Posts from — February 2007

Paycheck Calculator - Estimate your taxes and stuff on your paycheck.  This is especially useful if you’re starting a new job or moving to a new area.  Hat tip to John Mishanski for the link.

Matt Cutts - If you’re interested in Google, you’re probably already reading this blog, but I figure it’s worth pointing at anyway.  Matt is Google’s most visible blogger, by far (not counting the corporate blogs, which really aren’t people).   Whenever you read something online about “Google deleted my website!” or “Google blacklisted me for no reason!”, there’s a good chance Matt will explain what’s going on.

I’m looking at some airfares on Orbitz, and it informs me:
“This flight starts and ends at different airports”

I thought that was the whole point of air travel!

I figured it out eventually.

I shook hands with Hillary Clinton today.

I was wearing my “Kill Bill” shirt, which thankfully the secret service didn’t assume was directed at the ex-president.

This is a good explanation video for OpenID, from a user perspective. Basically, it lets you use one username/password pair over a range of websites, so you don’t need to remember as much.

I haven’t used it much, since I didn’t quite get it, but the video made it much more clear.

“What would Scooby Doo?”

After far too much looking, I’m moving to a different apartment, where I’ll reside for 6 months. It’s about half a mile from where I am now and a mile and a half from work. It’ll be good to have a longer-term address, though I need to start buying some furnishings for it at some point. Girts (my roommate) is going to be gone for the next couple of weeks, though Jon’s going to be visiting, for a while in the first half of March, so things should be lively.

Work has generally been good… I’ve been frustrated with how little I’ve accomplished this week, though that can’t be surprising with a 4 day week with orientation. There’s an amazing amount of stuff to learn that I didn’t have access to when I was an intern. It’s nothing I didn’t expect.. just more of it.

Wow, it’s late, I should sleep.

Continuing my bad experiences with hosting companies, a database at magicspatula.com was lost without backup somehow a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, this included the information stored in the bills system, so it was lost.

This prompted a relocation of the site and the addition of a bunch of features today. Here’s what’s new:
- You can use the site without a lehigh email
- New users can create accounts for their houses
- Snazzy pie graphs!
- Export your bills to a spreadsheet
- Smarter emails during bill reconciliation (only emailing affected parties, including a summary of the change in the email)

So, sorry to anyone who was using it earlier, since you need to reenter your info. If you’d like to use it again, it’s now up and running at http://magicspatula.com/bills/.

At this point I’m not looking to write a lot more code for it, but if you run into any bugs or have an important feature request, let me know and I’ll take care of it.

Now that I’ve moved hosting, I’ll probably be working on some more projects on that site, though I’m not sure what.

Fox New’s new “comedy” show, “The Half Hour News Hour” debuted tonight, and I’m not sure if I’m more offended politically or comedically. It has been described by its creator as “The Daily Show for Conservatives”. I watched the entire thing.

So comedically, it just wasn’t that funny, but that’s ok, some comedies don’t start out that funny. The main problem is that it misinterprets the reasons the daily show is so funny. Yes, Jon Stewart is moderately liberal, and the audience is very liberal, but the daily show certainly makes fun of liberals a lot. It makes fun of conservatives more because they’ve been in power more so have provided more fodder for comedy. But regardless of the political leanings of a subject, the daily show will make the joke if it’s funny. The half hour news hour only targets liberals, and gets mean-spirited pretty fast. Instead of, for example, quoting a politician, then making fun of their words or playing video to point out their hypocrisy (a mainstay of the daily show), the half hour news hour just took conservative opinions of things and attached punchlines to them. For example, they had a segment making fun of an electric and/or hybrid car, saying it couldn’t get up a slight incline and ran out of power after going down the street a bit (these are the jokes). Besides not being very funny, it’s intellectually offensive.

If this is the conservative comedy that the daily show is missing because it’s “so liberal”, then I think that’s just fine.

Slate’s article about the show is a fun read, complete with a youtube link for a clip of the show.

Interestingly, “The 1/2 Hour News Hour is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, co-creator of 24″. Whenever I hear about 24 (which I don’t watch), all I think of is conservative WSJ columnist Stephen Moore’s defense of the Military Commissions Act’s torture as being “Jack Bauer Justice” and “most Americans want that sort of thing” (clip here). Not surprising it’s on Fox.

A lot of you probably saw Steve Jobs’ letter about DRM. It’s an interesting read, at least. I don’t agree with some of the explanation, but it’s definitely a start. More interestingly, check out Macrovision’s response to the letter. Macrovision is a major supplier of DRM technology, so they certainly have a horse in that race.

This week, I got a Mac for the first time. It’s a 15″ MacBook Pro. I had the option of getting a windows machine or an apple, and I decided I should try something different, plus I already had a windows laptop. So far, it’s been really good. The design of the hardware is excellent… especially the little things, like how it dims the screen and lights the keyboard when the room gets dark, or how you can check the battery charge without turning the computer on.

I hadn’t used OSX for any significant amount of time in the past, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment. Some aspects of the keyboard are taking a bit of getting used to, but it’s not too hard. I now have one linux, one windows, and one apple machine.

Installing software on this is so easy that it creeps me out.

I still don’t like iTunes. Then again, I don’t think I actually like any music players besides amarok, so that’s not really a strong criticism. I guess I’ll try to install amarok here, I’d imagine that’s doable.

So, what other software do people recommend for this? I’ve already installed adium, quicksilver, xjournal, firefox2, fink, and whatever google put on here before I got it. I don’t really feel like I’m missing all that much software at this point. I might want to get an external mouse, though, I’m not sure.

I still need to find a way to control music with the keyboard without switching to itunes.

Saw this one at work: