another stupid analogy

There are these people who love ice cream.  No one would argue with them that ice cream is a good thing.  They make ice cream and they encourage people to try ice cream and make ice cream a regular part of everyone’s life.

These proponents of ice cream have been around for a long time – long before ice cream became popular.  In the beginning, various groups emerged everywhere in support for ice cream, eventually getting us to the ice cream loving world we live in today.

However, not all is well.  These various groups feel very strongly about how ice cream should be eaten.  Some purists see using a scoop as the only “correct” way to eat ice cream.  Other purists think that eating straight out of the tub is best, since it’s the fastest and most direct way to consume the ice cream.  Yet another faction insists not only on the use of the scoop, but for a magnificent presentation of the dessert.

In these rough times, ice cream is plentiful, and people generally love ice cream, but there is constant disagreement over the correct way to eat it.  In fact, some people have become so dedicated to promoting their method of eating ice cream that they have little time left to eat ice cream themselves, sometimes letting ice cream melt and go to waste.  Worse still, some people have started eating other cold, refreshing desserts like frozen yogurt.  Oh my!

Thankfully, not everyone is as concerned about all of this.  Most people enjoy having the option of having a cold tasty dessert and see no reason to limit themselves to a particular way of eating ice cream, or any frozen dessert.

Meanwhile, those fervent supporters of spoons, scoops, and sundaes continue to spend a tremendous amount of energy supporting their cause, losing sight of the original intent of their forefathers.  The fight to promote cold tasty desserts has been won, but yet they fight on.

tyres

I knew something maybe wasn’t right when the tires started slipping on level ground.

Something definitely wasn’t right when the car would move forward on level ground only with extreme effort.

Miraculously, we were able to get out of the parking lot, which had a slight uphill ramp to get up to the main road.  After that, it was all downhill.

Thankfully, the brakes did work for the moderate downward slope.  Not so fortunately, they got a FAIL for firmer braking needed for the stop sign at the end of a steeper slope.

Luckily, we weren’t going too fast and the car in front of us wasn’t damaged.  Cars have bumpers for a reason, and 1 5-10mph collision is what they are designed to handle.  Unfortunately, my friend’s car didn’t fare so well. He’s got dents on a few panels up front and a smashed headlight.

Lesson learned?  Next time someone offers to drive despite clearly inclement weather, make sure that they have all season tires.  I went and looked up the OEM tires on the car:
Pirelli PZero Rosso

On the TirerRack page, you’ll notice that there are no ratings for snow or ice traction – reason being this is a summer tire.  Also mentioned on the page: “PZero Rosso tires are not intended to be driven in near-freezing temperatures, through snow or on ice.”

Very nice.  I can see how summer tires are fun, and they probably make the car handle very well during test drives.  However, selling summer tires as standard equipment in areas that get snow seem pretty irresponsible.  In Seattle it makes some sense since we get very little snow here.  However, the same practice goes on in Cleveland and other cold areas – especially with luxury cars or sporty cars.  Then again, car accidents are good for the industry – more repairs, more parts sold, more new cars sold.

almost as dumb, but much more amusing

Google vs. Porn:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=google%2C+porn&ctab=0&geo=us&date=all&sort=1

What’s with the end of year uptick for porn?

For more amusement… check out Ohio: http://www.google.com/trends?q=google%2C+porn&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=usa.oh&date=all&sort=1

dumbest search ever

Clearly I am feeling inspired today.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=1337%2C+l337%2C+l33t&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1

i have a clock!

Back when I retired my Comcast DVR service, the thing that I missed the most was that I no longer had a clock in my living room.  Since then, I have actually gone through the trouble of finding a replacement clock.

In my mind, a simple clock should cost no more than $5, and shouldn’t be needlessly elaborate.  I first tried Target, where there was a Sony clock for something like $15.  Too much.  I then tried Best Buy, where they had the same clock, but for more money.  I clearly was looking in the wrong places.  I later checked out the local hardware/random crap store where they had some cheapo clocks like the one I got in Hong Kong 20 years ago that didn’t even accurately keep time.  $3, but too small and crappy for the living room.  At that point, I basically gave up.

