The New Road

Muscle stimulator

I rent my office space from a chiropractic group. The doctor in charge came by and gave me a free certificate for an adjustment. I took her up on it and she did some good tweaks and a lot of stretching. I mentioned that my hamstrings are tight and demonstrated using a hurdler's stretch. I used to not be able to get within inches of touching my forehead to my knee, but over the past couple of years I have been stretching every day and I've gotten within a centimeter or so. But that last centimeter has been a tough one.

She recommended this muscle stimulator where they put two pads on alternating sides of the muscle and then electrically stimulate it to massage and stretch out the muscle. The procedure was twelve minutes of watching my thigh muscles freakishly contract without my mind instruct them to do so. After I got up the muscles weren't sore but I still had a nerve memory of the pads being on them, which was kinda odd.

Anyway, end result, it worked. On my right side I can touch knee to forehead without bending the knee. And on the left side it got closer, but not quite there. I wonder if I can do a few more sessions with it. Maybe loosen up my calves as well, or my lower back.

Dallas vs. Green Bay

I'm picking Dallas for the game tonight. It will be a close good game. I'm looking forward to it.

The Iraq Deal

I'm not quite sure what to make of this agreement that Bush brokered with Maliki. It's not a treaty, so it has no legal standing. What it really does do is show me how desperate the administration is at this point to ensure that it can still continue to pilfer money from the treasury by filtering it through Iraq. The other thing it says to me is that any pretext of flexibility with Bush in regards to Iraq is gone, so the best thing to do is concentrate on the elections.

Every time I think about Iraq I shake my head. Thirty years of plotting to regain power over the country and when the conservatives finally have a lock on everything, they go with Bush and Iraq and flush everything down the toilet. What a joke.

NFL Results

Wow. It was an interesting day alright. Both of the Bay Area teams won. That's a shocker. Ah well, it's down to Pittsburgh tomorrow night to put me at 50% for the week. Go Steelers!

NFL Picks Today

Alright, after Turkey day I'm already 3-0. Let's see if I can keep it going today.

Some tough calls. Some upsets. This will be interesting.

Today's NFL Picks

It's double fun today. I get to partake of Lori's amazing Thanskgiving meal today. And there are three, probably fairly interesting NFL gams on today. Early this morning it's Green Bay and Detroit. I'll be going for the Packers. Then in the early afternoon it's the Jets versus Dallas. I'll take Dallas by a long shot. Even with the upset the Jets still suck. And the last game of the day around 5PM my time is Indi vs. Atlanta. I'm going to take Indi. I know, i picked favorites. If I was looking for an upset it would be Detroit over the Packers this morning. But come one, the Packers at home with an en fuego Bret Favre? It's a lock.

If you want an interesting pick, the Pats to go undefeated for the regular season. All of the teams the play against until the end are crap except for Piitsburgh, and they play Pitt at home. That's a huge advantage to the Pats. It's kinda like watching the Yankees, but you have to love what the Pats are doing this year. It's stunning to see how they can just completely brutalize other reasonable NFL teams. Against the Bills, which are a reasonably good team, they were scoring at will on the offense and completely containing them on the defense. It was both boring and absolutely amazing to watch. The most interesting thing about that game was listening to the color guys trying to find three hours of dead air to fill. From the first Pats drive you could tell Al and John just looked at each other and said, "How are we going to fill three hours with this?"

Application tips from a developer

Sometimes I see folks struggling with their applications when I know they should have anticipated these problems earlier. And I know that because I'm a developer and I write software for a living, so I know all the dirty little secrets of developers. So here are some tips to save you time from me, an honest to god, front-line developer.

