Edificial Intelligence

Misty, water-colored memories...

2006-12-08T22:39:00.000-06:00

Found this in the archives over at Wired :

Date: Wed 12/20/2000 2:22 PM
From: Jonathan Harber (jharber@fundsxpress.com)
To: newsfeedback@wired.com
Subject: Happy Holidays ... You're Fired

Regarding the subject story, I find it hard to believe anyone is surprised. ("Happy Holidays ... You're Fired," Dec. 18, 2000) Through 1998 and 1999, many 20-somethings with little experience, basic skills and self-important attitudes demanded super-inflated salaries (not to mention sports cars and other stuff) relative to their skills and experience.
Many dot-coms with no real business plans hired these often spoiled brats when they had lots of money and catered to their every whim thinking the money would last forever and it didn't. Now these youngsters will have to start low and work their way up just like everyone else. This is a direct result of wishing for castles in the air.
Successful businesses have followed plans that slowly and prudently build revenue streams for 200 years and will continue to do so by rewarding quality products and solid business plans rather than catering to a culture that supports the opposite. The dot-coms that have dried up have done so because they had weak plans, offices that were too fancy, perks that were too expensive, and compensation packages that were too greedy. This result was inevitable.

Ahhh...the memories.

Note to the unwashed masses: Fundsxpress is a company I used to work for (along with some other folks), back in my heady, code-slinging days of yore. Still, having been one of the ones with the inflated salaries (I declined on the sports car...I'm not greedy, dammit!), I really did like the irony of the above post considering that FX back in the heyday was neither slowly, nor prudently building revenue streams.

Goes, back to that old gamblers maxim, "If you've been at the table for twenty minutes and can't figure out who the patsy is, get out. You're the patsy."

Oslo Gay Animal Show...it's SUPER, thanks for ASKING!

2006-10-22T00:39:00.000-05:00

You know, I find it REALLY funny (but not surprising) that there has been opposition to the Oslo Gay Animal Exhibit. I mean, it sure does hurt the fundamentalist argument that homosexuality is a choice, not a genetic trait, when:

homosexuality has been observed among 1,500 species, and that in 500 of those it is well documented.

Still, you've got to give those true believers credit, to tenaciously cling to their views in the face of mounting evidence (pun intended...BA DUM BUM!) requires some strong faith...or rampant stupidity...or both.

Maybe they can just crawl under their bed with the flashlight, bedecked in their Armor of God PJs (thanks Matt!) and pray for the Rapture to come.

Carmen Electra and the Law of Attraction

2006-10-22T00:11:00.000-05:00

I was in CVS today buying some playing cards when I spied the latest copy of Us Weekly and started flipping thru it. This magazine is like a Hollywood train wreck in print form. After reading about the horrors of Tara Reid's botched plastic surgeries and the life lessons she learned, I spied this awesome quote from Carmen Electra, erstwhile "Strip Aerobics" instructor and physics hobbyist:

I'm really into quantum physics. Some of my friends are into it, some of them aren't, so I'm trying to get them excited about discovering all these interesting things about thoughts and the power of thoughts.

It gives me chills thinking about it. It's fun.

It's about time celebrities started endorsing active participation in science and encouraging the younger generation to get interested in learning. And while I imagine that Richard Feynman would've been a big fan of Carmen's ability to tone her body thru the high impact art of striptease, he might take exception to her implicit definition of quantum physics in the above quote.

Quantum physics is a seriously complex topic, one that I admittedly have a very weak grasp on. However, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the "power of thoughts." I would suggest Ms. Electra consider taking some courses at the local university to brush up on her understanding of physics. While I'm sure she will be bored by the rudimentary Newtonian physics models she will be forced to study in the beginning of her educational journey, she will get to study quantum models soon enough. And when she does advance to that point, she will have learned enough to realize just how stupid the above quote was.

Tags: carmen+electra quantum+physics skeptic woo+woo

The Following is NOT a Drill...

2006-10-11T21:02:00.000-05:00

After making a public promise to post more I find myself falling down on the job. The last post was made over a month ago. Sheesh! A lot of stuff has been going on here, work has been very busy, and I've had several guests in from out of town over the last few weeks that have kept me away from my little corner of the web.

This week my son and wife are out of town, leaving me to wonder how I stood the quiet of my apartment back in the days when I was single. Though the quiet was a little disconcerting at first, I have to admit there was a certain thrill I felt when I sat down and read for two hours straight on Monday with no interruptions or pressing matters.

I've decided that quiet time is definitely something that needs to be put into the schedule every once in awhile.

Logical Fallacies Explained

2006-09-10T12:16:00.000-05:00

I haven't found a better explanation of common logical fallacies than this one, therefore, this link is the best explanation EVAH! (Argument from Ignorance) (found via reddit)

Steve's collecting more attention

2006-09-09T22:55:00.000-05:00

Apparently, another person has started wondering about Steve Pavlina's grasp on reality. It'll be interesting to see where the "Is Steve Delusional?" blog goes as it develops.

As I've said before, the burden of proof is on the claimant, and so far all I've heard in response to my request for proof is the sound of crickets chirping in the distance.

American Education is Alive and Well!

2006-09-02T11:19:00.000-05:00

Me: "I'd like a gallon and a half of paint please."
Guy at the Register (GATR): "We don't sell half gallons; we only have gallon and quart cans of paint."
Me: "Okay give me a gallon and two quarts of paint."

Methinks someone should have paid a bit more attention to rudimentary fractions in math class as a child.

Tags: math humor consumerism

Subjective Universe

2006-08-27T21:24:00.000-05:00

Well, I got sick of the general lack of results that my silly objectivist worldview was getting me, so I took Steve's suggestion and started adopting a subjectivist mentality! The results have been outstanding! For instance, I saw this video on psipog.net and got all inspired to practice my psychic skills. I tried and tried and tried and nothing happened. Then I tried one last time and was able to produce this video:

Actually, that's not exactly how it happened. First, I saw the video and thought, "Gee, that looks an awful lot like a magic trick I learned in high school." Then I set up said magic trick and filmed it. And unlike the sample video I do it with the top of the glass in full view. Of course, psipog, the investigatory powerhouse that it is, states on the media page:

Everyone knows that videos and pictures can be faked - please do not go around saying how you think something was faked, there are literally hundreds of ways to fake the files below. With that said; they aren't fake. But draw your own conclusions.

Okay, so my conclusion? They're fakes. By the way, the music in the video is relevant to this post. First person to name the song in the comments section wins my love and respect. Matt's probably most likely to get it.

Tags: skeptic psychic+powers psipog bullshit

Rifftrax: Fifth Element and More!

2006-08-20T23:12:00.000-05:00

Mike Nelson has been busy over at rifftrax and has just released his take on The Fifth Element along with Star Trek V: The Undiscovered Country! Go download it now!

Tags: rifftrax fifth+element startrekv

The Church of Steve Pavlina

2006-08-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

Update: I've been conversing with Steve via email (my initiation, not his...I point that out because I don't want to give the impression that he is being critical of any of this article). He's decided to not submit himself to the JREF challenge (he points to this blog entry for his reasoning), but has provided some more background information on the college graduation. Apparently, he graduated from CSUN with his double major, and served as President of the Association of Shareware Professionals in 2000. I've informed him that any proof he (or anyone else) provides for the claims I bring up in this article will be posted. My goal here is to seek the truth in this matter. The article will stand as originally written with new evidence appearing in updates such as this.

One of the sites that I read quite frequently is lifehacker. I think it's a great site with lots of cool software, tips, and tricks that are great ways to maintain organization, simplify processes, and generally learn about interesting things. Lots of great DIY projects to suck up free time as well.

One of the core sites that they seem to refer back to again and again is Steve Pavlina's weblog. They've featured articles on how he works, how he gave up coffee, and how he gets up early, among others. Steve is a bit of a productivity, self-improvement guru, who has taken a whole host of self-help, feel-good, nonsense from a variety of sources, rolled it together, repackaged it, and made it his own.

Via lifehacker, I kept getting sucked into poking around Steve's website and finding myself amazed at the outrageous claims that he would make. He is, as lifehacker describes him, a "prolific productivity writer and entrepreneur." On his site he describes himself as "intensely growth oriented," and his website is subtitled as "Personal Development for Smart People".

The Mythology of Steve
Steve makes some pretty wild claims about his life, many that I find hard to believe. For instance, he claims, through the application of incredible focus and discipline, to have graduated from college with a double major in a mere three semesters! He claims to have taken 30+ hours a semester, worked a full-time job his last year, and served as the head of the local computing organization, while maintaining a 3.9 GPR and having adequate time to socialize, do errands and housekeeping duties as well. While all of this was going on he, "continued reading time management material and applying what [he] learned, but [he] also devised some original ideas."

He also talks about triaging course work and refusing to do assignments, not showing up to classes he thought were worthless, and a whole host of far-fetched ideas that sound great on the surface, but definitely don't seem applicable if you intend to get a 3.9+ GPR. He then goes on to give conflicting advice, like, "During one of these sacred time blocks, do nothing but the activity that's right in front of you," only to be followed by "the best way I know to keep up is to multitask whenever possible." He caveats this by saying that multitasking should not be used where it will "degrade performance," but it should be used on low level tasks. But then he goes on to talk about taking advantage of dead class time and working on other class assignments during boring lectures, and also instantly memorizing all material presented the first time through.

All of this advice on the surface, by itself, sounds like it should be plausible to implement. But it fails in the same way that most self-help fails; it's full of non-actionable platitudes. For instance, how do I go about determining which classes to blow off and which to attend, at the beginning of a semester when I know nothing about the teacher, their exam preferences, or even the skill level of the rest of the class (which determines the grade curve)? How do I instantly memorize new material the first time through so I don't have to read outside of class? These are just a few instances of a series of problems like this.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence
On the surface the list of accomplishments sounds impressive (the college thing being just one of them). However, there is no evidence of any of this being true. Steve claims to make about $9000/month from his website via ads, donations, and other services, and claims that it is not his only source of income. There is no proof of this other than his word. How about a scan of a few monthly Google Ad-Sense checks? Or a tax return for the web business if it's broken out into a separate company?

Even if he doesn't want to publish his income figures, how about backing up some of the other claims? A college transcript would be a good start, since that usually breaks down what semesters you took what courses. Even the name of his college where he got his degrees would be helpful. How about one of those "glowing letters of recommendations" he received from his professors, or even a copy of his "student of the year" award that he mentions? At this point, anything would be a good start.

Pavlina provides nothing other than his word, which becomes more and more suspect as you stroll through the site.

Multiple Sources of Income
One of the many sources of income that Pavlina taps into is his wife, Erin's, "intuitive reading services." For $45 you can email Erin up to three questions, along with a photo, and she will use her psychic abilities to answer them. My first question is, why do you need a photo? For $90 you can talk to Erin for 20-30 minutes over the phone and she will provide intuitive readings in which she can give you more in-depth information and allow you to ask follow-on questions. Her specialty is helping you see "where you're at on your life path and where your guides would like you to be going." Steve claims to have these abilities as well, but decided not to pursue it as a career himself. Something about spirit guides telling him it wasn't his destiny or something.

As is common with the self-help gurus, Steve and his wife have bought into and promote a wide variety of psychic nonsense, from intuitive readings, psychokinesis, astral projection, herbal remedies, qi gong, communication with the dead, lucid dreaming, and intention manifestation (if you think it, it will come).

The Death of Skepticism?
All of this nonsense has been getting more apparent on the personal productivity site that Steve runs. He details the results of a spirituality seminar he and his wife attended and then explains why his wife has started charging for her services. His recent articles "The Death of Skepticism" and "The Law of Attraction" are examples of more of this woo-wooism.

