Monthly Archives: September 2007

Politics

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One thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but never really had the energy to do, is write letters about big issues. Alone it probably doesn’t make a huge difference, but when people get a deluge of letters either supporting them or condemning their stance on something, it most certainly can sway their opinion.

I think the first of the series of letters is going to Orem, Utah’s city council and police department, after their police department knocked down, handcuffed, arrested, and jailed an elderly woman… for not watering her lawn. The city attorney, most of all, should be written to, as (s)he still plans to prosecute her.

Long Shot

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If I were to offer a used Canon Rebel 300D digital camera, with battery but no lens, for $250, would anyone bite? (Review of the model here.) I don’t currently have it, but I’d guarantee it to be in working order. (In other words, I’d be taking the liability on purchasing it.) Or $275 with lens.

The reason I ask is that this is a very good deal, but I only want the 10D. I’d love to let someone else benefit from the good deal along with me.

N.B.: This is not a binding offer, just a solicitation of interest. I may very well not purchase this, and the auction ends in 3.5 hours.

N.B. 2: This offer really only applies to people I know…

Making Firefox Rock

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Firefox is great. But it can be made better! Here are some Add-ons you should consider:

  •  WebDeveloper toolbar: in addition to all sorts of things that are handy for web developers, it includes some things that I find really handy just for using. You can disable images, disable external images, disable CSS, convert a POST to a GET (great for URL hacking), disable the cache, disable referrers, etc.
  • Adblock Plus: you’ll just never see ads.
  • Flashblock: Flash is nice, but sometimes it’s obnoxious. This makes it so you have to click on a Flash element to play it.
  • LocationBar2: I actually haven’t tried this yet, but I think I’m about to.
  • ShowIP: Displays the IP of the site you’re connecting to. IMHO, this should be standard, although I suppose many people wouldn’t know to look.
  • FormFox: This should also be standard! It shows you where the form you’re submitting goes. Again, it’s something most people would overlook, but every now and then I really want to know and have to dig through the source… Not anymore!
  • Mouse Gestures: I actually use this for only one reason: a quick roll of my hand across the mouse (right-then-left) should go back. It just seems intuitive. (In fact, I discovered this accidentally in Opera, which supports it.)
  • Reload Every: It’s often handy to have a page reloaded periodically, automatically. This does it. (There’s no way to have it watch for updates, though…)
  • Greasemonkey: This one basically lets you load scripts which alter the page after it’s loaded. Vague description, but here are some useful scripts for it:
    • eBay Search Pictures: eBay charges sellers a fee to display a picture. Otherwise it shows a little green camera icon. As a buyer, I really like a little thumbnail. This one is ingenious: it’ll make a little thumbnail where there isn’t one, by grabbing it out of the auction. To quote the Guinness guys, brilliant!
    • One to show only negative feedback. I always wished eBay allowed this.
    • Ironically, UserScripts.org, the main site for user scripts for Greasemonkey, has a pretty crappy site. This plugin allows sorting of results pretty nicely.
    • GMail Super Clean is a nice theme for GMail.
    • YouTube Googler makes YouTube’s display suck a little less. The video is much larger and the comments aren’t even loaded. (I don’t know why, but the comments on YouTube are the worst comments of any site I’ve ever seen. Always.) N.B. that if you’re looking for a script to let you download YouTube videos, there are about 30.
    • Those who frequent Flickr will be familiar with the spaceball.gif that’s put ‘over’ images to prevent them from being saved via right-clicking. This is pretty obnoxious in my opinion. I was about to recommend a script to fix it, but noticed that someone has an even better solution: next time you come across a “spaceball.gif” protected image, right-click on it and do “Adblock Image” (assuming you installed Adblock, mentioned above.)
    • GoogleMonkeyR: Wow! This does more than meets the eye. By default it just adds a spiffy blue background to search results, which I thought was lame. But then I found the settings. You can set it up to do multiple columns. I have a fairly high resolution so I have 2 columns. You can remove sponsored links, although I don’t. You can number the results. And there’s the “Autoload” for more, which I thought would just add prefetch hints. But actually, you just scroll down and more results are loaded. This is incredibly spiffy!

