I was asked to “critique” a friend’s new blog. Because I’ve been writing like this since before anyone called this format a “blog” . . . here’s two paragraphs from my response:
I’m really excited about Prop 8 as well, and it is funny that you borrow that story from Gandhi that I enjoy as well. Tonight I just watched “Cry, the Beloved Country” and was moved all over again by great words in a book I have read twice, about . . . compassion and forgiveness. I did not expect to be left feeling so emotionally.
[ . . . ]
And I hope you enjoy the blogging thing. Write for yourself but remember you are being read. I still get emails from old posts I wrote, especially about the divorce stuff. Occasionally someone comes to me expressing a pain that is familiar, and I have the chance to return in a small way some of the kindnesses that have been bestowed upon me over the years. Your children, your grandchildren may some day read through or skim what you had to say. In that way you may be able to help them in their growth, years from now. And remind yourself of things forgotten.
To be sure, “the divorce stuff” is really just a bunch of excerpts from a book someone else wrote. Lately though I have had very little to say about my personal life or things that have stirred my passion. There is less creative self-expression or revealing of myself these days. I am not sure if that is as it should be, or if that needs to change. I figure that my relationship with my web site changes over time based on my needs and how I take responsibility for fulfilling those needs.
Update: Tammie was laid off a few weeks ago. If you know anyone looking for a smart, talented and diligent Microsoft .net and C# hacker, please check out her LinkedIn profile. (Welcome to the economic down cycle. Yahh!!)
I will be out of town, but one of my favorite baristas at my favorite cafe will have an art opening this Sunday, December 21. Since I may be featured as a model for one of her works, I thought I might even have some vain self-interest in promoting the event a bit.
So, the idea is that caffeine can either be used to keep you awake and functioning at a basic level, like say while you’re driving cross-country, or it can be used to enhance your cognitive peaks, in case you’re trying to really get the mind crunching on some problem so you can produce a paper or code or such. Further advice is that because caffeine tolerance builds up after a few weeks, caffeine becomes ineffective. The best strategy is to go off caffeine when you don’t need it, and use caffeine wisely when it is needed.
For my part, in the past year, I have gone through the occasional abstinence. More frequently though, I drink tea during the day, which has less caffeine, and then when I need to kick it up a notch, or to wash down some tasty chocolate, I drink coffee. Part of my weekend ritual is to have a “chocolate croissant” and a coffee, after which I have a really aggressive creative buzz going on, even though I have been drinking tea at work all week.
The other advice is that creativity peaks shortly after you have just woken up. Therefor one might try scheduling creative periods after a morning cup of coffee, then an early afternoon nap, followed by another cup of coffee.
I wonder if instead I should have a cup of tea in the early evening, so I can enjoy a moderate creative boost at home on my own time.
Welcome to the recession. My employer has reduced the budget. We will maintain a constant headcount but need to reduce discretionary spending. We’ll keep serving bagels on Friday mornings, but no more fancy salmon dill red bell pepper pesto “lite” cream cheese.
All the same, while I can enjoy Philly Cream Cheese-“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”? Haha! 1980s flashback spread!
Mainly, I am happy and lucky to be in a pretty decent position to ride out this downturn with my income intact. Though, I have a nice cushion in the bank just-in-case. If I do find myself unemployed I may move out of my place and hit the road for several months.
On a less jovial note, the remains of a bookstore I recently saw in the Inner Sunset:
One week ago the people of this country began to party in the streets. I was actually driving down 16th St when I had to stop because the street had been spontaneously closed by joyful San Franciscans. Once I got on my way home I passed Market and Castro. Castro was blocked off for a formal street party, but the crowds seemed subdued. Upon arriving home I saw that Prop 8, repealing the right of people to marry a person of their own sex, was ahead.
Joy at electing a remarkable man to the White House. But a gut-punch to those of us who feel deeply about equal rights.
Just now I received a link to Keith Olbermann, and NBC commentator, who does an excellent job of expressing my dismay over Proposition 8:
The gist: marriage is about Love. At the time Barack Obama was born his parents’ marriage was illegal in 1/3 of the United States, and in the days of slavery, marriage between black people was illegal. There is no advantage to be had in opposing gay marriage, and in this culture where we feel uncomfortable about the impermanence of relationships, and the high rate of divorce, if two people can find love, we ought to allow them to enjoy it the same as anyone else.