I was quite amazed by the "Death of Skepticism" post. Being an unabashed skeptic myself, and being a living being, I have to say, "reports of my death have been greatly exagerrated." Once I got over the shock of the title, I read through the article and was absolutely amazed at the shoddy thinking rampant throughout. I've dissected it below because I think it's a decent example of faulty logic.

Pavlina starts out by saying:

Skepticism is the mindset that says, “I’ll believe it when I see it… and even then I’ll still have doubts.”

This is a straw-man argument, essentially Pavlina redefines skepticism so that it will be easier to attack and argue against convincingly. In truth, skepticism is the belief that knowledge is obtained through observation, testing, and the gathering of empirical evidence (data points), and drawing conclusions from that evidence. You ignore things like what you see, hear, or feel, and pay attention to what you can measure and record. People tell stories, see false patterns, and hear strange noises and draw erroneous conclusions all the time.

The best example of how a skeptic operates I can give is one of Bayesian probability. If I flip a coin without letting you examine it and I flip heads, do you instantly think I have a two-headed coin? Probably not.

What if I flip 3 heads in a row? You're probably still not worried.

What about 25 heads in a row? Not impossible, but improbable enough that you'd want to examine the coin. Closely.

You would not, without examining the coin, publish an article about how the laws of probability are bunk, or the person tossing the coin is controlling the coin with his mind, or how the coin toss is affected by life affirmations! But that is essentially what Steve is doing when he talks about the effects of his lucid dreaming, his thought channeling, and all the other nonsense he goes on about.

He goes on...

The basic idea of skepticism is that you should doubt that for which you’ve seen little or no evidence. Apparently it’s cool to be a doubter these days. Plus it’s always easy to poke holes in someone else’s beliefs from the outside looking in.

Ahh...here Pavlina attacks the establishment and uses the Underdog Fallacy to gain sympathy. Those cold, unfeeling scientists with their instruments and test tubes can't possibly have the requisite positive spiritual energy alignment to see what I've seen. How can they comprehend the grandeur of the universe? By implying that it's cool to be a doubter (he provides no evidence of this one way or another), he is insinuating that the popular vote is not always the right vote. This is absolutely correct, but it's also not always the wrong vote, either. As a matter of fact, popularity has nothing to do with truth one way or the other.

The problem with most skeptics though is that they don’t take skepticism far enough. If you want to be a true skeptic, then you also need to be skeptical about skepticism.

Fair enough. Let's get skeptical about skepticism. What has skepticism given us? Well, for one it's allowed us to understand basic principles of physics, which has allowed us to put a man on the moon. It's allowed us to understand the underlying principles of genetics, and do pre-natal screens for diseases like Down's Syndrome, it's given us vaccines to cure diseases like smallpox, and drug cocktails that are helping people with AIDS and a whole host of other great things. Furthermore, it's given us a framework to determine if some of the traditional remedies like homeopathy, magnet therapy, psychic communion, feng shui, numerology, and chiropracty actually work. It's also helped us analyze newer types of psuedoscience like perpetual motion and alien abduction to see whether these things are true. We can look at the statistics behind psychic surgery and determine whether it's effective. Same thing with reflexology and magnet therapy. How about the power of prayer? Yup, we can measure that too.

So now that we're done being skeptical about skepticism, let's turn the same critical eye on things Steve endorses. Studies on life affirmations and goal setting? Turns out the only study these gurus refer to over and over turns out to be a myth.

If the universe was truly influenced by my thoughts, but I believed it wasn’t, then I’d be using subjectivity to manifest objectivity. So I had to know – was the universe really objective, or was I manifesting the illusion of objectivity in a subjective universe?

Unfortunately, testing for subjectivity is an oxymoron. You can’t actually test for a subjective universe.

Actually, you can, and it's really easy to do. Simply take a survey of a large enough sample of people and have them make intentions, or pray, or consult psychic advisors and compare their results to people who don't do this stuff and measure their results against people striving for the same goals and not praying, etc. A simple test like a series of coin flips should be sufficient. You'll find what the rest of us have found, random chance is a much better predictor than any intentions you may have.

The whole idea of testing implies doubt, and doubt will corrupt the test if the universe really is subjective

By this logic, subjectivity would appear to be a waste of time anyway. If the universe is truly subjective, than all physical laws should be able to be repealed at a moment's notice provided the will directing them is strong enough. By this same extension, it should logically follow that the stronger subjective will would win in a contest of two subjective universe participants with diametrically opposed intentions. In short, if you and I flip a coin and I will it to be heads and you will it to be tails, the stronger will should prevail in a subjective universe. So if a subjective universe proponent goes up against an objective universe proponent in an experimental test, the one who has the most will should win. In short, subjectivites should be influencing the tests in their favor. The negative naysayers should be getting proved wrong time and again, because they're not intentionally manifesting anything. Even if they were, I've got to imagine the chi-wielding, feng shui focusing, psychic communing powerhouses of the world would be shutting them down. But they don't. Ever. No controlled study has ever been done that has found in favor of a subjective universe where intentions can be manifested through thought alone. So this means either the universe is objective, or it's subjective and all us objectivites are putting a perpetual aura of objectivism out there that's precluding all attempts of subjectivity anyway. Sorry to be harshing your mellow, Steve! But either way, for all intents and purposes the universe becomes objective!

Ultimately skepticism is rooted in fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being gullible. Fear of living foolishly.

This is an appeal to sympathy. You don't want to live in fear, do you? Skepticism is full of fear. Don't believe in skepticism!

Actually, I find skepticism to be incredibly enlightening and fascinating. We have the capability to split atomic particles; we live in a universe where an incredibly complex strand of amino acids plays a major role in determining our height, weight, eye color, and even our daily emotions and responses, and replicates millions of times a day without error due to basic universal principles; where simple processes of natural selection and evolution have led to the rise of a wide diversity of life, from humans to wasps that make cockroaches into zombies.

I personally find this much more satisfying than the concept that putting my sofa in a different corner of my living room will align my spirit energy. Or the crazy notion that angels sit on my shoulder and whisper thoughts into my head.

I would think that if I believed in a subjective universe, and the universe was really objective, then my ability to function should decrease.

This statement is erroneous on so many levels. Putting the argument from incredulity aside, the most obvious problem is that it is drawing a false premise. If the universe is objective, and I believe in a subjective world-view, than I should make mistakes that should hinder my success. The last part of the sentence doesn't follow from the first. Logically, it's a non-sequitur. Being wrong does not denote failure to achieve goals implicitly, you could have a string of good luck, you could be doing things that are beneficial in both a subjective and objective universe. Certain things, like hard work, for example, can be beneficial in both instances. Also, people win in Vegas all the time. Most just don't have much luck making a career out of it.

Or you could do what most self-help gurus do and redefine failure as postponed success, and claim that the failure made you grow into some future success that will come down the pipe. For example, Tony Robbins gave relationship advice about how to maintain a committed relationship that was full of passion, love, and romance. Then, he got a divorce and claimed that now that he had gone through the pain of a divorce and the success of finding a new life partner he was truly ready to give people the final word on...how to create a really successful relationship full of passion, love, and romance. Same goes for Wayne Dyer. It's a classic case of heads I win, tails you lose.

Finally, your subjective worldview could cause you to make money in an objective world off people by convincing them to pay you for your brand of nonsense. But really, when you factor in all the self-help drivel that Steve is paying to read, all the seminars he attends dealing with angels, and psychic friends, and magical spirits, and the like, he IS coming out behind. That is lost income, lost time, and lost effort that could be put to more productive use elsewhere.

Steve then goes on to outline his "intelligent alternative to skepticism." Since he's done so well in redefining skepticism for his own uses earlier in the article, he continues doing so.

A skeptic is concerned about the probabilities of success vs. failure in any endeavor. For example, before a skeptic starts his/her own business, lots of questions must be answered to alleviate fear and doubt. How well are other people doing in this industry? Do I have enough money? How will I support myself? What if it doesn’t work? Am I good enough? What are my chances of success?

My experience with skeptics is that they are less concerned with success or failure and more concerned with truth versus fantasy. Plenty of skeptics have businesses. Einstein wasn't particularly concerned with popularity, neither was Richard Feynman. As for business enterprises, Harry Houdini, James "The Amazing" Randi, and Penn & Teller have all had successful careers and would be what one could define as entrepreneurs by the classic definition. They weren't too concerned with failure when they started with no money, many times performing shows on the streets for a few dollars while they were establishing themselves.

An Open Challenge to Mr. Pavlina
It is quite possible that Mr. Pavlina and his wife are sincere in their beliefs that they have these amazing psychic gifts despite the fact that these types of phenomenon have never been manifested under controlled experimental conditions. Ever.

Another of Steve's main interests is the $1 Million Experiment. Essentially, you sign on for free and then use daily affirmations to, as Napoleon Hill would say, "think and grow rich." The end goal is for everyone who signs up to manifest their way to $1 million dollars, including Steve. Think of it as a combination of Stuart Smalley and Dave Chappelle; "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggone it, I'M RICH BEEYOTCH!"

Well, I've got a great way for Pavlina to fulfill his $1 million manifestation, put the final nail in the coffin of skepticism, and prove these psychic gifts exist. The JREF Million Dollar Challenge! That's right Steve, for a measly couple of hours of your time, you and your wife can undertake a controlled experiment, with a previously agreed upon protocol, put your psychic abilities to the test and walk out with a cool million bucks for your trouble. Not bad, huh? Here's what you need to do to apply.

By the way, if Steve gets another chance to talk to Sylvia Browne again, he may want to ask her how she's coming along on getting ready to take the JREF Million Dollar Challenge. Then again, he may want to keep quiet since she might get to the prize money before he or his wife does. But I doubt it.

Tags: steve+pavlina self+help sham psuedoscience skepticism sylvia+browne

Criss Angel is totally Mindfreaked over this!

2006-08-18T00:46:00.000-05:00

This is the most awesome magic I have ever seen. Totally. via [JREF Forums]

Tags: magic illusion humor

Overheard in the Office

2006-08-15T00:15:00.000-05:00

To paraphrase Bill Cosby, "Adults say the darnedest things." via [del.icio.us]

Tags: humor quotes funny

Already Slackin'

2006-08-15T00:10:00.000-05:00

Less than a month after I promise to post more, I already start slacking. I have excuses in spades tho. Audrey and I both got food poisoning last week and were put out of commission for a day and a half. Then I had to get caught up at work before the end of the week which killed the rest of my free time.

Finally, Audrey's left out of town and Sean and I are home alone at the "bachelor-pad". Unfortunately, Sean's not at the age where he can appreciate our low-estrogen situation so he makes me spend most of my nights trying to put him to sleep. Normal activity shall resume mid-week (hopefully).

In the meantime check out the Daily Show take on Social Networking.

Tags: humor daily+show

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

2006-08-10T23:05:00.000-05:00

For those of you who have cable and get the FX channel, you should make it a point to watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. This show is the best parts of Seinfeld, Arrested Development, and Cheers all rolled into one...plus Danny DeVito.

Tags: humor comedy tv its+always+sunny+in+philadelphia

The Beauty of Capitalism

2006-08-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

As many of my friends can attest, I am an unabashed fan of all things quirky, offbeat, and off-message. In short, I am drawn to social train-wrecks of all sorts. In college, I would run home from class to watch Jerry Springer every day. I went to Nuevo Laredo to buy a glittery, silver-painted Buddha, because of course, nothing screams Mexican culture like a 2 ft. tall, ceramic Buddha in glitter paint. So when we were in Cancun and my sisters came back from the market and claimed that a large percentage of the tourist T-shirts had nothing to do with Mexico, Cancun, the beach, or tourism in general, I was intrigued.

