Robert W. Rose

What is the quintessential American sandwich? I can think of a few candidates..

Bologna and American cheese on white bread with yellow mustard and mayonnaise. Mayo optional. For bonus points use Oscar Meyer Bologna, Kraft Singles, Wonderbread, Frenches mustard and Miracle Whip. Substitute Gouldens mustard if you’re feeling “spicy.” Just about everyone I know grew up eating this sandwich in their school lunchbox. It’s simple and easy to make, so it’s the perfect food to make for your kids.

Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff on white bread. Another American lunchbox classic, but many parents won’t feed it to their kids regularly because of the high amount of sugar. But the sugar count does scream, “American!”

Philly cheese steak. You can find this sandwich just about every place that makes sandwiches, but there are many variations (the real one is made from cheese whiz). Might be slightly too “regional” to be all-American tho.

Dynavax is set to release a hay fever injection that will give hay fever sufferers 2 years of protection against the allergen. From the article: “Dina said that based on the current hay fever market, which is worth about $10 billion, the company expects a successful vaccine to be a blockbuster.”

Here’s some food for thought about the grass industry (in Oregon).. “In 1999 the “farm gate” value [of grass seed] was nearly $350 million. Grass seed companies added about 33% or $100 million in research, production and marketing services bringing the total value to over $450 million…” “Approximately 3,500 people are employed directly on Oregon’s grass seed farms. The industry is directly responsible for an additional 6,500 non-farm jobs.”

I know it’s not fair to compare Oregon to the rest of the nation, but Oregon is the largest producer of grass seed. $450 million vs. $10 billion is something to think about.. And how many hay fever sufferers are there for every person employed by the grass seed industry?

I’m just glad I don’t live in the valley any more..

I’ve been watching When the Levees Broke, a documentary about Hurricane Katrina, the flooding afterwards, and our government’s response to the disaster. It’s a powerful documentary. Constructed mostly of interviews, it details the experiences of the people that lived through the disaster and the politicians and aid workers that dealt with it.

As I wrote before back in September of last year, I’m sickened by how poorly our government handled the disaster. Physicaly, sickened. At the end of the first half of the documentary my sickness had turned to anger. How could this possibly happen? What the hell was our government thinking? Ignore the problem and it will go away? Remind the people of the war in Iraq and they’ll lose interest? No one cares about the people who live in the South? It took the federal government almost two weeks to mobilize troops in New Orleans and evacuate the people. Two weeks! We can invade a country on the other side of the planet in 48 hours but we can’t get troops to a city within our borders in less than two weeks? God Save Us!

The second half of the documentary focused on the rehabilitation of people’s lives the year after the disaster, and also what’s (not) being done to protect and prepare ourselves for future hurricanes. The simple fact is: they’re not rebuilding better levees. Watching this I just felt embarassed and ashamed. The situation with the Core of Engineers is just downright embarassing. I don’t blame them–they’re doing what they can with the resources they’re given. The problem is fixing the problem is not a priority for our government. And it’s a problem we can solve! It’s an engineering problem! It just requires several billion dollars…..

You may be asking: Is the cost of building better levees “worth it”? How many people are actually going to return? What are the chances of another hurricane hitting the same place again anytime soon? Yes, it’s probably unlikely to happen again anytime soon. And probably not that many people will return, and their economic contribution to society may not make the proposition of rebuilding the levees “viable”. But hang on a sec–if you buy these arguments then how can the government allow people to live there? It’s criminal to not build better levees–but if you don’t build better levees, it’s criminal to allow such a large population center to return there.

I’m left with the impression after watching this documentary that the government felt that yes, New Orleans was not a safe place during a hurricane, but the cost of making it safe simply wasn’t worth it. After the hurricane, the government still feels this way and is passively discouraging people from returning there by not doing anything to fix the problem.

The Map Ransom project is trying to collect $1600 to make publicly available “56000 USGS maps.”

I was really excited when I first read about this, but then I discovered that the maps being “liberated” are USGS Digital Raster Graphics (DRG) files. This is not exciting for two reasons: a) these maps are already available online for free at the USGS Seamless Data Delivery website and b) DRG’s… kinda suck. I mean, come on. Who wants a poorly scanned tif image of a map from the 1980s?

What I want is easy access to two things:

* High resolution satellite imagery. Someone needs to convert all of NASA’s LANDSAT data into the visible spectrum and encode it into GeoJPGs. This can be done already (and for free), but I haven’t found any tools that make it easy. Someone needs to just do it and put it online for everyone. 🙂

* Good road data. TIGER/Line is online and it’s free.. but the data is outdated and sometimes downright innaccurate. USGS Digital Line Graphs are online and free.. but the problem there is the data is outdated and doesn’t always contain street names.

You can get this stuff already through Google Earth and NASA World Wind, but as far as I could find you can’t export the data into something usable from either of these programs. Actually in World Wind you might be able too, but they don’t have good road data.

When that data gets put online in an easy-to-access form then I’ll celebrate. I’ll even donate some bucks to make it happen. Lemme know when it’s going down!

I’m on the federal do not call list, and I just got a telemarketing call from Dish Network. The conversation went something like:

Me: Hello
Dish: Hello may I speak with Mr. Derick?
Me: Who?
Dish: I need to speak with the head of the household or whoever owns this home.
Me: OK you’re speaking to him
Dish: Hi my name is xkjhdf and I’m calling on behalf of Dish Network and I’d like to offer you…
Me: Excuse me, but I’m on the federal do not call list.
Dish: Oh I’m sorry, I do not have that information. *click*

No good bye, no “have a nice day”… but I guess it’s a good thing that he ran away when I mentioned the do not call list.

