Belated post

• Bet On America -

  The evidence for our nation's downward spiral isn't sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals. We think we're the only country with decline-and-fall issues.
  
  I'll wager that many of the toughest challenges for Americans in the future won't be associated with our geopolitical decline, weakness or decrepitude. No: Our challenges will be the unimagined consequences of our many successes.

• A travelogue on East St Louis
• Predictions from the year 1900 - a must read
• ASP.net Chart Controls
• The economics of Scientology

On productivity

For the programmers out there - did any of you know about this feature (code snippets) of Visual Studio? Somehow I didn't. If not, it's the best 14 minutes you'll spend today

Friday link clearing

• Sarah Silverman, Obama, and the Jewish vote - not safe for work, but worth watching
• Small Banks are doing fine it seems
• Israel asked Bush for permission to bomb Iran, and it seems Bush refused! Good. No point in throwing away all the gains in Iraq
• Making money twice - worth reading
• Who serves in the military? Well worth reading.
• Jetpacks!
• The difference between Sunni and Shia in short form
  
• And this little nugget - via Ezra Klein

  Dear American:
  
  I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
  
  I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
  
  I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
  
  This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
  
  Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
  
  Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

  
  

David Friedman speaks at Google!

About his new book, Future Imperfect. Here is the video. All of my tech nerd readers should watch this, for the global warming moment alone if nothing else.

Your Monday reading

• Visual Thesaurous
• SchellingPoint.com
• Reporter gets shot, keeps reporting
• An alternative to business requirements
• The Pop vs Soda map
• David Friedman on Bob Barr
• An interview with Bob Barr
• An Asian rant about Europe, which had the memorable quote

  Heaven is a place where the police are English; the chefs are Italian; the car mechanics are German; the lovers are French and it's all organized by the Swiss. Hell is a place where the police are German; the chefs are English; the car mechanics are French; the lovers are Swiss and it's all organized by the Italians

Advances in child management

A wonderful technical acheivement

Conflict follows device that drives away teen loiterers
A wall-mounted gadget designed to drive away loiterers with a shrill, piercing noise audible only to teens and young adults is infuriating civil liberties groups and tormenting young people after being introduced into the United States.

Such wonderful times we live in.

Friday links

• Everybody kills Hitler - quite good
• Interesting bit by David Friedman on public education
• Bob Barr might be running for the LP nomination, that would be strange
• The best cartoon I've seen in quite some time, everybody check this out...
• The ocean is cooling... - Global warming enthusiasts are sounding more and more like defense lawyers.
  

Throwing stuff to the wall

Via Marginal Revolution, here comes today's quote of the day

Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don't overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

The market is a discover process after all.

X-Sql, welcome to the Blogroll

I have recently discovered that my friend Naim has recently started blogging about software matters and such at http://xsqlsoftware.blogspot.com/

Welcome to the blogsphere!

I'm amazed at my self control

There's a digital infrared thermometer for sale for the amazing low price of $38, and I haven't bought it! It's surprising really.

Tuesday night rapid fire

• Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
• John Robb on private military contractors - one thing he doesn't mention (and I don't think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It's unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
  
• Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
• For some reason validator callout extenders won't work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
• Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
• Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
• DNI on leaving Iraq
• A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
• Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
• Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
  

A cool ASP.net feature

If you're getting strange ASP.net errors like "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed", check out this entry on CodingHorror.com.

Free tech stuff

I have a perfectly good scanner and laser printer (black and white) which, alas, are not Vista compatible. Does anyone in the Atlanta area either of them?

Friday round up

Sorry for the light blogging, work and the house hunting process have been quite draining on me.

Anyway, Here is your recommended reading for today

• The Economist has a great read Iraqi Kurdistan, or as it will soon be known, Kurdistan.
• The absolute minimum you should know about Character sets and Unicode
• Russia Tests "Dad of All Bombs". It's good they're keeping themselves busy. Money Quote: " Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment"
• Megan McArdle on why we haven't been attacked since 9/11. Personally I think it's a lack of talent/money/motivation on their part, plus a host of supporting factors
  
• The view from the top of the world
• I'm surprised this hasn't come back to life among the many Bush conspiracies.
• There's this from Craigs List

  Sushi Model: Willing to act as display showcase as sushi is displayed placed on body for patrons to eat off of.
  • Model preferable of Asian ethnicity
  • Height requirement: 5'6'' to 5'11''
  • Slim built; clean and body shaven
  • Will wear bottom with pasty/string bikini top or topless
  • Compensation: $200/3 hours

• Don't you just love it when support for Microsoft Products is done using commands only they know? Check this out (which did work for me)
  

What I'm reading while uploading...