Venturing down to the market, I laid eyes on what I would consider the penultimate achievement of capitalism and free markets.

The Front
The front of the shirt is innocuous enough, It reads, "Guess Who Just Got A New Daddy" and has a picture of a blond haired face in some sort of helmet/goggle combo. Could be that the man has become some sort of father-figure, and the back will have one of those Tequila Rage/Stupid Teen/Spring Break/ "Girls Gone Wild" type quips on the back. Only upon closer inspection do you realize that the man looks like a real bad caricature of George "Dubya" Bush. What does Dubya have to do with Spring Break, Cancun, or Mexico, you ask? Other than some questions about how he spent his youth, I have no idea. Let's turn the shirt over and find out.

The Back
Flipping the shirt over, we discover that it is a picture of...I need to emphasize this so you can truly appreciate the awesomeness of it all...GEORGE BUSH IN MILITARY GARB GIVING SADDAM A SPANKING WHILE OSAMA LOOKS ON FORLORNLY FROM THE DISTANCE! Aside from the gratuitous asses depicted since both Saddam and Osama have their pants off, I have no idea what this has to do with Cancun. I especially like the hand prints on the rumps of the "bad guys" and the "stars of liberty pain" emanating from their posteriors. Just to let you know that "Dubya" is a tough, but fair, disciplinarian.

The Burning Question
What kind of person dreamt up this shirt? Was it a Mexican with a US-type streak of patriotism? What made them think there was a market for a shirt like this? Of course, I HAD to pick one up! I only wish I had it in time for 4th of July! What a conversation starter!

Imagine, me at an Independence Day BBQ talking to some random person about my shirt:
RANDOM PERSON: So, I see by your shirt that you support the war in Iraq?
ME: Actually, I support spanking as a form of international discipline.
RANDOM PERSON: Huh?
ME: I also support being a daddy! I think there's not enough love in this world. Want to see pictures of my son?

Ahh...good times, good times.

Tags: cancun tshirt funny

Rifftrax Review - No Spoilers

2006-07-28T23:38:00.000-05:00

The wife and I just got thru watching the first rifftrax episode, the send up of Road House, starring Patrick Swayze. Let me start off by summing it up in one word...Hilarious!

Mike Nelson is in top form with the new rifftrax offerings. I honestly think the Road House mp3 was funnier than most of the old MST3k episodes (not as funny as Manos, The Hands of Fate, or Mitchell, but few things are).

The Purchase
The purchase was extremely easy. I basically went to the rifftrax website, clicked on the Road House link in the bottom center of the page and then clicked on the "Buy Now" button where I was whisked to PayPal to complete the transaction. The download came as a zip compressed mp3 file, that I unpacked and loaded into iTunes. The zip package also came with a text file with some simple instructions and a chapter by chapter breakdown of the DVD time and what point in the mp3 file it corresponded to. From there it was on to the iPod and off to the living room for viewing.

The Setup
We watched the DVD on a basic TV and DVD player setup and played the rifftrax mp3 (rifftrack?) on my 10Gb iPod mounted on a Bose iPod Dock behind us. Like the website said, getting the volume levels normalized was pretty painless. We did have an issue syncing up the source and DVD because both my wife and I thought that we were supposed to hit play on the iPod after the MGM lion roared for the second time, but we were supposed to hit play after the first roar. Still, it was apparent fairly quickly so we wasted about thirty seconds rectifying the problem. The other problem we had was that we had misplaced the remote to the iPod docking station during our home renovations last month and have still not found it. So, while pausing the rifftrax and the DVD should have been a simple affair, we made it a little more complicated than it should have been. Even given this, it was still fairly easy.

The intro of the mp3 is designed to introduce you to the rifftrax format and get the timing right. In addition, throughout the movie a monotone, computerized voice character "Disembaudio" repeats occasional lines from the movie as they occur to let you know how far off from the movie track you are. While it's a little disconcerting at first, you get used to it fairly quickly. And to be fair, it's not like the acting in these movies is really all that great to begin with. In addition, Disembaudio provides a decent character for Mike to interact with, a la MST3k.

Because it's difficult for the audio to start exactly in the right spot, we found that the slight drift got more pronounced as you made your way thru the movie. Still, about an hour into the movie it was a simple matter of pausing the DVD for a second to let the mp3 catch up and then we were able to enjoy the rest of the film with no issues.

The Humor
As I mentioned above, Nelson is as funny as ever, if not funnier, in this format. The fact that the movie had some nudity and "salty" language was the perfect foil for his squeeky clean brand of humor. While the rifftrax is family friendly, with no cussing, the movie is definitely not, so you may have to make a decision on whether you want to watch this with the family on a movie by movie basis.

The humor is the same as MST3k, and he does the same running gags he did with previous movies, the types of jokes that build on earlier jokes and become more hilarious, not just in the context of the movie, but in the context of the commentary itself. Example, a lot of jokes centered around the absurdity of Dalton, Patrick Swayze's character, being a "famous" bouncer. So, whenever one of the other characters talks about him in the context of having heard some story of his colorful bouncer past, Nelson usually takes the opportunity to work in a joke about how bouncers are revered as heroes in the film universe, or how Swayze does ordinary things in a "bouncer-like" way.

Conclusion
I was surprised by how much my wife (who is not an MST3k fan...having not seen most of the episodes) liked the rifftrack. Her comment after finishing it was that we had to get the Fifth Element commentary when it came out. The website indicates that the $1.99 rate for the commentary is a beta price, indicating that it will be raised once the site gets a following. It's unclear what the final price for the commentaries will be, but I can definitely say that at $1.99 it's a steal. I'm looking forward to seeing how the service develops as it goes on. I really do think that technical issues of syncing the playback aside, this widens the possibilities of the MST3k format quite considerably.

Tags: rifftrax mst3k humor mp3 ecommerce roadhouse review

Qumana Test

2006-07-27T22:55:00.000-05:00

I'm trying out Qumana after seeing it mentioned on lifehacker as their "Download of the Day." It's run on OS X and Windows. I'm using it on WinXP and I have to admit that so far I'm impressed. It does subtle little things like automatically inserting the last link you copied to the clipboard when you click on the hyperlink button that makes blogging a whole lot easier.

The Drop Pad looks like a neat idea as well. I'll definitely have to try it out in the future.

Update: The WYSIWYG editor seems to be doing something wacky with my text alignment and margins. Not quite sure why it happened, but hopefully the changes I made to the HTML source in the "Source View" editor will fix it.

Tags: qumana blog editor app software winxp osx

Isn't this kind of the point?

2006-07-26T07:18:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal points to a trend among a small minority of Netflix users who let movies sit on their shelves unwatched for months at a time without watching them.

Having been one of those people (Ran sat on my shelf for a full 3 months before I found a four hour block to sit down and watch the movie in one sitting), I've got to wonder what all the fuss is about. I mean, part of the point of Netflix is the "no late fee" aspect of the model that allows movies to gather dust with no ill effects.

The WSJ seems to want to imply that the emperor has no clothes. I think the robes he wears are just fine, personally. [via cote]

(btw, Road House just arrived yesterday and my wife insisted on watching it once thru without the rifftrax commentary first since she'd never seen it before. After viewing a movie which, in her own words, "exceeded all my expectations of terribleness," I think she may be looking more forward to the rifftrax commentary than I am. I'd forgotten how incredibly dancy all the fight scenes are. Swayze and the guy who plays "Jimmy" don't do spin kicks...they pirhouette!)

technorati tags: business, netflix, entertainment, movies

Ask A Ninja: "Ninja Love"

2006-07-25T20:24:00.000-05:00

You can guess what this is going to be like...but it's still funny all the way thru. I especially like the theme song and how ninjas make "quotation fingers"

"And I'll tell ya, I'm sorry ladies...but your hump and lovely lady lumps will always take a back seat to the glowing essence of the Tiger Princess Lady..."

technorati tags: ask+a+ninja, humor, youtube, video, funny

Rifftrax

2006-07-24T23:20:00.000-05:00

My "Super Best Friend" Matt clued me in to Rifftrax, a service put together by Mike Nelson, of MST3k fame that allows him to continue his lampooning commentary stylings in an online format. Basically, Mike's selling DRM-FREE mp3s of his audio commentary over various movies. You rent the appropriate DVD, and play the movie and the commentary simultaneously and get a few hours worth of entertainment. I haven't used the service yet, but I'm definitely intrigued. One of the biggest limitations of MST3k was that they were forced to use obscure films since they couldn't afford to buy the licenses for more mainstream cinema. While the low-budget films were certainly great fodder, and endlessly entertaining in their own right, I always wondered how the gang would handle more recent, bigger budget films. Hopefully, this will answer the question.

The other thing that I find amazing is that Nelson has used the internet to offer this entertainment over mainstream cinema (more value for customers) while still driving down costs of the entertainment model. Isn't technology grand?

"Roadhouse", the first movie they've provided commentary for, is next on my Netflix queue. They've got a preview clip up on the website and it's pretty damn funny. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to watch it and let you know the thoughts on the service.

technorati tags: rifftrax, mst3k, humor, mp3, mike+nelson

So, What's Been Goin' On?

2006-07-24T22:26:00.000-05:00

General Errata and a Change in Direction

I've been silent for a long time on this weblog, which is usually a sign that a lot is going on. Steve, over at Sciatica has even commented on my lack of posting. My son Sean is, of course, keeping me quite busy, but it's more than that. Work is ramping up as I get accustomed to my new role and responsibilities (which keep expanding). In addition, a number of side-projects have been keeping me occupied and out of commission for the last month or so since I graduated.

The family just got back from a week in Cancun. While we were away we got hardwood floors installed. This meant moving furniture out of the house the week before we left, and then spending the week afterwards moving it back. We took the opportunity to get rid of some old furniture and buy a new living room set. My wife and I also decided it was time to do away with our hip and fashionable, cinder-block and 2x4 deskset and get real office furniture. This has all been extremely fun and exciting but what I'm most proud of is something that has been going on behind the scenes...

Ed Gets a Consulting Gig

At the beginning of this year my sister left the corporate world and started her own gift company. It was an incredibly brave decision for her to make since she was a highly compensated investment banker with a stable job, as well as a few lucrative offers on the table at competitors and clients of hers to come work for them. She decided to chuck all of that and follow her heart and do something that she felt passionate about.

While she spent a lot of time getting set up and filling out legal forms, she was also working hard with web designers on putting together an e-commerce site. At one point during the initial stages she had expressed frustration that she was spending so much time on the "nuts and bolts" of the company and so little time getting in front of customers. I suggested that she consider setting up a blog and using that as a way to initiate contact with people that would be interested in her business and services.

After consulting with her for a few hours here and there and showing her the value of sites like Technorati, delicious, and flickr, she set up an initial weblog on blogger. I gave her a couple of pointers and she just ran with it. As the whole experiment has evolved, I've been working with her on honing the online strategy and blogging and social networks have become a much bigger part of that. It's been a lot of fun watching her get the nuts and bolts of RSS, weblogs, social networks, and a whole host of other technologies. It's been equally fun watching friends and family react as they realize how she's running a business that has ramped up to profitability in under a year, has several clients queued up in the pipeline, and is selling products online before her website even goes live!