GMail

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So I’m now forwarding all my e-mail to GMail. (Mostly because OWA is the worst mail client ever.) As you’re probably aware, there are sponsored ads. (Actually, I’m not sure why Adblock Plus isn’t catching them, but I digress.)

Today one of the other members in the Democrats here e-mailed me. His e-mail didn’t even discuss anything political, but I guess it picked up on the word “Democrats” in his signature. The ads were mostly about Ron Paul.

But the best… I just e-mailed one of my professors saying that I’ll miss her class tomorrow. The ads on the side are now for TheFakeDoctorsNote.com: “Print A Doctors Excuse Instantly.” How convenient!

2008

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I would love to be wrong, but here’s my prediction for 2008: Rudy Giuliani. He’s not who I’m favoring to win (at all), but he’s who I’m currently convinced is going to win. Here’s why:

  • Obama: My favorite. But he’s young in the Senate and has no leadership experience (e.g., as governor). I think he’d do great, but I don’t think enough people think that.
  • Hillary: I’m a Democrat and agree with about 99% of her policies, and yet I’m not too fond of her for no reason at all. I know a lot of people, many who would normally vote Democrat, who would not vote for her. The problem is that I also think that she’s going to get the nomination. Which means it’s going to be down to her and a Republican. More on this in a minute.
  • Edwards: He’d make a great leader, but he’s not getting much attention right now. Unless this changes, I don’t think he stands a chance.
  • Bill Richardson: He’d also be great, but at the current rate, his recognition is so low that I don’t think he stands a chance.
  • Mitt Romney: Not many Massachusetts voters like him, especially since most Massachusetts residents are Democrats. No Democrats would vote for a conservative Republican in 2008. But what Republican is going to vote for the governor of the (arguably) most liberal state in the country, who implemented universal healthcare in the end of his term and was in office when we became the only state to permit gay marriage. He has his followers, but I don’t think he stands much of a chance.
  • Ron Paul: Some of his policies are good, but I think “out there” is the best way I’ve been able to describe him. While he has a very vocal cadre of Internet supporters, I don’t think he stands a chance “IRL.”
  • Rudy Giuliani: From what I’ve heard, a lot of NYC residents hate him. But he’s a moderate. I figure the far-right will go for Romney and lose. The far-left won’t vote for him. But everyone from center-right to center-left, and most undecideds, might be willing to consider him. (I’m not diametrically opposed to him yet, though I think I’d definitely vote blue.)

In addition to the whole, “I could be wrong” thing, this could also change over time. For example, if Edwards starts getting a lot of publicity, he stands a chance. Giuliani could fall in popularity. Obama could push his numbers up, or get the media to talk about something other than the fact that he’s black. Hillary could win over some voters by combating the impression that she’s uncaring and cold-hearted.

Nutjobs

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You are a nutjob if:

  • You refer to government conspiracies. (Actually, let me qualify that. You refer to government conspiracies without showing compelling evidence.)
  • You refer to “the homosexual agenda” or use the word “infiltrated” to refer to homosexuals.
  • You believe income tax / the IRS are illegal, and/or have voted to abolish them.
  • Most of your savings are in some format other than, err, money. (I suppose there’s some logic here, if the economy were to utterly crumble. But if the economy utterly crumbles, who wants your gold / rubies?)
  • You are an anarchist. (This is 100% irrelevant to supporting smaller government, which is far from being a nutjob. I’m talking people who truly think we should have no government at all.)
  • You vote to permit torture.
  • You support an immediate and complete withdrawal from Iraq.
  • You support staying in Iraq indefinitely with no exit plan.
  • Your plan for ‘solving’ illegal immigration consists primarily of “build a really big fence.”
  • Your plan for ‘solving’ illegal immigration consists primarily of deporting all illegal immigrants.
  • You write an “erotic fantasy” novel about police officers being gunned down.

Geek

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“Your mom is so old that she owes Jesus a quarter?”
“Why would she owe him a quarter?”
“Because she’s so old.”
“Yeah, but why did she borrow a quarter?”
…
“She’d better hope Jesus doesn’t charge interest.”