• Install operating systems fresh - If you are going from Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.5, or XP to Vista, reinstall fresh, don't upgrade. Upgrade can leave a lot of stuff hanging around which might cause instability. Engineers in large organizations setup their environments using operating system images generated from installing fresh. You should do the same.
• Every non-default option should be tested - When you open a dialog box and there are a series of checkboxes, anything option you change can be deadly. Engineers generally only test using the defaults. So if you check or uncheck boxes, or select different options, then you could be heading for disaster. If the option to 'print every third page upside down on the back side of the paper' is critical to you, then save the document before you try and run it.
• Don't load up your machine with crap - Don't have multiple firewalls or virus checkers, those things can interfere with application on your system, and they don't play well together. Be very judicious about what you put on your machine that runs during startup or continuously during operation.
• Do what the company says to do - If the software is made to run on Windows, run it on Windows. If it's made to use the Oracle database, use Oracle, not MySQL or some substitute. Companies will tell you the recommended environment for their software. And that means what their developers develop on. So if you want the application to be stable always follow their recommendations. Sales guys will tell you that their application, which was designed to run on Oracle, will run on MySQL. Don't believe them. Salesman say anything to make a sale.
• Use features central to the application - Developers will often throw a feature into an application that is only tangential to the core idea of the app. For example, a contact management application that has a GPS function to tell you which of your friends are nearby. That GPS function is probably written by one developer on 20% time, so it only gets a little testing with just his personal GPS unit. If GPS is your thing, then get a GPS application. A contact management application is about managing contacts, use it for that purpose and avoid spurious fun features.
• Don't install the extra stuff - Some installers will install the application and a bunch of extra applications that will help people like you. Don't install them unless they are required or unless you really think you will use them. If you install an application, you should use it or un-install it. Applications can interact with each other in negative ways. That's why the first question you will get when you report a bug is 'what else do you have installed?'
• Clean off vendor installed stuff - This goes along with the previous comment. Uninstall all the crap Gateway, Dell, Sony or whoever installs on your Windows machine for free. Or better yet, when you get your new machine, just install Windows from the DVD from scratch. That will give you a nice clean install to start from.
• Keep your documents in the documents folder - Both Mac and WIndows now have standard directories for your documents, images, tunes, etc. Keep your documents in your documents folder, your images in your images folder and so on. That's what developers do, and that's what they expect you to do. More importantly, that's what they test.
• Don't bitch about screwing yourself over - Don't expect to get any sympathy from a developer when your try to do non-standard shit and FAIL. Your story about how you took a Java application then used a re-compiler to turn it into .NET code and suddenly it didn't run will just get you blank stairs from developers. Just use the application they way they intended, and if you can't do that then write your own.
• Avoid all-in-one applications or devices - More functionality means more code, more code means less testing and more bugs. Do yourself a favor, buy a photo editing application to edit photos, and a word processor to edit documents. Avoid applications that say they do a whole bunch of big things.

These are common sense to engineers, but not common sense to your average Joe end-user. Hopefully these will at least give you some sense of when you are stepping out onto the software plank.

NFL Picks Progress

Well, I'm either 60% or 56% on the week depending on how tomorrow's game goes. Not too bad given what a flukey Sunday this was. The Pitt loss was just crazy. Chargers was just a bad pick, clearly they are more hype than reality. Houston is better than I thought they were and New Orleans is worse. I figured the Browns were a better team, oh, well. And Chicago/Seatlle was a coin flip. This coming Monday night game should be interesting though.

NFL Picks Today

Here are my picks for today. Let's see how I do. I was 64% last week. I get the feeling that will drop a little this week. But I can always hope.

Man, I don't feel strong about a lot of these. This could be a very interesting weekend amongst the chaff teams who were separated from the wheat teams at birth this year.

May 21st, 2011

Mark your calendars, May 21st, 2011 is the day of the rapture when all of the good kids will depart in a split second and live all of use to live in hell on Earth. Or, so says, Harold Camping. How did I find this out you ask? A lowly atheist like myself should not be privileged to such arcana! Well, I have a tendency to surf the AM dial when I'm tooling around in the evenings and sometimes I stumble on Mr. Campings unique voice (6.2MB MP3).

It's that combination of peanut butter on the roof of the mouth baritone and insane whacko religious insanity that grabs me every single time.

If you don't want to listen to the audio Harold talks about some of his reasoning, if you can call it that, as to why the rapture will occur on May 21st, 2011. After that we will get five months of hell fire and then the universe will vanish, this planet along with it.