The Value Add

Needless to say she's become a believer in this whole phenomenon. She's attracted several regular readers to her site (WhirledEvents.com) and the personal site was so popular that she set up a separate blog on corporate gift giving. The sites have been a great way to prescreen clients, and have also served as a way for clients to get a feel for what to expect from her prior to ever meeting her. In addition, she's managed to reach people out of her local area that she would never have had the chance to meet otherwise. Finally, it's given her the opportunity to sell products on a limited basis online while her e-commerce site has been getting set up. In short, the blog has helped hone the business and vice versa. If you get a chance you should check out some of her articles on special occasion gifts to get some ideas for those special people in your lives.

That's It?

Well, not really. I've also been working on a couple of side projects that were neglected since I started school. I'll post more on those as they become more concrete. In the meantime, I intend to make a few changes around here...

A (Slight) Change in Direction

First, I expect the posts to get longer now that I have some time to actually search for content and post more stuff. Second, I think this blog is going to have more of a business focus. One of the things I've been mulling over a lot lately is the wide gap between management and the front-line employees, and making sure that every employee in the company is working to move the ship forward.

Having said all of that, I doubt that this place is going to be all work and no play, so even if you're not into "management speak" (or as one of Cote's buddies dubbed it, "econobonics"), you'll hopefully still find things around here that are worth reading.

At the very least, you can expect more baby pics :)

technorati tags: social+networks, blogging, whirledevents, ecommerce

QuickSilver/VoodooPad Integration At Last!

2006-06-08T22:29:00.000-05:00

For all you Mac users out there who use VoodooPad (highly recommended), Quicksilver finally has an official Voodoopad module to append/prepend/etc. to Voodoopad on the fly.

I have been dying for this for ages. Setup instructions can be found here

via [Damn You, Sir, You Have Killed Me]

Technorati Tags: voodoopad, quicksilver, osx

Skype for Mac Update

2006-05-12T01:09:00.000-05:00

Checking to see if the new Skype for Mac updates my web presence...if it does you should notice my online status on the right menu.

Update: WOOHOO! It works! If you haven't gotten it already (and you have a Mac) go get the update. Windows users already have all these features (of course). WinXP version can be found here.

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, mac, osx, apps

Coolest Quote Ever

2006-04-27T14:33:00.000-05:00

Metal-Maniac gets hit by a train and lives:

Maybe the metal gods above were smiling on me and they didn't want one of their true warriors to die on them. Otherwise, I'd be up there in the kingdom of steel.

via [Penn Jillette]

Technorati Tags: heavy+metal, metal+mania, train+wreck, humor

Knowing Your Customer

2006-04-09T00:16:00.000-05:00

We just received a junk mail advertisement to join Frog's Fitness. What's interesting about this advertisement is that it's on nice quality, heavy stock paper, multi-colored and attractive. It's flashy and talks about the exacting standards of the club and how it will exceed our every need for a fitness center in every way - "from services and amenities, to classes and equipment". Awesome! I'm actually looking to join a gym in the near future as I'll be graduating this semester and won't have access to the campus rec center anymore. I would be really interested in joining Frog's cuz this advertisement makes it sound super-keen.

The only problem is the gym locations are a bit of a commute for me.

You see, Frog's only has locations in Long Beach and San Diego. My wife works for a company headquartered in the San Diego area so I'm sure she's on some sort of employee mailing list that Frog's has paid to access. Living in Houston, Texas means that I'm not the customer that they're looking for. Now any rational person who thought for more than two seconds would realize this, but Frog's probably just had a list and sent out the mail on auto-pilot like all good companies do. Better yet, they hired a third-party to do it for them. It's advertising. That's how it's done.

The problem is, that model really sucks. They just wasted postage, printing costs, employee time, and a whole host of other expenses just to send me an advertisement that I have no chance of ever responding to in a positive way. Yet they claim that their gym will "exceed my every expectation" of customer service. Well, the primary expectation I have for a gym is convenience- and so far Frog's hasn't exceeded that one.

Technorati Tags: gym, fitness, marketing, advertising

What's Wrong With The Google Mini?

2006-04-07T21:35:00.000-05:00

Alright, Cote, seeing as how you have first-hand knowledge of this, I nominate you to respond to the criticisms.

Update: Fixed the broken link

The iPod Observer - Now Playing - Microsoft Confirms it Originated iPod Box Parody Video

2006-03-15T20:48:00.000-06:00

Microsoft Confirms it Originated iPod Box Parody Video. Awesome.

If Steve Jobs isn't worried now, he should be. Microsoft gets it.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, apple, ipod, humor, parody

Infogami

2006-03-12T13:06:00.000-06:00

Currently playing with Infogami. Feel free to join in the fun.

Technorati Tags: infogami, web, blog, wiki

Malcolm Gladwell is blogging

2006-02-28T23:07:00.000-06:00

I'm not such a huge fan of Gladwell (tho I do like him), but I do know that Cote is, so I thought the following was worth a mention if Michael hadn't seen it yet. Gladwell is now blogging and doing it well. He plans to use his blog as a place for his readers to post criticisms, corrections, and comments about his articles as well as a means to expand on article topics and give more of the filler research that didn't make it to press. via [Infectious Greed]

Technorati Tags: malcolm+gladwell, blogging, new+yorker

On an unrelated topic, Cote, now that you have two blogs, which one should we link to when referring to you? Do you want to enhance brand drunkandretired or brand peopleoverprocess? I guess the real question is, who owns peopleoverprocess, you or RedMonk?

Update on what I've been up to...

2006-02-24T21:43:00.000-06:00

I'm not quite dead yet
For the last several weeks whenever I had a few spare minutes of computer-time I would look forlornly at this weblog and wonder when I would have the time and the energy to post again. As many of you know, my son Sean was born at the beginning of December. Between that, finishing up school, and starting a new job, I've been extremely busy. Hence the lack of updates.

Career Hijinks
The other reason for a lack of updating has been the fact that a large portion of the newsworthy items in my life have been things that I can't really post here, especially on the job front. I took an internship this summer working for an investment management company in town. Due to the large number of constraints on fair disclosure, insider trading concerns and a few observed experiences while I was there, I decided to refrain from posting anything even remotely job related. Since the job also required a large number of hours, very little time was left over to actually do anything else besides school and get ready for Sean's arrival.

Suffice it to say, the internship wrapped up in September and I landed another internship to take me through til I graduate in May. Where I'm at now is a publicly traded company and I'm once again working in a position that requires a certain amount of "sensitivity" about disclosure concerns. I'm liking the job a tremendous amount, and both internships have given me some valuable education as well as paying me well for the opportunity to learn on the job. I've gained an enormous respect for the ins and outs of our capitalist system in the process as well. Let me just say that the phrase, "a fool and his money are soon parted," is not just a colloquilism, it's almost an economic axiom. Caveat Emptor. If you are thinking of making an investment in the public equities market, you should think long and hard about why you have an edge over the vast majority of people trading in and out of that stock all day long. I'm not saying it's impossible for the individual to persevere over the market. In fact, I think if you know what you're doing it's quite possible. I just think that most people underestimate the market's ability to price in common knowledge about a company.

Blogging and my future
By now some of you have noticed that I haven't bothered to mention the company I'm working at. One of the things I've noticed about getting a job in finance is that most of the people you work with are from older generations and they just don't get this whole "blogging" phenomenon. The concept of me writing about anything regarding the company that hasn't been vetted through public relations and legal is a might bit scary to them. And since I don't officially have a permanent job there yet, I'm going to remain mum on that for the time being. The truth is, until I get some sort of indication that mentioning the name of the company from time to time is not grounds for dismissal, I probably won't do it.

Having said all that, I'm still convinced there is an enormous opportunity with this stuff that they aren't taking advantage of. One of the advantages I have is that I have the luxury of bouncing crazy ideas off the wall. So maybe I can spark some interest internally. That is still a ways off though.

The MBA
I finish up school in May and I am really stoked about that. Despite a lot of groundswell on the internet around the idea of a Personal MBA, I think the education I've received in an academic institution has been extremely valuable. First, I made some really great friends and contacts. Second, I got to learn from some really great leading minds of various business disciplines, including people who've served at the Federal Reserve and the White House reporting directly to the President. I got the opportunity to run a private investment fund for a year, and I had the benefit of sitting in a classroom for 6-9 hours a week focusing on one subject; learning about the environment that businesses operate in. All those things would have been denied me if I had undertaken a self-study course of my own design. While I agree with the general statement that the academic and the commercial realms have a lot of differences, I disagree with the idea that a traditional education is outmoded. Like all things, I think the level of intensity and passion you bring to something is the crucial factor in determining success or failure. But I can honestly say, having read most of the books that are listed on the Personal MBA curriculum, that I think the standard education is more valuable. I think what's missing from the Personal MBA concept is a true discussion of context and the way all those disciplines interact. The other thing I think that is lacking is a certain amount of academic rigor. In other words, some things that are included in an MBA program are boring and dry (Operations Management springs to mind). What person in their spare time is going to look at assembly line production optimization? Yet, I think that's an integral part of a large portion of businesses and if you are going into any job with even a small manufacturing component you need this knowledge.

Frappr-cino
Going off on a tangent, I started a Frappr Map for the readers of this blog to add themselves to. I got the idea from the generator of all things content-related, Michael Cote. Add yourself to the map if you get a chance, I think it would be fun to see where my two readers are located. And if there are more than two of you, well I might get more concerned about putting content up :)

On Being a Dad
Enough about work and blogging, what I've really been excited about lately is my brand new, baby boy. For those of you who subscribe to my photo feed, you'll know that I've gone baby crazy. The truth is, being a dad is incredibly fun. Everyday it seems like Sean is growing or doing something new. Some days I just sit and watch him for hours at a time. The dogs seem to like him, which is a relief, since they are very big and he is very small at this stage in his life.

When I step back from it all, it's kind of a mind boggling concept, being a parent. When you're involved in the day to day aspects of it tho, it's just a lot of running around. Changing diapers, changing clothes, giving baths, feeding, taking them to the doctor, taking them to day care. The amazing thing to me is that you never stop to question it while you're doing it. It all seems worthwhile; every step of the way.

It's also been really amazing seeing my family get all excited about having a grandson/nephew around. The fam has been tripping over themselves to get babysitting duty.

Finally, for those of you who have sent baby gifts and haven't received thank you cards, please be patient. We sent out the first and second round of cards, but recently got inundated with a third round of gifts from a large number of people, and we're trying to unbury ourselves from those in addition to keeping up with our kid.

In the meantime, I would expect posting to be light until about May since I have a lot on my plate at the moment. Of course, that's one of the joys of RSS is that you can just have this blog sitting in a newsreader and not have to worry about missing an entry. So sit back and relax...I'll keep posting sporadically letting you know I'm still here.

Firefox Search Plugins by Ed

2006-01-01T14:48:00.000-06:00

Awhile back I wrote a few finance-related Firefox search plugins and posted links on this weblog. The plugins didn't have an installer, so I expected you, my dear readers, to manually install them into the search-plugins folder.

As part of my New Year's Resolutions I decided to stop punting hard work on to my readers and whipped up a handy web page that automates the install. If you ever had a desire to search for a company's SEC filings, but were deterred by having to type in the URL of the SEC website, or couldn't remember the ticker symbol of a company's stock, then these plugins are for you!

Check em out here. Comments are welcome, but bear in mind, these plugins do exactly what I need them to, so the chance of me fixing any issues you have with them are slim.

Technorati Tags: firefox, search, search-plugins, sec, edgar, finance, investing

Some People Scare Me

2005-12-15T17:51:00.000-06:00

I make more playin' online poker in a week than I do working at my job for a month.

