/dev/null/kevin

Just a little reminder of my proudest blogging moment here at Sun.

That's all folks!  Follow me at http://devnullkevin.blogspot.com

Today is my 19 year anniversary at Sun.

It's also my last day.

Thanks to all my friends.

If you like this blog, it will continue at http://devnullkevin.blogspot.com/

Bye!

Here is how different sports appears to people who don't care about that sport:

Soccer (Fútbol)

kick, kick, kick, out of bounds, kick, kick, kick, whistle, kick, announcer gets excited!, nothing happens, kick, kick...

GOOOOOAAAALLLLLLL!!!!

kick, kick, kick....

American Football (pro)

Kickoff, commercial, 3 seconds of play, wait, talking, 3 more seconds of play, more talking, commercial, another commercial, game recap...

TOUCHDOWN!!!

40,000 replays of touchdown, commercial, kick off, commercial, play, play, play, punt, commercial, halftime, naked boob!, quick cut to commercial...

Baseball

Pitcher stares, shakes his head, more staring, more spitting, steps off mound, spits, grabs crotch, commercial.

Commercial for jock itch powder.  Viewer fights urge to spit and grab own crotch.

Basketball

First 47 game minutes: Walking, passing, scoring, whistles, scoring...

Gatorade commercial.  Nike commercial. Michael Jordan's underwear commercial.

Last game "minute": Timeout, whistle, free throw, foul, timeout, free throw, foul, timeout, free throw, timeout, commercial... (88 real minutes pass)

Hockey

Guys skate left.

Guys skate right.

Puck no where to be found.

squint, clean glasses, nope - still no puck.

Conclude that the puck must be invisible!

NASCAR

♫ The cars on the track go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round... ♫

♫ The commercials on TV say beer and trucks, beer and trucks, beer and trucks... ♫

♫ The people in the stands have bright red necks, bright red necks, bright red necks... ♫

Horse Racing

Hype, interviews, hype., ladies in big hats, hype, interviews, profiles, filler... (3 hours)

Race! (2 whole minutes)

Interviews, filler, replays, filler, filler, filler... (2 hours)

Golf

Soft, whispering voices lulling you to sleep.

Ah... sleep...

Zzzzzzz...

Olympics

Hype, interviews, hype, Americans, Americans, Americans, hype, interviews, American national anthem, medal count.

Americans.

Cricket

Is that a batter or a goalie?

Bowler?  What?  Is he trying to pick up a spare now?

Wild pitch!

Days?!  This game lasts days?!  I am out of here!

If you don't care about Twitter then stop reading.

A while back I posted that Twitter needs to delete the follow-spammers.  There were three kinds of responses:

• Agree!
  
• Disagree!
• Then follow me on Twitter out of spite.
• "Why should I care?  It doesn't bother or affect me."

BTW, one of the comments from that post left a great link to Stop Twitter Spam!  Check it out for lots of details.

For the "It doesn't affect me, why should I care?" crowd, here is your answer: It does affect you.

Let me first acknowledge that, yes, this is all Twitter's problem, and they need to fix it.  But it is also our problem and we should assist where we can.  Twitter, after all, is a social service so we must behave like social creatures.  A community is always stronger as a whole.

If you saw an arsonist lighting a fire would you try and stop them and/or put out the fire?  Or would you just say that this is the fire department's problem and ignore it?  Would you at least report the fire?  Would it make a difference if the fire was near your house or favorite winery?

If Twitter matters to you -- has value to you -- then you should care that your service could go away if Twitter can't fix the problems.  Are you just willing to jump to the next service, like plurk, FriendFeed or identi.ca?  If you are then you are forgetting that the value of Twitter is not the technology, but the social network itself that you've created.  Just because you are willing to switch to a different network doesn't mean that your other friends all will.  You won't be able to rebuild what you had.  It will be different, even if the underlying technology is better.  Remember that Twitter itself had no value until it reached a critical mass.  Twitter also has many useful tools built on top of its API.  Those tools also go away.

Thus, if you think that the follow-spammers don't affect you then you are wrong.  Even if they don't send you messages they are breaking the service that you use.  They are also making it more difficult for the Twitter staff to fix the problem if they are dealing with outages all of the time.

