Category: Uncategorized

Anytime Golf for iPad is now live in the App Store.

That was almost too easy.  A few hours after I posted Blogger was shutting down FTP publishing, I started looking for blogging software that supported sqlite and importing from Blogger.

No more than 20 minutes after I downloaded MT I had my entire blog imported from Blogger. This plugin connects over the Blogger API and grabs your entire blog and all metadata, including comments. 
The only thing it got wrong were the timestamps of my blog entries, but sqlite made short work of that:

update mt_entry set entry_authored_on = datetime(entry_authored_on,’-8 hour’);

I’m loving this!  I wish I had switched over a long time ago.  I’m gonna miss that old theme though, I had been using it for 8 years.

Thanks for the kick in the pants Blogger!

This may be my last post for a while. Blogger has announced they’re soon going to be shutting down FTP publishing.

I knew this day would come. I always thought it was kinda ridiculous they allowed FTP publishing. It frequently breaks and it doesn’t generate them any revenue.

I guess I’m gonna have to install wordpress. Figuring out how to import my 300+ posts over the last 8 years will be interesting.

I’ve been car shopping lately and have come across two instances where the car is advertised as a “Carfax 1-owner” vehicle, but the car has actually had two owners. Carfax.com does in fact report 1 owner, but when checking the vehicle with Experian AutoCheck, they report 2 owners. In one case I was actually able to determine Experian was the one that was correct, because the dealership had all of the sales records for the car in the glove box.

Don’t trust Carfax.

Coverage I’ve read of the story focuses on Comcast having an unfair advantage over other ISPs, or vertical integration gains they’ll make by joining forces with NBC. But there are two other things I wish were being discussed:

1) Net neutrality. Unfair advantage over other ISPs would be a non-issue if we had decent net neutrality laws in place. There would be no risk of Comcast abusing their power (by slowing down video feeds from other providers).

2) Broadband as a public utility. I strongly believe that broadband should be regulated as a public utility, just like power and water. The fact that Comcast has grown so large that they can drop $14B on another company is unbelievable. They have no competition on cable Internet like the DSL providers do, because cable Internet doesn’t use the phone lines–which are regulated as a public utility–so they’ve been able to overcharge subscribers. If this system were fixed the Comcast purchase of NBC would also be a non-issue.

The 72 hour “free phone service” experiment has failed. Only about 1 in 3 outgoing calls actually have worked. Call quality is terrible. Frequent drops. Sometimes the line will start doing a “fast busy” in the middle of the conversation. About 1 in 3 times I reboot my ATA it just flat-out can’t connect Gizmo.

But the most frustrating thing is Google Voice’s “Call” interface doesn’t tell you what’s going on. It just says “Now connecting…”, which would be fine if it actually connected. When there’s an error, or your phone never rings, you’re left there wondering what the hell happened.

New data released last week from the CDC:

• 22M infections in the US so far
• 98,000 hospitalizations
• 3900 deaths

Therefore:

• 0.445% of the population who gets swine flu requires hospitalization, or about 1 in 220
• 0.0177% of people who get swine flu die from it, or about 1 in 5600

Children only:

• 8M infections
• 36,000 hospitalizations
• 540 deaths

Therefore:

• 0.45% of children who get swine flu require hospitalization, or about 1 in 220
• 0.00675% of children who get swine flu die from it, or about 1 in 15,000

I wonder how they come up the 22M and 8M. I was sick with something bad last week. I thought, “no way it’s swine flu.” But I looked up the symptoms for swine flu, and I actually met the symptoms. (Which are basically, “it’s like the flu”). It wasn’t until seeing these numbers I thought, “well maybe I did have swine flu”. There are 304M people in the US, so 7% of the population has already gotten it.

If you go through the old CDC data it appears the flu typically peaks in February, so we might be a ways from hitting the peak of H1N1.

I stumbled across the video “The Case for a Creator”, which claims to be a scientific explanation of why “science” proves the existence of God and creationism. I found it very entertaining on a number of levels.

The video presents science from microbiology to astrobiology. At every step of the way, the science that is presented is used to dispute Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It’s comical, laugh-out-loud funny; the leaps in logic are pretty astounding.

But something occurred to me while watching it that I hadn’t known how to articulate before: why can’t evolution and intelligent design be compatible? If you accept, as the video supposes, that an intelligent designer constructed bacteria that later (“suddenly”) turned into complex multi-celled organisms, presumably at the hands of this intelligent designer, why can’t you accept the intelligent designer designed evolution?

Simple rules, when combined and run over time with the right initial conditions, create complex and unexpected behaviors. Chaos Theory and Intelligent Design design combine to make Evolution? Any takers?

Just teach your kids God guided evolution and then we can all get along.

I stumbled across this blog entry on the IBM corporate mantra from years-gone-by: THINK. That’s it. Just “think”.

It got me “think”ing about my experience at Hewlett-Packard when I was in and just-out-of college. I really bought into The HP Way while I was there. I still think about it to this day.

Are these corporate mantras distilling the visions of their respective companies for their employees, or are they cleverly disguised brainwashing exercises designed to trick you into feeling good about your work? While I know people that would say they are the latter, I opt for the former. And I present as a reason for this the argument that they aren’t used anymore.

Nowadays, when a company tries to “invent” a new mantra for itself, it’s not taken seriously. (See what I just did there?) It might be naive to say that mantras have to come from the founder(s) of the company, but I’m not aware of any modern company that’s been able to create a new mantra for itself, one that inspires employees and invokes the greater good. It’s got to be built into the fabric of the company.

Will we have another HP or IBM in this country?

I’ve been calling around trying to get quotes on a specific vehicle I’m interested in (yes, I’m torn about the CARS program but when there’s a deal to be had I can’t help myself).

Car dealers say the darndest things:

“Oh you can’t that get anymore.”

“That car doesn’t exist.”

“We’re the only dealer that carries that car.”