While there are lawsuits out to restore same-sex marriage through the courts, my personal hope is that we can put it on the ballot again, and that next time it comes before the people of California, the people will have grown in their own hearts to accept that allowing lovers to marry is what we ought to do. We gained ten points since the last ballot proposition, and Prop 8 would likely have failed were it not for balls-out misinformation fear campaign by the Mormon Church and other cultural conservatives, who viewed popular support for same-sex marriage in California as the first step in a trend that would ultimately lead to acceptance of same-sex marriage throughout the United States.
We have work ahead to ensure the rights of a minority that has been tormented for too long.
One of my favorite automation strategies is to use Makefiles. The reason is that unlike a shell script you get free error-checking: a Makefile will bomb out on you if one command in the sequence fails. You can also chain targets together, lay out sub-dependencies, and the rest. I’m just finishing up on a little project which has this as the top-level target:
# default
all: dhcp sync yay
# cron-able
dhcp: hosts restart-dhcpd
# Positive feedback rocks!
yay:
@echo
@echo "YAY! Have a fortune cookie:"
@echo
@fortune -sa
The first target, “all” is what will be run when a user types “make” and you see that things get broken down further. The “sync” target depends on the user to either enter a password or forward an ssh credential. (more…)
I have a deep-rooted aversion to Daylight Saving Time, that ritual where we screw with the clocks in the Spring and the Fall to get people out of bed earlier so that, originally, New York stock brokers could get an hour of trading in before the London exchange closed, and later so that people may have more time to spend money on leisure sports in the afternoon. Farmers and parents find it a bear, since animals and children don’t really appreciate having their schedules re-adjusted.
But really, it saves energy! Look! Science!
Nope.
According to a new study of energy consumption in Indiana, Daylight Saving Time actually results in increased energy consumption, especially in the Fall. Remember when the Bush Administration extended Daylight Saving Time a few years back as a magical way to conserve energy without actually doing anything? (I remember, because I had to patch servers to keep their clocks consistent with Congressional legislation.) The study finds that DST increases energy consumption the most in the fall!
Estimates of the overall increase are approximately 1 percent, but we find that the effect is not constant throughout the D.S.T. period. D.S.T. causes the greatest increase in electricity consumption in the fall, when estimates range between 2 and 4 percent.
These findings are consistent with simulation results that point to a tradeoff between reducing demand for lighting and increasing demand for heating and cooling. We estimate a cost of increased electricity bills to Indiana households of $9 million per year. We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States.
Basically, the gist of it is if people get home earlier in the afternoon, they save money on lighting, but they fire up the AC or the heat. Back in WWII when people had more incandescent lighting than climate control, DST may actually have saved a bit of energy.
My main objection is that monkeying with the clocks is a very messy way to implement a notion to “wake up earlier in the summer and enjoy the morning” but I’m a crank.
I voted! This is the first time I encountered a line at the polling place, which had twice as many booths as usual. I’d say turnout is high but there are also a fuckload of propositions on the San Francisco ballot, which was 4 over-sized cards, most of them double-sided.
I spoiled my first ballot, and had to ask for a fresh one.
Last week I contacted the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission regarding Prop R, to rename the sewage treatment plant for George W Bush. I just heard back from their Communications and Outreach department:
Dear Daniel Howard
This is a modern facility that protects the ocean and the environment every day. And yes, we feel that this proposition would denigrate the fine work performed at our plant.
Please do not reply to this email.
If you have additional questions, please submit them through our Feedback area at: http://sfwater.org/feedback.cfm
I have long thought the Internet needed a tip jar. I felt so strongly about this that back in 2003 I spent some time building my own online feed aggregator, which had the ambition of collecting feedback (like Digg) and later monetizing by allowing users, should they desire, to “share the wealth” back to site authors. Say, if you’d marked 50 pages that you like, and decided to chuck in $5, the site could take your $5 and try to give, say, 10 cents to each site. In this way people could gain some modest remuneration for the Internet publishing efforts.
Of course, that was a bit ambitious for me and the project was scrapped when I scored full-time employment.
Briefly, the idea is you can earmark sites for tips of various sizes, then send in a few dollars via PayPal. Tipjoy will then pass the tips along to site authors. They profit by collecting a 3% transaction fee, and I assume they get some float off their PayPal balance as well. At this time authors “cash out” via Amazon.com gift certificates or by sending the money off to charity. That is for legal reasons though it sounds like they hope to traffic in cash in the future.They recently added the ability to cash out via PayPal as well, and deposit to a checking account is a planned feature.
I added a tip jar down in the feedback section below. I set the default to a modest 2 cents. I’m more curious than anything as to how many folks would bother to spread the karma.
I was just mulling over proposition 8 and how happy I am to see that Google and Apple have each taken a public stand against it. So, I figured I’d shoot a brief message off to upper management suggesting how proud I would be if my employer were also to take a stand in defense of civil rights.
Then I wondered that other people may have similar sentiments and similar inclinations to share their feelings with their management. I’m not holding my breath that my company will take a stand, but it doesn’t hurt to share the idea.
I consider it a hard-won blessing that I work in an industry where I can feel comfortable openly expressing my support for the rights of homosexual people.
UPDATE: Due to multiple requests, a “sample text” that folks should feel free to steal / adapt for their own purposes:
Boss,
I think it has been great that both Google and Apple Computer have both publicly stood in defense of the diversity of their employees and their community and made a public stand against Proposition 8.
I have been a Sidekick user since the black and white days. Prior to receiving my G1 on Tuesday evening, I had used my Sidekick 2 pretty heavily for nearly four years. I loved its solid feel and the membrane keyboard. The applications mostly worked together pretty well, though the web browser was butt-slow. I have high hopes that as the spiritual reincarnation of the Danger team, the Android team will spawn a worthy successor to the Sidekick 2, which I regard as a peculiarly satisfying pinnacle in the evolution of the mobile phone.
I have been playing with my G1 for three days now. Here’s how it has been so far . . .
Setup
I fault the Quick Start guide for going over what the buttons do and the user interface, then half way through the booklet it tells you how to put the battery inside the phone. That was somewhat annoying because the very first thing I wanted to know is how do I get the battery in the phone and turn it on. Transferring the SIM card was easy enough, and the “tap the Android” process worked rather well.
Unfortunately, the night I tried to first use the phone there was a bug that surfaced in Google’s internal systems so I could not log on to the phone through my hosted domain account. It tossed out a bizarre error code and as usual Google’s support was no help: another customer with Premier hosted domains was incorrectly informed that the G1 didn’t support domain logons.
In retrospect, I should have tried T-Mobile technical support, who have through the years done a solid job at escalating Sidekick issues appropriately. I give the device an extra bonus point for putting the “factory reset” feature within the options panel, rather than making it a voodoo process that involves a paper clip.
Hardware
I wish the Android could be incarnated within the Sidekick 2’s hardware. The Sidekick 2 is built like a tank, with a solid feel and rubber bumpers. You could bash a fool in the skull with a Sidekick 2 if you had to, wipe off the blood, and get back to writing an email on that awesome rubber membrane keyboard.
The G1 is smaller in each dimension, and feels more rickety. It is solid enough, but it is no Sidekick 2. My biggest gripe is that the keyboard, while not truly awful, leaves something to be desired: there is little tactile feel and it took a little retraining to hold my right thumb further out over the keyboard in order to clear the right-side wedge. I am not sure how that will do for prolonged typing. The space key is also narrowed and at least once I have typed an ‘@’ instead of a space.
I like that it charges through the Mini USB port. Yes, I would prefer if it had a proper headphone jack, but that’s not a huge deal for me.
I really look forward to the day that the screen rotates based on how you are holding it.
Gmail
The Gmail client is very nice: it integrates really well with Gmail on the web and my contacts list. If you compose a new message it can check not only your contacts list but also other addresses that you have corresponded with, which is nice. When I read a message on the phone it is marked as read in Gmail and vice versa. It is also easy enough to switch between tags.