But, as fate would have it, I was destined to find a clock.  As I was coming back up to my apartment after driving home from work (a rare occurrence in itself), I spotted a iPod dock/alarm/radio/clock in the corner that people put the trash that they think other people might want.  I snapped it up and figured I’d give it a shot.  The thing worked, but not surprisingly, wasn’t in perfect operating condition.  One of the speakers wasn’t working.  This must be why it was thrown out in the first place.

So what do I do?  I had the clock that I wanted, complete with dimmer, which is pretty awesome.  But no, I must meddle.  I just *had* to take the thing apart to try to figure out what was wrong with it.  After meddling with the speaker connectors, I came to the conclusion that the speakers worked fine, but for some reason the circuit board wasn’t outputting any audio to the left speaker.  I didn’t see anything visibly wrong with the board, so I cut my losses and decided to make it so that the thing has mono output.  Yes, I know.  It already had mono output so it really makes no difference.  But anyway, a bit of solder later, I had both speakers working.  It actually sounds better, BTW.

OK…  where was I…  I wrote all that while Outlook was searching for some e-mail… Now I’m waiting for my remote computer to do something.

Anyway, the clock is working.  Plus, it has decent speakers so now I can listen to the radio while working from home without having to have both my HTPC and my TV on.  Instead of 200W? I’m running on 15W.  Sweetness.  I also managed to tether it up as a speaker for the HTPC in case I feel like listening to my own music off the comp without wasting the 47” TV.

Back to work!

the western stubby

Top: Western Stubby (4oz.)
Bottom: Elgin style (4oz.)

a year ago…

http://blog.paulip.com/2008/03/day-12.html

Maybe I should get around to posting all of my Egypt photos.

workout routine

For last week and this week:

Monday: Gym
Tuesday: Ski
Wednesday:  Bike
Thursday: Bike
Friday: Bike

comments on the new facebook

I have 451 friends, well above the 120 friend average, so I’m not the “typical” user… although I may be the typical content creator that helps keep a bunch of typical users engaged.  Anyhow…  here goes.

1. Too much news.  Sure, I check facebook waaaaay too often, but having the News Feed only capturing the last 4 hours of activity is not cool.  I may check facebook frequently during the day, but that does not mean I want an entirely new page of content to look at every time.  A handful of new items each time is all I want.  Thanks.
2. Highlights are worthless.  Why?  Because they position the content before the contact.  There’s no easy way to scan through it.  I need to keep jumping from picture to subject to creator.  It takes me way too much effort to figure out which are photo albums or what the photos contained in are.  Yes, videos have the play icon, photo albums have the photo border, but none of these pass the squint test.  They all look the same dammit.
3. The photos in the News Feed are distracting.  They draw my attention away from the content.

seattle weather is wonderful

No, no sarcasm there. I honestly like the weather out here.  The only thing is that no one seems to believe me. Subjectively I feel that it’s better since I feel like I see a lot more sun out here than I would back home.  Even on cloudy days here (like today) it’s fairly bright and the clouds are often patchy enough that the sun would poke through at one point or another.  The hills and the water help to highlight this effect by making it easier to see breaks in the clouds miles away (as in 50 miles away).  The sun may not be shining on me, but it’s nice to know that it’s shining somewhere nearby.  Temperature-wise, I’m OK with the cooler climate, especially since I like to do active activities outdoors.  No sweating if I bike up Capitol Hill!  And it’s cold enough that there’s snow in the mountains so I can ski, plus the occasional snow in the city for the sake of variety.

Objectively, I’ve looked at the climate data and it has told me that Cleveland and Seattle have the same number of sunny/cloudy days.  I looked at this data back in 2007 and I can’t seem to find it again.  What I could find was a different set of reports:

Cleveland
Seattle

You can find data for your area here.  Note that the Cleveland data is from the airport, which is on the west side which gets less clouds, rain, and snow.  The Seattle data is from Seatac airport which gets more rain and clouds because the city of Seattle itself is more in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains.  In other words, it’s biased against my argument that Seattle’s weather is better than Cleveland’s.

Precipitation:
Seattle – 150 days/year
Cleveland – 157 days/year (+7 days)

Heavy precipitation (>0.5”)
Seattle – 21 days/year
Cleveland – 23 days/year (+2 days)

Needlessly hot days (High >90F)
Seattle – 3 days/year
Cleveland – 9 days/year (+6 days)

Comfy days (High >50F, <90F)
Seattle – 278 days/year
Cleveland – 231 days/year (-47 days…  a month and a half less!)