--Random cell phone talker in the table behind me at lunch

Our broker will let us lever up 4 to 1. Right now we're about 80% invested in shorts. We've also been doing a lot of commodities and futures. We don't like pure equity because there's not enough volatility in it. We can't get in and out with a profit in less than a month or so.

--Day Trader I met at a party

It seems that I've been hearing a lot of scary things come out of peoples' mouths these days.

Technorati Tags: quotes

Why Netflix rocks

2005-12-14T14:36:00.000-06:00

I get a lot of questions about my Netflix subscription. Is it worth the price? What about those times when you really want to watch a particular movie RIGHT NOW, and it's not one of the ones you have checked out? Do you end up watching more movies and wasting more time now that you have Netflix? Is it really cheaper in the long run?

I think Netflix is probably the greatest bang for the buck service I subscribe to. What I save in late fees and hassle from not shuffling my butt over to Blockbuster is worth the subscription alone. Sure there are rare times when I go on a movie watching binge over the weekend and end up without a film for the next day while I'm waiting for my Queue to update, but there are also weeks where I don't watch any films and don't have to worry about hassles. I had Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" sitting in my living room for about four and a half weeks before I sat down to watch it. No late fees, no hassles, and I got to it on MY time. To be honest, I can't think of a time when I absolutely had to watch a particular movie right away and didn't have it, but if that ever happened I could easily go to the Best Buy down the street and buy the DVD rather quickly, or rent it from the neighborhood video store just the same as always.

As far as my movie watching habits, they've stayed about the same. Maybe up a little, but I've noticed that my TV watching habits have gone WAY down since I now use Netflix to rent TV show season DVDs and cut out most of the crap TV I used to watch. Plus, the Queue provides an easy way to remember the movies that I wanted to watch, instead of having to go to the videostore and sort through the stacks every time I come into the store. Oh yeah, and the Netflix RSS feeds are super-handy for staying on top of the New Releases and what you've seen lately.

Also, it seems like any time I've had a problem with the service, they seem to already have thought of an EASY solution and put it on their website where I could find it. Got sent the wrong DVD? No problem, fill a form out on the website, they send you the right one immediately, and tell you to send the wrong DVD back. DVD never arrived? Fill out the form on the website and they send you a new copy, NO QUESTIONS ASKED. I have yet to actually have to talk to anybody at Netflix about anything, but I feel like they're one of the most responsive, friendly companies I know.

But as for the main reason I love Netflix, more than my neighborhood video store, it's the fact that they have movies like
Terror Tales: Ninja Vampire Busters / Vampire Honeymoon in their inventory and the other guys don't. Yuh!

Technorati Tags: netflix, movies

openomy

2005-12-11T20:38:00.000-06:00

I haven't had a chance to try it yet (still taking finals), but if openomy works half as good as they say it does, I'd be willing to predict that this could be the next "Web 2.0" company acquired by Yahoo!

Technorati Tags: openomy, web2.0, filestorage

Baby Announcement

2005-12-08T20:59:00.000-06:00

Baby Announcement
Originally uploaded by egoodwin.

It's been hectic so I haven't had a chance to post anything, but our son was born this last Monday. Mother and baby are doing great and we're all slowly getting settled in.

Of course, as luck would have it, I'm smack in the middle of finals. I actually left a final on Tuesday and headed straight over to the hospital to check Audrey and Sean out and take them home.

The Ig Nobel Creations of Mankind

2005-12-01T11:15:00.000-06:00

You can view a webcast of the 2005 Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony here. The Ig Nobel Awards seek to recognize odd and unusual scientific experiments and research worldwide.

You can see the list of this year's winners here. I think my favorite study has to be "The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers: Reflections on an Aspect of Technological Change in New Zealand Dairy-Farming between the World Wars" by James Watson.

Technorati Tags: ignobel, science, humor

Fundamentalists say the darndest things!

2005-11-29T10:57:00.000-06:00

Wacky statements from Fundamentalist Creationists! It's a mine of comedy gold!

For example:

"You know how I always say I witness to telemarketers? Well just a few minutes ago I had another one...another foreigner with a heavy accent, most likely from India...and I think I got through to him, folks!!!! Please, everyone pray for whoever that man is! He LISTENED to me!...When it was over, he said, can we talk about business (mortgage refinance)? I replied, no, sorry, I'm not interested in discussing a mortgage, and he still thanked me."

These are actual posts on various Fundamentalist message boards. Check it out. Some of the posts come from my favorite nutjob website RaptureReady.com, where zealots talk about how they're sooooo looking forward to the Rapture, and what preparations they're taking and how awesome it would be to get vacuumed into the sky.

Speaking of RaptureReady, apparently today's "Rapture Index" is 154, which is categorized as "Fasten Your Seatbelts!" So, I guess my question is, if you WANT to be sucked into the gaping maw of God during the Rapture, why should you fasten your seatbelts? via [skeptico]

Technorati Tags: skepticism, fundamentalism, humor

New Media vs. Old Media

2005-11-14T15:55:00.000-06:00

Buzz Bruggeman at ActiveWords was talking on the Personal Productivity Podcast and had an interesting observation.

Buzz said that after his first appearance on the podcast a few months ago, he got 300 customer requests for licenses. Later he did a print media interview with a Minnesota newspaper with a circulation of about 250,000. He got 5 requests.

Yeah, I think this social media thing has got some legs to it.

Technorati Tags: activewords, buzz, podcast, cluetrain, tech, productivity

In case anyone is listening...

2005-11-10T22:59:00.000-06:00

I've put together a display on the bottom of the sidebar that tracks my recent musical listening via audioscrobbler. It was a pretty easy mock-up using FeedDigest. You know...just in case anyone cared.

Technorati Tags: music, rss, blogging, feeddigest, last.fm

Public Service Announcement: ICE

2005-11-09T21:05:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine emailed this to me awhile ago. Today when I was cruising through my email archives I thought it would be a good thing to post here as a sort of Public Service Announcement. He's a doctor in the ER (in the US) so I'm pretty sure this is legit. Even if it's not in common practice now, it sounds like a handy little lifehack to me:

A campaign encouraging people to enter an emergency contact number in their mobile phone's memory under the heading "ICE" (i.e.In Case of Emergency).

Originally established as a nation-wide campaign in the UK, ICE allows paramedics or police to be able to contact a designated relative / next-of-kin in an emergency situation. The idea is the brainchild of East Anglian Ambulance Service paramedic Bob Brotchie and was launched in May this year in the UK. By adopting the ICE advice, your mobile will help the rescue services quickly contact a friend or relative.

ICE your phone now!

Simply select a new contact in your phone book, enter the word 'ICE' and the number of the person you wish to be contacted. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

Please will you also email this to everybody in your address book, it won't take too many 'forwards' before everybody will know about this.

Technorati Tags: hospital, er, emergency, cellphone, lifehack

Def Con One, Y'all!

2005-11-04T13:23:00.000-06:00

Snap! Pop Will Eat Itself has come back from the dead! The band has decided to get back together and has been working on a new album. You can get a 10 minute preview sample via bittorrent here.

Technorati Tags: pwei, pop+will+eat+itself, techno, industrial, music

Freedom isn't free...

2005-11-01T08:06:00.000-06:00

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

--A. J. Liebling

Lest we forget what makes this whole internet thing so damn cool.

Stanford iTunes

2005-10-21T14:15:00.000-05:00

Stanford iTunes is a huge deal! I don't think it's unfair to say that this may have the ability to change the demographic of the educational system in the US as we know it! The ability to download lectures would put higher education in the hands of the world's poor, and completely revolutionize the educational compensation structure. Imagine professors being able to monetize their lectures on a class by class basis, being able to lecture about subjects they are passionate about and finding their personal "microbrand" audience, and being able to find compensation commensurate with their audience appeal, regardless of what university they teach at!

One of the downsides would be a trend towards "popular" lecture topics and away from the "harder" material with little financial worth. But I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

It'll be interesting to see how this develops. I would love it if more universities did something similiar and if they started adding video as well.

Technorati Tags: stanford, itunes, education, apple

Soduku Night Fever!

2005-10-19T21:04:00.000-05:00

What's up with everyone going crazy over sudoku lately? A few days ago I didn't even know how to work the puzzles and now they seem like they're everywhere! The Fortune magazine write-up on Bram Cohen (of Bittorrent fame) showed him solving the puzzles. And I just got back from the grocery store and there was an jumbo sudoku puzzle book at the register next to the tabloids!

I haven't had a chance to toy around with them yet, but they look pretty fun. This flickr sudoku game looks pretty tough too!

Flickr Sudoku found via [lifehacker]

Technorati Tags: sudoku, puzzles, bittorrent, bram+cohen, trends

Stop Kaz

2005-10-07T09:00:00.000-05:00

This is the sort of thing ideally suited for the internet; Skeptico tells the story of "Dr. Kaz deMille", either a predatory fraudster or a mega-delusional headcase (maybe both). "Dr. Kaz" tells churches stories about her death and resurrection in the World Trade Center disaster, her meetings with God and Jesus, and their messages to her and the rest of the world. Oh yeah, and she also does faith-healing, and oh yeah, she charges about $20,000 per appearance, just like the good lord intended.

The Stop Kaz website has been started as a place to find verified factual information about Kaz and her claims. If you know anything about this woman, please contact the webmaster of the site to stop her from stealing more money from people under false pretenses. via [skeptico]

Technorati Tags: skeptic, stop+kaz, charlatan

Harvey Danger's new album: DRM-free torrent!

2005-09-29T00:21:00.000-05:00

Harvey Danger, one of my fave bands, is grabbing this internet-thing by the horns and releasing their latest album as a DRM-Free torrent. Now you have no excuse to give it a listen, and, if you like it, buy it, and check em out in concert. via [boing boing]

The Road Home

2005-09-27T19:34:00.000-05:00

I should've linked this sooner, but the Houston Chronicle has a blog for evacuees from Rita looking to get back to Houston. It provides reader anecdotes and articles about gas availability, road conditions, and lane closures throughout the Gulf Coast area. I arrived about 3am last night after a long time on the road from Alabama. Thanks to my sister-in-law and her husband for putting us up for the last several days.

We decided to come into Houston from I-20 to Marshall and take I-59 South to Cleveland and cut across 105 to Conroe and I-45 South. We ended up hitting very little traffic. It looked like Cleveland and Conroe had limited power since most of the traffic lights weren't working and the street lights weren't lit. It was a little eery with all the trees down on the sides of the road and the pitch black of the buildings. But there was plenty of gas (regular unleaded only) at the gas station in Nacogdoches, and no complications. I hope everyone coming back to H-Town and the surrounding areas has as much luck as we did.

Hurricane Rita

2005-09-22T16:13:00.000-05:00

For all my loyal readers, you need not worry about me, I have retired to my "summer home" (sister-in-law's place) in scenic, Hamilton, AL. I shall return on Monday or Tuesday as time (and natural disasters) permit. Hope everyone else is safe and doing well.

FXFC HFSC Activity

2005-09-04T14:33:00.000-05:00

Interesting post on the FX corner of F*ckedCompany a few weeks ago after a long period of silence:

Today I overheard a TS noob talking about a fax from the COB to the CEO he saw over by the company fax machine. Sure enough, the damn thing was lying around in plain site, and it said pretty clearly that the company's going to be sold off for parts any day now.

Could it be true? Is FX finally going on to the chopping block after all this time? Anyone want to bid on The Statue for me as a birthday gift?

