Moose Tacos

From Colbert excerpted from the Fact Checker,

I will give the last word to failed Democratic presidential candidate and fake news commentator Stephen Colbert who described the superhighway as a scheme "to make Canada, the U.S. and Mexico one country and force us to eat moose tacos." After investigating the matter, Colbert concluded that it must be true "because I got it from the Internet."

pobox.com move...

Time for an inane question:

I'm getting a little sick of paying pobox.com $20 every year, but so many people have that address. I just renewed for another year and my New Year's resolution is going to be to move all humans to my gmail address. While it will be a pain to change all my accounts to gmail, I can do that. I just don't know the best way to get people to change.

Any thoughts on the best way to do this that would be the least annoying? At least with my contacts, mass emails don't seem to work as some people are still calling a phone number I haven't had for 5 years. My "reply-to" has been gmail for a long time, to little avail.

I was thinking of setting up an autoresponder that will send a form message to anyone that sends to pobox telling them that in the future they should send it to gmail. But that's pretty annoying. Then again, I really don't have that many friends. I could even do it by hand each time a pobox email arrives.

Only possible on the Internet

If we didn't have the Internet, how would we know things like this exist?

It's been a long time

So I went to the mailbox the other day and was surprised to see an envelope from the law firm of Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson, LLP. Surprised really to see a letter from any law firm. Having been through the lawsuit wringer before (well maybe it was a washboard not a wringer) I was a little nervous to open the envelope. Nervous enough that I had to open it right there and then standing on on my driveway. I was hoping for stupid junk mail or maybe some Nigerian e-mail scam turned postal.

After opening the envelope and pulling out the letter I tried to quickly process it. The letter said something about parking tickets for a license plate that didn't belong to either of my cars. But wait... the license plate does seem a bit familiar... and what is the date on those tickets? 1998? Oh crap. Then I remembered the license plate of the car I owned almost 10 years ago. The license plate that is still in a box in the basement on top of the license plates from all the cars that I've owned, my parents have owned since I've been alive, and maybe some others I've collected.

As you may have guessed by now, this was a letter from a law firm representing the City of Chicago. The city decided that after 9 1/2 years I owe $440 for 4 tickets - straight up. Do I remember getting those tickets? Not specifically. But I do remember that was the year I left Chicago (and the state) and sold the car to a junkyard for $25. I remember that was the last summer for that car and that it didn't work very often. It certainly seems possible that I got some tickets, but I don't remember specifics. Really most of the details are blurred through the lens of 9 1/2 years.

To add insult to injury, the glorious City of Chicago has informed me that I've been found liable through an Administrative Hearing process. This process is now over, my time to contest the tickets has come and gone, and this is my final notice. The final notice was sent via regular mail - not registered mail or something to prove I received it. If I don't pay they claim they could put a lien on my property or garnish my wages. Why is this the first letter I've received? It's not as if I've been hiding out under a false name. Granted, I did leave town for a couple years, but I've lived in Illinois for the last 7 1/2 years. Was I really that hard to find? I have a drivers license, two cars registered in my name, and I faithfully pay state income taxes.

Should I pay? I think I'll consult with my attorney.

Android

Look for an ex-Neog in this video.

Security?

We've all heard of "security through obscurity" but have you ever heard of "security through letterhead"? One of my favorite sites (http://worsethanfailure.com/) has a nice mock conversation between a consultant and a domain registrar regarding a domain name transfer. If you've ever wondered how hard it would be for someone to swipe your domain from you the answer is probably not very hard.

The Colbert Effect

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200710u/colbert-campaign

This is an interesting analysis of the effect Colbert might have on the South Carolina presidential primary. My favorite quote comes from page 2:

"I can’t point to anything other than truthiness, but I believe the 'drunken college student' demographic is being overlooked."

Cube-De-Sac

This could have been good for the Cube-De-Sac...better than that mirror I had mounted on top of my monitor.

Ok, that's three posts in a row for me...Someone else needs to step up.

sql injection

Pretty good, but this is still my favorite:

New Signature

I came up with a new email signature. I can't believe I never thought of it before.

p@rick

And for those who know me as 'pat':

p@

Awesome...and it saves a keystroke to boot.