Finally, there is a new wrinkle to this story.  Since the whole point of follow-spammers is to ultimately get followed themselves (so you see their spam), the spammers have added retweeting to their arsenal of tricks.  What they are doing is taking normal tweets from the public timeline, or from people they are follow-spamming, and retweeting the text, plus their spam link.  This gives them the illusion of being a legitimate user and of having "meaningful" content, and that increases their hit chances.  How does this affect you?  They could be retweeting your posts.

Do you want the picture you sent of your child linked to porno-spammers site?  If anyone does a google (or summize) search they would be linked together, forever, along with you since you never blocked them as a spammer.

So, bottom line: everything affects you in a social network, so you should care.

I redid this old post as a Crappy Graph:

Chuism: Wisdom passed down from my father.

Chuism #3: Political Options

This one is short, but sweet.  I'm just going to quote him verbatim.

"Democrats want to make the poor richer.  Republicans want to make the rich richer.  Both of them want to do it by making me poorer, and I'm supposed to pick which is best?"

aka, the lament of the ever-shrinking middle class.  Two-class system, here we come, America! 

This cnet review of Lasonic i931 ipod "dock" is hilarious.  You can see the little ipod nano in the tape cassette bay.

Update: Link fixed!  Here is a second link in case that one goes bad.  No commercial, either.

Here are pictures my step dad took of the San Bruno Mountain fire, located just south of San Francisco.  He is a guide for the area so it's very sad to see it go.  Still, as an environmentalist, he knows that fire is part of a rebirth process so he's looking forward to the renewal and regrowth process once things are under control.

While uploading a spreadsheet to Google Docs I got this error:

We were unable to upload this document because of this error:

conversion request did not return an error or a new document

This error message comes from the converter we're using, and hopefully tells you what you need to know to fix the problem.

That's one of the worst error messages I've ever seen.  I'm surprised they didn't draw it on a blue background.  The fact that they suggest that it could actually be helpful is just insulting.

In spite of that error message, I was able to track down the legal thing I was doing and remove it.

On to actually using the spreadsheet.  I updated a few numbers and then tried to resort some rows.

FAIL.

I cannot sort by number.  I can only sort A-Z or Z-A.  Are you kidding me?  Do they really expect that people won't use numbers in a spread sheet?

I also cannot sort just a range of rows, unless I only want them sorted by column A.  The only was to sort by any other column is to sort the entire sheet.  Yes, I can freeze some of the top rows, but if there are any rows I don't want sorted, I am SOL.

It just might be possible to do these things, but I can't figure it out.  Maybe it's just a UI fail, but I don't think so.

One more thing I never thought I'd have to reboot: my keyboard.

Check out the Optimus Maximus keyboard.  Each key has a 48x48 OLED display that is fully programmable.

The best part: only US$ 1,800.00.  Bargin!

To all movie reviewers: you are not as clever as you think.

Yes, I hate spoilers [1 2], so I had to rant on yet another case of blatant spoilers contained in movie reviews from professionals who are supposed to know better.  If you haven't seen The Happening (and I hear, you shouldn't, because it's really bad) then I'll bet that you, like me now, already know the movie's plot twist.

Watching Ebert and Roeper: At the Movies, they made a little "clever" joke that gave it all away.  Roger Ebert himself (who isn't on the TV show anymore) gave it away in his printed review, as did the New York Times.  These are four top movie reviewers with huge audiences, not some punk blogger, so why are they just giving away this plot twist?  I'm no fan of M. Night Shyamalan, but even a bad movie doesn't deserve to be spoiled.

I had to laugh at this statement from the NY Times reviewer:

"I won’t say too much about the gimmick that Mr. Shyamalan has come up with this time around..."

Dude, too late!  Seriously, the last half of that sentence is a spoiler, as was the frigging title of your review.

I'm not putting any links here so if you track down their reviews then you're inflicting the spoiler damage on yourself.  Plus, they don't need the huge bump in traffic from being dev-null-kevin'ed.

Update: If you don't mind this particular movie being spoiled for you, then I recommend this "spoilerrific" review of The Happening.  via Molly Wood.

Chuism: Wisdom passed down from my father.

