Went to another building for a meeting a couple of hours ago. This is a shot from my Treo looking back toward my normal building from the 17th floor there. It goes up to 50 I hear, but we didn’t go that high.
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I know I’ve posted a lot today, sorry. Don’t know what has gotten into me. In any case, forget the Mini. It looks like after several years the Smart will finally be available in the USA! I saw one (with Mexico plates) outside of Pittsburgh a few years ago and instantly said to myself “I want one!” But they haven’t been available unless you wanted to import one yourself and go through all the attending hassle.
Smart Cars: Coming to the U.S.
(via Digg) Um… or maybe still a Mini. Or, more likely still, another Saturn. Of course for now, the main goal is to keep my 1996 Saturn going as long as possible. It went over 170 kmil a couple weeks ago though, and I don’t think any car I’ve ever driven regularly (the Dodge Colt, the Ford Taurus or the Toyota Corolla) have ever made it to 180 kmil. We shall see… Oh… and I still haven’t posted about Brandy’s car… maybe if she doesn’t post about it herself I will by the end of the weekend. There is a steady stream of these sorts of things almost every day it seems. More and more restrictions, more and more rules, more and more barriers… all these kinds of things just hamstring all the benefits that can come from a fully wired world. (Not that they don’t mess around with too much with the unwired world too.) Sigh. And most of these things happen with almost no resistance too, that is the sad part. New bill: Cyber Safety For KidsAct of 2006
Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help!
Thanks for Chad to pointing out to me that my cousin Jake’s TV appearence on the World Poker Tour (see here) is actually on this week. It aired for the first time earlier this week at 16 Mar 2006 02:00 UTC on the Travel Channel. Chad says it will be repeated several times before the next new episode airs next week. I couldn’t find that information on the online schedule, but according to the Travel Channel schedule it definately will be on again at 25 Mar 2006 23:00 UTC. Or, there is always the torrent. I haven’t actually watched the whole thing yet, but I probably will tomorrow. And there is an air mattress (two actually) as well! When Amy and Brandy were here they decided I should not sit on the floor.
After starting my new job, I decided a review of statistics might be in order, just to make sure I remembered all the relevant terminology and such and had the concepts fresh in my mind. I don’t actually have to DO that kind of analysis for work right now, but I certainly have to understand it. So review is good. It has been a long time since I’ve had to do this kind of stuff. Now, I dug this particular book up from college days. Specifically the one summer between undergrad and my one abortive year of grad school. Even though I had a Physics degree, the Heinz schoiol required an actual stats class as a pre-requisite. I had used lots of stats, but never taken an actual stats class. So I signed up at the community college over the summer. There was all kinds of confusion about if I was an in state student or not and what the price was and all kinds of other things. Anyway, as it ended, although I attended all the classes, I never was officially enrolled in the class, never paid, and never got any official credit for it, and Heinz did not care and I started anyway. The class was also painfully simple. I was very bored. In any case… the book… like the class, the whole first half of the book is painfully slow. There are chapters spent on what Means and Medians are, which arer topics Amy covered in the first half of 5th grade… I know it started at the beginning, but… so anyway it slowly gathered steam. Only the first few chapters were truly trivial. Then there were many chapters of stuff I remembered once I read it, but would have been challenged to describe cold if asked before I read the book. Then maybe the last half of the book was actually stuff I didn’t remember at all. It frustrated me though. Not because the material was hard, but because it was all being done as a cookbook approach. “Have this kind of problem, use this procedure.” There was no derivation from first principals, and in many cases they avoided actual equations whenever possible. And there were bunches of places where if they had used calculus it would have been a lot nicer, but they were doing this at a level where algebra was enough. Now, I understand, this is the kind of bpook this is. This is a stats literacy book, not a book for math majors. So no proofs. No derivations. No detailed analysis of WHY something is done the way it is… it is just given as fact. Which has its purposes, but that always tends to frustrate me. I don’t like just being told something is some way because it is, I like to understand why. But that would be a different textbook entirely. (And I’m not so interested that I’m going to go order one now.) This one did its job. It refreshed my memory of various sorts of statistical