I only heard this small fragment when I was in the car, but to snag it off the Interwebs I had to listen to a while hour and a half of that beautiful monotone baritone. He really only talks about the rapture, over and over again, and what absolute destruction means. The definition of destruction seems really important to him.

Of course this is all brought to us by family radio. Because, of course, it's not real family unless it's batshit crazy Christian. What kind of fucked up family would let their kids listen to this anyway? Speaking of which, Harold has sage advice on parenting. First, don't have kids because they won't live long enough before the rapture. And second, don't worry about college funds for your kids, because they'll be raptured before they can make use of that silly sekular edukation anyhow.

BTW, as I was searching around the Interwebs for more about this May 21st, 2011 date I found that Harold has been talking this up for decades. But it was 1994 the last time. Apparently after the last date lapsed the bible revealed itself in new ways to Camping who subsequently bumped the date out by 17 years. Good luck this next time Harold!

A long while back we had a Christian/Atheist flame war in the comments and I talked about this whole rapture thing and the response I got was, "Nobody talks about that" or "It's just the nuts". Dunno. It's the only thing I hear about when I flip the radio onto the Christian AM stations. Rapture. Rapture. Rapture. Life if so bad here the true believers can't wait to get home.

As for me, I can always convert to Catholic the day before then convert back the day after.

Artwork from a feature

One of the first things I ever did for Leverage Software was to build the dynamic people map that shows people in your community that you might want to connect with. It's cool. You can zoom and hide or show people based on various profile traits. As it turns out it's one of the features that really sells the service. To the point where, unbeknownst to me, artwork was commissioned on it:

Wow. That's a first for me.

Android good for the iPhone

I'm not sure if this will be controversial, but I think the iPhone will benefit from the launch of Google's Android in the same way Android benefits from the iPhone. What's happened is that Google has created a rising tide that will lift the entire cellphone industry. They have built a baseline standard for phone software that the industry will either have to adopt or compete against. Since it's free, and since cellphone manufacturers have thus far been willing to spend very little on cellphone software, my guess is that they will just use Android and re-skin it.

The net effect will be that the baseline for all cellphones will start off far better than what we have today; touch screens, network access, great graphics, extensibility, awesome web browsing, etc. etc. And developers of both web software and embedded phone software will benefit from that.

Take as an example a company like Starbucks. I could easily see a world where you could open up your cellphone, browse to the Starbucks app, get directions to the nearest Starbucks and even submit your favorite drink order so that it's fresh right when you get there. But up until now, while that's a cool idea, it wasn't practical for a company like Starbucks to do that type of development for every phone. Now they can write to the Android interface and potentially ship on a bunch of different phones from a wide variety of carriers in a couple of years.

It doesn't have to be companies as big as Starbucks. It could be little guys, like you and me, who no longer have to worry about chosing Motorola, Nokia, LG or mobile Flash or whatever. We can just write to Android.

Anyway, how does this benefit the iPhone. It will raise awareness among consumers that their phones really suck. And either the can get a phone running Android which is far better than what they have. Or they can get an iPhone which is really cool as well, but integrates with their desktop and their iTunes far better than the Android phone does.

That being said, I think Apple needs to add the ability to run the Android VM on the iPhone. It doesn't have to be seemless. But iPhone adopters shouldn't get penalized by restricting what apps they can run on the phone.

most pathetic monday night game ever

Yes I picked SF to lose and I nailed that. But I still feel bad about how incredibly poorly they played. It's hard to call it football. Holmgren said Seattle was only going to throw, they did, and SF still couldn't bring the pressure and stop them. Ugh. I can't see a good team in SF's future for at least five years.

Good times at Palmetto High

Thanks to the miracle that is Facebook someone from palmetto high school who graduated the same year I did offered to be my friend. It's not that special. There are only two of us on Facebook who graduated that year. (But there are 50 listings from this year...)

We tried naming a few friends but honestly I didn't make many friends at Palmetto. I explained it this way:

It's highly unlikely that we hung out. In 10th grade my family came down to Miami from Pennsylvania. I thought we had landed on a different planet. On my first day on the bus I was warned by the guy sitting next to me not to sit with or talk to the 'yard apes' on the bus. My mouth just dropped. A couple of days later I was preached at to convert to Christianity or face eternal damnation. Then some kids invited me into Atrox, which was some white supremacist group, and at that point I kinda gave up on the social scene.

