/dev/null/kevin

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.

Catchy headlines are the surest way a newspaper can get people to read a story.  I use the exact method on this blog.  There should, however, still be some meat to the story/post, else you become The Boy who Blogged "Wolf."

Take this headline, for example:

Feinstein Gives Details On Secret Clinton-Obama Meeting

Wow!  Secret details!  I must read this story.

Here are the details:

Earth-shattering.

But the true irony is this line:

So in reality, Senator Diane Feinstein didn't give any details.

But that makes for a much less alluring headline.

Clinton and Obama Meet, Reporter Gets Nothing and Likes It!

I caught some heat for making fun of Led Zeppelin's recent tour.  Thus, it's only fair that I point out when older rockers do something noteworthy.

Checkout Shooting Star's singer crowd-surfing so he can play a timpani solo.  Take that, kids!  It's about 3:15 into the song.

Twitter's performance problems are well known.  Twitter, and everyone else, are trying to fix the problem.  Here is my quick and dirty fix:

Kill the Spammers.

This is not a long term solution, but it may buy twitter some time to really fix the problem.

Twitter spammers don't actually spam, the don't send messages to you.  What they do it follow you, and everyone else.  Their hope is that you'll investigate their profile and then click on the web link (mine comes here to this blog).  It may also boost their search engine ranking, I don't know.

However, this also puts an extra burden on twitter.  Twitter's scale problems stem from the fact that the workload increases geometrically as every message people send is forwarded to each follower.  The more followers people have, the slower twitter is.  The follow-spammers just increase that load.  Some of these spammers follow 25,000 people.  That's 25,000 extra message each time any of those 25,000 tweet.  There are hundreds of follow-spammers, so that's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of extra tweets.

Again, removing the spammers won't solve any of Twitter's problems, but it might give them some breathing room to work.  I think it would be easy to auto-detect most of these spammers.  If you follow more than 10,000 people and have less than 1000 followers yourself, you are probably a spammer.

I have blocked some of my more obvious spammers, but I'm not 100% sure this helps.  It depends on how Twitter implemented the blocking feature.  Hopefully they aren't checking for blocks all of the time and that the block just removed the spammer from my follow list.

I checked the Twitter forums to see if this (seemingly obvious) suggestion has been made, but I didn't have too much time to look.  I did find other people who have spammer problems, but I didn't find a discussion about Twitter removing them, or what kind of impact it would have (maybe it's just worth the trouble to them).  So, lazyweb, if you know, give me a pointer.

Update 1: I posted my own suggestion to the forum, we'll see what the response it.

Update 2: Twitter has admitted that uses with lots of followers/followees severely tax the system.  Then Rober Scoble (with his 20K+ of both) gets "blamed" for the problem.  So, I think it's only a matter of time before the spammers get the spot light.  To be clear, I don't blame Scoble.  He is a legitimate user.  Non-human spam listeneres and spam bots can be eliminated to (temporarily) free up resources so Scoble is free to tell us he is safe after earthquakes.  It's all still on Twitter's shoulders to fix the scaling problems.

Imagine being on a conference call with the following international coworkers:

• John (male, English pronunciation)
• Jon (male, English pronunciation)
• Jon (male, Scandinavian pronunciation)
• Jan (male, Scandinavian pronunciation)
• Jan (female, Scandinavian pronunciation)
• Juan (male, Spanish pronunciation)
• Jean (male, French pronunciation)
  
• Jean (female, English pronunciation)
• Yan (male, Chinese pronunciation)
• Yuen (male, Chinese pronunciation)

Good luck!  Enunciate well.

It's finale season for reality shows, so that means tons of filler, and time to give your TiVo's fast forward a workout.  Who knew it took two hours to read one name off of a card?

Watching these shows really make me love my TiVo even more.  The joy of fast forwarding through commercials is nothing compared to the joy of fast forwarding over the Jonas Bothers or some enless montage o' crap.

Sadly, filler is not limited to reality shows.  Sports is now loaded with filler.  If the game "starts" at 7pm, that means I tune in at 7:45, skip the 15 minutes of pregame hype, and then gradually catch up as I skip the commercials, halftime (more hype) and other fluff.  If it's a hockey game, then I get to skip both intermissions!

The events with the most filler, however, are the big horse races.  They are nothing but hours of pure filler, followed by two minutes of actually racing, followed by another hour of follow-up filler and pictures of rich ladies in big hats.