/dev/null/kevin

The BBC reports that, according to a survery conducted by the Pew Research Center in Washington, there is a large percentage of Muslims who don't think that 9/11 was carried out by Arabs. Many of those surveyed are from England and France, so non-Arab countries.

I'm very curious to know who these people think did carry out the attacks. I certainly don't mean for this to be Arab or Muslim bashing in any way, but I think it's a fair question to ask. If not Arabs, then who? Did America attack itself? Did we fake the whole thing? Maybe is was those pesky Canadians. Did the Pew folks phrase the question misleadingly?

Honestly, please post an answer if you know what these people believe or why the results turned out as they did.

Update: There is this video which documents many of the "conspiracy theory" point of views. I present it in the spirit of representing all sides.
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June 23, 2006 10:58 AM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |

When browsing online reviews of products, it's always imporant to read the negative reviews to see if there is real problem, or if the reviewer is just an idiot. Thus, I found this comment about the HBO TV show Rome quite amusing.

In short, the reviewer complained that "the script was predictable." Really. A show based on history is predictable? Shocking!

Personally, I loved Rome. I didn't want to like the show because I was trying to not watch any more new shows, but this one was too engrossing. It was like watching the early Sopranos episodes. Maybe now we need a show about Italians in the distant future since we have shows about the present and past. Battlestar Gallacticus?
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June 22, 2006 10:59 PM PDT Permalink | |

Perhaps they forgot to install their firewall...

Dude, you're extinguishing a Dell!
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June 21, 2006 04:22 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [4] |

I've been using my TiVo to record a bunch of sporting events lately. Between the hockey playoffs and basketball playoffs I had to get into the habit of adding *at least* 30 minutes to the recording time. I've been adding an hour.

Now, I realize that sporting events run long and games can go into overtime, but whoever is estimating the length of these games is severely underestimating their end times. I would have lost the ends of many games had I not added the extra time. It seems like they are short changing themselves by underestimating the game lengths so why not err on the side of caution?

At least the World Cup games seem to end on time (due to the nature of how football/soccer time is kept). However, I have noticed that the network TV coverage is now starting up to 30 minutes early. I guess they need to put their commercials somewhere.
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June 21, 2006 10:44 AM PDT Permalink | |

Does you opinion of someone affect how you feel about their work? I'm finding that the answer you that question is "yes."

People used to love Tom Cruise and his movies. Then Tom went crazy with all of the couch-jumping and Scientology. Now he is less popular and his movies are also less popular as Mission Impossible III opened much lower than expected.

I used to find Dilbert very funny. Then Scott Adams started his blog. I read it because I thought it would be funny.

It's not.

But the problem isn't that it's not funny (it's not supposed to be), but it's that I learned what kind of person Scott Adams is. He's a nice guy, and smart guy, but he's also very arrogant. Very. He considers himself to be smart and logical, and therefore infallible and that's a huge turn off for me.

I'm smart and logical, but I do know that I make mistakes. Everyone does. Anyone who says they don't make mistakes is making one by saying so. I am smart enough to know that I can be wrong, so I always try be open to other ideas. Scott certainly solicits opinions from his readers, but usually in a manner to just prove himself "correct" about something.

At first it didn't bother me. He has his opinions and I have mine. I get along with plenty of people who have different opinions than me. But after repeated dismissive postings I kind of got sick of it. Even when I agreed with Scott's opinions I didn't like his attitude. I also found that I enjoyed the Dilbert cartoons less, which is sad.

So, I won't be reading his blog anymore. We'll see if that helps.
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June 07, 2006 12:40 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [2] |

I signed up for the Google Spreadsheet Beta program. To my surprise, I got an account right away (I signed up using my gmail account, so maybe that helped).

Summary Review:
Pretty good. Missing a few features, but very useable.

Slightly More Detailed Review:
My first impression was that it looks very nice. Clean interface. Not too many buttons, but I was able to find and feature that I needed easily and quickly. The heart of a spreadsheet is the built-in functions and there are many. The only features that I couldn't find don't appear to exist yet. More on that later.

The first test was to import a Star Office document to see if it worked. Oops, first problem, Google only imports XSL and CVS. Of course, Star/Open Office can export as XSL. So, I took my hockey team spreadsheet, which has lots of player stats and payment information in it, exported it as XSL, and then loaded it into Google's spreadsheet. Boom, no problems, there it was. I have some fairly complicated computations that span several sheets and they all worked fine.

Now the bad news: missing features. To the best of my knowledge, the following features don't exist yet:

• Borders. I could not find a way to add borders to any cells, rows or columns.

• Hide/Show rows and columns. I couldn't find a way to do this and searching for "hide" didn't yield any hits in the online help. Now, it's worth noting that the spreadsheet that I imported had some columns hidden originally and they are still hidden in the Google spreadsheet. So, hiding works, but I have no idea how to unhide those columns.

• Limited cell formatting. There are only 14 predefined cell formats and no way of creating custom formatting. Want scientific notation? Out of luck. European date formats? SOL. Time with AM/PM? No way, Jose.

Now, this is a beta product, and missing features is certainly better than broken features, so I really don't take too many points off for these omissions as they will probably be added at some time.

One advantage of Google spreadsheets is that they are easily shared. Spreadsheets can be exported for viewing or editing. This is really nice if you have collaborative requirements.

The speed of the product is rather nice, too. I didn't really try to stress it out, but it was very fast with a medium-sized document.

The bottom line is that Google spreadsheets passes my initial tests. I send feedback about the missing features and will provide an update when/if I get a response.

p.s. Unlike Gmail, there are no invites to give. You'll have to sign up on your own.
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June 06, 2006 09:59 PM PDT Permalink | |

Scott Jolly blogged about the science of this a while back, but here is an excellent video of two guys making their own Bellagio Fountains with nothing more than Diet Coke bottles and Mentos candies. 202 liters of Coke and 523 Mentos candies...

Excuse me while I head down to 7-11. Thanks to my buddy Rob for the tip.
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June 06, 2006 01:03 AM PDT Permalink | Comments [1] |

My RSS news reader had, not one, but two stories about celebrity dads who have never changed a diaper. Both Donald Trump and Adam Sandler admit to never having performed the task, and I'm sure that there are many others. Yeah, they're rich and all, but if you're not willing to take the good with the bad then you're not being the best parent you can be.

As a man, I find it really lame when other men won't do something because "it's girly" or "it's women's work." To me, that is just a lame excuse not to do something that you're afraid of doing. A real man does what has to be done, even if the task is daunting. All the bravado and macho attitute mean nothing if you wuss out on a task that women and 14 year old baby sitters have been doing for centuries.
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June 05, 2006 05:05 PM PDT Permalink | Comments [1] |

Here is what American network TV will look like this next TV season. I'm not seeing too many must see shows. Centainly not any new ones.

Note: The networks have a split season. In the fall, Fox has baseball and NBC has Sunday night football. So, some slots have two shows listed for the split. Also, I'm on the west coast, so the football doesn't actually air during primetime. Adjust for your timezone.

Some shows (24, Prison Break, Lost) will either start late (24) or have a large break in the middle (Lost, Prison Break) so there won't be any repeats. Yeah!

I'm working from home and have received no less than 10 automated calls telling me who to vote for on Tuesday. The last few callers are now on my "do not vote for" list.
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June 02, 2006 11:41 AM PDT Permalink | |