I can remember that bus scene like it was yesterday. I pleaded my way into getting a bike and rode back and forth to school after that. I actually did hang out with a few cuban kids to play poker, and some stoner kids, though I didn't smoke myself until years later. The computing scene there at the time was miserable, the kids were stuck programming Turbo Pascal on old klunker PCs.

And the teachers, woof, don't even get me started. My social studies teacher told us he had a cabin in Montana that he was going to go to after the coming apocalypse that was foreseen by Nostradamus. We were all invited if we could manage to get through the desolation on the the way there...

Palmetto was so hopelessly fucked. I'm not sure if you can

Generation by generation, getting better

I heard a really interesting statistic from Paul Krugman recently, he said that in the mid-1970s 30% of Americans thought that inter-racial marriage was 'acceptable', and that this year, thirty year later, 77% of Americans think it's 'acceptable'. That's a huge shift from overwhelmingly negative, to overwhelmingly positive in just 30 years. It's a huge cultural shift in the right direction.

It certainly mirrors what I have seen. Growing up I remember clear casual racism among my parents and their peers; jokes, concern about housing prices, issues at work and so on. When I started working in the mid-80s I found that race based jokes and such were discouraged. Now I would say that straight up racist talk will get you severely reprimanded if not outright fired. Again, a shift to the better.

I think it's just a shift among the generations. The blatant racism of the generation from the 40s and 50s is dying out and giving way to the boomers who were by-in-large more accepting. And they are in turn giving way to my generation whose views on gay marriage are largely favorable. And I'm sure my daughters generation and her peers will be even more accepting than I am, and so on. It's the natural progression of things when you don't have artificial institutionalized bigotry like slavery or apartheid.

I'm optimistic. Bill O'Reilly's audience is dying, literally, and along with it his ideology. Watch his ads, it's all about the retirements homes and reverse mortgages. The same thing with my local radio station KSFO. They are the radio station of barber shops. And as the last of the barber shops give way to Supercuts, so will their audience and ideology. Sure there will be holdouts, there always are. Just like there are kids today who like to the big band music of the 40s. But bigotry in America is slowly fading away. Becoming part of our collective memory as a sad chapter from a less civilized era.

Not Bad For Picks

Even if lose the lock on the 49ers tomorrow I'm still well ahead of 60%. Not bad. That Colts game was crazy. A missed 29 yard field goal. Crazy.

Sunday Picks

I went 2-0 last week. Let's see how I can do this Sunday/Monday:

I'll be happy if I break 50%, frankly. The NFL is kinda hard to watch nowadays. With the exception of the Pats, Colts, Steelers, Cowboys, Packers, Lions and sometimes the Chargers the rest of these teams just suck. It's painful to watch these high priced players hamstrung by horrible QBs. Where has all the talent gone? Alex Smith? Please. Wasn't he the starter for the University of Pheonixs Play By Mail "Paper Tigers"?

How is anyone surprised that Randy Moss is great again? Wide receivers are only good when the coach wants to throw the rock, the o-line gives the QB enough time and when the QB has the talent to heave the rock. 90% of a receivers stats have nothing to do with them. It's all in the rest of the team. And until now Moss has been playing with horrible QBs and with porous o-lines. Thus, no gains. Now that he is on the Pats, are we supposed to be surprised he is doing well? I'm not. He's talented, Brady is talented, Belichick is gutsy, and the o-line holds. It's what pro football is supposed to be about.

Anyway, what to watch... Greenbay/Vikes is the best game of the weekend. Cowboys/Giants will be very entertaining close second. Browns/Steelers will be good. Colts/Chargers will be fun in the first half. And maybe Bengals/Ravens nd Lions/Cards, but it might be early blowouts.

Thank you neocons!

Yeah, this Iran saber rattling is really working. Check out the difference in just two weeks:

Two weeks ago

Today

Oh, wait, I'm not one of the Bush's neocon oil buddies who is getting filthy rich extorting the working poor for luxuries like gas.