Clearly, we needed to calculate this. But there were some questions:

  • What interest rate would Jesus charge? We’re fairly certain that it’s un-Jesus-like to charge interest. One of my less-culturally-sensitive friends pointed out that Jewish bankers were generally hated in ancient times for usury, so we settled on 10%.
  • How long ago was the investment? The obvious answer, 2007, doesn’t make sense, since Jesus probably wasn’t loaning people money as an infant. We settled on 1,990 years. At age 17, Jesus may have loaned someone a quarter.

I don’t have a financial calculator handy, so I had to use a web-based form. Not many of them worked that well. $2.97 came up fairly often. Frustrated, we just used the Future Value formula. Jesus is apparently owed $5.88 x 1081.

This shows why interest rates really matter. If she had negotiated a 5% interest rate, she’d owe only $3.67 x 1041. But if she put it on a credit card, where 27% is more typical… She’d owe $9.28 x 10205.

OSWD

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Many moons ago, I loved the site OSWD. Basically, people submitted really nice web designs, and they were free. The site had some issues, and forked a few years ago, into OSWD.org and OpenWebDesign.org. I came to prefer OpenWebDesign.org. These days, neither is updated that often. OpenWebDesign has a forum on their main page, and it’s usually full of spam links.

So I bit, and posted on the forum asking if they’d allow someone like me to volunteer to help a bit, even if it’s just moderating comments. It was rapidly going to down the road OSWD went, I told them, and I didn’t want that.

I just remembered, so I went, excitedly, to see what response I got. Had I spurred others into action, causing lots of people to say, “This site sucks right now. Let us help!” Did the site admin apologize and take us up on our offers, or at least pledge to do better?

Nope. One guy, whose username is an obscenity, posted saying that the only people left are those there to ‘[expletive] things up’ because they have some issues with the site administration. And that was all.

But he mentioned another site: OpenDesigns.org. And it’s just become the place I go when I want to find some good design. It’s a nice, clean site. It’s not overrun by spam links to porn sites. It’s supposed to be community-driven. Check it out!

Douchebag

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Last night around 1:30, I was almost asleep when someone in a neighboring building began banging on drums and screaming very loudly. After about 15 minutes, I was getting really annoyed.

A few minutes later, it stopped abruptly. It would appear that someone who was almost asleep when they began playing the drums at 1:30 in the morning called the police. I of course won’t know the details until I’m at the station on Monday to do police logs, but it was probably anonymously reported at 1:45 a.m. by a disgruntled student in a neighboring building. And whoever that anonymous student might be, I salute you: Hero of the Day!

UBCD: It’s Magic

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I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is worth its weight in gold. (Err, I guess that’s not a grand compliment given the weight of a CD. Let’s instead say that, had I paid $200 for it, I don’t think I’d regret it.)

Least year I accidentally hosed the bootloader on my laptop. All my data was, in theory, intact, but all I got when turning my computer on was “OS not found,” which is very scary on a live system with important data on it. I tried all sorts of complex stuff, before I remembered that I had the UBCD. I booted it up, selected “Partition Tools,” and found a program that automagically restored my bootloader.

Monday night, one of my professors explained that he was just given a used laptop, and that it was all well and good except that he didn’t know the password. (And it was a WinXP machine where you need one.) I volunteered to help because he’s a really nice guy and, well, it can never hurt to be on a professor’s good side.

It took me about two minutes, and most of that was waiting for things to load. It includes a utility that let me just blank the password in the registry. It was kind of unceremonious, but I rebooted, ejected the CD, and then got the windows login screen. I just hit enter, logging in with no password, and it worked!

Of course then I spent an hour uninstalling old junk and downloading updates. As I sat there, he asked if I’d come help out a friend at his office–who would pay me–who was having similar problems. I agreed, and he called them, telling them that the FBI might be looking for me, but as long as I wasn’t caught beforehand, we’d be coming by another day to help him.

It’s got all of those utilities that come in handy when you’re absolutely desperate. I think I could make serious money on the side helping people with problems like this. And best of all, it just works. Oh, and it’s free.