Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

I've been reading Helter Skelter recently and found a few things I didn't know. First off, Charles Manson was born in Cincinnati, OH (where I am right now). Secondly, he spend part of his youth in Wheeling, WV (where I was born and raised). How weird is that. He was about 18-19 when in Wheeling when my parents were 14-15. Did they meet? Did they know each other? Hell, maybe my older aunts dated him? Scary.

Inspired by Ned Batchelder, I have added myself to the Mirror Project. Here is my entry.

MetaFilter: Apparently Google now can act as a calculator. It does simple math, as well as trig functions and I think most useful of all, unit conversions.

5+2*2

sin(45)

100 degrees F in K (so cool that they thought of supporting Kelvins)

Andrew discusses the O'Reilly Safari electronic book program. Basicly he is somewhat down on the service since it doesn't think the negatives (no offline access, support for printing only a page at a time) outweigh the positives (cross library electronic searches, no heavy books to lug around).

This is disappointing. I was really hoping that this would be a very useful and wonderful service (after all, I love the quality of most O'Reilly books). With that said, I am probably not that ideal a customer for this product. I don't travel a whole lot (at least not yet...I just started a new job at HP and I could see myself traveling more). Also, I tend to buy books when I want to go deep in an area not just to fulfill a brief exploration of an area. I could see this service being very useful to a consultant that has to get up to speed really quickly across very disparete areas of technology. Lastly, electronic searching aside, I am just to fond of the dead trend edition of books. I like reading away from the computer, like on the couch or in bed. Plus, I just like the feel of the cover and the pages and the smell of books. I have a decent sized library of fiction, non-fiction and trade books and I love them (except when I move apartments).

Andrew also details Manning's plan to let you buy the physical book and the e-book of one title through them for the book's list price. You end up saving money if you want both editions. Its a clever pricing scheme since there are almost no costs associated with the e-book (manufacturing or distribution) so the real gain here is that Manning is getting you to pay full list price for the book as opposed to you going to Amazon or Barnes & Noble where you are undoubtably going to get a discount (which comes out of Manning's margins). Its a nice idea, although, I think having both editions isn't going to appeal to everyone. Clearly the travelers will like it and if the book has a lot of reference materials than the electronic search will be greatly apreciated.

Was out furniture shopping tonight and finally picked out a nice couch. I arranged all the shipping details and the warranty and all that jazz. Then it came time to pay. Went with the credit card and then signed the receipt. Here comes the kicker. She asked to see my drvers license to "confirm identity" and because "the coroporate offices like them to". Well, I had read last months Crypto-Gram on such things and yet I gave in. It was OK, for them to see the drivers licesnse but I should have drawn the line the saleswoman recording my license number. Not sure why I didn't protest. I knew it was wrong during the encounter. I was defiitely, tired, bored, hungry, and pissed because i took 30 minutes to get there (and thus the desire was to end the encounter as soon as possible). It just ruined the rest of my night.

My only recall now I guess is to write a letter to the company. Ugh...there goes more time down the drain.

I'm a big fan of Nokia phones. I've been a happy user of the 3360 for some time now and before that I used the 5110 during my seven months in Belgium. So of course, when it came time to get a new phone for my wife, it had to be a Nokia. Since we like paying month to month, our only option here in Cincinnati is Cincinnati Bell Wireless. It was seemingly great that they were having a sale on the 2260 for only $39.99. Its got that same great Nokia UI with the neat blue backlit screen. When we got it home, that is when I was a little disappointed. Although it does have the same on/off switch as my 3360 (which houses the IR port) the 2260 doesn't have an IR feature. Even more irritating is that the 2260 only allows one phone number per address book entry. That is really annoying and forces you to have awkward address book entries like "Jeff Mills Work" and "Jeff Mills Mobile" rather than just "Jeff Mills" with two numbers.

I can understand leaving out the IR port to save some bucks and offer a cheaper model, but at the same time the address book limitation is truely frustrating since I know its the same OS in both phones. It wouldn't cost them anymore to include the two or more numbers per entry feature in this phone.

Why do major websites forget to register an alias for their site minus the "www" prefix? I want mazda.com to work just as well as www.mazda.com.

The damn SOBIG.F has got my inbox filled with crap. I have received things from the following domains:

intel.com

oracle.com

unisys.com

schwab.com

Some of the biggest tech companies in the world and one large financial house. If they can't keep their systems upto date, prehaps the systems are flawed to begin with.

Update 11:27 am EST:

I've just received more of these damn things from bellsouth.com and my new employer, hp.com. Ugh.

Update 1:15 pm EST:

Just received a message from J.P. Morgan Chase.

I've just recently had some issues sending mail from my mail client to a remote SMTP server. Thought nothing of it in the short term but it bothered me that it has persisted. Well, I have discovered that the source of the problem is that my ISP, Cincinnati Bell, has decided to block outbound port 25 traffic, i.e. SMTP. I have an e-mail into support, hopefuly they will tell me something. This irritates me to no end. Mitch Kapor is having a similiar incident with his DSL service (although they are filtering DCOM port 135 rather than SMTP). Hopefully both of our issues will be resolved.

Sept 1, 2003 Update

Update September 15, 2003: We now have a work around.

My latest entry to the mirror project has been accepted.

I'm excited. Just got a package from Amazon containing:

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier

Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

This blog now has category based RSS feed thanks to a great tip from the girlie.

One thing you need to watch out for is in step four is not to have any trailing whitespace. If so, MT blindly tacks on hidden spaces to the ends of your file names, which of course means that your web server won't serve up the file using the name you are expecting. Billy and I banged our heads against the wall trying to figure out why it wasn't working.

Its taken almost two months but i have finally posted my wedding photos and honeymoon photos.

Each of these albums contain nested albums fully documenting each event. The events are arranged in order for the most part.