Posts from — May 2008

Slate answers a question I’ve long wondered: After how long will idling a car become less efficient than turning it off and then back on?

It turns out that modern cars start very cheaply, so if you’re going to idle for 10 seconds, it can be effective to turn the engine off. Details and caveats in the article, of course.

Put these beliefs in order of the percentage of Americans who have them according to recent polls:

- Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened (polling in 2007)
- Obama is a Muslim (polling in 2008)
- Saddam had WMD (polling in 2007)
- They have been in the presence of a ghost (polling in 2007)
- The Sun revolves around the Earth (polling in 1999)

The highest number in the list is 30%, the lowest is 10%. Answer will be posted once there are some guesses..

I posed this to a couple of coworkers today, and they were able to get all but one right, which was impressive.

Good luck!

Two guys who drove around the country correcting typos in signs

Bonus points for the punny newspaper headline ‘Typo Personalities’.

(via Sarah’s shared items)

I’m in Chicago on layover on the way to Allentown. I can’t really sleep, which is good (temporarily), because I had some work I needed to get done. Hopefully the code I sent out was rational, I guess I’ll find out later.

As we approached for landing, the sun was about to rise over Lake Michigan, so I took this picture:

Obviously, it loses something in translation, plus I had to wait for the plane to give me a reasonable angle toward the Sun. As we approached, I briefly got a view of the Chicago skyline with the lake and sun as a backdrop, which could have made a really neat picture, but it came out far too blurry.

Coincidentally, when I got in and re-synced Google Reader, I got a post from Doc Searls containing a picture of the same view at a different time of day:

1.5 hours left… perhaps I’ll find some food.

Someone I met in Boston who had a shared affinity to the show mentioned that the AD movie (alluded to in the series finale) was still a real possibility. I hadn’t heard this, so I was surprised when I stumbled upon this clip from Keith Olbermann tonight, confirming it (last Winter):

(http://youtube.com/watch?v=e56-kBlYs6w)

“Few television programs have ever reached the level of intelligence and humor for three weeks which Arrested Development maintained for three seasons.”

Indeed.

COME ON!

My second Arrested Development-related post of the night…

I saw Blue Man Group with Jon and Jen on Friday. It was a lot of fun, and had quite a few clever tricks that I enjoyed. After the show, the actors are outside for pictures. They are still “in character”, so they can’t talk or smile or anything. I asked one of them if he watched Arrested Development, and he looked at me and gave a silent, ever-so-slight knowing nod.

Awesome

Steve Novick is a Democrat running for Senate in Oregon. He’s 4’9″ and has a hook for a hand (not kidding), but he’s turned it into a positive: his site is VoteHook.com, and he made this ad:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2UesvrH-cs)

And, of course, here’s the relevant Arrested Development scene for this post:

(http://youtube.com/watch?v=zSsK7lshuMg)

(I got one of these the other day, so I figured I should take a picture for this post)

Firefox 3 release candidate 1 is out, and you can download it here. If you use firebug a lot, it might be worth holding onto v2 for a bit*, otherwise I’d strongly recommend switching to 3. I’ve only run RC1 in linux (at work and home), and so far it’s been exceptional. It runs faster, looks great, and is good for you.

I had previously complained about the visual complexity of the location bar (aka awesome bar). For some reason, it no longer bothers me. I think it’s partly because of small UI changes, but mostly that I’ve become used to it.

One thing I’m finding especially useful with the awesome bar: Gmail has the subject of the message you’re reading in the title, so if you’ve read a message before and want to find it, you can search your messages without even going into gmail, just start typing words from the subject in the awesome bar. Even more useful is with things like Google Docs. If you have a spreadsheet that you open every once in a while, just type the name of the spreadsheet in, and the (cryptic) URL will come up. MAGIC.

I wonder if this will affect the way that website developers create titles and URLs for pages. The value of unique, memorable titles for pages has just increased.

Dria.org has good overviews of a lot of the changes from 2 to 3 (with pictures!).

* You can run firebug with FF3RC1, you just need to run the alpha last I checked, and it isn’t terribly stable yet.

Beginning May 9, I’m flying somewhere each weekend on non-business trips for 4 consecutive weekends (and taking 1 vacation day total). This probably is not sustainable…

PA/NY is next, followed by Seattle. A few weeks later I’ll be in DC, then a few weeks after that, it’s Cape Cod.

I was watching CNN on my flight back from Boston (more on that later), and there was a reporter discussing a recent Clinton speech. Paraphrasing a bit:

“One thing I noticed during her speech was that instead of saying things like ‘when I’m president..’ and ‘if I become president’, she today said ‘if I were to become president’, so she’s talking about it in the past tense.”

Clearly, this is not the past tense, it’s a hypothetical subjunctive. I think she’s confusing it with the pluperfect (e.g. “If I had become president”). I guess this isn’t the most important thing to complain about, though..