Camera
The Sidekick 2 takes muddy pictures on a good day. The G1 has a 3 megapixel camera that takes some pretty nice photos under decent lighting conditions. Unfortunately, the G1 fails a few things the Sidekick 2 got right: the lens is right where I’m apt to put my thumb, there’s no flash, the shutter lag is substantial. The Pictures application is decoupled from the Camera application, so you need to switch from the one to the other to review your photos.
Contacts
I was at first disappointed that there is no practical way to export my contacts from the Sidekick 2. I went through my Gmail Contacts list and cleaned everyone up, integrating phone numbers to email addresses. I had a lot of fun finding pictures of everyone on the web and cropping them into my contacts list. There seemed several instances where updates I made on the phone or on the web didn’t make it across. And one contact I swear got eaten and had to be re-added.
One feature lacking from the Sidekick 2 is the ability to put friends in groups. At the very least it is nice to be able to pull up a group of coworkers versus the rest of your friends. Maybe there is a “tag” feature I have overlooked, or things will improve in the future.
Another unfortunate bug is that in the Gmail interface, you can not add a photo to a contact who has only a phone number.
Web Browser
The Sidekick 2 web browser was horribly horribly slow, and would tend to get upset if a page had too much JavaScript. The G1 web browser is fairly zippy.
That said, the interface can be extremely frustrating: wide web pages require a lot of dragging up and down and back and forth. Sometimes columns of text will be shrunk to page width, but not always. You can not easily resize text. (You couldn’t do this on the Sidekick 2 at all.) The Google Reader app works well enough but there is no way to make the font larger. (I hate squinting.) I am not yet used to the zoom feature: you need to hold your finger down on the screen, without clicking a link or scrolling, then you need to go catch the + or – button that appears and hold that down . . .
The Sidekick 2 allowed for bookmark folders: the G1 web browser has no folders or even a provision to reorder the bookmarks. This is really frustrating because one of the great features to me was to have a folder of Nextmuni bookmarks so I could quickly pull up information on approaching transit vehicles. I look forward to this being fixed. It would be even more awesome if bookmarks could be synced with say a Firefox subfolder on my computers.
The web page links are often quite tiny, and my big beefy man fingers are constantly clicking on the wrong thing.
Messaging
The G1 data plan includes I believe 400 SMS, whereas the Sidekick data plan was $5 cheaper and included unlimited SMS. I like that the SMS application groups messages by sender as in Gmail: tapping a thread brings up what amounts to a conversation with a contact. Deleting SMS messages is a little annoying: you get to confirm that you will delete an entire thread.
The Sidekick 2 supported AOL instant messenger and you could add a Yahoo instant messenger application. What it did do well was to proxy the connection through the Sidekick service so that if you lost reception temporarily messages would queue on either side and be delivered asynchronously. I do not know if the G1 does this.
The G1 supports Google / Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL within a single IM application. I prefer the way Pidgin works where contacts are grouped together regardless of their protocol. This IM application seems to require a lot of navigating up and down the hierarchy: I have no idea if it will be much fun if you are chatting with a friend through Google at the same time as you are chatting through Yahoo. Anyway, I don’t intend to use instant messaging much.
Maps
The Sidekick 2 had no navigation features. The G1 Maps application so far has been slow, inaccurate, and unstable: it crashed once and other times it would take a long time to inaccurately figure out its location. GPS is disabled by default to conserve battery power. There’s no turn-by-turn navigation. The first time I tried to grab directions the service was down, and the next time it took some fidgeting to figure out how to tell it that I wanted directions to the destination from my current location. (Click on the destination label on the map and then hit Menu > Directions.) Another frustration is that if I go to my location and then switch to Street View, I still have to click on the map near my location, and then figure out how to navigate the street view back over to the original location.
Map searches are very slow (often 10 seconds or more) even on the 3G network.
The Maps app could use some polish. I also need to get used to it. I am very disappointed that there is no transit support.
Calendar
Yay! My mobile phone now syncs with my calendar! I can not really offer a thoughtful review of the Calendar application, because whenever I launch it the user interface makes me want to vomit. I guess it will take some getting used to.