Spam Tagging Etiquette

If I get added to a mailing list after buying something, I'll try to unsub. If that doesn't work do you mark it as SPAM? Is it worth contacting somebody? Complaining?

Feels very passive.

Java Web Technologies Renaissance

It's a ruthless cycle. You create something so much cooler than anything out there. It makes people go wow, I never knew you could do that!

It's inevitable that somebody and probably a few somebodies will come along and make it relatively easy for mere mortals to do and the next thing you know M$ has a wizard that let's you click to build.

The good thing is that lazy people like me can benefit from the mini revolution in different ways to build integrated AJAX enabled web applications with just reading level Javascript skills. There's the obvious GWT, but also Wicket seems like a brand new way but maybe old feeling way to write web applications without feeling like you are writing web applications.

Why now all of a sudden the outburst of creativity? Is it all inspired by RoR?

Your Travel Dossier

Apparently everybody who flies now has a dossier. You can get a copy of your own. I saw a link to a link on boingboing. Try it and see what you get. It's ironic and perhaps telling that you have to snail mail the request and that some poor schmuck has to photocopy it and mail it back to you?

The samples they show seem to be the complete GDS PNR that a business travel agent might create. Knowing what I know it seems like it's your travel agent's fault that all the data is in there.

Don't drink coffee

If your reaction on the first sip is "blech." It's helpful to also to throw away old cups of partially drunk coffee as you might accidentally drink from one.

Healthcare Reform

I've read lots of stuff on this subject and the only conclusion I've really drawn is that the status quo doesn't cut it. In summary my views are,

1. Everyone should be able to get healthcare
2. Choice in insurance is good
3. Insurance should not be tied to your employment

I believe we can and should take care of people when they get sick. It just seems wrong to me that people have to die and suffer because they gambled on not needing insurance or they just can't afford it.

It should be obvious that choice is good.

This last point is important to me because it's one more thing that keeps people where they shouldn't be. It's completely at odds with "at-will" employment. Finally, it really limits the competitiveness of legacy companies like GM and even quasi-governmental CTA.

In a review of presidential perspectives on healthcare, in this Sunday's times, none of the 3 top candidates of either party have proposals to satisfy my 3 top requirements. I'm bummed out that it probably won't get any better than the status quo.

A Bonafide Plan to Improve the World

I deal with a lot of contracts. In my last one I reviewed I spent 25% of the time stating the things I wanted and the other 75% pouring over the clauses to make sure it was consistent and to try to catch the holes. I just know that their are still ambiguity that I didn't intend that if things went south, I could be screwed by.

What if there were a DSL for contracts? With this we could test the contract for logical consistency, highlight the ambiguity, and eventually compile it into different styles of legalese.

And this is where we improve the world. Once people start using this widely, we would need significantly less corporate lawyers. Productivity would boom because people wouldn't waste their time reading the same sentence 20 times to figure out what it really means, and arbitration could be handled by code.

l33t 9009£3

Is this really necessary?

Cleaning Up My Desktop

This is one of my favorites that I had to capture for posterity before I trashed it. I guess whoever coded up that error must have never got it in their testing.

Palm Garnet has a similar thing where you get an error during sync and the error detail is something like AirStateSamMachine.c. What exactly are you supposed to do with that? Maybe enlightened mac / iPhone users don't have to deal with this?

I want to build an app like that

A friend of mine has a kid at the Lab School, and they recently sent home a note with all the kids suggesting the parents talk to them about Twitter and the appropriateness of paying attention in class.

Free food

Schneier has an interesting bit about how people steal free food from a drivethru. So let's assume you had a Mac-attack, is this really the best you can do? Do you think you could apply this to say a drive-thru Starbucks or cleaners (not that Leon's suits would come close to fitting me)? I mean if you have money enough to own a car and put gas into it, why would you need to do this? There's a reason they call it a Value Menu!

Mac Screen Capture

There haven't been any posts in two days, so I thought I better help keep this blog alive...

