Big 3 v. Everyone

Is this the type of publicity Ford needs right now?

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/ford-doesnt-own-its-logo-and-neither-do-you/

Vibrant Ads

Vibrant Ads are those ads that pop up in the middle of a page when you mouse over an underlined phrase. As someone who likes to "read with their mouse," it's really distracting to me to have an ad pop up right in front of what I'm trying to read.

A note to web sites: If you use Vibrant Ads, I will never come back. I acknowledge the need for ad revenue, but it's just not worth the aggravation to visit a site with Vibrant.

Quicken 2009

I started using Quicken some time back in the 90's. I don't remember exactly when, but it was somewhere around 93-94, as I got it not too long after I got my first computer. Somewhere along the line when it was time to upgrade, I switched to Microsoft Money.

When I got married, it was actually a lengthy discussion between us whether we should use Quicken, like my wife had been doing, or use Money, like me. We decided on Money, simply because I handle the money in the family, so my input weighed more on this topic. That was in 2001.

The time came to upgrade recently, and I couldn't actually find Microsoft Money in stores. I looked at all the usual places, and couldn't even find it on Amazon.com. The only place I could find it was via download directly from Microsoft. So, when I was at Costco, I went ahead and purchased Quicken 2009 due to the great price it was selling for.

Mistake.

Quicken 2009 doesn't seem to want to run on Vista. The Quicken Sidebar Gadget doesn't update properly (it shows old new information), and when you click on Savings Plan, it crashes EVERY TIME. No exception, it crashes every single time. I literally don't know what that screen is supposed to look like.

So, I went on quicken.intuit.com to look to see if there is some sort of patch or workaround for it, and it appears that Intuit does not actually provide support for Quicken. The support options are limited to problems with the download, unlocking the CD, and a community forum. I thought maybe the community forum was the place that you'd put your problem and Intuit employees would respond and then the solution would be available to everyone going forward.

After looking around the user forums, it seems to be a gather place for people to post their problems, then for other users to tell them that they have the same problem and Intuit won't respond to their requests for help.

I've had enough, it's going back to Costco. I guess I'll download the appropriate Microsoft Money version.

DSLR Camera

I have 4 kids under the age of 6, and it seems that there are a lot of times that the point and shoot camera I have just can't keep up with the kids. I've tried several brands and models, both personally and in the store, but they all seem to have too great of a shutter "lag" to capture the kids the instant I hit the button. This has caused me to consider a consumer level DSLR. I don't know much about photography, but my understanding is that you basically buy into a system of lenses, Canon or Nikon, for example, and then you upgrade bodies down the road.

This seems like a reasonable system, although since I don't know much about photography, I'm forced to do a ridiculous amount of research to make an informed decision. As near as I can tell, the two biggest players, Canon and Nikon, have followers akin to Ford or Chevy.

Anyway, so I'm coming into a small windfall in about 2 weeks, and I think I'm going to go ahead and pull the trigger on the Canon XSi. I suppose one can double think this into infinity, but I'm sure that it is more than sufficient for my needs. It really doesn't hurt that the price is down something like 40% from this time last year...

Bitter Clinger

In light of my previous post, this mug makes me wish I drank coffee.

Bitter Clinger Mug
Buy this product at CafePress
Designed by Big Elephant

Obama

First, let me say that I didn't vote for Obama. And no, I didn't vote for the old guy, either. I was kind of discouraged by the choices this year.

The Good:

1) Everyone loves Obama. Not just people in the US, but people in other countries. Maybe that's because they figure he'll do what every other Democrat in recent memory has done and ravage our military, but whatever the reason, we could use a little good PR these days.

2) He is black. Ok, some may argue that, but who cares. I never cared about his race when I decided I didn't want to vote for him, but since apparently it's important to some people, I'm glad we can remove the supposed stigma about never having had a black president.

The Bad:

1) I work for a small company. So, even though I've personally been promised a tax break, I'm pretty sure there won't be as much money to go around when raises are due, since the owner of the company I work for is squarely in Obama's crosshairs.

2) Speaking of crosshairs... He's going to be coming for your guns. I'm a bitter clinger, so I'm not very opimistic about the next 4 years.

3) Yeah, he's a socialist. I'm not for removing incentives for success, enabling people who want to live off others, or any sort of big government.

Bump.

Watch this:




Then this:

Letting Someone Go

We had to let one of our developers go today. It sucks. The job wasn't a good fit for him, but it still sucks...

