Posts

Posted on

A shot in the dark from the heart of Silicon Valley

I have a routine when I start up my day, absorbing “news” from around the web.  It basically goes like this: call up Yahoo (for my subscribed-mail (this is the email address I use when buying/registering/sharing); Gmail (I forward all of my personal mail to Gmail); and an RSS newsreader.

My “News” is made up of different sources from different places.  The idea is to learn what’s going on in my world – things relevant and interesting to me.  This is made up of international, national, local, and ‘hyper-local’ information; hyper-local being items concerning my friends and family.

To that end, tools like Twitter and Facebook are helpful but there are those of us that like to manage that information a little differently – we choose to manage (and control and own) our own online presentation.

KPAO is a site run by a few folks, including my friend Dave.  They decided to collaborate on a single site rather than each hosting their own as a way to bring some variety to the content being delivered.  The postings range in topics from product reviews to political thoughts to insights and ponderings about daily life.

Dave tends to be the largest contributor of content, which is good as he’s the only one that I actually know running the site so the posts tend to be a little more relevant.  He’s pretty opinionated and doesn’t hesitate to share his thoughts.  I don’t always agree but when I don’t I still walk away with something to think about.

Posted on

An excellent take on green opportunities

Another in a great series of podcasts..  This one from the Commonwealth Club and a talk given by Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.

Schmidt talks about the opportunities that exist when looking at green technologies.  It is incredibly encouraging to hear him speak – to see business leaders embracing the true opportunities that are out there.  He’s not talking about the environment, he’s not talking about climate change, he’s talking about money and opportunity – language the will resonate with even the staunchest old-school industrialists.

And by the way, it helps the environment, national security, job creation, the economy and so many other concerns that cut across so many American demographics.

Could we see this kind of innovative thinking coming to fruition in the near future?

Listen to it here or subscribe to the commonwealth club on iTunes

Posted on

Spam success rates

In an earlier post, I pondered how many people could really be falling suseptible to a particular form of SPAM.

Today I stumbled across this article on the BBCs website which reports on a recent study looking at how spammers work and what their success rate looks like.  The good news?  Not that many people are falling for them (but you knew that didn’t you?).  The bad news?  Enough people clearly are as these guys are still out there, still making money..  But it does provide some entertainment value when I receive an especially crafty one.

Posted on

Sports Basement lives up to its image

This weekend I went for a bike ride around the city.  It’s the first time I’ve taken my new road bike out specifically to ride for exercise and not just to get around town; riding to work or around the neighborhood.

I bought a proper road bike, as opposed to a hipster bike (read: trackbike) with the idea of going for the occasional road bike ride to supplement mountain biking as a form of exercise.  But, I’ve outfitted the bike knowing that most of my riding will be around town.  I have a headlight and taillight on the bike for commuting and riding at dark and I don’t carry an inner tube or pump, knowing that a bike shop is just always just around the corner in this city.

On Sunday’s ride I didn’t have the lights on the bike (it being daytime) but I also didn’t carry a tube or pump.  And so of course, I flatted out.   Luckily I was just down at Crissy Field only 1 block away from the Sports Basement.  I could walk there, buy a new tube and pump it up.  Of course being a good store, I knew they would have a bike pump available for public use.

And that’s when I realized that I also didn’t have any money with me.

I went into the store anyway, with the plan of asking one of the employees if I could just walk out with a brand new inner tube, with the promise of returning later in the day to pay for it.  I trusted that the Sports Basement was a good store, with good community karma, and they’d be willing to help a guy in need.

5 minutes later I was installing my new tube and pumping it up with the store-supplied, publicly available bike pump.  The store met all of my expectations.

Later in the day I returned and paid for my tube (as well as buying 2 additional tubes) and I also bought a tiny under-seat pouch to store a spare tube.  It’s a target for getting stolen if I leave my bike parked on the street, but the pouch only cost $10 and the tube $4 so if it is stolen I’ll be out $14 but it it’s not, then I’m that much more prepared for the next time.

I had so much faith that the Sports Basement would do the right thing and they completely met my expectations.  I can’t recommend them enough.

Posted on

The pain of software upgrades

One of the trends in software that I’m not that excited about is the contstantly-updating,  minor patch-releasing, weekly pop-up rendering annoyances of modern applications.

Among the worst offenders (in my mind) is Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader for Windows.  It seems like it’s always downloading something.  Microsoft would be at the top of the list, but it is the operating system, and I recognize the need for windows to keep its security profiles up-to-date.

I prefer the option to check myself for updates and decide myself whether I want to install it.  I’ll do it at my own convenience thank you (especially if it requires a restart).  And for that, I appreciate the option to do it on my own time.  This is how I’ve got Windows set, and any other application that gives me the option.

And so it was, with this attitude, that I finally decided to get around to updating my website photo management software (Gallery).  Ahh, such naivety.  Did I really think that I could simply backup all the files on my website, and the database, and clear the caches, and deactivate the plugins and modules, and upload the new application files, and install them, and configure the installer, and actually get the site working?!

Needless to say it didn’t go so well.  It took me an entire day to get through the whole process of updating the website (oh.. and backing out all of the changes and getting the site back to the state it was in before I started the whole process).  Painful indeed.  But thankfully it was a rainy, nasty Saturday so what else did I have to do?

So once I had the site back to normal, back to the way it was before I tried to update, what did I do?  Oh, of course, I tried again!  Ugh.  Fool me twice…  Thankfully I was a little better prepared the second time (and I made sure my backups were truly backups, not just mocking, incomplete similarities to the original files) and it only took a couple of hours to go through the grating process of upgrading and downgrading the site.

Suddenly, the version of the software I’m using looks just as good as it did the day I first installed it.  What new features could I possibly need?  I think this version will suit me just fine for at least another year, until the pain of this experience has worn off sufficiently for me to try again.

Posted on

2008 Presidential election percentages

According to The New York Times, the 2008 Presidential election could have seen the highest percentage of Americans coming out to vote.

Based on early figures, about 62.5 percent of all eligible voters cast ballots, just shy of the 62.6 percent figure that was recorded in the 1964 election. But that figure will climb and almost certainly set a new record as the remaining votes are counted..

I for one am really excited to see that more and more Americans are getting out to voice their opinions on important matters facing the country.  I am hopeful that we will see significant changes in the coming years that will increase political involvement even more.

In my mind, there are three issues that really need to be addressed with American politics:

  1. This is the no-brainer: Get a more accurate vote counting mechanism in place.  If you go electric, make sure the system can’t be manipulated and insist that the company that develops the machines are willing to stand up to critical – and open – testing.
  2. Get money out of the system.  Now that we’ve seen the longest and most expensive presidential election, let’s make it the last of its kind.  Mandate that elections get funded by a general pool of money rather than donations.  Mandate that TV and Radio stations (easy for those over broadcast) donate a certain amount of time for political advertisements so that candidates can get their messages out and not have to raise money to do so.
  3. Get rid of the current electoral college.  At the very least, have each electorate vote represent its own district’s popular vote, rather than a blanket state-by-state system.  It’s no fair that Texas and California get ignored because their outcome is a given.  There are electoral votes in Texas that would go Democratic and California votes that would go republican – and they should go that way.  There are too many disenfranchised voters in the current system.

Whether these issues will be addressed in the next few years is to be seen.  Somehow I suspect not; especially with everything else (ahem.. economy) that will need to be addressed.  But I hope that somewhere in the near future we’ll see some of these issues finally getting the attention they deserve.