Chuism #2: The Law of Pre-Fallen Objects

This law is subtitled, "You can't fall off the floor."  I added that last part, making this a multi-generational Chuism.  In short, it means something can't fall if it's already "fallen."  i.e. Just assume something is going to fall and put it, gently, on the ground before gravity does it for you (and less gently).

This law originated with packing stuff into the car.  When moving or shopping my mom would load things into the car and put them in precarious places.  My dad would take one look at everything and reposition it all so that the bouncy car ride home wouldn't destroy half of what we'd bought.

The law really applies to putting things on the seats of your car.  It just takes one emergency stop to send it all crashing to the floor.  Items especially susceptible to this were:

• Flowers in vases or other wedding center pieces
  
• Fish in bowls (yes, this happened)
• That tuna casserole for a potluck
• Me and my sister (pre-seatbelt era)
  

These days you could probably add laptops to the list.

I learned the "you can't fall off the floor" part again from my college drinking days.  Better to pass out on the floor than a bunk bed.  Just saying.

... all car alarms will be illegal, especially this one:

Personally, I hate this particular one so much that if I ever do see someone stealing a car with this alarm I'm going to help them.  Hey Buddy, need a hand there?  Got money for gas?  Buckle up!  Remember, safety first.  Bye!

A recent tweet about pickles reminded me about a recent trip to Arby's.  They were advertising a "Southern Chicken Sandwich."  My wife got one and she ended up with a tiny sandwich consisting of the following:

• tiny bun
• tiny fried chicken patty
• mayo
• pickles

Arby's Southern Chicken Sandwich

We weren't sure where the "Southern" part came from.  Maybe we are just ignorant Yankees, so was it the pickle?

Soon afterwards I saw an adversisement for McDonald's Southern Chicken Sandwich.  It, too, consisted of just chicken and pickle.  I was sensing a pattern.

McDonalds's Southern Chicken Sandwich

So, I put down my copy of William Shatner's book, Get a Life, and went to google "southern chicken pickle" to see if, indeed, the pickle is the key to making a Southern Chicken Sandwich.  What I found where two blog postings [1, 2] mentioning that McDonalds was ripping off Chick-Fil-A's southern chicken sandwich.  Ah ha!  (Arby's didn't make their RADAR).

Chick-Fil-A's Southern Chicken Sandwich

Again with the pickle.

I don't get to the south much, nor even to the few Chick-Fil-As in California.  The first time I saw their name I pronounced it "chick-FILL-ah."  Can someone tell a dumb Yankee why the pickle makes it Southern?

Update: Pulled from the comments, it's a NY Times story on the chicken-pickle sandwich wars.

My dad, as dads are want to do, has passed down years of fatherly advice.  Some of it actually makes sense - more as I get older.    So, for the benefit of mankind, I will be repeating some of his better gems.  I even added a new blog catagory!  For the record, he is a distinguished hardware engineer at Agilent (by way of H-P), although I still had to show him how to use the remotes for his new plasma TV setup.

Chuism #1: The Last Tuna Can

This metaphor stems from living in the woods with raccoons who would knock over our garbage cans looking for food.  There would be a huge pile of garbage that needed to be placed back in the cans.  We would clean over half of the mess, but it would still look like a huge pile of garbage.  In fact, it would look like we had made no progress at all.  It wasn't until the last tuna can was placed back in the trash that the area looked clean again.

I've taken this as a metaphor for measuring progress of any task, from programming from weight loss.  It's easy to spend lots of effort but see little tangible results, and that can be demotivating.  The Last Tuna Can rule is just a way of reminding myself to not get discouraged and to keep pressing on.  The results will come if you don't give up.  The code will work once you pushed through the debugging, and the GUI will look nice once it's been properly skinned.  The home remodel project will be less chaotic once you've cleaned up the mess, and the weight will start to drop once you've conditioned your body to do so.

It's also a reminder that there are other ways of measuring progress.  For example, we would look inside the garbage can to see our progress, and that provided some confirmation that we really were making progress.  It is important to find something to help make sure that you are not wasting your effort.  Perseverance is good, but you also don't want to be a damned fool about it either.  You can only say "stay the course" for so long without any kind of results (yes, that's a jab at certain political figures).

Also, get garbage cans with lockable lids.