Some of you may try to put two and two together with my last post... you'd be right.

A Weekend Too Short

I'm having a hard time getting up the motivation to go into work today. I worked almost 18 hours on Saturday, essentially eliminating my weekend. What was supposed to be a 3 hour firewall switchout turned into a marathon of wasted work.

Random Friday Night Happenings

I got last minute tickets to the Rangers tonight. Turns out they were pretty good seats.

On the way to the game there was a Prius holding up traffic in the left lane. That was excusable, but I couldn't wrap my mind around the fact that the dude finished the burger he was eating, wadded up the wrapper, rolled down his window, and threw it out onto the road. I think that's pathetic and lazy, but I actually had to stop and ponder it that it was from a Prius driver.

Also, I have personally witnessed BOTH of Brandon Boggs' Major League home runs.

The new Macbook Air commerical

An interesting thought about fuel economy...

I was talking with a co-working today about fuel economy and he illustrated to me how our way of looking at fuel efficiency is fundamentally flawed. We get excited when something like a Prius hybrid car gets 45 mpg. I have a Civic which is comparably sized to the Prius and it gets in the neighborhood of 35 mpg. So, the Prius, which carries a hefty fiscal penalty up front, will get me a little better mileage over the long run. However, my Civic really doesn't burn all that much gas based on how much I drive, so any increase in efficiency wouldn't really save me all that much money.

The true measure of efficiency should be consumption. Think of this:

2 pairs of cars.
The first pair of cars consists of a car that gets 12 mpg, and one that gets 500 mpg.

The second pair of cars consists of a car that gets 16 mpg, and one that gets 50 mpg.

When asked, most people would say that the first pair is more efficient. After all, the one car get 10 times the mpg of the other. However, when you do the math, the results aren't intuitive.

When each car is asked to drive 500 miles, they burn the following amount of fuel:

First Pair:
500 miles @ 12 mpg = 41.6 gallons
500 miles @ 500 mpg = 1 gallon
Total Consumption = 42.6 gallons of fuel

Second pair:
500 miles at 16 mpg = 31.25 gallons
500 miles at 50 mpg = 10 gallons
Total Consumption = 41.25 gallons

As illustrated by this example, maybe GM's strategy of improving the efficiency of their big burners like the new hybrid Tahoe is superior to Toyota wringing a tiny bit more efficiency out of its already miserly subcompacts.

Untimely Inclement Weather Reports

Trying to watch a TV show that is constantly being interrupted with inclement weather reports is really annoying.

Trying to watch that same show a week later on Tivo is downright infuriating.

I tried to watch The Office and My Name is Earl just now, and both shows were entirely pre-empted by the NBC weather schmuck going over the same info over and over and over for the entire hour that I Tivoed. She suggested that you can watch the episode on Hulu.com, instead. Great, instead of seeing it on my bigscreen in HD, I get to watch it in super crappy resolution over streaming video.

So, fine, I'll just watch Eli Stone. Oh wait, it turns out the first 15 minutes are nothing but a weather report telling me the same thing that I can figure out by getting off my butt and looking out the window. About 30 minutes in, they flash a message across the screen that we can watch the show in its entirety at 3:10 AM. Now, Tivo is great at appearing to shift time, but it can't actually go back in time and record a show after the fact.

When will networks get their heads out of their butts and realize that people have DVRs and also that if they wanted to know about the weather, they will tune to the Weather Channel (or the 3 other HD network-run all weather stations), or open up their web browser and get whatever information they want.

Patent Bending

There's a new show on the Science Channel called Patent Bending. The premise of the show is they dig up old patents for outlandish devices and try and make them work.

I had high hopes for the show, although it was mitigated by the appearence that the show is an obvious attempt to capitalize on the Mythbusters' recipe for success. Unfortunately, those hopes were in vain as the first 10 minutes of the first show only served to illustrate that the producers of the show made horrible, horrible casting choices for the show's lead.

The show led off with a design for a golf club with a 12GA shotgun shell in the face so that you can get some extra drive in your game. The show took an immediate wrong turn when they started discussing using compressed air in lieu of the shotgun shell. What's the point of digging up a old patent if you're immediately going to disregard the basic design element of it?