Freeze days (Low <32F…  not that I really care)
Seattle – 30 days/year
Cleveland – 120 days/year (+90 days… or 3 months)

Days with snow on the ground (not that I personally mind snow)
Seattle – 4 days/year
Cleveland – 53 days/year

On a side note, Seattle gets an average of 5.7 days of snow a year.  That hardly justifies investing in a large fleet of vehicles to manage snowfall.  For weird winters like this, just deal with it.  I’d rather spend that money on a new 520 bridge.

flight stats

As I've mentioned before, the age of American Airlines' planes have been concerning me. On top of that, I just booked another set of flights on AA. To make myself feel better about that, I decided to look up some info on the safety of planes. Boeing put together a pretty nice and easy to follow report here:

http://www.boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf
(and if you want to look at some official numbers, check here)

So the DC-8x that I'll be flying on is probably ancient (most likely over 20 years old), but at least the model has a decent safety record. Domestic airlines have a decent safety record as well. Still, if AA fixed the dent on that jet I saw last weekend they might be getting some better fuel economy.

$6.30 at msft

we have some weather

On the flight over to New York on Friday the pilot indicated that there would be some rough skies as we pass through “the weather.”  I’m on the flight back to Seattle right now and the pilot just came on to tell us to fasten our seat belts as we “have some weather” as we head into Seattle.  Last time I checked, there is always weather.  Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s bad.  Granted, I find lazy shorthand ways of speaking useful, but it’s interesting to see the devolution (or evolution?) of language as we use it.

 

A year or two ago I was watching some sports commentary and one of the commentators was going on a small rant about how people no longer say that players have injuries.  Instead, body parts are listed.  “Player X has a groin,” or “Player Y has a hip,” never citing the fact that there was any injury.  Of course the player has a hip!

 

Oh, and happy birthday to PMA!

wfp

Work from plane.  Yes, it’s my first time.  I’m having a fun time going over research and mulling over some threads that sprouted from TechFest 2009, the equivalent of a tech science fair within Microsoft.  There was a bunch of cool stuff there.  Some of it was directly relevant to what I’m doing for work, while some of it was just cool in its own right.

I haven’t decided whether to officially take a holiday day for today.  It’s left to how much work I actually do today.  I’ve done some e-mails, reviewed some research papers, and done some nice long term thinking using some analogies I’ve been developing.  I love analogies, especially stupid and ridiculous ones that happen to work.

The most recent thread that I’m thinking about is to tackle an agency problem.  There something that we would like to do, but we resist doing it because of social norms or awkwardness.  Wouldn’t it be great if someone could just step in with some fake (or real authority), act as decider, and let you out of the bind?  It’s the reason why people make fake excuses to get out of things, or use luck as a arbiter – to put the decision on some external factor so that we don’t have to take the blame.

And Vatsal, when I said I couldn’t help you move this weekend because I was out of town, I was telling the truth.  Either that, or I’m constructing an elaborate lie using facebook, twitter, and my blog.  Helping you move would be easier. (-:

flock you

Checking out the blog editor in Flock.  It has an eerie resemblance to Windows Live Writer.  Maybe it's the tabs at the bottom with nearly identical names, or the bar at the bottom for entering tags.  Hrm....  Windows Live Writer does appear to be less buggy though.  Looking at the source, this thing is generating some odd HTML.

The "WYSIWYG" editor makes me think the first paragraph is in some default font and this current paragraph is in my preferred Trebuchet font.  The HTML says the opposite.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

hands on activities

Last night I was wondering what I felt like doing, and I felt like doing some hands on activities.  Unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything that I could do at the time.

Today, I woke up, ate some crumpets (cheaper and better than English muffins), and biked down to the Hop In Grocery to see how long it would take me to get there if I started taking the Connector bus shuttle to Microsoft.  It took me about 10 minutes, so it seems like it would be comparable to what I’m getting now taking the regular connector.  Granted, it’s all downhill.  Since I timed myself going down, I figured I might as well time myself coming back up.

The last time I biked up to my place from Montlake, it sucked.  After playing 2-3 hours of ultimate frisbee, an uphill climb of 400+ feet is just not that fun.  I had a much easier time going up today – that is, until I discovered that my rear tire had gone completely flat.  I guess that was the kind of hands on activity I was looking for.