In Gnome, to do a screen capture, you press the Print Screen key. On a mac, Cmd-Shift-4, which I can never remember and have to google every time. (You can also select a portion of the screen with Cmd-Shift-3). On my MacBook, there are five function keys with empty special features (F8 - F12)...couldn't they put a screen capture key on there (to be activated with the Fn key)? I'm sure I could remap my keyboard, but this is a useful activity that I think a lot of users would benefit from having a default, easy to use/remember way to do it.

I Wish I Could Buy an iPhone

But I don't like iTunes. It would be great if somebody wrote a piece of software that allowed me to sync up the phone but didn't require iTunes. Ideally it would work on Linux and transcode my FLACs.

Eat Them Up Yum

This one is a little old, but since I just joined up and don't have anything inane right now, I decided to pull this one out of my vast knowledge of stupid 80's trivia (a.k.a. my butt).

I give you the video for that wonderful 80's hit: Fish Heads

It was a big hit around the campfire back in the day. Little did I know that it stars Bill Paxton!

Game over man...

Other blogs to check out...

sillydogbarks
Rules of the Swarm

By the way, is there a feed for the comments?

Yet Another Great Vista Feature

After it crashes, it offers to check online for a solution to the problem. The progress bar moves for a while and then the dialog just disapears. I guess that means there's no solution or perhaps no problem it's willing to acknowledge?

Who are three people....

I never thought would blog. Next thing I know you'll all have Facebook apps , Twitter pages, and a guild. I assumed that when I got an invite to a blog from Michael it was a phishing scam, but I was wrong. Thanks for letting me play.

Brings a smile to your face

I get this from google analytics everyday. Makes me smile.

Snapfish Inanity

I'm more of a snapfish consumer than producer (no kids), but I just uploaded 240 pictures from a road trip. I tried to do this on my mac, but if you are on a mac, you have to use an html form with 10 file fields and browse for the files one at a time, and there's no progress bar. On a PC, they let you use a flash uploader. So I booted up my PC into windows just for this and decided to use their "Picture Mover" application. Apparently, the snapfish programmers haven't heard of threads.

When I plugged in the camera, it took about thirty minutes for it to find all the photos. In that time, the interface was unresponsive (couldn't scroll, didn't redraw itself). It also had them in order by filename, not by date. And it didn't respect the rotation that is stored in the files. I figured that when I uploaded them, snapfish would make it right, so I clicked "move now". It copied all 240 to my PC (what was it doing during the first 30 minutes???), then started uploading. The first two took over an hour. I expected it to upload more than one at a time, but it looked to be going in order. For kicks, I left it on and went to sleep.

I couldn't believe it, but in the morning it was done. I went to the snapfish site and they were still in the wrong order and orientation. The rotating interface was actually kind of nice and worked well, but the rearranging interface is a nightmare. They present all photos in the album with a text entry box next to each photo with a number in it. Then they tell you to change the numbers to the order you want them in. This is nontrivial for 240 pictures. I started doing some sort of insertion sort. After you click rearrange, it of course takes you back to the album page and you have to click edit, rearrange, wait for a page load, then start doing some renumbering. Another tactic I tried was moving ones that were interrupting the order to the end by giving them numbers greater than 250 (this way I didn't have to renumber both the source and the destination).

Anyway, I've made it halfway and it's a complete mess. I'm thinking of doing bubble sort for the remaining 120...

Still nothing else to do

Now it says this...

Nothing else to do

It's been saying this for 15 minutes.

I found a bug on blogger

They aren't pluralizing "comment" correctly...

Leave linked in?

We should start a national leave linked in day. Get everybody to delete all their contacts at once . Think of the productivity gains when people stop spending all day trolling for names they recognize.

EOM?

When sending an e-mail without any content, what should you put in the subject line to indicate the body of the message is empty? If the recipient is surprised to find the message empty, then you have failed.

I've seen two different ways of trying to convey an entire message with just a subject line. The first I might call the standard [EOM]. The other frankly left me a bit surprised and confused. Would you use [nt]?

Group Inanity

This is for Roger.