Some folks are irritated with American reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden. Julie indicated that she had mixed feelings upon seeing our “own countrymen basically holding a frat party outside of the White House, hanging off of trees and singing ‘Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye!'” I have heard others moan that this doesn’t change anything, why are we celebrating?
So, I expressed my own feelings in a comment on Julie’s blog:
I was happy about the news yesterday, and I still am. We killed a bad guy who has devoted his life to killing us. That is a victory, and I am proud and glad.
When the crowd outside the White House gathered and sang the Star Spangled Banner, it brought a tear to my eye. Then, America the Beautiful. People gathered at Ground Zero for a candle light vigil. In both places, the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” They spoke for me.
I think it is debatable who kills the most Muslims. Our military adheres to Rules of Engagement that put them at greater risk in order to protect Muslim civilians. On the other hand, extremists recruit the young and naive to walk into crowds of Muslims wearing explosive vests.
We are not perfect and we shouldn’t pretend to be. We make mistakes, we kill innocents, and we have failed to hold ourselves to our own standards of humane treatment of prisoners and jurisprudence.
We are drawing down forces in Iraq, which has changed from a brutal dictatorship built on terror to a messy, unstable, imperfect democracy vulnerable to sectarian violence. We now have one less reason to linger in Afghanistan, which may help motivate the government there to get its act together.
Last night was progress. America done good and a bit of pride is perfectly reasonable.
-danny
I mean, its no Moon Landing. No sincere attempt to curb global warming or end world poverty, hunger, disease . . . but it is progress and I’ll celebrate it just the same.
Within ten minutes, Maggie has defeated the automatic feeder.
Maggie likes to try and wake me up early for breakfast. Spraying her with the water bottle hasn’t dissuaded her, so now I put her out on the porch. I have read that an automatic feeder could distract her attention: instead of bugging me she’ll watch vigilantly over the feeder. And since we’ll be out of town for two weeks in May it would be a worthwhile investment.
Alas, this PetSafe Electronic Pet Feeder didn’t last ten minutes before she was able to break in and get the kibble. I’m proud of her. But I’m looking forward to finding a feeder that will keep her entertained without bothering me in the morning.
Fans in Mountain View Celebrate India's World Cup Victory
As I was walking home from the cafe I encountered a growing crowd of shouting, chanting, singing folks waving Indian flags. I googled “Indian Holidays” on my smart phone, then thought to google “India cricket” and it turns out India has just beaten Sri Lanka to win the World Cup.
In my Sophomore year of college I was paired with a roommate from India. Tarun was a very serious EE major who left the room for only three things: 1) classes, 2) meals and 3) the India-Pakistan cricket match. He was a nice guy but since he was always studying in the room he wasn’t an ideal roommate.
Indian ex-pats I meet tend to be really serious, smart, hard-working people, so it is nice to see a crowd of folks reveling in a collective emotional experience. This is a great moment for anyone who has moved so far from home to make their life.
I’m trying to get a better handle on my “spending cash” which is managed through my personal account and credit cards. Most “needs” type expenses are covered through our joint finances, so the personal account is mostly discretionary. The problem is I want to reduce my personal credit card debt, and these days the personal account doesn’t get much money to play with, which means I need to be smart and aware with my discretionary income.
About a decade ago I tried managing my spending by writing the date on a series of $20 bills. If I was breaking a bill with today’s date on it, things were going alright. If I was breaking yesterday’s date, I was doing well, and if I was spending a bill with a future date on it . . . well, time to cut back, eh?
This time around I’m thinking to allow myself $10/day. ATMs don’t give out tens, and these days I make some small purchases with the credit card, so I’ll try a different solution: a Google Spreadsheet!
I thought it might be neat to share the progress here, in case other folks are curious to see how this experiment works. You should be able to see the results tally up over the course of the month on the right.
This is by no means a comprehensive thing: I’m not tracking automatic withdrawals (charity, web hosting) or interest on the cards: I’m merely trying to keep my personal spending (the “burn rate”) in check by maintaining an awareness of what’s up. This is pretty much lunch money, small gifts, and entertaining the sweetheart. My rule is going to be that any personal spending I have to initiate I will track. So, I’ll count the $50 mobile phone bill, for the sake of a healthy challenge.
Technical note: I don’t know for spreadsheets, but the formula for setting up the balance column was to start at cell D3 with this formula:
=IF(A3="",,SUM(D2+C3))
This basically means that if the date (A3) on this row is filled in, add the amount (C3) to the previous total (D2). I was then able to “copy” that cell, multi-select all the cells below, and “paste” and the formula got updated each row, as my Excel Guru colleague expected.