• Hardcore Troubadours - a bio of the Old Crow Medicine Show
• Catalogs of Data Visualization on Coding Horror
• Minorities become the majority in 10 percent of U.S. counties - which has the interesting quote

  In northern Virginia, Teresita Jacinto said she feels less welcome today than when she first arrived 30 years ago, when she was one of few Hispanics in the area.

  "Not only are we feeling less welcome, we are feeling threatened," said Jacinto, a teacher in Woodbridge, Virginia, about 20 miles southwest of Washington.
  ...
  "I think across the board all of us feel like we're not welcome," said Jacinto, who was born in the U.S. and volunteers for an advocacy group called Mexicans Without Borders.

  Perhaps it's because she's feeling unwelcome because she's advocating an unpopular cause?

• The Old Crow Medicine Show on AT & T Blueroom
• Green Fakers on Radar. The celebrity excuses are funny.
  

Cell phone advice

I'm thinking of getting a Blackberry 8700G. Does anyone know anything about this phone? I would like to use it as a secondary internet connection as well as a phone/pda.

Quick link round up

• Long range acoustic devices
• The Agitator has a list of questions that should be asked of all presidential candidates, well worth reading
• Ward Churchill has been fired.
• Black straw lighting from the Strobist and Lighting Mods.
  

The cyber-crime map of the world

Check out this article in Forbes.

3 random link

• Meaningful advances in battery technology
• A 24 inch monitor for $229. My, how the prices have fallen
• China executes ex-drug chief for graft

  China executed a former drug and food safety chief on Tuesday for corruption in an unusually swift sentence which will serve as a warning amid a series of health scandals that have stained the "made in China" brand.

  Can you imagine that happening in the US? I can't.
  

A thousand curses upon Comcast Broadband

I've been getting 90% packet loss on all upstream traffic all day, which pretty much kills any and all productivity on my part. The tech support couldn;t do anything and had to schedule a service appointment for Thursday.

Does anyone know if you can get DSL without a phone number?

Sony VAIO customer service - an exploration

Jane Galt vents most eloquent on her frustration with the Sony Corporation, specifically Sony Vaio tech support. Short version; it's lame.

In the post she states

So instead, I'll try to change the cost-benefit analysis. With your help, I'd like to make this little incident as expensive for Sony as possible.

Let's remind Sony that sometimes, the dumb bitches have blogs. And friends with blogs.

So if you're reading this, and you have a blog, if you wouldn't mind linking to this post, preferably with the words "Sony VAIO customer service" in the link, I'd appreciate it awfully.

Sure, it's revenge. But revenge has positive social uses. If it gets expensive enough to screw over their customers, they'll stop doing it. To all of us.

We'll see what happens. It creates an interesting exercise in feedback, i.e. an advancement in the first of of the OODA loop.

That would be a good company to start - a service that monitors the blogosphere for mentions of a product and somehow differentiates the positive and negative threads so one could track the source and find hidden problems with the business process.

Quick Friday roundup

• E-Snailer - Write a letter on the internet
• High Trust Societies
• Fair and Balanced Radio - by Radley Balco
• Better and better car batteries. From Wired. We probably need at least one generation more of advancement before plug-in hybrids are feasible.
  

An interesting Vista fact

You can't use four gigs of DDR RAM on 32 bit installations of Microsoft Vista. I recently got another two gigs (it's very cheap right now) and was disappointed to see that Windows was only registering 3,326 megs. I do some research and find that 32 bit OS have a max of 4 gigs total memory it can use, and that includes sound cards, video cards, (everything) as well as sticks of DDR.

More details at CodingHorror.

Two things worth reading

• A DIY guide to building your own CNC machine (for about $600)
• Interesting thoughts on Global Warming
  

Friday round up

• A look at where the I-Pod is made, it's pretty much all of East Asia
• A nice look at Electronic Medical Records
• Coming Anarchy does math
• Get your postal mail over the internet! This would solve a lot of problems for me actually.
• 72 year old Marine beats crap out of 27 year old pickpocket.
  