During their exploration of compressed air as an alternative to the shotgun shell, they went to a paintball store and talked to the owner about the technology behind paintball guns. When the store owner discharged a shot of compressed air, the show's "star" that seems to wear nothing but sleeveless shirts dived under the table like a little girl. The rest of the people in the room immediately started laughing at him, but it really just struck me as sad. This was further compounded when the same guy fired a flare gun into the air to illustrate Newton's law, and reacted like a little girl shooting a canon.

I had Tivoed two episodes but only made it through the first few minutes of one before being disgusted by the apparent lack of manhood of one of the hosts and deleted both of them.

It's a shame, really...

Windows Vista SP1

I have 4 computers that run Windows Vista. Two desktop computers and two laptop computers. All except for one run Windows Vista Ultimate. One of the laptops (a tablet PC) runs Windows Vista Business. For some reason, one of my desktops picked up on SP1 and offered to install it, to which I accepted. The other 3 however, have not said one thing via Windows Update about SP1. Even when I force a check for updates... nothing! Ahhhh, the mysteries of Microsoft.

How is Symantec still in business?

Some companies continue to survive, despite their own best efforts. Case in point: Symantec.

When my company was looking into purchasing Symantec Enterprise Vault, I literally called their sales department 6 times trying to speak to someone to ask them a few questions. I actually left them a message that I had $20,000 ready and waiting for their software, all they had to do was call me back. No call... really...

I recently installed Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 on a computer to test. Very first thing it did was break my wireless connection. Upon searching (I love you, Google), it turns out that it's a known issue that SEP11 breaks WPA and WPA2 authentication. When I try to pull up the link to the Symantec support article to see if there's a fix (it's been known for at least 4 months now), Symantec.com is down. Down. Really. Down. They probably tried to use their own product to protect their servers.

Last Thursday, Hotmail started blocking emails from my company's server. Turns out that Symantec Brightmail, which Hotmail uses for spam filtering, seems to think that our IP has been compromised. You know, the IP that is protected by another one of their products, Symantec Endpoint Protection. Of course, after some Googling (yes, it's a verb, too) I found several blogs from people like me who were blocked recently. Probably someone at Symantec pushed the wrong button. But the irony remains that they blacklisted a mail server that was protected by them...

RatemyCop.com

There are various news stories floating around about RatemyCop.com. Most of them center around Police agencies being up in arms about someone's right to have their views heard on a public forum. The funny thing about this is, I don't think many people would have heard of the website if the cops hadn't raised a ruckus about trying to get it shut down.

A word about passwords...

If you’re protecting something of value, you need more than just a lock. You need to manage the keys. For some reason, people at my company don't feel inclined to create decent passwords, and then keep them to themselves.

Weewar map editor

Weewar has a map editor now. Thankfully, as I was starting to tire of the same old maps. I threw a new map together and will try it out. As a rookie map editor, the only way I could make sure the map wasn't one sided was to make it mirror image. I suppose with enough thought I could make a more random looking map, but I'm still new to this.

Mobile Shell 2.0

The wonderful minds over at SPB Software House put out a press release earlier this month saying that Mobile Shell 2.0 is coming out at the end of this month.

I'm really looking forward to this...

They had better hurry if they are going to meet their deadline. Only two days left...

Divisive Topics - Abortion and Gun Control

Can someone explain to me how some people can think that Abortion is a Constitutionally protected right, and that your right to own a gun clearly isn't?

Adobe and Apple

Why is it neccesary for software updates (Quicktime and Adobe Reader) to put shortcuts on your desktop and quick launch bars? When I installed the programs originally, I had to clean up after them, and every time they get updated I have to do the same.

While I'm at it, Adobe Reader is the biggest piece of bloat floating around in cyberspace. Why, when Microsoft Word 2007 opens about 25MB, does Adobe Reader take 54MB? It's not even a word processor, it's just a stupid reader. A bloated one at that.

I don't use Photoshop, but I hear that has become overly bloated, as well.

Adobe, what happened to you?

Politics

The only thing bad about politics is that politicians are involved.

Hillary is telling us that she wants to implement government health care. Have you seen government housing? Show me one thing the government is doing a good job on right now as a reference that we should trust them with our health care. Is it going to be like public education, where you can't pick your school unless you move? Is it going to be like public housing where it will be taken advantage of until it is run down and undesirable?

Obama is running ads in Texas telling me he wants to give me a $1000 tax break and simultaneously close the "corporate tax loopholes." Great, so he wants to buy my vote and tax my employer so they can pass the cost on to the consumer and/or cut positions to make up for the lost revenue. Maybe all the jobs will just go to non-socialist countries where the government won't saddle them with increasing taxes.