Yesterday, at the cash register of my local supermarket, I was asked by the cashier if I would purchase only one of the two packs of noodles I had intended to purchase. The unspoken implication was, in that way, someone else could have noodles too. Now, from the point-of-view of the supermarket’s profit, it makes no difference whether those two packs were sold to me as an individual, or sold separately. Yen is yen. But as an example of a society sharing its burden (even in this small way), it spoke volumes. I had my hand gently slapped, and was humbled.
I recall a story I heard on the radio, from I think it was Denmark, where a lady needed a medical procedure and was informed that there would be a two-month wait for the service. She explained this to her son, a Doctor, who offered to pull some strings to get her in sooner, and she shamed him because the right thing to do is follow the rules like everyone else: fairness before favoritism.
This sort of thinking in anathema in much of the world, but it is a way of thinking that I really like. I guess its because as a child I was indoctrinated with Socialist ideology at the water fountain, where we were taught to queue and each take an equal share.
Today, all eyes are on Egypt. This morning it sounded as if Mubarak would be removed from power, and I felt a euphoria at all the times in my life when I have pumped my fist in the air and chanted with the crowd that “The People–United–Will Never Be Defeated!”
At lunch, we watched the captions on the TV as Mubarak spoke, and said he wasn’t resigning. I have work to do but I have Al Jazeera on in my headphones.
It felt like today could be one of those days when the people triumphed. Not today, but soon.
So, one of my peeves is companies that charge new customers a lower rate, and then raise the rate after you have had them for a while. I think it is really weird that loyal customers are charged more than new customers. For example, I signed up for basic cable service with Comcast at $60/mo, but paid the introductory rate of $30/mo, which is about the most I’m inclined to pay for monthly television. (And I’m only willing to pay that much because I prefer to live with someone who likes TV.)
Anyway, my rate recently went up to, as best I can tell: $45/mo for the next six months, after which it will go up to $60/mo. “Homie don’t play dat.” So I called them and explained that I was only going to pay them $30/mo, either through them or DirecTV, which both offer new customers $30/mo. They transferred me to some other lady that said that it was $45/mo or bust unless I wanted the cheaper $30/mo package but no more Bravo. I said I’d check with my sweetheart and the lady on the phone said “okay, $30 package for you.”
Not sure if we have Bravo or not, I looked online. Aside from pirating shows, which is inconvenient for the non-techy sweetheart and the old analog television, Amazon.com offers “Top Chef” and “Project Runway” which is what we watch on Bravo, for $2/episode. If both shows are running then we’d pay $16 in a month, otherwise . . . ah and yes, Amazon on-demand service pipes straight through the TiVo: no technical expertise or computer connections required!
So, I think I’m paying Comcast $30/mo now, and if I don’t have Bravo then I’m purchasing shows a la carte. Vivé consumer empowerment!
Update: Comcast got in touch with me due to this post, and switched me back to the six-month $30 rate that includes Bravo. Thanks, Comcast! I guess I’ll have to blog about this again in August.
My first experience of “Idaho” was hitching a ride to the Rainbow Family campground in Wyoming in a car with Idaho plates driven by a lady who took sips from the bottle of beer she kept pressed between her legs. At which point I concluded that Idaho must be Awesome.
Mind you I haven’t been fooled in to actually going to Idaho.
Some fantasies are best left untainted by reality.
The G2 is fast as heck. It has all the cool new Android apps, and T-Mobile let’s you do tethering out of the box. We moved our apartment last month and setting up a wireless access point on my phone was braindead easy and plenty fast while we waited for the DSL installation. Everything works faster, and the battery life is better to boot.
The keyboards has a generally nice feel to it. But . . .
The biggest drawback is the lack of a number row on the keyboard. Really irritating to have to press ALT to type numbers. Entering “special” characters is a bitch-and-a-half. For example, to type a < you have to type ALT-ALT-long-press-j. WTF? Also, I miss the scroll wheel. There is a button on the phone that sometimes-but-not-always works as a directional pad to surf through a text field but I have learned to stab my thumb at the screen until I manage to land the cursor where I want it. (What I really miss is the Sidekick 2 direction pad.)
It is a very very nice phone with a short list of dumb shortcomings.
Last month I “cut and copied” the following letter printed in the Palo Alto Daily News. (Or I think its called the Daily Post now.) Now I shall paste, transcribe and share:
The text reads:
Bike changed a life
Dear Editor: A recent letter on “bikes vs. cars” stated that the over-50 crowd was “not about to go out and buy a bicycle” to replace their cars. Read on. Three years ago, I got in my car to go to an appointment and discovered that I had a dead battery. Frustrated (my wife had our other car) I slammed the car door only to notice right above me was my son’s old mountain bike hanging from the garage rafters.
