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.