This is progress? We have a weakening dollar, a housing economy in the tubes, a severely strained credit market, and outrageous oil prices. Of course, Bush could (and should) do something about these things, but he won't. Because in this type of market the rich get much richer and the middle class just gets poorer.

If you want something to take your mind off this try some of the awesome R&B stylings of Jill Scott. Try out the track "Hate On Me" to fall instantly in love with this powerful singers voice and attitude.

Flick interfaces

I'm going to experiment with bring the 'flick' scrolling to one of my interfaces. Meaning that the user could click-drag then the area would continue to scroll along that vector for a certain time until slowly easing to a stop. The iPhone does this in all of it's scrolling areas.

First I can put aside the vector math, which is relative pretty simple anyway, by constraining to just left/right or up/down. The one variable is then speed, which is the size of the original click-drag move divided the amount of time of the click. So a fast wide click is very fast, while as short and long click would move relatively slowly.

So what is the best algorithm to compute the distance to travel starting with a given speed (or velocity) which tails off slowly towards the end? Exponential decay? Something parabolic to model along the lines of skipping stones?

Eric? Landon? ;-)

Private Efforts Versus The Gubment

I love the beautiful irony of the privately funded Minuteman border fence. Instead of taking the ton of money given to them to actually build a fence, they just paid off themselves and built a cow fence. Not at all what these staunch patriots (er, bigots) were expecting. They thought they were building a super high double fence with trenches and cameras and what not. They got a five wire cow fence that anyone could jump over or cut through in a matter of seconds.

Could it be that privately funded efforts are just as prone to graft and corruption as public ventures? Perhaps even more so because of the complete lack of accountability?

Here is the question I have for all of you Minuteman fans; why aren't you up in arms about the Canadian border? It's much bigger, much more porous, and the one documented entry of a terror suspect we have coming over a border was from the Canadian side. Shouldn't we be putting up a fence there too? And how about the border between Alaska and Canada? And the waters around Hawaii? Seems like we have a lot of borders. So why is the Mexican border the only one you care about?

Heroes Retool

Good news for Heroes fans. Kring, the show's creator, realizes it sucks and has a good grasp on the reasons. Everything he says I agree with completely.

Smashed Hybrid

Here is what a smushed hybrid front end looks like.

Looks just like a regular smushed front end, eh? ;-)

According to the mechanics I was very lucky that the airbags didn't deploy. That would have sucked.

Lori had some words with Megan yesterday about easing up on me with the backseat advice. It kinda worked. When I was driving her to dinner last night you could see her mind whirring about how to give me advice about driving while still conforming to Mom's rules. It was cute, so I gave her the pass on it.

Googling Oso

It's kinda funny what you find when you are up at 5AM waiting to run and you Google your dogs name; Oso. For one thing you find some astronomical stuff here and here. There is a band in Santa Barbara named after Oso. Not bad, I guess. And there is a Flickr account named Oso with some cool pics from around the world. And, of course, The Onion Source, who could live without that.

Then my run gets cancelled. And I'm back to bed, to cuddle with the real thing.

Getting Admonished By Megan

The toughest thing about getting in a fender bender yesterday turns out to be getting near constant admonishment from Megan about it. I figured it would be a learning experience. I took her out to see the card with it's pushed back hood and explained how I hadn't been able to stop quickly enough but that everyone was ok. i figured it would be a good safety lesson, but Megan, she is like a safety nazi. It's all about smoke alarms this, and fire escape plan that. And now...

I was driving her over to dance class in the truck and she says to me; "Your driving too fast. Your going to smash the truck and I like truck." I wasn't driving too fast at the time. But her perceptions of car speed are skewed south, it's a trait she gets from her mom.

This morning as I gathered my keys and computers for the trip to the office she told me again, "Be careful. Don't drive too fast. Don't smash the truck." How long is this going to last?

In good portion I'm reaping what I have sown. My parents went with the old fashioned, "We are parents, we are gods, we don't make mistakes, you do" line. But I've favored the, "I'm human. I'll be honest with you when I screw up and we can both learn from it" approach. Not that it happens that often. But it does.

