This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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January 2011
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Foggy Needle

Boom Boom Boom

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Steve Jobs
  • Apple Results
  • Feedback about eReaders
  • Contacts Cleaner
  • Olbermann
  • DirecTV / Tivo

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20110123.mp3″ text=”Recorded 23 Jan 2011″]

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Egypt Coverage

This has been a crazy week for me, so I’ve basically been underwater, and not able to keep up with current events they way I usually like to. Really, I’m just starting to pay attention now. Remarkably, it looks like the US cable networks are actually doing some live coverage. But they still suck. Try heading over to the Al Jazeera English Live Stream.

There are of course all sorts of online blog type coverage as well. As usual, one of the best is Andrew Sullivan, who links to all sorts of other relevant sources.

Simple Email Service #SES

Hmmm… Interesting… Looks like this launched a little bit ago.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) (beta)

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required – businesses can utilize a free usage tier and after that enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer fees.

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses. To optimize the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, businesses must deal with hassles such as email server management, network configuration, and meeting rigorous Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards for email content. Additionally, many third-party email solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.

Amazon SES eliminates these challenges and enables businesses to benefit from the years of experience and sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com has built to serve its own large-scale customer base. Through a simple API call, businesses can now access a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively communicate to their customers. For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business’s outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

Maybe now I can sleep for a few hours. :-)

Not Having a Good Day

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Verizon iPhone
  • Arizona Aftermath
  • Lost Time
  • Listener Feedback

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20110116.mp3″ text=”Recorded 16 Jan 2011″]

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Book Frequency

So, speaking of reading, just a quick graph. This represents the frequency at which I finish books. I used to keep track of pages per day, but now that a bunch of my reading is Kindle based, which has locations instead of pages, that really isn’t a measure I can use any more. So instead I look at the pace I am maintaining in terms of how quickly I am getting through books. Each day, I look at the fraction of a book I have completed, which is then converted into the overall book frequency.

As you can see, for most of the year the rate was very low… as I was going through a couple of dry boring and very long non-fiction books. But then, those books were out of the way, plus I moved to reading some (not all) of my books on Kindle. Importantly, this doesn’t just mean the Kindle device itself, but also other devices. So yes, I’ll use the Kindle device when I am going to be sitting down and reading for a little bit, when that is my prime activity. But if I’ve got even a minute or two while I’m waiting in line for a coffee or whatnot, I’ll pull out the Kindle app on my iPhone and start reading. Those are cases where I never would have been reading a book before.

Anyway, at this moment, I am trending somewhere near 1.35 ОјHz for my book frequency. Inverting that we get about one book every 741 ks. That could otherwise be expressed as one book every 8.57 days or 3.55 books per month. Now, some of you may read a lot more than that, which is of course great. But for me, given everything else occupying my time, this is a pretty good clip. I don’t think I’ve read at this pace in many many years…

Of course, as soon as one of those really long, dry, boring books ends up coming up in my book selection process then I may once again have one of those times where finishing a single book ends up taking many many months. I’m sure it will happen eventually. But for now, I’m enjoying reading a bit more than that.

Kindle Ratio for 15 Jan 2011: 65%

So, the latest update. The newest book of the last 20 I read (well, that I’ve posted about so far, I’m a bit behind) was available on Kindle, but the one that fell off also was, so the ratio stays at 65%, with 13 of the last 20 available on Kindle. For reference:

1- YES – Shadow Puppets
2 – NO – 9 Ways to Bring Out the Best in You and Your Child
3 – YES – Shadow of the Hegemon
4 – NO – The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
5 – YES – Ender’s Shadow
6 – YES – The Elegant Universe
7 – YES – Children of the Mind
8 – NO – Introduction to Algorithms
9 – YES – Xenocide
10 – YES – The Geography of Bliss
11 – YES – Speaker for the Dead
12 – NO – First Break all the Rules
13 – YES – Ender’s Game
14 – YES – Until the Sea Shall Free Them
15 – YES – Foucault’s Pendulum
16 – YES – Java The Complete Reference
17 – NO – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
18 – YES – The Audacity of Hope
19 – NO – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
20 – NO – Data Mining

And there we are for the moment.

Particularly Ranty Show

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • Behind the scenes Preview
  • Reading Polls
  • Arizona Shooting
  • Mac App Store
  • Verizon iPhone
  • Garmin iPhone App
  • Sam Finishes Going HD
  • New Congress

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20110109.mp3″ text=”Recorded 9 Jan 2011″]

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Cheeseburger

The Arrival of 2011

In the latest Curmudgeon’s Corner…

Sam and Ivan talk about:

  • New Year Again
  • Sam Gets Married
  • Review of 2010 Predictions
  • 2011 Politics Predictions
  • 2011 Tech Predictions
  • 2011 Economy Predictions

Just click to listen now:

[wpaudio url=”http://www.abulsme.com/CurmudgeonsCorner/CC20110102.mp3″ text=”Recorded 2 Jan 2011″]

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