Why must everything involving hard drives take forever?

I've been running a checkdisk for the past six hours. No fun at all. And I find out last night that my hard drive doesn't work with Vista. Totally funless.

SkyNet

An interesting vision of what it might look like.

Yet another FireFox tip

Type about:config in the address bar, filter by cache, and change the value of browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl to true. It speeds up the browing experience by quite a bit on ssl sites, particularly if they use Ajax.

Two firefox tips

While doing some reseach, I discovered that the "leak" is acually a costly feature (aren't they all). It has something to do with cacheing closed tabs.

Anyway, to fix it, just follow the instructions on this LifeHacker page. Also, I've heard good things about about Tab Mix Plus.

SQL Server Errata

As everyone should learn from my 3 hours of Sql server frustration... Sql Server returns different values when you run a CheckSum on the same text for varchar and nvarchar data types.

The above probably isn't interesting to any of my readers, but should I forget it later I can find it again.

Monday link roundup

• An in-depth examination on how to build an energy efficient house
• Robot snipers in Israel
• Strobist begins Lighting 102
• No one thinks seriously about alternative energy. Check out this post from TreeHugger "New Battery Pushed Prius to 125 MPG". It's a great idea and invention, but it's a plug-in hybrid. The motion is coming from the power grid. Granted electricity is usually more efficient than gasoline, but that's like saying that a diesel engine gets infinite mileage because it doesn't burn any gasoline at all.
  

Sunday link round up

• A creepy collection of suicide notes
• Google used this camera to create their new "Street View" feature (which is not in Atlanta, yet).
• Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin explains why the lessening of racial majorities is a bad thing for diversity. Really.
• There's a new, free version of Refactor! specifically for ASP.net. It's pretty cool. When I installed it it deleted all of my toolbox snippets in Visual Studio, so be careful about that.
  

Thursday link roundup

• Ala. Officials Probe 'Monster Pig' Saga

  State wildlife officials said Wednesday they want to know how the huge hog dubbed "Monster Pig" got into a fenced hunting preserve where it was chased down and shot to death by an 11-year-old boy.
  ...
  weighed 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet, 4 inches from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.
  ...
  Jamison was hunting with his father and the guides on May 3 when he killed the giant pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

• Are you a good liar?
• Microsoft Surface
• Popular Mechanics how to videos
  

A retort I didn't say

While I was in Borders today I overheard someone say "I wish they'd just get what they have right instead of coming out with something new". I think she was talking about Microsoft Vista. I thought, "That's what they're doing, they're just adding a new skin and saying it's new." The the "fixed" features create other problems because that's just the way technology works.

Random Thursday links

• How to fix the Microsoft Home Page
• Robert Conquest's 3 Laws of Politics

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

• More Stirling Engines how to guides - this one looks a bit better than the last one I posted. Here is another one.
• The top 100 web apps for freelancers - mine is not on it, yet.
  

A needed innovation

Last night I spent about seven hours trying to get a particular Microsoft web product to work, only to discover at the end of a long search that you simply couldn't make it work that way. I was trying to update the error message dynamically and have it appear in the VCE

It would be quite handy to have a list of things that a product CAN'T do, it would save so much time trying to prove negatives. Perhaps that should be a new site idea.

Monday link roundup

• A useful post from CodingHorror.com on interface friction
• Al Gore, like Ann Coulter, seems to be a mac person
• A blog for women! And one of the editors might be someone I went to high school with.
• Kuler! The Adobe web color harmony tool - via this site
• Co-Mapping (mind mapping software) looks cool
• Properly bashing ethanol
• HiddenUnities and PurposeSlog have posts on the Wire and 24. I helpfully added the Shield in the comments. All excellent programs, though 24 is basically a commercial for the cell phone industry, not torture.
  

Firefox tip

(via CodePoet) To speed up Firefox

Open Firefox, type about:config into the adress bar, filter on "v6" (this should easily find the ipv6 setting)
Right click it and choose "toggle" and the FOX is back in business.

It works quite well.

The Civil War in time lapse format

Coming Anarchy has an awesome time lapse animation of the Civil War, it's one of the best animations like this I've seen.

Wind Power in Popular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on Wind Power on their site. Sadly, it makes it seem unworkable on any kind of large scale. It would be quite handy on a small to medium scale though.

Local cooling

I sit here at four in the morning, listening to Woodie Guthrie trying to restore a database that a client accidentally deleted the day before launch (yay me). And it's 54 degrees outside. In Georgia, in the middle of May. It seems unnaturally cold lately.

I wonder if there's a site somewhere that tracks local temperatures and plots, plots a yearly average and indicates if that is lower than average or higher. If not, that would be a cool AdSense supported project...

How does the West expect to win...

When we have judges like this

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms "Web site" and "forum." An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts."

A cool idea

ThinkCycle.org - an open source community for machines.

Quote of the moment

Via CodePoet, and from this page

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. (Nathaniel S Borenstein)

and

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

and

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)

Monday link roundup

• It's Wiretap the Internet Day - what have we come to in this country. Sigh.
• Entrepreneurial Adages - All quite true. in particular

  Start with nothing, and have nothing for as long as possible -- small budgets give big focus

• Battlefield spy-bot - really cool
• Tribal Minds
• The indispensable Col. Patrick Lang has an outline of what a diplomatic solution to Iraq might look like. I would read all of it. Webbed version of the outline is here.
  

Blogger is back!

It's been hanging on posts for the past few days. Now it's working again for some reason.

xSQL is a cool Sql Server tool

I've been using xSQL for a good while now and I think it's about time to give it the Moody Loner endorsement. While it does a lot of things, I mostly use it for copying databases between servers where I have different permissions (doing that using the built-in tools is quite problematic) and it's saved me countless hours of tweaks and cutting and pasting.

It's run by cool people too. Check it out here http://www.xsqlsoftware.com/

Friday Rapid Fire

• European Solar Power - with an array of mirrors instead of photo voltaic panels
• CogMap - an online organization chart maker, pretty cool, very Ajax-ey
• SilverLight - Microsoft's Next Big Thing has it's first (that I've seen) user generated application. And I just learned Ajax...
  

Thursday rapid fire

• In camera photo tricks that get you around Photoshop
• Business 2.0 magazine fails to back things up with disastrous consequeces
• Getting fat can mean that men are committed to a relationship, among many other things
  

A cool flash embedder

The best Flash embedder I've seen actually. It's called SWFObject.

Science and truth

Via this episode of BloggingHeads, I came across an interesting article about the philosophy of science, specifically that of Thomas Kuhn. Money Quotes:

Scientists, as Kuhn describes them, are deeply conservative. Once indoctrinated into a paradigm, they generally devote themselves to solving "puzzles," problems whose solutions reinforce and extend the scope of the paradigm rather than challenging it. Kuhn calls this "mopping up." But there are always anomalies, phenomena that the paradigm cannot account for or that directly contradict it. Anomalies are often ignored. But if they accumulate, they may trigger a revolution (also called a paradigm shift, although not originally by Kuhn), in which scientists abandon the old paradigm for a new one.

Denying the view of science as a continual building process, Kuhn asserts that a revolution is a destructive as well as a creative event. The proposer of a new paradigm stands on the shoulders of giants and then bashes them over the head.

In other words, science advances funeral by funeral.

On the first day of my Advanced Macroeconomics class in 1994 the professor (I forget his name, I think that was the last class he taught before he retired) said that we should think of the truth as "the consensus of informed opinion".

In other words, for practical purposes, the truth is the state of the art, as of right now, and we should expect it to change over time.

Interesting developments on carbon emissions

It would seem that there has been some progress in developing an actually useful way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Essentially it's a giant vacuum that sucks the CO2 out of the air. It gets around several problems, most notably geography (the devices can be anywhere). While there is energy expended in the proccess, the main guy has the interesting observation

The real issue, says Lackner, is not the energy consumed but the CO2 emitted. He estimates that for every ton of CO2 he captures, he'll generate another 0.4 ton. But because this process will take place at a plant, where emissions are concentrated relative to air, it will be easily captured.

Pair it up with nuclear power and you've got an even bigger net decrease.