Now that I have some good daylight in my apartment, I can repair the bike, maybe tune my skis (the edges are in desperate need of some filing), and at some point perhaps replace the dome light in my car.

measurement fail: comscore

I've been spending some quality time figuring out how to get accurate external measurements on various Web properties. ComScore was the alleged solution, given it's the standard way that everyone gets data on market penetration and everything. They've got the data, they've got the tools, and they do the classification that makes the tools fairly simple to use.

Maybe I'm a methodology nazi, but I always try to understand where the numbers come from. It didn't take too much looking to see that the "social networking" category was a complete shit show. I think Facebook, MySpace, Hi5. ComScore thinks Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace, Facebook. OK. Fine. I guess blogs are "social" in a way too. But let's look deeper.

In addition to blogs, I noticed a ton of what I consider "content" sites. Some examples are Gawker sites (Gawker, Gizmodo, FleshBot, etc.), TechCrunch, and ChicagoBreakingNews.com. I guess these all started as blogs, but with paid reporting staffs and advertisements I think it places sites like that closer to news or media sites. Both feature content that someone gets paid to write. It's like saying the Wall Street Journal is a social networking site because people write content and the readers can leave comments. I respectfully and vehemently disagree with this view.

Then there are the notable exceptions. Certain well known local social networking sites aren't included - sites like Mixi, which is huge in Japan. One notable exception that you've probably heard of is Twitter. That's right. ComScore doens't consider Twitter social media. To me, Twitter seems much more social than reading news articles on TechCrunch. So how is Twitter categorized by comScore? According to comScore, Twitter is a "Instant Messenger" service. IM as I know it does private one to one communication in real time. Twitter does public one to many communication not in real time. Almost polar opposites.

What are these guys on?

your mom

So as part of work I've been creating some accounts on various Web sites so that I can try them out. Considering the number of these I'll be making over time, I've created a fake e-mail address and identity for these fake accounts.

For some reason I decided to go with the name "Your Mom." Clearly fake and also amusing. This morning I checked the e-mail for that account and discovered that reunion.com sends out e-mails for whenever anyone on their site searches for you. In less than 24 hours three people have already searched for "Your Mom" on reunion.com. I'm amused.

i miss comcast cable

I didn't think this would happen, but a few days after getting my Comcast cable canceled, I'm beginning to realize that the Comcast DVR was a bit more important to me than I thought. The main thing I miss about it was the clock. I didn't realize it until I took the DVR out that I constantly check the time on it. Now, when I look over to check the time, I just see empty space. Maybe I should go buy a clock.

On another note, I just realized that I haven't updated my profile on blogger for a while. The only things updated were my city and the removal of some items that weren't supposed to be displayed in the first place. Note to self: don't use a blog as a real journal or scratchpad, even though being able to e-mail stuff to it is awesome.

t1000 and the motorola dvr

These items are completely unrelated.

I just watched the ending of T2: Judgment Day, and the more I’ve had to think about this the more incompetent the T1000 is.  It could have done so much more.

I think the problem stems from the fact that the the T1000 was an evolution of the terminator series of cyborgs that were designed to infiltrate the resistance by posing as humans.  The T1000 was great at that, but I think it could have been much more effective if the creators re-thought the Terminator’s MO.  The old terminators had to masquerade as people because that was the only way they could insert a killing machine into a mass of unsuspecting humans.  Something smaller and less intrusive wouldn’t have the firepower, and anything that was big enough wouldn’t be able to get into the bases without such a trick.  The T1000, on the other hand, had a host of other options if the machines had the same creative thinking abilities as humans.

The T1000’s liquid metal alloy may have been designed for better cloaking by giving the T1000 the ability to take the form of any person.  Great.  They also found that the T1000 could hide by becoming a floor of some other object, as seen in the metal facility where the lucky guard met the T1000 at the coffee machine (so lucky he got a full house).  Why couldn’t the T1000 do this as its primary attack?  My only explanation is that then it wouldn’t be a terminator in the classic sense.  The T1000 almost seemed obligated to return to its human form.  Because of this identity crisis, the T1000 constantly went around as a human, complete with all of the strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths are the ability to gather information from people.  This was key in finding John Connor.  Weaknesses are all the limitations when trying to kill John Conner, Sarah Connor, and the Terminator.  For some reason the T1000 stuck to it’s human form.  When trying to find its targets in the factory, it walked around as a cop.  Why not just melt into the floor and seek them out, then jump out of nowhere and stab all of them at once.  Easy!  But no.  The T1000 seems to think that the only way to get credit for the kill is to do it as a human and using as little of its advantage as possible.  I blame the machines for programming it this way.