Jyve baby

2005-08-26T23:48:00.000-05:00

I've got a presence icon on the sidebar so people can Skype me (courtesy of Jyve). Now, it should let you know if I'm online or not so you can do the whole VoIP thing. Oh yeah, I also installed Google's new Talk client this week. I think Skype's better (multi-conference capability, ability to interface with international phone networks, etc.), but very few of my friends are using it at the moment. Maybe the google buzz will finally get this whole VoIP thing going.

Blogger Toolbar for MS-Word

2005-08-20T13:50:00.000-05:00

This is a test post using the Blogger for MS-Word plugin toolbar. Let’s see if it works. Blogger for Word found via Make Magazine

Saint Arnold Brewhouse Blog

2005-08-13T21:06:00.000-05:00

St. Arnold Brewery, creator of the greatest beers ever, now has a blog. Check it out for all the up to date info on the brewery and the beers!

Oh yeah, and they've got webcams too!

H-Town, Brew-makin' cam-whores! This internet-thang is da' bomb!

Unscientific Housing Bubble Indicator

2005-08-01T19:57:00.000-05:00

Just thought I'd throw my own two cents into the housing bubble debate raging through our financial communities lately. While I could wow you with facts and figures about the rise in interest only mortgages, negative amortization mortgages, etc. I think this is a way scarier indicator, albeit mighty unscientific.

When the geeks start leeching real estate instruction videos, you know the end is nigh. Computer geeks are always the last ones on the bandwagon with everything involving popular opinion. Want to know what home theater system to get for that high-fidelity experience? Ask a nerd. What car has the most fuel efficient engine? Bingo. Nerd.

Want to know what color is going to be "in" next year? Do yourself a favor and skip the nerd this time.

As an aside, for those of you who would like to know more about Carleton Sheets, I suggest you go here to learn more before you shell out any hard-earned cash (or bandwidth in this case).

Project Aardvark

2005-07-16T08:16:00.000-05:00

For all of you techies who haven't been keeping up with Project Aardvark (the summer intern project for Fog Creek Software), tech support looks like it got a whole lot simpler.

Fog Creek Copilot is in beta right now and I can't wait for it to get open to the public so I can fix all my mom's computer problems from the comfort of my own home. Of course, the only downside is I'm not sure how Copilot handles system reboots.

Technorati Tags: tech+support, family, vnc, project+aardvark, fog+creek+copilot

It's a BOY!

2005-07-13T19:14:00.000-05:00

18 Week Ultrasound
Originally uploaded by audrey.goodwin.

The baby is doing well, and the doctors had a hard time getting him to pose for this picture. Apparently, he's inherited his Dad's spastic attitude! ;)

I have a feeling I'll be spending most of my days and nights chasing this kid and the dogs around the house real soon.

And I couldn't be happier right now.

Technorati Tags: baby, ultrasound, family, boy

Google - Personalized Home Pages

2005-05-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

Ok, this is just awesome. The drag and drop rearrange is great!

Technorati Tags: google, webapps, personalized, my+google

Skype + Thunderbird

2005-05-10T07:27:00.000-05:00

If you guys (and gals) use Skype at all to place phone calls, you need to check out the handy Skype plugin for Thunderbird. It allows you to place phone calls via SkypeOut. via [Skype Journal]

Update: The plugin seems to cause my addressbook some problems. When I try to load it, it never appears and spirals off into some sort of loop. I have to manually kill Thunderbird from the Task Manager. Uninstalling the extension seems to fix the problem. Your mileage may vary.

Technorati Tags: skype, thunderbird, voip, telephoney, telecom, mozilla

Microsoft more open and transparent

2005-05-04T23:53:00.000-05:00

Brij Singh's got some interesting comments about Microsoft over at Random Musings. He thinks they've done a good job of opening up the company via blogging. I have to agree.

Right now, Microsoft looks to be gaining my trust much better than both Google and Apple. In fairness to Google, though, they haven't done anything I would consider wrong, I would just say that I like Microsoft's attitude towards blogging better.

Technorati Tags: blog, weblog, software+companies, microsoft, google, apple

Baby Goodwin!

2005-05-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

Baby Goodwin - Ultrasound
Originally uploaded by audrey.goodwin.

So, last week I made mention of some big events happening over here that I didn't feel comfortable mentioning at the time. One of those things is the fact that Audrey is pregnant!

Of course the family has been going nuts! We're really excited about the news as well, but it's been really funny watching everyone around us freaking out.

We went to the doctor today to get the first ultrasound. You can check out the pics over at her flickr account. I have a feeling that's going to turn into "Baby Goodwin Central" so feel free to drop in and leave comments and well wishes over there.

Firefox Click2Call Vonage Extension

2005-05-03T09:54:00.000-05:00

Some awesome soul has gone and coded up a Click2Call Extension for Firefox/Thunderbird. Click2Call is a nifty Vonage feature that allows you to highlight a phone number on your computer and initiate a phone call to that number without picking up the phone.

Awesome productivity enhancement for your Thunderbird Address Book if you're a vonage user.

Update: for more insight on how this all works (and the ability to extend the code if you want) check out this page.

Technorati Tags: vonage, voip, telecom, telephony, click2call, mozilla, firefox, thunderbird

If I could teach the world to sing one thing

2005-05-02T16:01:00.000-05:00

scientists opine on the principles of their craft (their particular field of focus or science in general) that they wish more people understood. Excellent insights from really smart folks. via [boing boing]

Technorati Tags: science, scientific+method, scientists, opinion, teaching, learning

Basecode firefox extension for Basecamp project management

2005-04-30T11:17:00.000-05:00

Spoiltchild Design has put together Basecode, a Firefox extension for use with 37 signals Basecamp project management site that I reviewed a while back. It looks like it gives you some cool functionality. via [37 signals]

Technorati Tags: basecamp, 37signals, project, project+management, organization, basecode, firefox, mozilla, extension

Steven Levitt on his Daily Show Appearance

2005-04-30T08:33:00.000-05:00

Dr. Steven Levitt (co-author of the interesting book Freakonomics and economist of note at University of Chicago), talks about his appearance on the Daily Show over on his blog. Having watched the appearance I have to agree with his assessment of the show and the format. The appearance was way too short to adequately discuss the ramifications of his studies and/or the depth of his research and how to factor out personal bias from the data.

Having said all of that, I think he did a great job. He did come-off a little bookish, and nervous, but in an endearing kind of way. I think it actually helped sell the idea that he didn't have a political agenda of any sort and was just interested in his work because it often led to surprising conclusions. Good job, Dr. Levitt!

Technorati Tags: economics, freakonomics, daily+show, jon+stewart, steven+levitt

Skype Communities on LiveJournal and Google

2005-04-30T08:29:00.000-05:00

For all of you folks, like me, who are having a hard time convincing friends and family to give Skype a chance, check out this Skype Journal entry talking about Skype Communities on LiveJournal and Google. Now you can find yourself users based on your interests and locales.

Technorati Tags: skype, voip, telephony

Huh?

2005-04-29T10:55:00.000-05:00

It's funny 'cuz it's true.

Technorati Tags: humor, parody, consulting, e-business, business, biz

John Wiley banned from Apple stores because of Jobs biography

2005-04-28T12:57:00.000-05:00

Ok Apple fan(atics), explain to me how this is somehow a more egalitarian, bohemian hippy company that "understands" my needs and desires more than these guys?

Is it just me or is Apple just trying to piss off their fan base? What I find more amazing is the way the core Apple fans just let this stuff pass by when the same actions from Microsoft would have them in an uproar.

I was all set to invest in a Powerbook (for the first time), but between this, the bait-and-switch tactics on iTunes upgrades, the lawsuits against their own users, and just a general sense of encroaching evil-ness, I think I'll sit on the sidelines for now. I've already got about $40 worth of iTunes mp3s I legititmately purchased that I've been locked out of thanks to their DRM. No sense in going further down the rabbit hole.

Technorati Tags: apple, powerbook, drm, rights, civil+liberties, freedom, microsoft, steve+jobs

Evan battles Vonage

2005-04-27T12:57:00.000-05:00

Evan Williams (who is no longer working at Blogger, contrary to not-so-popular opinion) is not thrilled with Vonage so far.

Technorati Tags: blogger, evhead, evan+williams, blog, weblog, social+software, vonage, voip, telephony, internet+phone

iSee iTunes

2005-04-26T14:44:00.000-05:00

For those of you with a Tivo (not me) and an Airport Express (again, not me *sigh*) you should check out iSee iTunes. It allows you to use your Tivo as a remote control for your iTunes. If you combine it with the Airport Express you've got a quick and dirty stereo system you can port to pretty much anywhere in the house. Pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: tivo, isee+itunes, itunes, mp3, media, convergence

PENNYWISE

2005-04-25T09:58:00.000-05:00

The Official Pennywise site is currently undergoing a redesign. In the meantime, a whole host of news is on the site. The most important however, is that the new album hits stores in July and is titled The Fuse.

Technorati Tags: pennywise, music, punk, album

It's BAAA-AACK!

2005-04-23T14:29:00.000-05:00

The blogger redirect issue is back! I can't see my site anymore!

Technorati Tags: blogger, blog, troubleshooting, tech+support, bugs

Johnny Depp laments his sad career since 21 Jump Street

2005-04-22T14:50:00.000-05:00

I should be hauled out and flogged for linking to the Onion (who doesn't read it now?), but this editorial by "Johnny Depp" is just to awesome to pass up.

Aw, Who'm I Kidding... I'll Never Top 21 Jump Street

Technorati Tags: humor, Johnny+Depp, Depp, acting, movies, cinema, actors

Site problems

2005-04-21T13:38:00.000-05:00

Well, I can finally get to my site again. Blogger's been having serious problems for me over the last few days. All my attempts to read my site redirected me to the blogger homepage for some reason. Problem appears to be fixed now.

Technorati Tags: blogger, blog, troubleshooting, tech+support, bugs

basecamp review

2005-04-19T15:39:00.000-05:00

I became interested in basecamp since it seemed to "scratch an itch" that I've had for simple project management for everyday group activities. Since the majority of my friends are non-technical by trade I can never get them to sign-on to services, download software, or any of the myriad things that would allow me to simplify my life. So, I've got Skype installed on my PC ready for VoIP chatting with nobody to chat with (except Cote), Shinkuro for secure IM and file transfer, and a whole bunch of other things with no network to interact with.

So when Basecamp came along I set out to find projects to use it for. Coincidentally, I was planning a camping trip with my friends, the majority located in different cities, so we decided to try it out to organize the trip. What follows is a review of my impressions of using Basecamp with non-technical users on a non-technical project.

First, I had to set up our group site. No problem there, I simply went to the Basecamp website and selected the free, one project plan. The one thing that wasn't clear to me was that you set up a "company" that can have multiple projects within it. I named my "company," northpadrecampingcrew, which I regretted the instant I logged on to our website and saw that I had to create a project. The company is used to set up the virtual domain for your project site, which means that this site can't be reused for other things now that the camping trip (our project) is over. Basecamp allows you to delete the project and start a new one under the free membership plan, but the domain name is so specific it's too much of a hassle to explain it to people for other projects. While not a big deal (I can create another free account and just delete this one), some sort of explanation of the project/company relationship during the setup process might be helpful, though it might the setup process a little slower.

Once I logged onto our site, I created our project "Camping Trip," and began adding people to the project. Once again, the project vs. company issue reared its ugly head because I invited some people from the company page, and others from the project page, which meant that some members didn't have default access to the "camping trip" project. Despite what seems like criticism, I will say that once you realize you've made a mistake with Basecamp, it becomes relatively easy to identify what is going on and how to fix it.