One item not mentioned in the article is that it is possible to start this on a small scale without any public/government consensus on the topic. Any meaningful consensus, particularly an international one would most likely be ineffective, slow, corrupt in implementation and captured by special interests from the start.

The above remedy is able to be done by quite a few people with little public input and delay. The Sierra Club, Richard Branson, Wal-Mart, whoever, could just set them up as much as they wanted. It doesn't get around the free-rider problem, but it does allow private virtue to be accomplished.

For the record, I'm still a skeptic on global warming, but the technology is fascinating.

Snipers and robot armies

After reading these two articles (here and here) about new forms of sniper scopes, I have to wonder, why aren't robot armies in the field right now? Granted, all of the shooting must somehow involve a human, but I would imagine that remote operator could be anywhere. We've had unmanned aerial vehicles for years now, and those fly, which would seem to be much more complicated and expensive.

Random links

• Remove the web developer and the web gets developed
• Term of the day "Fever Swamp - A political website or mindset that is prone to wild accusations and is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories."
• An excellent post on conspiracy theories
  

The funniest thing I've read today

From this Popular Mechanics article on flying cars

Recently, NASA scientists discovered that most people love to play video games but hate to die in fiery airplane crashes

Cool article in Popular Mechanics

About the Army's Land Warrior System. It's very cool.

Sunday round up

• A nice graph of the internet
  
• If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd believe in this one "I found Saddam's WMD Bunkers". The reason that no one in government is following up on them is that the US invasion forced the weapons into Syria, and the Bush administration didn't act on the information quickly. The Democrats don't want to move on it because it proves the main cause for the invasion. It's a bit too cinematic to be believed, but quite interesting.
  

Tuesday round up

• Popular mechanics and 100 mpg cars
• Couple Fights for Baby 'Metallica' Name
  

  In Sweden, parents must get the names of their children approved by the tax authority, which is in charge of the population registry and issues personal identification numbers, similar to Social Security numbers in the United States.

• Billy Joe Shaver seems to have shot someone.
  

Fair trade energy

Check out this article on Popular Mechanics about using excess CO2 and algae to create biofuels. It's an elegant solution, using one problem (excess CO2) to solve the other (the need for energy).

If I were Bill Gates, or at least in some position of power in his charity, I would subsidize the creation of these things in the third world. Doing that would create industry in the (mostly) quite hot third world countries where it has never been. Unlike the traditional oil regimes though, this industry would not be easily stolen as capital and expertise could be moved fairly easily.

I'll have more ruminations on the "Curse of oil" and capital flight eventually.

Friday night round up

• Hansellman on graphing - the data "wants" to be presented in a certain way
• Hansellman on a family backup strategy - for all of those of us who give out free tech support to family and friends
• Perceptions of America and Iran in der Spiegel
• Der Spiegel again - Muslim integration into Europe
  

Needed technological advances

In keeping with Instapundit's list of needed technological advances, here are four of mine

• Cheaper Carbon Fiber materials - Much lighter and much stronger than metal, but at the moment, much more expensive. If this cost could be brought down many other technologies become economical, electric cars, prefabbed buildings, small scale wind generation, etc.
• Smart traffic lights - while these do exist at the moment, they are not in wide use. I live in a traffic-light heavy part of the city. I also do most of my car travel at non-peak hours. I still stop at most of the lights for no reason whatsoever. Smart lights (these exist already) would sense if there is a car that needs to get by and turn green (assuming there was no competing traffic) and then snap back to it's existing cycle.
• Decentralized electric power - To my knowledge, the main power grid has not been modernized, ever.
  
• Cheap wholesale medical testing - imagine just having a machine in your home that could analyze your blood or urine every day or week and test it for the top 50 detectable problems. If all of these problems are caught at the first opportunity, how many lives could be saved?
  

Quick Wednesday link splash

• Backyard wind-power - not cheap, but not horribly pricey either. I imagine this would work much better in the country.
• The Aral Sea - on Wikipedia
• An interview with Michael Crichton
• Hand Cranked Cell phone charger - sadly available only in Japan. One would think it would be more popular here. Oh well.
• More hydrogen economy
  

Quick Thursday round up

• Interesting solar thermal plant in Nevada.
• George Eastman - founder of Kodak, and the originator of two of my favorite quotes. He named his company Kodak because he thought the letter K was "a strong, incisive sort of letter". His suicide note was "My work is done. Why wait?".
• Tech Recipes - Vista Tips
• A good bio of Albert Jay Nock.
  