I got it down — both tires were flat — pumped them up and rode off to my appointment.
Until that moment, I had not been on a bike in 40 years. After three or four blocks I wondered why it had taken me so long to get back on a bike. It was fantastic!
Several days later, I purchased my own bike on Craigslist and was soon riding to and from work — 15 miles round trip — taking the bus on days it was too cold or to dark. I’ve lost weight and never felt better.
After two months, my wife and I realized we could get by with one car, so we sold my car and used the money to put solar panels on our house. I now pay nothing for electricity. We’ve lowered our carbon footprint significantly. I’m 57 years old.
I have that uneasy feeling that I am forgetting something. I guess it may have something to do with the fact that after having resigned herself to my loyalty to my beat up old round-the-world college backpack, Mei had me empty it so she could take it in for repairs as a birthday present. Subtract that missing element from the new apartment I’m still unpacking in to after the holidays . . .
Or its that yesterday I spent some time at the hospital visiting a friend from older days, hanging out with his folks and keeping them company while their son, my age, drifted in and out of sleeping off the stroke he had on Friday. I remember the time spent in Colorado when it was Dad’s turn to shake off his own stroke.
And then there’s the Congressman shot clear through her left lobe. I listen attentively when they explain that, as with my friend and with my father, the left is where language is. One question is whether there is motor control in the right hand, since the hand is controlled next door from language.
I worry about my friend, but I know he will be okay, one way or another. One way he won’t be able to work, and may even need some personal assistance. Another way is that between his youth, spirit, and clean living, he will rehabilitate so well that years from now he will have difficulty convincing people who hadn’t seen it that he had once had a stroke.
Only time will tell. For now his folks are taking turns sleeping in the reclining chair next to his bed in the critical care. The son is there to rest and cooperate with the Doctors. The parents are there because there really is nowhere else in the world they can be right now. They attend to the details of managing their son’s life and care while he is down. I worry more about them, because I have some idea of where they are, and their needs can be better understood without a medical degree.
That may be it. I feel like I am missing something because instead of the hospital I am headed to the office. I would rather wait around at the hospital. Fortunately my friend and his family are inundated by visitors, and dropping by for a while in the evening after work, I won’t be in the way.
The man spends a few hours in the morning posting to his blog, and the rest of the day wandering the streets of New York City, his senses keen for prey, which he captures with the bravery of asking a stranger if he can take their photo.
How does he pay the rent? The video doesn’t get in to that. For me it is enough to see a guy has found his particular thing, that he’s in his element, and that he is this human archetype, the lone hunter wandering his territory in search of a prize.
Good news! Southwest Airlines offers wifi on my flight! Only $5 introductory price! I have to try this out!
The service is “designed by Yahoo!”
It is kind of really really slow to make connections.
Wait . . . WTF is this?!!
Yup. Southwest Airlines wifi does HTTP session hijacking to inject content in to your web pages.
This is a perfect illustration of the need for net neutrality: your Internet Service Provider should not interfere with your ability to surf web pages. This would be comparable to your phone company interrupting your telephone calls with commercials. Outrageous! Wrong! Bad!!
(On Mei’s computer there are actual ads in the blue bar on top, but my AdBlock plugin filters those.)
It gets worse from there. On the “designed by Yahoo!” experience you can surf on over to Yahoo! just fine. But I’m a Google man. Here’s what Google looks like:
Work-around #1: On sites that support them, use HTTPS URLs. Those are encrypted, so they can’t be hijacked. So, where http://www.google.com/ fails, https://www.google.com/ gets through!
But my little WordPress blog lacks fancy-pants HTTPS. And the session hijacking breaks my ability to post.
Work-around #2: If you have a remote shell account, a simple ssh -D 8080 will set up a SOCKS proxy, and you can tell your web browser to use SOCKS proxy localhost:8080 . . . now you are routing through an encrypted connection: no hijacking!
Update: they charge is $5/segment, so $10 if your plane stops in Las Vegas, and you get to type your credit card number a second time. Though, on the second segment, Google loads okay, but I still had to route through the proxy because the magic header was blocking WordPress’ media interface.
The Gogo Wireless on Virgin America always worked way better than this, and Google covers the cost over the holidays. And as far as I know: no session hijacking!
I honestly believe that Google really does intend to not-be-evil. And though I know they screw up and have to deal with some grey areas, I put a lot of trust in Google with my personal data. Trust I wouldn’t put in Microsoft or Facebook.
Anyway, my faith in Google was recently re-affirmed when I fired up Google Chrome on a new box and was presented with this dialog:
If you’re not being evil, you make it trivial for users to switch to a different search engine. If you’re making an effort to really do right by the user, you ask them which search engine they prefer, rather than just defaulting them to your own.