Editing categories, developing to-dos and milestones are all pretty easy to do and comprehend, so I began putting in initial items and assigning them to various people (who brings food, what camping gear we needed, etc.) Once members started logging in and giving their thoughts I realized that the concept of Project Management is a little foreign to non-technical users. First, the delineation between messages and todos are fuzzy (intentionally flexible by design), but this led to some people posting todo items in response to other todo items. For example, there might be a todo item "bring 5 gallons of water - assigned to Paul created by Ed" and beneath that you would see a todo item "I'll bring the water, no prob - assigned to Ed created by Paul." The concept of moving the dialogue to another screen in the webapp was a little unintuitive to a lot of people.

Second, the Dashboard is your default screen when you log-in. The Dashboard gives a running log of recent activity since your last log-in in reverse chronological order . This means you will see comments to messages, messages, recent todo items, etc. all in a big giant list. While not a problem once the user gets familiar with the site, it's a little intimidating to the non-techie jumping into a project mid-stream once activity has been started. The most common complaint I heard, after, "why are we using a website to plan a weekend camping trip?" was, "I logged on to the site, it made no sense, so just tell me what I need to do so I can do it." I think a lot of this confusion would've been avoided if the Dashboard wasn't the first page these people saw. Maybe a default action of going straight to the todos or messages when a member logs in for the first time would be helpful.

Finally, I didn't like the way the interface seemed to default to emailing todo items to people. At one point I decided to just make a todo list for gear with each item being an item we needed to bring so people could just check off if they had something. I didn't realize that the email default was set, so everybody involved in the project got emails like, "Tent" or "50' nylon rope" that didn't make much sense to them.

On the plus side, I have to say that the more that people used the site, the smoother things seemed to flow. Once people got over the initial "culture shock" of the site, they seemed to use it pretty well. I found that using my administrator powers to move erroneous todos and post messages with the deleted information seemed to help people understand what each aspect of the site was used for. We posted directions to the campgrounds, got equipment needs divvied up, and placed member contact info in one easy to lookup place. The comments sections were soon used for in-jokes, conversations, and generally made the group planning easier and more fun.

All in all, I would recommend Basecamp for use for personal, social projects. It was worthwhile and the price is right. However, I would advise people that they should ignore the Dashboard when they first log-in and just poke around the site (starting in the Milestones, Todos, and Messages) and just post a message or comment or two to get acclimated.

Technorati Tags: basecamp, project+management, review, webapps

blogger's been losing posts...

2005-04-19T15:24:00.000-05:00

blogger's been spotty over the last few days and has lost two really meaty posts that I had. So, if you're one of the two loyal readers out there who have been wondering over my lack of content, that explains it.

The other reason for the spotty posting is that we just got back from a long weekend of camping on Malaquite Beach over at North Padre with my close friends from college. We took the dogs with us, of course. Unfortunately, though there were many Kodak-worthy moments, the constant wind and sand convinced us to keep the digital cameras at home, so we didn't get any pictures. I need to remember to start bringing disposal cameras in situations like that. We had a great time and it was seriously one of the more relaxing vacations I've taken in a long time.

Lots of stuff has been happening lately, but unfortunately most of it is stuff that I don't feel comfortable blogging about (yet), so I'm going to have to stay relatively silent for the time being.

One thing that I can tell you is that Audrey's finishing up her MBA this May. Only three more weeks left and she'll be done! We're really looking forward to kissing a portion of our household tuition payments goodbye! It seems like University of Houston's been taking most of our income for the better part of 2 years now, so this'll be a nice change of pace. Now, I just have to buckle down for another year and get through and then we'll be home-free.

Technorati Tags: camping, blogger, mba, university+of+houston, uh, personal, life

gmail's New GUI Editor

2005-03-31T16:41:00.000-06:00

gmail's New GUI Editor
Originally uploaded by cote.

Cote points out gmail's new GUI editor. Apparently, I'm not special enough for the smart-folks at google, because I've still got the same old non GUI editor on my gmail. Still, it looks pretty swanky, and can't wait for it to "trickle-down" to little ole me.

Update: As Cote kindly points out, I'm an idiot.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, gui, webapps, email, mail

Yahoo 360°

2005-03-31T10:57:00.000-06:00

So, I got an invite to check out Yahoo 360°, and now I can invite other people too. If you want to check it out...specifically you non-techie, weenie friends of mine, then shoot me an email.

My account will probably sit there rotting unless you other folks step up and get me interested in it. I've discovered with these social network things that if you don't have a groundswell of users they are typically useless, and most of my friends and family don't spend any time at their computers away from work. They just use email, arguably the most bass-ackwards mode of communication in existence today as the extent of their computer use.

MS-Office Tip

2005-03-30T17:14:00.000-06:00

MS-Word: To remove all the formatting from a particular piece of text (sentence, paragraph, document); select the text and hit Ctrl-Shift-N. Absolute lifesaver when cutting and pasting something garbles up your document layout.

Technorati Tags: office, lifehack, word, ms-word, ms-office, microsoft

Paging Dr. Frist...Dr. Bill Frist

2005-03-26T17:22:00.000-06:00

While I've got my opinions on the Schiavo case, I'm going to be kind to my gentle readers and not air them. However, when it comes down to the political grand-standing our spineless politicians are doing in order to squeeze some more blood from the stone of political opinion, I feel more than comfortable commenting. In particular:

Speaking on the Senate floor "more as a physician than as a US senator," Senate Majority Bill Frist, MD, said he believed there was "insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state."

...

Frist apparently used a digital video of Schiavo to determine that the Florida woman who has been fed artificially since she was brain damaged in 1990 might not be in a vegitative state. Think that's against a few ethical standards, but moving on...

from [Personal Democracy Forum]

Now, if you want to let your religious convictions sway you one way or another, more power to you...but to get in front of a nation and say that a twenty to thirty minute video allows you to come up with a more accurate diagnosis than teams of doctors, nurses and other specialists who have had key access to this woman for several years is nothing short of ignorant, disingenuous pandering. To use this case as a springboard for reelection is sick.

Which is why I'm fully endorsing this idea. Upload pictures of your medical ailments to flickr, tag them with the word Frist, and get them sent to our esteemed "doctor," who will then diagnose them. via [boing boing]

Update: apparently, someone else has the same ailment that I do.

Technorati Tags: schiavo, flickr, politics, frist, democracy, liberty, freedom

Vonage Problems with 911 blamed in death

2005-03-23T11:33:00.000-06:00

Since this deals with Vonage AND my hometown (two topics near and dear to my heart), I feel compelled to post this. Harris County wants internet phones to have enhanced 911, as a result of a mother dying from a gunshot wound, and her daughter being unable to use Vonage to dial 911.

First, let me state that any time violent crime takes an innocent life it is truly a tragedy. And anything I say going forward should not be construed as me being flip or trying to assign blame on the victims.

Having said that, the article is a little unclear on what the family's Vonage account set up was. On the features screen of your Vonage account (where you set up Call Waiting, Forwarding, Voicemail, etc.) the first box bolded in red states that dialing 911 is NOT automatic and must be set up. Setting it up takes you to another bolded link which discusses the difference between Vonage's 911 service and traditional 911 dialing. Both of those things are set up in a way that they grab your attention on the screen.

While I'm not going to try and guess as to what actions the family had taken beforehand or if they realized the differences in service, I'm hard pressed to come up with an idea of what Vonage should have done differently. I'm also hard-pressed to understand how you can assign guilt to them, when the central issue is that 911 call centers are very secretive and selective (as the article states) about who they disclose information to. Also, the article doesn't state clearly whether the 10 minutes it took to place the 911 call were truly critical to the situation. Finally, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the real criminals here are the gunmen, and not the phone company. I would argue that more effort should be placed on finding these criminals, as that is a higher priority.

This is an issue that Vonage has been working on since before I became a subscriber. In fact, when we signed up there was absolutely NO 911 service in our area, and we were told so during the sign-up process. The fact that they've managed to put limited service in place is proof that they're trying to do the right thing here.

Still, the article is a good reminder to test 911 service when you get a VoIP phone setup. via [slashdot]

Technorati Tags: vonage, voip, phone, crime, 911

MC Chris

2005-03-22T14:14:00.000-06:00

MC Chris (best known as the voice of Hesh on Sealab 2021) is also a geek rapper extraordinaire. Check out his online collection of mp3s. I especially like "Fett's Vette" (an ode to Bobba Fett and his cool rides).

Slice you open like a Tan-Tan,
faster than the Autobahn,
Or a motorbike in Tron,
do the deed and then I'm gone
Jabba has a hissyfit,
contact calrissian...

Also, be sure to check out this interview with mc chris on slashdot.

Technorati Tags: rap, hiphop, mc+chris, star+wars, sealab2021, hesh

Marginal Revolution: The War on Drugs

2005-03-22T08:54:00.000-06:00

The War on Drugs:

One interesting reason why the drug war reduces consumption less than people imagine is that prohibition reduces some costs. Drug sellers, for example, do not pay social security taxes for their employees, they do not follow minimum wage laws and they do not obey costly FDA regulations. On net prices are still pushed up by the threat of prosecution but the lack of taxes and regulations is a countervailing factor.

I wish our legislators read blogs.

Technorati Tags: marginal+revolution, economics, war+on+drugs, politics, ideology

Muay Thai Fights on Flickr

2005-03-22T00:50:00.000-06:00

Originally uploaded by saadiq.

Check out these awesome pics from various Muay Thai championship fights that people have posted to Flickr.

Technorati Tags: flickr, photos, muay+thai, fighting, martial+arts

Feynman Lectures

2005-03-21T15:50:00.000-06:00

Does anyone know if there is a torrent available of the mp3s and pdfs at this site? I'd like to listen to Feynman's lectures, but the time requirements to download each individual file are a bit much.

Technorati Tags: richard+feynman, feynman, science, lectures, physics, torrent, mp3, pdf

We are living in an enlightened age, indeed!

2005-03-21T10:16:00.000-06:00

Apparently, CNN is reporting that some guy sees Satan on a turtle shell. Now, before I go out on a limb and bash the guy too terribly, I want to take CNN to task for making news out of absolutely nothing. Despite the fact that it's a slow news day, there is no reason to give people who refuse to think anymore ammunition.

From the article:

Owner Bryan Dora now says he sees Satan's face on the critter's shell. He can spot lips, eyes, a goatee, shoulders and a pair of pointy horns on Lucky's back.

"The marking on the shell was like the devil wanted us to know he was down there," Bryan Dora said. "To me, it's too coincidental that the only thing to come out unscathed would have this image on it."

I guess the first, most obvious question to me is, "why would Satan want to burn down your pet store?" The second question to follow would be, "okay, assume Satan wants to burn down your pet store, why would he leave you a Satan-gram?" Then, "okay, assume Satan wants to burn down your pet store AND he wants to leave you a Satan-gram...why not appear to you and jump up and down and say, 'Bryan Dora, I burnt down your pet store, come to me and feel the power of the Dark Side'?"

At the very least, make it more obvious than a crude outline of a Satan face on the back of a turtle shell!

Besides, how do you know what Satan looks like? The stylized horn and goatee devil is a relatively recent phenomenon (last 100 years) and I believe is mostly popularized by cartoons, comics and tattoo parlors. This smacks to me of the same phenomenon that causes "alien abductees" to draw pictures of aliens that look remarkably similiar to each other...and remarkably similiar to aliens in science-fiction magazines, TV, and movies of the time period the abductees grew up in.