Quck roundup

• An interesting look at the military aspects of social networking.
• Underwater windmills
• How we would fight China
• The metaweb/FreeBase
• Evidently February was cold
  
• Blurb has dropped their prices.
• Strangest suicide attempt, ever

  Two Georgia men survived a gruesome suicide attempt Friday after cutting their own arms off with a saw, reported Atlanta's Journal Constitution.
  
  The 40 and 41-year-old men managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting them about six inches above their wrists, Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin told the Journal.

• Baby steps to a better editorial, it's easier to see why this one is so wrong.
• The 20 best comic book weapons.
• It's odd seeing this already existing - I stumbled across this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' which is the general gist my future novel The Comedian.
  

The ever amazing Vista

For some reason Outlook quit working on my new Vista install. Basically it would gray out and then present with me an offer to go to Microsoft to fix the problem. I actually do that and lo and behold, it gives me a registry fix that actually works. Amazing. I think that's the first time that has happened.

Freaking Vista

For some reason after the upgrade my local box would not respond to localhost. After several hours of searching, I finally see this article. Who knew write permissions on a log file could be so important?

And now of course, it doesn't work anymore. Sigh.

New favorite deal site

The new one is UberBargain. They found a one Terabyte hard drive array for less than five hundred dollars.

Growl

I've been stuck trying to upgrade Office 2007 for the past 10 hours now. For some reason the Groove files are un-deletable. The Microsoft general knowledge base article on uninstalling Office is here.

Three things

• The US government converts the leader of a one million member Afghan tribe from an ally to an enemy in Afghanistan. Why aren't we just buying the opium and then burning it or selling it for legitimate purposes (there are some)? It would be much cheaper than the current fight, and also make the Afghan farmers in the most hostile areas utterly dependent on the US. Where is Nixon when you need him?
• The Snake Eater - an army of Davids helps out in the Iraq war. From concept to completion in only 30, very cool.
• Japanese Snowplow Robot!
  

Apocalyptic reading for the Tech Crowd

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

That's the fiction reading of the new year - for the disturbing nonfiction reading check out North Carolina Woman Charged With Malicious Castration After Attacking Man's Genitals. It's disturbing mostly in that there are other kinds of castration in North Carolina.

Short 2006 best of list

• Best New Movie - The Departed
• Best Book - Truth Imagined by Eric Hoffer
• Best TV Show - The Shield
  
• Best Old Movie Seen For the First Time - Tie - The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman) / The Testament of Dr Mabeuse (Fritz Lang) / The Big Sleep (Bogart/Bacall). Only The Big Sleep is in English, where as the other two are probably much better off being subtitled. All three are from the 30s and 40s.
  
• Best New Gadget - Garmin Street Pilot - I never get lost anymore
• Best New General Interest Site - DamnInteresting.com
• Best Concert - Prince - though to be honest I didn't see that many in 2006
• Best New Band discovered - Freakwater - I have no idea how I managed to not know about them until this year, they're perfect for me.
  
• Biggest physical accomplishment - Biking the entire Silver Comet Trail - 126 miles - in one day with no rest and very few stops for water and such. It did take forever
• Biggest professional accomplishment - staying in business for another year I suppose
• Biggest artistic accomplishment - successfully finishing two whole songs, and actually doing open mic nights
  

Sunday rapid fire

• RFID Digital Door Lock - this looks very cool, a totally key less lock system.
• The RFID Superstore
• MyPhotoPipe.com - a very large format printing service, run by a blast from the past
  
• What would Genghis Khan do in Iraq - an interesting article The Mongols also immediately executed the caliph and his sons on charges that they spent too much money on their palaces and not enough defending their nation.

The end nears

The end to my long upgrade struggle anyway. From three pin adapters that go onto four pin holes, to reformatting hard drives to bizzare RAM voltage, it's been an informative two days. Now to go Christmas shopping. Humbug.

RAM wickedness

I want the 16 hours of my life back. I've been chasing my tail on what I believe are memory problems. The photo is apropos of nothing, but I thought it turned out nicely. It's from my little Canon.