That being said, if this keeps up she is going to have a new lesson to learn; that nobody likes constant reminders of their mistakes.

Pictures of my car's damaged front end tonight or tomorrow.

BTW, poker last night was going pretty good until I ran into a brick wall called 'Mel'. At one point he hit a royal straight flush on fourth street. I didn't pay him out on that. But I did pay him out when I went all in after flopping the nut full house, only to get out-drawn on fourth street with a slightly better kicker. I packed it in after that but Mel found another five full houses over the next hour and took most of the remaining money on the table.

Colts/Pats

I've been waiting for two weeks now for this Colts/Pats game this weekend. If you listen to the Pro commentary it's all; who gives a shit about the other games this weekend, it's Colts/Pats! I mean, come on, two undefeated teams, both playing at their best, one a defending Super Bowl champion. Hell, it might as well be the damn Super Bowl this year. And...

My satellite won't be showing it to me. It will be showing me Raiders/Texans. I'm in one of the only two markets in the whole country that is contractually forced to show the other game being played in that time slot. I can just hear the commentary now; "It's another three and out for the Raiders, Now highlights from the game you would much rather be watching and real nail-biter as the Colts and Pats are even at 13."

My pick is for the Pats to win, and the Raiders to lose. And for me to potentially find a sports bar in San Mateo where they hopefully are out of the blackout zone.

Megan's First Race

Megan ran in her first race yesterday. It was the 400 meter Pumpkin Dash. I had to wake her up at 7AM to get her there by 8AM, only to find out that her race didn't start until 9:30AM. As a the race approached the track and field kids took the little kids out for some wind sprints and stretches. That tuckered Megan out so a few minutes before the race was set to start she decided she didn't want to run.

We sat on the side of the track and watched the kids in her race start. Then she got inspired and we ran together, about 40 seconds behind the other five kids (four boys and one girl). Her in red sneakers and me in Danskos (I didn't know I was going to run.)

As we approached the finish line people were cheering for her and yelling her name. She loved that! And then as Lori came around we found out she had won a medal for coming in second among the girls. That blew her mind.

She says she will run again, but she made it clear to me that she is running to get that attention at the end of race. There are worse reasons I guess. I enjoy the attention when I run too.

A little peace

If you want a little peace and quiet the next time you go to the movies try out a cell phone jammer. Of course, using one might get you fined $11,000.

If you want a little violence you could see American Gangster like Mel and I did last night. The reviews I heard gave Oscar level praise to Denzel, but I have to agree with Mel that it was just Denzel's usual shtick. I think he found a few degrees of play here and there, but overall it was his usual "stand up guy" performance just shaded dark. What was Denzel's Oscar scene in Gangster? I can't think of any. And you have to have that one scene that perfectly frames the character. It just wasn't there.

That being said, Gangster is a great movie. It should definitely be in the running for best picture and perhaps best supporting for Crowe.

Pre-Kid Anxiety

I just got off the line with a friend of mine who is going to have her first kid in a couple of months. I think back to myself at that point and how I was really freaked out about the whole thing. She is much more cool about it. I remember that I had this notion somewhere deep in my subconscious that Megan was going to pop out and start asking questions about God, death, the meaning of life, all of the tough stuff right off the bat. Basically that I would be faced with parenting issues I was completely incapable of handling right away.

I think it comes from seeing other parents and how they respond to their kids and thinking, "Man, I would never have answered that way." And then freaking out because you need to know how to come up with the right answers. But the thing is, they are at one point on the very slow "responsibility curve" of parenting. And that "responsibility curve" is insanely slow. It starts with changing them when they poop and pee, then flicking their hands away from open wall sockets, then separating the kids when they are beating up on each other, and so on. And all that happens well before any sticky questions about God and the nature of man. Plus, at least in the beginning, you get a couple of shots at any question. And even when you do make a mistake later on you can always say, "You know what, I didn't know that was the deal you had with Mom. Sorry about the mixup. Everybody makes mistakes." Or, whatever.

Anyway, long story short, no need to freak out about the parenting thing. And I think every sane and reasonable person is going to be a good parent.