I'm not dogging on anyone's religious beliefs, I just get really sick of these miracles (remember the Jesus Tortilla?) that really aren't. They always seem to stem from a combination of the need to feel significant and a lack of understanding of how the visual system operates. Humans, and most other animals are wired to recognize patterns. It's a mental shortcut that allows us to recognize faces at a glance from various angles. It's what allows us to rapidly process incoming visual data and assess whether we are in danger, or safe. It's what kept your ancestors from ending up as lion-food long enough to propagate the genes that eventually became you. It's also what causes you to see shapes in cloud formations, or tortillas, or turtle shells.

Get over yourself...so far, not a single "miracle" in recent history has stood up to true scientific inquiry. More often than not, there's either been fraud or duplicity involved...or simple random chance.

Technorati Tags: skepticism, mysticism, occult, paranormal

Technorati Tags Bookmarklet

2005-03-19T16:12:00.000-06:00

Checking out the Technorati Tags Bookmarklet I found on oddiophile. Pay no attention, nothing to see here.

Technorati Tags: technorati, tags, folksonomy, tagging

Update: NICE!!!

Technorati

2005-03-19T14:28:00.000-06:00

I'm a little late to the bandwagon, but after dealing with del.icio.us and flickr, I've decided to start incorporating Technorati tags into my blog posts. I'm trying to figure out if there is an easy way to just drop a whole bunch of tags in at a time without having to edit them all by hand. If I can't find something I may just have to code up a quick firefox extension someday when I have free time again.

For now, I'm just typing em in.

Tags: technorati, tags.

Google gets Mac-ified!

2005-03-16T08:51:00.000-06:00

Check out GoogleX for some Mac OSX Dock style action on your favorite search engine. It saddens me that I'm that susceptible to eye candy. Note to Google: don't be evil. Save me from myself and my eye-candy addiction. via [The Tablet PC Weblog]

Technorati Tags: google, mac, ajax, osx, search, webapps

Back to VoIP again

2005-03-15T13:11:00.000-06:00

Ross Rader chimes in on the VoIP debate in response to a post by Om Malik.

I agree with Ross...the feature-set of VoIP doesn't have to be nearly as reliable as the telcos for a number of reasons.

1. People have redundant, instantaneous communication systems now. Back in the days of yore, when my granpappies used to ride their dinosaurs to school, I had two options: mail a letter, or place a phone call. One was instant, the other was not. Now if I can't call you on your main phone line, I can get you on your cell phone, or I can IM you, or send you an email, or even fax you. This redundancy in the systems makes the reliability of any one medium less important.
2. The key purpose of phone calls is communication. As long as people can communicate effectively and not get distracted too much by the medium, they will be okay with minor distractions. I will deal with some jitter, some echo, some tinniness in VoIP as long as one basic criteria is met: I can communicate with more people, more effectively than I could before under the old system.
3. The level of distraction tolerated is directly proportional to the added value of the new service offering in question after subtracting out switching costs.

VoIP meets these criteria without question. Under my old phone plan I was paying $45/month + long distance charges. My out-of-state friends, my international family, and my wife's out-of-state employer all caused us to rack up long-distance charges that caused our bills to average around $80-$100/month. Now, we pay $25/month. Even after talking to relatives in South America for several hours at a time I've never had a bill above $33 (since Vonage's new price scheme went into effect). That's real money in my pocket.

In addition, I get lots of valuable services that I didn't have under the old system. Voicemails get sent to my email, I have number portability, additional lines are cheap and require little to no new infrastructure, and I get 3-way conferencing free of charge. I don't have to wait for tech support personnel to show up at my house when something goes wrong. I have the ability to keep long-term records of my voicemails as WAV files to be sorted, catalogued, remixed into songs, or what-have-you.

Switching costs are absolutely non-existent.

When you tack on the added bonus that additional features are easier to implement because they require no new hardware infrastructure and are programmatically introduced, you get a long-term cost-benefit curve that is almost flat.

All those things combined are the appeals of VoIP. If you want to try and tell me that a little static is going to send me running back to the telcos you're crazy.

Technorati Tags: vonage, voip, telcos, economics

Afghan Warrior: Afghanistan's first blog

2005-03-13T00:52:00.000-06:00

After the election the new government established a new ministry by the name of Ministry of Women's Affairs and the women can easily solve their problems and they also have representatives in other provinces. During the Taliban we didn’t have internet system in Afghanistan but now there are about 25 net cafes in Kabul, and also some in Herat, Kandahar and Balkh provinces. People are really interested to use the internet but its too expensive for people to use it - only rich people can afford it. Under the Taliban Government we didn’t have any TV channels but now we have 4 TV channels in Kabul and for the first time in Ghazni, Balkh, Herat and Kandahar provinces.

Awesome. I really hope this is legit, and not some 16 year old kid in Orlando playing a prank.

Technorati Tags: afghanistan, afghani, blogger, blogging, blogosphere, liberty, freedom

Don't know what you got til it's gone

2005-03-11T08:35:00.000-06:00

Man, I come in this morning, fire up the ole' computer, and discover that Bloglines is down. And the amazing thing is that I start freakin' out! I'm thinking to myself, "How will I ever remember all the sites that I have feeds for?"

Then I take a few deep breaths and remember that the beauty of RSS is that I don't have to worry about it...it'll give me everything I missed when the service comes back online/routes correctly/whatever. It's amazing how a sudden unexpected shift in environments/habits can cause such panics. I mean, I read bloglines in the morning! Doesn't everybody know that? Didn't the internet plan around that?

*Scary*

In other news, I stayed up WAY too late last night and got up WAY too early. Now, my eyes seem to have trouble focusing on the monitor. I hope this goes away soon.

Technorati Tags: bloglines, webapps, ajax, rss, newsreader, aggregator

I'll show you a poo poo head!

2005-03-11T00:45:00.000-06:00

For those of you who couldn't bear to sit through an episode of the "OC" to catch a glimpse of the Star Wars trailer, I present to you the (Not Quite) Episode III trailer. via [#joiito]

Technorati Tags: star+wars, lucas, episode+iii, episode+3, revenge+of+the+sith, humor, parody

As if there weren't enough reasons to want a Powerbook

2005-03-04T11:48:00.000-06:00

This Powerbook + iTunes hack is the coolest!

Technorati Tags: powerbook, mac, osx, mac+osx, itunes, apple, hack, motion

Translate This!

2005-03-04T11:30:00.000-06:00

Lost In Translation: Extreme Tactical Weapons Force...words simply cannot describe the pure comedic genius that you will follow down that link-click. The rest of the site is top-notch as well, though some of it may be NSFW. Site found via [All Things Christie]

Technorati Tags: humor, parody, funny

Whatever happened to classmates.com?

2005-03-03T15:33:00.000-06:00

I keep getting these really annoying spam messages (I'm sure I solicited them eons ago when I first graduated from college...but still) from classmates.com. Of course, they have the requisite "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email, but when you click it classmates.com refuses the connection. Really annoying. I get the same when I try to go directly to classmates.com. I thought they were profitable at one point. Did they go bankrupt? If so, where do these emails come from?

More importantly, how do I successfully unsubscribe from this crap-fest?

Technorati Tags: spam, annoyance, web, classmates.com

Balloon Baby

2005-03-01T14:01:00.000-06:00

This looks like my kind of fun. via [Due Diligence]

Technorati Tags: humor, funny, fun, jokes

Cote on Feed Searches

2005-02-28T14:07:00.000-06:00

Cote talks about what web services he'd be willing to pay for. In summation, he decides there would be very few. He does concede that he would probably be willing to toss more money to our new search-engine overlords:

Put another way, it'd tell me about each new site Google found that linked to my weblog. I'd want to be able to do the same thing with any Google query: I don't want to subscribe to the current results the query would return, I just want the diffs since I ran the query last. I want to new just the new results in the query every day/week/whatever.

With Google, I have to manually do this today and sort out the new links from the old links. It's tedious, repetitive, and time consuming: the kind of stuff those amazing computers are really good at. Long ago, before weblogs, when we had to walk to each website we wanted to read (usually up hill, both ways, through snow), I'd do this manual searching about once a month for my websites.

It's amazing to me that Cote's been willing to put that much work into this whole "online experience" thing. I'm sure he's not alone. Back in the golden day, he essentially would function as a "manual, human feedster". Me, on the other hand, found it much easier to just sit back and relax until Feedster and PubSub got created. Now, I get all the rip-roaring ego-strokin' content I need.

Here's the Holy Grail of web content as I see it: To quote Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump, "Even the sun shines on a dog's ass sometimes." To put it another way, even the most moronic, Everquest-addled, Babylon 5 quotin', World-of-Warcraft-lording, Furry-message-board-posting dweeb can express a good idea every once in awhile. I want something to take my meta-interests and scour the web constantly and report back to me after filtering out the junk that these types would talk about that I have absolutely no interest in. Oh yeah, and I want it to be accurate.

As it stands right now, the social networking technology is really good at getting you to people who have a lot in common with you, or at the least, a strong affinity on one characteristic (political views, musical tastes, programming editor of choice). Now I want you to take care of the edge cases for me. Get me the people I have nothing in common with, who I would hate to talk to in real life, and give me the single distilled idea that they have that I would find useful.

Technorati Tags: feed+search, cote, rss, lazy+web, aggregators, social+networking

Investopedia Search

2005-02-27T19:28:00.000-06:00

I finally got around to creating an investopedia search plugin for Mozilla. If you're interested just download it and unzip it into the 'searchplugins' directory (c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\ is the default on Windows) and restart Firefox.

Technorati Tags: investopedia, investing, finance, search, search+plugins, firefox, mozilla, web, browsers

GloFish

2005-02-24T00:02:00.000-06:00

For my birthday, Audrey got me a pair of GloFish! Ever since I read about them I've been keen on getting some. Something about the concept of genetically-engineered pets just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

I have to get a blacklight so I can see them "glow", but even in natural right they're pretty luminescent and shiny. Well, one of them is, the other one doesn't have the "glow" gene expressed all that strongly. Still, I'm planning on getting some more in a few weeks (she bought the last two in the store).

Ahhh, science, how I love thee!

I'll see if I can get some good pictures to post once I get the black light in.

Technorati Tags: glofish, fish, genetic+engineering, pets, aquarium

Joi Ito's Web: Shinkuro

2005-02-23T11:30:00.000-06:00

It's about time Joi Ito finally jumps on my bandwagon. I've been talking about Shinkuro for a long time now to anyone who would listen (see this post from the Shinkuro v1 days).

While there are some shortcomings (mainly that there is no API for programmatic interaction to build apps on top of it, Shinkuro IDs are tied to machine for security reasons, and file sharing large libraries of files can be cumbersome) it has a lot of promise, especially for ad-hoc project collaboration. Oh yeah, and Jeff Kay (the lead developer) is just a swell guy with some really sharp insights.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...watch this app.

Update: I just installed the latest version and it looks like they have "Key Escrow" abilities so you can get your encryption keys off the relay in case of hardware failure replacement. One more reason not to use this app has been done away with. Resistance is futile.

Technorati Tags: shinkuro, joi, joi+ito, social+networking, encryption, security, chat, secure+chat

cote on 43 Things

2005-02-17T12:41:00.000-06:00

Apparently, cote has only done one thing!

Just when I thought I had caught up with Jones, he pulls one over on me and adds more content! And he's got laser eyes to boot! (Note to self: get laser eyes, then agree to meet Cote somewhere and lop off his arms with my laser eyes. Let's see him aggregate as much content after that.)

Technorati Tags: cote, 43things, social+networking, webapps, content