Another thing is that the didn’t program some unique escape or pursuit tactics for the T1000.  It runs after cars.  It can’t escape from tight situations like being in a molten pit or a pool of liquid nitrogen.  All the T1000 needs to do is have the equivalent of “Go go gadget arms,” reach out, grab something, and then haul itself immediately away from danger.  Jokes.

OK.  On to the crappy Comcast DVR from Motorola.  For those at Comcast reading this, recall that there was this open source DVR product called Myth TV that was available years ago (and still is).  Thanks to Greg, I was using MythTV back before I went back to school.  It was great.  It did the same recording of programs as the Motorola DVD does, but it did it so much better.

First of all, Myth TV is responsive.  The Motorola/Comcast DVR is not.  Yes, the Comcast box with its latest software is better than what it was before, but it’s still a joke.  Remember back when we had slow computers and the designers took that into account?  It seems like people these days assume that the devices we use have ample power to respond instantaneously so they don’t worry about this.  The end result is that we press buttons and it takes the device seconds to respond.  This might be acceptable for web pages (although less so), but it is completely unacceptable for hardware and client software.  Sure, it’s OK to make us wait.  We did this happily for years as we dealt with modems, floppy drives, and slow CPUs.  That’s why we have progress bars a dialog boxes – to tell the user that the system has recognized your input and will get back to you.  The Motorola DVR and the iPhone fail to do this, and it pisses me off to no end.  As the Motorola guy or the iPhone guy, you may be thinking “gee, if we put in these things, it would make the experience hell.  Who would want a DVR/phone that gives them confirmation when they press a button?”  I ask you, who would want a phone or DVR where they can’t tell if they presses a button or not.  The iPhone was great at this at the beginning with the nice transitions between screens.  I loved that since that’s a great way of letting me know that the input is accepted and making me wait without making me wait.  Nowadays I need to wait a few seconds to get that animation.  To that I ask, “WTF?”

My second gripe is that the Motorola DVR doesn’t have great playback features.  I really miss the automatic skipping of commercials offered by Myth TV.  With that I can just sit back and watch a 1 hour show in 40 minutes (literally!).  With the other great MythTV feature of watching playback at an accelerated speed, I could watch that 40 minutes of TV in 35 minutes.  60 minutes of regular TV condensed into 35 minutes.  I may actually start watching more TV!

Lastly, the Motorola DVR just sucks at managing the recordings.  After getting the complete recordings of Seinfeld, I no longer needed to have all those episodes on the DVR.  Is there an easy (or at least easy to discover) way to delete an entire series of recording?  No.  (And as I like to say at work, if a feature isn’t discoverable, it doesn’t exist)  Instead, I need to manually delete them all.  This means:

1. Press down to an episode for Seinfeld
2. Press OK
3. Right press to the delete button.
4. Press OK
5. Press OK to confirm
6. Wait for a second wondering if it recognized my second OK
7. If the confirmation box is still there, press OK again and go back to the previous step
8. Go back to step one and repeat 50 times or so

Reading that list of steps probably takes as long as it does to delete one recording.  Imagine doing that 50 times.  If you don’t have an active imagination, just read the list 50 times.

My final gripe is more about my TV or HDMI, so Comcast, don’t take this personally.  To switch HDMI inputs on my TV it takes 5-10 seconds.  This gets annoying if I want to watch a DVD and then switch back to the news or something.

My plan is to just use this new PC.  I can watch movies from it.  I can stream all the shows I watch online (except for King 5 News).  I can listen to music on it.  I can type this blog entry on it. (-:  And I can do all of this without having to deal with poor responsiveness or switching inputs on my TV – plus I don’t have to pay for cable, although it seems that Comcast is perfectly willing to give me cable TV for free.  How about just give me cable for a lower price so I don’t start actively thinking about Clearwire or FiOS?