I did a search on google for dish network do not call list and.. holy cow.. they were warned a lot in 2005 for violating the do not call rules. And here we are again in 2006 and they’re still at it. Maybe they consider the cost/risk of being fined less than the money they’ll make off of customers that don’t report them.

If you get telemarketed too and you’re in the do not call registery, please.. file a complaint with the FTC regarding a do not call violation.

I find this hilarious. Level 3 Communications – a top-tier Internet Service Provider – approached me yesterday by phone and email to see if I was interested in buying bandwidth from them. Here’s the email:

Good afternoon, my name is XXX XXXXXX and I am a sales representative with Level 3 Communications. We are global providers of bandwidth for content providers. We are interested in talking with you regarding your bandwidth requirements. Please check our our website below. Please call me if I can assist you in any manner with any data applications.

XXX X XXXXXX
Account Representative
Level 3 Communications
One Technology Center TC8-Z
Tulsa, OK 74103

My message on the phone went something like: “We’ve recognized that your hosting facility uses a lot of bandwidth and we’d like to have a conversation with you about how you can save money by going with Level 3.”

Hosting facility? A lot of bandwidth? Content provider?

I’m none of those! I hardly think my little linux machine I run off my DSL needs more bandwidth. It doesn’t even have a 100mbit card in it.

Are they desperate or just misinformed? Or are they just scraping DNS records for leads? (Which is against the rules, supposedly)…

BoingBoing keeps making a big deal out of this CIA employee who got fired for blogging. She allegedly wrote some comments in her blog that questioned torture, or the CIA’s use of torture, or whatever.. we’ll never know exactly what she said.

Well…. She’s not really a CIA employee–she’s a contractor who works for BAE Systems. And, she’s a software tester, so I can’t imagine she does anything remotely related to torture, torture policy, or torture research for the CIA. I’m sorry she lost her job, but I don’t think she lost her job because she was blogging or because of her views related to the Geneva Convention.. as BoingBoing puts it. I think she lost her job because she’s employed as a software tester and she wasn’t spending 110% of her day testing software. (If she were a government employee things would probably be very different–they would have had to sick Scooter Libby on her–lol).

I love BoingBoing, but they do this kind of thing a lot… They take an issue and do one of two things to it: 1) turn it into some sort of a “blogging is freedom of speech” issue or 2) turn it into some kind of “this is why we need fair use” issue. I’m all for blogging and I’m all for fair use but BoingBoing’s constant desire to boil down an issue into one of these two camps gets a little old some times.

This CIA employee thing is a perfect example. It has nothing to do with blogging. If she were posting her beliefs on torture in the break room her employer probably would have had the same response: “we didn’t hire you to criticize the hand that feeds us, you’re fired.”

A while back they did the same sort of thing with the Sony rootkit fiasco. They turned it into a fair use issue. They made the issue out like all these people got burned by buying music they couldn’t copy onto their computer; as if they had to buy the music and then copy it onto their computer to survive. Well what about this: what about just NOT BUYING THE MUSIC in the first place?! No one’s twisting your arm making you buy overly copy-protected music. You’re not gonna die if you don’t buy it. If you don’t like DRM… VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET. There are plenty of other legal ways to obtain the same music.

*Deep breath*… Or maybe I’m the one that’s messed up and I always read these arguments into BoingBoing’s post. Maybe if I just stopped reading BoingBoing they’d stop making every issue out like it’s free speech or fair use.

I love 300W and 500W halogen floor lamps. They put out a great wide spectrum pleasing light.

Too bad they’re serious fire hazards.

The Bend Visitor and Convention Bureau released a crazy flash animation on where-the-hell-are-we.com last month that was supposed to be the beginnings of a viral marketing campaign for Bend. Well, it backfired…

The local newspaper let the cat out of the bag, and then a whole lot of Bend residents started asking questions about who was paying for the video. Many of them, including myself, felt the animation was not only an unusual marketing tool, but also a little … I don’t know how to put it. I don’t personally find it offensive, but I could see how others in Bend might. It begins with two stoned ducks asking where the hell they are, and then it’s explained to them (in so many words) that they’re in a place where hicks, hippies and big-bosumed ladies congregate to enjoy the great outdoors. It tries to be hip and edgy, but it just comes off as strange.

Some enterprising bloggers did the research and it turns out the animation cost $35k to produce and was paid for by the hotel tax. So Bend residents didn’t really pay for the video; Bend’s visitors did. Regardless, I still feel it’s a waste of tax dollars.. (especially because it backfired)! I hope other cities learn from this mistake.

Here’s a backup of the video if you haven’t seen it.

What a great program.

Looks like I’m not the only one with problems. First hit on google for “luaedit deleted my file”: This new version occasionally deletes files from your hard drive on exiting. The first time this happened it deleted all the files in the the directory containing the file I was editing. The second time it deleted all the icons on my desktop!

Update: Looks like LuaEdit is a popular tool for editing interfaces in WoW. Somebody must have trojaned it. Link: Don’t use LuaEdit. Seriously. I had the same thing happen to me as well. I was manually editing one of the lua option files in my WTF folder, saved some changes, closed the program… Then came back the next morning and discovered that ALL my addon option files had been deleted. Fortunately I had a recent backup, but… I ended up just uninstalling LuaEdit.

Too bad, cause LuaEdit looks like a sweet program. I guess if I want it bad enough I’ll have to download the source. 🙂