John McCain is openly anti-Constitution (See McCain-Feingold act).

Huckabee is anti-family (see his voting record on Education. He doesn't want you to be able to home school.)

I wish I could afford my own private island. Is Cuba for sale?

Webware 100

Don't forget to vote at the Webware 100

Macworld

Oh, Macworld is about to start? I can't hardly wait untilll.... (snnnoooooooooore...)

No Ford Pics, One Week!

...or ever, if Ford has its way:

via Boing Boing

http://www.bmcforums.com/showthread.php?t=42402

snotty holier-than-thou types

As a followup to my previous post (Children with Blogs) about Gizmodo, I thought I'd pull a posting off their own blog about the device used in their CES prank.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/notag/tv%20b%20gone-23694.php

Here's the posting in its entirety:

Copied Text Below -------------------------------------

Mitch Altman is an asshole. And not just any asshole, but one of those snotty holier-than-thou types who has nothing better to do with the money he made as a founder of 3ware than to develop a device with the sole purpose of imposing his viewpoint on others. See, Altman hates the television and its encroachment into public space. Rather than just doing what most everybody else has done—which is either not really caring or, failing that, getting the fuck over it—Altman has invented a device called the 'TV-B-Gone' (obviously having expended every last vapor of his creative ability developing the product, he was left to co-opt the most obvious name schtick ever). Essentially a universal remote that cycles through every possible code, the TV-B-Gone has a single purpose: to power off televisions whenever the user feels like being a dick.

Read the Wired News profile, where Altman wanders through a city, turning off other peoples' televisions, peppering his behavior with such gems as, "We just saved him several minutes of his life." Maybe after making his tens of dozens of dollars on the TV-B-Gone, Altman can invent a gadget that transports self-important cocks who think they're waging a subversive culture war to a log cabin coffee shop where they can reassure each other how awesome they are for hating television. Free berets for the first 100 pricks to use the word "Sheeple!"

My new Tivo

I recently bought TiVo HD DVR from Amazon. It's my fourth Tivo (yes, fourth.) I waited until recently because some lame politics and corporate BS prevented Tivo from being able to enable the multi-room functionality of the new HD Tivos, and I wanted all my Tivos to work together. The wait was worth it. I can now have HD content on my HD TV. It also has dual tuners allowing me to record 2 things at one time. They typically sell for around $300, but Amazon has them for just under $260. The Tivo HD is also expandable via the Western Digital MyDVR drive. Best of all, the familiar and user-friendly Tivo interface is the centerpiece of the DVR.

Children with Blogs

I've seen a lot going around the web about Gizmodo's CES stunt. If you want the short version, Gizmodo, a gadget blog, went to CES (Consumer Electronic Show) and began turning off TVs with a device that turns off TVs. I suppose someone with a Homer Simpson-esque sense of humor might find it funny to turn off a wall of TVs that potential customers are looking at, but they then proceeded to interrupt a product presentation by Motorola that was showing on a set of TVs during a press conference.

CEA, the company that runs CES, obviously banned the person responsible, but they are being unclear what, if any, further actions will be taken. I think when it comes down to it, there were 2 partys harmed in a clear way by the prank, Motorola and CEA.

The harm to Motorola was clear when Gizmodo interrupted their press conference. For those that don't know, companies compete for press coverage at this even, and often a good presentation can raise the value of a company's stock (or lower it.)

Before CEA meters out the final sanctions, I'm hoping they realize what this prank has done to their credibility. Companies pay unbelievable amounts of money to participate in the convention, millions in some cases. They do this with the belief that they will be in an environment with professional press, and retail buyers from around the world. For the first time, it became clear that children are being let into the event. Spoiled children who get gadgets for free because they have a successful blog, but children nonetheless. I can't help but wonder what the fallout will be from this next year. Obviously, a few pieces of electrical tape over the IR recievers of the devices would prevent this from happening again, but will someone try to outdo them next year?

Honestly, the prank wasn't even funny. It wasn't creative, it wasn't harmless, it just wasn't funny. I'm sure that some people got satisfaction watching someone "stick it to the man," but beyond that, there wasn't much funny about it.

Browser Game of the Year

The folks over at Galaxy-news.net have announced the nominees for Browser Game of the Year. My favorite game Weewar was nominated for no less than 6 of 15 categories! Way to go guys!