Ajax is a seductive swamp

Specifically the Ajax.net toolkit. It would seem that one can't retrofit an existing site, though who knows why.

Two cool tech things

• The tale of a family in Vermont that lives totally off the electrical grid, and how they do it.
• Radar Goliath
  

We all knew cell phones could spy on you...

Now it seems to be confirmed

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

And if the FBI can do it, talented hackers can do it too. One can be tracked (more or less) by a cell phone too.

Friday rapid fire

• A quick review of video hosting services
• DIY public hotspot
• SQL Refactoring and formatting - a bit pricey, but it seems interesting
  
• Yet another electric car - due sometime next year
• Revealed: Why understanding economics is hard
• What economists agree on
  

Quick Monday rapid fire - fun addition

• On the matter of remittances by immigrants to foreign countries

  Moreover, remittances are far more likely to make their way to people who actually need them. American aid tends to be received by governments, which in most third world countries are not especially honest. So the majority of American foreign aid never makes it to actual poor people in the developing world. In contrast, Latino immigrants are wiring money directly to their mothers. They know exactly who’s getting the money, and they’d hear about it if the government stole it from them. It probably even has foreign policy benefits, as the remitters are likely to have a generally positive impression of America and to transmit that impression along with their remittances.

  And the best part about all this is that it doesn’t cost us a dime! All we have to do is let them scrub our toilets and pick our strawberries. We get lower prices on the goods and services we buy and we get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing we’re helping to alleviate Latin American poverty. It’s such an incredible win-win arrangement that I find it rather depressing that it’s considered controversial in American politics. Increased immigration is a cause that should unite liberals (with their concern for social justice) and conservatives (with their belief in hard work and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s not how the issue has played out in the real world.

  Very well put.
  

• Gun toting robots!
• From the mouths of ad executives
• An original knife holder
• Easily the best use of Flash I've seen in months
• Quotes from Jim Webb, the Marine veteran and aspiring Democratic Senator from Virginia. Though nothing beats him saying "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch Jane Fonda slash her wrists."
• A FoxNews empolyee gets waterboarded, sadly it's not their web designers (their site gets worse by the day, though, still no Lou Dobbs, happily)
• Iron Man is about to be real!
• This looks quite interesting
  

Quick rapid fire

I hope to have my election predictions tommorow, but in the meantime...

• Robotic sentry that shoots real bullets
• Mapped Up - good idea, good execution
• This is a fine epitaph
• Whipping therapy cures depression and suicide crises

  The professor used the self-flagellation method to cure his own depression; he also recovered from two heart attacks with the help of physical tortures too.

  Only the Russians would come up with this. Actually this would explain the flaggelants of the middle ages, as well as the Puritans scourging themselves.
• Victim's cousin charged with tattooing killer
  

Line of the moment

The message you get when one is about to delete something in BlinkSale

This action is wholly irrevocable and utterly non-undoable.

At long last...

I finally get the wireless router to work with my laptop. I think it was changing the channel that did the trick. I'm typing this from my living room.

The quote of the moment is "Sometimes you have to murder your sweetheart" from a History Channel engineering program. It refers to stopping work on a favored project when it proves unworkable.

Quick Monday rapid fire

• HomeSite meets C#
• Warlords of Afghanistan - not quite a fansite, but I think it's safe to say the internet is complete.
• Windmills on Amazon
• Google invests in Plug-in Hybrids - Cal Cars curiously unmentioned.
• Martial arts and motion capture
• The quest for 100 mpg cars - doable but not pretty
• A really cool bike steady-cam I'll probably be building soon.
• I wound up building (so to speak) this camera mount this weekend.
  

Quick rapid fire

• A company that makes secret passageways
• Electoral-Vote.com is back!
• Slate has an interesting article on survival in emergencies
• This is a very cool OSX simulator
• The American Scene is quite interesting sometimes
• Ultramarathoners
  

Tuesday round up

• External GPS camera mount - it looks kind of tricky, but cool nonetheless.
• A Meditation On the Speed Limit - large scale annoyances by UGA students are probably a sign of increasing value to the UGA degree.
• The uses of anti-semitism
• Cool noir photography from Mr Riddles on Flickr
• A blogging conference I might actually attend. Why are none of these in Atlanta?
• C# bar code generator
• An interesting article on archetypes
• The decline of Western civilization, part 938.
  