analysis that I might bump into or need. Enough so I can speak about such things without being a complete idiot, and enough so I know where to look for more info if I need it. Which is good. But after 51 days and 940 pages of a statistics textbook, I am now quite glad the book I am now reading is a nice quick read novel… I have been meaning to post something about the whole DP World blow up thing ever since it started, but just never got around to it. Noticing as I eat lunch here today that Phatback has commented I thought this would be a good time… Here is my thought… I disagree with W on almost everything he does, and think is not only wrong but dangerous in most things… but, as much as I hate to say it, W (and Al) are completely right on this one. Were there some problems with the process in terms of it following the procedure it probably should have followed? Yes. Definately. And that is bad. Do I have an issue with the fact that DPW is not just a foreign company, but is actually completely owned by a foreign GOVERNMENT… yes… But… while both of those things were mentioned in the debate a decent bit, it was not the focus, the focus was that DPW was Arab and the risk was higher because of that. Looking at all that has come out I think that in the end the conclusion the administration seems to have been completely sound. And the orgy of xenophobia and proivincialism from both parties that erupted over this was absolutely shameful. Are there security issues at the ports? Yes. Damn right there are. People have been pointing out how vunerable they are since well before 9/11, and certainly ever since. But do they have to do with the ownership of the companies that run the ports? Not at all. They are completely independant issues. Why was it OK that the Brits were runniing things, but suddenly when it is another ally of ours that happens to be Arab it is not OK? Come on… And some people have even been pushing the idea that NO foreign company should be involved in these sorts of things AT ALL. Now, at least that idea is a bit more self-consistant, but it is so isolationist and backwards… Get with it… it is a global economy… national borders will mean less and less as the decades progress. International ownership is not an apriori bad thing. In fact often it can be very positive. And if we are going to decide it is bad across the board, get ready to say goodbye to many things we take for granted…. Anyway…. for the past several weeks while this depate flared up I just kept shaking my head every time I heard the talking heads… taking something which should be a non-issue, and flaring it up to a major thing… with the only end result being that in the end we further decrease trust in the world about us (already at an all time low), discourage foreign investment in the US and give some port business to a US company (as Al says, probably Halliburton)… and do absolutely nothing at all to improve the security at our ports. Thank you to the raving irrational xenophobic hordes in both parties for that one. (These same bipartisan folks are also working on such fun things together as making internet gambling illegal even when using overseas sites and on extending bad campaign finance laws so they extend to internet postings thus perhaps making the 1st amendment meaningless for thousands of bloggers… thanks for that too…. Urgh!) I just went to Google to look something up for work and instead of the normal Google home I got this:
Please no. Please stop. Please don’t ruin Google like Yahoo was ruined years ago. I don’t want a damn portal. I want to search. I have never really liked portal sites. They try to do too much for too many and just end up sucking. Even if you use the personilization features. Just too much crap. Perhaps Google would do better, but this screen shows no evidence of that. I think you have been able to get this page before, but this is the first time it ever came up as the default for me when I just typed in google.com, and I’m not happy about that at all. Yes, they have a link to the “Classic Home” on the page, and I’ll try to make sure that on the rare times I actually go to google.com instead of using the Google search box in Safari or Firefox, I’ll go there and not this awful “Personalized Page”. But still… Google is doing more and more stuff that dilutes what gave them their power and made them THE place to go to find stuff. Some of it clicks and is cool. Others just… no. Please don’t. And while we’re on google… time to reverse that China policy as well as the similar ones in various places in Europe and say screw you, we won’t censor results at all, and if you want to block us, go right ahead, people will find their way around it. And keep fighting the disclosure the DOJ is trying to do in the US, and if you are forced to submit in the end, deliver it in hard copy! OK. Thanks. Why GarageBand is dangerous and should be outlawed in any state where I am present. Press play on the above at your own risk. I can not take responsibility for any long term damage to your ears or brain which may occur. |
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