan in late December or January is much more expensive than flying in April. I'd better eat extra while I am there to make it worthwhile!
This will definitely be my highest-mileage year ever. 1.5 trips to Asia, 1 trip to Europe, and lots of trips to CA will do that, I guess. I have also learned, the value of frequent flyer miles is very low. Getting the basic priority level doesn't get you much, it seems, and availability of free tickets is low. I think earning hotel points has been better - there is a notable difference in how well they treat you when you level up with a hotel. Of course, hotels in general seem much more concerned with service than airlines.
Now, I just need to find a container of hair goo 3 ounces or less...
November 12, 2006
FlightAware.com
FlightAware is probably the coolest flight-tracking website I know of. Most airline sites only give you the time the flight left the gate, not the time it actually took off. This site not only gives you the actual take off time, it shows you the route and gives you all the in-flight stats.
Houston Wins
Well, it isn't quite the same as watching San Jose, but it is basically the same group of players, and they won another MLS cup today. Not the greatest game I've seen, although things sure picked up in overtime. You have to feel a little sorry for New England, who are now 0-3 in MLS finals.
November 11, 2006
Shared feed
Here is my shared feed from google reader. are you happy now, Greg? We'll see if I remember to keep using this.
November 10, 2006
The gym?
Exercise is better than drugs, at least for improving your energy levels. Maybe they need to work on a drug to increase motivation.
November 09, 2006
I don't see an 8
OK, I already missed a day. Can I blame being too traumatized by having to fend for myself since my wife is off travelling to give a lecture? No? Well, I'm not going to admit to spending all my freetime watching BSG, so I will just blame laziness! And consider this your damned make-up post.
I am not a cylon
So, I am making my way through Battlestar Galactica Season Two, and I am enjoying it, but I am slightly annoyed that they have to make the cylons (who are supposed to be robots!) so stupid. I am sure that some of it is just for dramatic purposes, and you can make some kind of excuses based on the biological nature of some of them, and maybe there is some master plan we haven't seen yet that will explain their incompetence, but I doubt it.
Now, I know I should be enjoying the analogies to real-world political situations like terrorism and dictatorships and the struggle between security and freedom, but I just want to make surre the 'bots get proper representation. (I would also appreciate a good explanation of how the Greek gods made a comeback into popular belief at some point, but I am not holding my breath.)
So let's remember just a few reasons why robots are better than people:
- Robots can store state, make copies of their state, and restore to that state. This means they can learn much more quickly than humans, and should not repeat the same mistakes that other robots made.
- Robots should have much better ability to aim and fire weapons. Humans can get pretty good at this, but imagine how good a robot could be with the ability to control muscle movements more precisely, not to mention a more direct ability to calculate trajectories based on current environmental conditions. So, these firefights between humans and cylon centurions should not be anywhere near as easy for humans to survive.
- Robots should be much more resilient to damage than humans. Unless you destroy the main processing or storage areas, the robot should be able to continue to function with its remaining parts. And, actually, if the robots designed a more redundant system there may not be a main processing area to destory - each area could function independently if necessary.
- Robots should not be locked into a human-based physical form. The cylon raider ship was a good example of this. The cylon boarding party was not. If you are going to try to send something into a ship to take it over, would you make it big and obvious, so the humans can find it and destroy it? Or would you send something small and sneaky. Or, hell, why not just send a virus or other contagion to cause damage. Or maybe, send a bunch of things so the humans can't stop all of them at once.
The moral of the story? Be friends with the robots, because they will win eventually. And if you are writing about robots, try to make a plausible reason why they are flawed and can't reach their true robot-potential if you are going to have them lose. And if you are consuming media about robots - try to enjoy the ride, because it will almost always be disappointing in the end.
November 07, 2006
Election Results
Well, things seem to be going about as expected - opposition to the TX governor split between 3 candidates, House goes to dems, Senate falls a little short. My poll experience went fine - lots of ovals filled in, no waiting in line.
The biggest disappointment of the day, though, was clear: No "I voted" sticker.
November 06, 2006
Election Day
Yes, it is that time of year again - election day. This will be my first time voting in Texas (3rd state I have ever voted in), which should be interesting. It is difficult to learn about all of the crazy local politics, especially without any reliable sources for political endorsements that I can turn to. I miss California's thick voter information booklets! The big local paper seems to only endorse republicans (for democratic-dominated districts like mine, they just don't offer an endorsement), and the free weekly paper doesn't even give endorsements. And there are a ton of offices to vote for - judges, justices, constables, clerks, commissioners - it is like they want to make it too tough to think about, so you should just go with a straight-party ticket instead of reading up on all 89 (I think - hard to count them all) offices. Of coure, a fair number of the judges are running unopposed if they are Republican.
They don't even make it that easy to vote. First, you need to register at least 6 weeks in advance of the election. Then, they send you a Voter Registration Certificate, which you are supposed to bring with to the polling place. Where is your polling place? Well, you need to go online and look it up, or call the 800 number, since it is not printed on the Voter Registration Certificate. How could this be any easier!
And this doesn't even include the bond measures. It seems strange to vote on bond measures in a place where I will probably not be around to see any of the impact (positive or negative) of the outcome. Plus, the bonds are grouped into 12 separate ballot measures, each containing a large number of different projects. It is over $1 billion in bonds they want to issue; it makes me rethink how ineffective the San Francisco city government is. (Maybe I am just biased by the FBI investigations of a significant number of city council members?)
Anyways, my thanks to the League of Women Voters of Dallas for getting some information about the candidates out there. I'm hoping that tomorrow evening is a happy one...
November 05, 2006
Things that annoy me about Google Reader
After a couple of weeks trying out Google Reader these are the things I am finding annoying:
- Can't count past 100.
- Sidebar occasionally gets out of sync with main pane and doesn't update properly.
- Can't view starred items by category/feed - it is a global list.
- The scrolling-marks-items-as-read has a bug when you read a long feed, then click on a short feed: the main pane stays scrolled down, and any short items will be marked as read.
- Clicking on the "Mark all as read" link for a feed makes the items disappear, whereas clicking on the "Mark as read" for an individual item just makes it scroll to the next.
- Doesn't handle certain & characters in feed titles properly.
- It can be slow, most noticably when scrolling a long list of items - slowly scroll through 20, when you hit the last one it slowly starts to load the next 20. Maybe it could start at 10 so by the time I get to the 20th item it would have them already?
- If an item consists of a single link, and I click that link, you can mark the item as having been read, instead of forcing me to separately specify it as read. Really, I won't mind.
- Not providing a specific time associated with each item.
- I wish I could have the built-in mp3 player for enclosures open in a popup window, so I could play something and keep browsing around to other feeds/groups. To be fair, Bloglines has this problem, too.
Annoying enough to go back to Bloglines yet? No. Maybe I am still a little too bloglines-influenced in my usage pattern so I keep encoutering bumps in google reader.
UPDATE: Of course, after I finally post this list, some of these have already been fixed. Time to find more, I guess...
November 04, 2006
Movie Review: Marie Antoinette
It was about what I expected: meandering, somewhat sympathetic towards royalty, and ultimately feeling empty. I'm just not sure what the point of this was, other than to show off the costumes, since it was not effective as either a mood piece or as a story or as a character study. The main question to me was, does this movie indicate that Sofia Coppola got lucky with her earlier movies? I liked The Virgin Suicides and I thought Lost in Translation was ok, although that may have mostly been Bill Murray. This just seemed slight, and I am sure there could be some pseudo-philosophical justification of that being the point, but if I have to sit through it for 2 hours I want something more than that.
November 03, 2006
Can we clone fish yet?
Global fishing stocks could collapse by 2048 according to a study led by a marine conservation biologist from Nova Scotia. It seems like a very superficial study - based on global fishing rates over the past 50 years - and also seems a little too evening-news-scary to be discussed on a Nature website. I am sure we need to do a better job conserving resources and protecting the oceanic environment, but it seems like there are some other important factors to consider before predicting the disappearance of sushi. Maybe I used up all my food-disappearance worrying on bananas, which are not probably not going to go extinct anytime soon. Whew.
November 02, 2006
Vonage Retention
I got a Vonage line for work purposes about two years ago. It worked well, the unlimited long distance was nice, and it was very cool to be able to move around my "land line" while I was migrating around the country a bit. Nice!
Unfortunately, this did not last. The quality of the international calls was poor - which made it useless for work with a co-worker in India. Then the U.S. long distance call quality got worse and worse - static, low volume, and lots of drop outs. It did not seem to matter which network or the amount of other network traffic that was going on. Sometimes it would work fine for the first minute, then it would start sucking and never recover. It became useless for any kind of important business calls - it is quite embarrassing to not be able to hear a question directed to you in a conference call!
I held on to the account, mostly for purposes of holding on to my "business" number, but finally decided to not bother going through the number trnsfer process and just cancel the account. Annoyingly, this can only be done via the toll-free number. (I should have called it on their line so they could see how crappy the quality was!) They tried to retain me as a customer, offering:
- A team of technical experts" from the home office to try to fix the quality issues I was facing.
- A free month of service while they were trying to fix the problem.
- A reduced ongoing monthly rate.
I tried to politely decline. I think the basic press story about Vonage is right, though - they are screwed. I just wish I could tell if it were their issue or an ISP trying to reduce competition problem.
My next task, I guess, is to get some new business cards printed with no phone number. Who do I want to talk to on the phone, anyways?
November 01, 2006
National Blog Posting Month
Yes, it is now officially NaBloPoMo, so I am going to try to get back into this blogging thing by posting once per day.
And yes, I am cheating by using this as today's post - I would have included my usual embarrassing costume picture, but I didn't get to dress up this year.