EvilFidgety Touchschreen
The “desktop” pans across three screens, which offers some possibility. It is easy enough to trash the analog clock widget on the middle screen. Alas, the touch screen takes some getting used to. For example, the first dozen times I tried to trash the Google Search widget I failed and concluded that Google had hard-wired it so that I was required to keep that widget on my desktop. I didn’t want the widget, and I hated having it forced upon me: how evil! After ranting about that here I gave it another try and successfully trashed the thing. I’m sorry I doubted your integrity, Google! Unfortunately, the wide Google search bar on the right screen can not be trashed. I google-search from within the web browser. I do not need nor do I want a Google search bar widget on my phone “desktop”. Forcing it upon me is evil and Google should apologize.
Android Market
Both phones have a marketplace where you can shop for and install additional applications. The Android Market is new and somewhat sparse. Apps download and install in the background, and have ratings and reviews so you can avoid the schlocky ones. The “Translate” app is kinda cute and potentially handy. And “cab4me lite” promises to help you map out your location and then call a local cab company, which sounds awfully neat.
What I really want is a nice note pad–I was always scribbling notes on my Sidekick. I also want an SSH client: preferably one that supports key authentication. Give it some time. I guess if I urgently desire a notepad I should jump on the developer tutorial.
Summary
People ask me what I think of the G1. I answer that it is okay and it will get nicer with time. the conventional wisdom that it is “good for a 1.0 device” works for me. If pressed I say that I miss the solid feel and membrane keyboard of my Sidekick 2. I like to think that in the next two years the Android platform will mature and someone will release a model with a form factor more to my taste.
My happy joy toy arrived today. So far, no love. It ties in to your Gmail account, see? But I have a hosted Gmail account. Rumor has it that hosted gmail accounts work, but when I try to log on I get this error message:
Sorry…
This account cannot be used on the phone because it is missing the following application: cl. Please contact the domain administrator for toldme.com or sign in using another account.
Alas, there is no information to be found on the Internets, and since I have a mere “standard” hosted gmail account I am not entitled to contact Google about the problem. So, I posted a message to their web “help forum” and we’ll see if someone knows. Meanwhile I guess I switch back to my old Sidekick and figure out how to migrate all the data I have stored on that device to the new thingus. With any luck I can shake down some Google employees for some technical support. I hope this isn’t another general case of “eff you hosted domain losers!!”
NOTE: A Google employee has already offered the guess that “cl” may be the Calendar application, so I’m seeing if I can make something happen . . .
UPDATE: According to a reliable source, there is a bug related to registering G1 accounts on hosted domains that surfaced this evening, October 21. They are working feverishly to fix this issue, and I hope we’ll be online tomorrow, October 22.
UPDATE:dannyman@toldme.com is now using his G1 as intended. Yay!!
My new toy is due to arrive on Wednesday. This morning I asked myself “where is my G1?” I cast about on the ‘net for answers. T-Mobile’s web site explained to look up the tracking number on at UPS’es web site, so I wrote them and asked where’s my tracking number? Then I peeked at the forums and saw that I can use my cell number as my tracking number! Pretty slick!
The next thing I did after that was to get my real tracking number from the UPS web site, stick that in Google, then bookmark the link to that page so I can just check that bookmark over the next couple of days to see if my widget has arrived yet in the mail.
In terms of spelling, I favor “colocation” or “co-location” to describe the facility where the servers go. My mind says “colocation is the fruit of cooperation.”
A lot of people use the word “collocation” which is a linguistic term to describe the frequency of word sequences. I believe this term is favored by sales and marketing people because when they type it in the word processor it appears without a red squiggle underneath.
What annoys me the most about “collocation” is that the pronunciation is different:
colocation: “KOH-location”
collocation: “COW-location”
For what it is worth, Google implies that the Internet is still 3:1 in favor of “colocation” when searching for a “colocation facility”:
The Linguists responsible for the word “collocation” have another term for people who use the word incorrectly: “hypercorrection.” Hypercorrection is when someone who aspires to greater social prestige will attempt to use what they regard as more prestigious language, but they end up getting it wrong.
I will be out of town, but one of my favorite baristas at my favorite cafe will have an art opening this Sunday, December 21. Since I may be featured as a model for 