Interesting

A very good post on GeoThermal energy by Malcolm Gladwell. For a simple explanation as to what it is

Geothermal heating and cooling is based on one simple fact: that 6 feet down in the ground the temperature is the same—between 50˚F and 60˚F- the whole year round. This means that it is relatively cool in the summer, and relatively warm in the winter.
...
For geothermal cooling, all one needs to do is to circulate water in a pipe through the ground to cool it, and use this cool water to cool the air pumped through the house in the heating ducts.

Heating is done much the same way. The numbers seem quite plausible, I wonder why it's not more popular.

The GPS

The Garmin Geko 201 is way, way cool.

21 Inch Monitor - Free To Good Home

Hello all

I've just found a good deal on a new LCD, and now no longer have any use my old 21" CRT monitor.

It's a Viewsonic Professional Series P815. No problems with it at all. It's free to anyone who wants it, must be in the Atlanta area, I'm not going to ship it anywhere.

Anyone want it?

Quick round up

• The great migration period
• Interview with the 37 Signals Founder
• Free Visual Studio stuff
• Free technical tutorials stuff
• The Alternative Energy Store
• More electric cars
• Carbon fiber - seems cool

Cool C#/AJAX things

• Three dimensional plotting in C#
• Drag and Drop with Atlas
• Lots more Ajax
  

A warning to all

Read this article: Visa Says ATM Breach May Have Exposed Data and then check your bank statements. I found a $461 dollar charge I didn't make. I just called Bank of America and started an investigation about it. They reversed the charge pending the outcome of the investigation. Scary stuff really. I'm not legally liable for the charge, but still....

Sunday rapid fire

• Create Visio diagrams programatically
• An interesting interview with Frank Miller
• Creepy pictures from North Korea
• A new studio album from Ramblin' Jack Elliot!
• I rode past this last week.
  

Friday round up

• Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
• The physics and biology of Superman's possible reproduction
• Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
• Why women have fat thighs.
• Amazing RC Plane Demo
• Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
• Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
  

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Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer

• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
• It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
  

Ambrose Bierce

• Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
• To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
  

H.L. Mencken

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Science Tuesday

In further effort to drive the biking in darkness post farther down the page I bring you Popular Mechanics interesting article comparing alternative fuels, as well as their article on souping up the human body.

A masterpiece

The Phillips/Norelco Bodygroom site. Absolutely perfect use of Flash, video and cleverness. A rare meeting of high tech and high concept.

Anniversaries of no consequence

• I recently went three and a half weeks without rebooting my workstation, which is possibly an all time record for me. (I usually average two weeks).
• It has been 12 years since I've seen a doctor. Three more years and I'm a common-law Christian Scientist!
  

Web video is on it's way

In particular there is Video Egg. Very cool.

I stumbled across it via Pamela of Atlas Shrugs. I do have to say that pro-Bush apparachiks with strong New York accents give life a new horror. Hot Air does a better job with both the video and the vitriol.

Granted, I think partisan bickering is a sign of strength and self-esteem, but at some point it gets silly.

Monday round up

• Catch and release attention
• Google Earth now tracks flights.
• Michael Yon is in Afghanistan, with some stunning photography.
• A massive list of free utility software.
• Positive imaging.
  

A nice feature

The Knoxville daily newspaper has an interesting feature, called Random This, where they send a correspondent out with a video camera to document some feature of life in Knoxville. It's not hard news, but it is much more detailed than a column would be. 800 words about a visit to a tattoo parlor or shooting range would not be terribly interesting, but the video version is. It's a good example of something that could only be done online.

Quick round up

1. Virtual Earth and Local.Live.com are very cool, with very good arial photography.
2. I am undecided about Geek Entertainment TV
3. Charles seems like a cool program.
4. Acronis seems to be a cool backup program.
5. A free book about information markets.
6. N-Unit ASP seems like a good tool.
7. The Russian birth rate is up.
8. Libertarian views on the Iraq war, from Reason Magazine.
9. A budget photography lighting system.
10. A wired article on arial photgraphy.
11. An interesting post from David Friedman about immigration and the welfare state.
12. European Demography.