kudos to the applidium guys for simply doing this and putting it out there. well done.

seriously, i’m looking at you spotify. i would like to like you. the reviews are pretty consistently positive, the pricing seems reasonable and the music selection appears to be pretty good.

but i go to sign up and you require that i link to a facebook account. no. i would like to moderate my interaction with that petri dish, thankyouverymuch. that’s a deal breaker for me. you know, i’d even be willing to pay a bit more to not have to use facebook auth. howsabout hooking a brother up there?

• Rightist extremism: My right to say abhorrent things | The Economist.

the real nuggets here are in the linked research and the robin hanson posting which is referenced in the body of the article. both are worth the read. in short, hanson surmises that you have a lot fewer opinions than you think and that a lot of shit is just made up on the fly.

personally, this reinforces the notion that you have to work really hard to avoid confirmation bias. the knee jerk reaction being to simply ack what you’re surrounded with or you’re brought up with or what you surmise is the right solution. subjecting information to scrutiny, and your opinions as well, is hard. further, it’s consistently uncomfortable.

perhaps a better (but psychologically more difficult) response is to just say, “i don’t know.”

i wonder how much better off we’d be if we just copped to our individual and collective ignorance and thought really hard about stuff before opening our word holes.

lately, i’ve been a sucker for these bag emptying, pocket dumping spreads. to me, it’s interesting to see the stuff that folks carry with them on a daily basis.

to that end, here’s my pocket dump. i do a lot of traveling and i dropped the pocket knife a long time ago. it became too much of a hassle to remember to drop the pocket knife / multi-tool from one day to the next. this is as minimalist and readily replaceable a setup as i can imagine, that’s been sanded down over the years.

top (L to R clockwise)

• iPhone 4S – incase snap case (the soft-touch coating is slightly tacky but doesn’t prevent it from just sliding into my pocket). did i mention how mindblowing siri is when you integrate it into your workflow?
• tumi money clip – i’ve had this thing for like 8 years and it just keeps going and going and going … it’s worn a hole in more than a few pairs of jeans.
• moleskine cahier 12 month weekly planner – i just shifted over to the planner version this month. i previously used the gridded moleskine cahier notebook. all receive the clear duct tape reinforcement on the spine and back pocket. this is particularly key since moleskine simply glues the back pocket flap in place. one would think that a fold over and a single seam along the bottom would be easier than gluing 2 seams. shrug
• sakura micron 05 – i’ve vacillated between these, G2s and sharpie pens over the years. they’re cheap, they have a great line and the pocket clip is incredibly solid.
• gerber shard – you need something to help you open boxes, tighten loose screws, open beer bottles in the lab, etc. i’ve been thinking one of those peter atwood creations might fit the bill nicely too. it’s interesting that gerber markets this as airline safe. i’ve never received any flack from the TSA on it, but if i have to toss it i’m only out $6.
• timex weekender w/zulu strap. this has to be the best deal in simple, functional watches going. i immediately replaced the strap that it comes with, with a zulu strap. up til a month ago i carried an O&W submariner style with a zulu strap. the ETA movement in that started to gain upwards of 3 minutes / day. getting it serviced didn’t seem like a particularly worthwhile expenditure, but i’m pretty attached to the watch. i might end up doing that anyway.

tools

• cast iron frying pan (what? you don’t have one of these? WTF is wrong with you? go get one and come back when you’ve come to your senses)
• tongs
• stovetop capable of getting that frying pan really hot

ingredients

• brussel sprouts – 1-3 lbs.
• kosher salt
• pepper
• chili powder
• onion sliced – 1 large
• garlic sliced (4 cloves)
• walnuts
• olive oil
• dijon mustard (optional)

instructions

1. clean and halve the brussel sprouts. halving them is important
2. get that frying pan hot, like really frickin’ hot, but not so hot that your oil smokes
3. pour in enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the frying pan
4. put a layer of brussel sprouts in the pan, cut face down
5. let the brussel sprouts sear
6. liberally salt and pepper the sprouts while cooking
7. add onions and garlic
8. let onions soften and start to scorch
9. add walnuts
10. toss the whole concoction with a few passes of chili powder
11. if stuff falls out of the frying pan, STFU and eat it.
12. when the mixture has reached the appropriate level of badass sear remove from heat and serve with dijon mustard on the side
13. evaluate offers of baby-daddy-hood from consumers of these sprouts

additional notes

i will acknowledge that it is indeed possible to improve upon this recipe through the judicious application of bacon. however, bacon use is widely regarded as cheating.

mason jennings :: minnesota

we’re big mason jennings fans in our house. that a mason jennings album should be in heavy rotation is really of no surprise to anyone. what was probably in even more rotation this year was the recent mason jennings live album i picked up on amazon a while back. i don’t think it was released this year, so i’ll elide it from the list.

adele :: 21

yes, i know that this is on the hitlist of every suburban mom in the u.s.. sue me. this album just keeps going and going. there’s the stuff that’s been getting copious amounts of airplay, then there are those album only gems that you have to love.

atmosphere :: the family sign

how can you not love slug and co.? dark, cool and funny. “just for show” has to be one of the more entertaining songs of the last year. come on you’ve been there, you know it.

bon iver :: bon iver

they should classify this man’s voice as a national treasure or something. between this album and “skinny love” from the previous album you should have a pretty strong case.

death cab for cutie :: codes and keys

this album rocks on so many different levels. if you don’t love this, you’re a terrorist.

dessa :: castor, the twin

it would have been sweet to make it to the fitz to see this show. first rate musicians performing mindblowing renditions of dessa on ‘ludes. dessa didn’t really work for me solidly until this year, this album was like backing off on the threads for something til you get the click and then everything just lines up.

doomtree :: no kings

i have such a soft spot for the doomtree crew it’s not funny. P.O.S., dessa, lazerbeak, etc. this album just rocks. there’s a little bit of something for everyone on this album even if you’re not a huge fan of minneapolis hip-hop.

pert near sandstone :: paradise hop

i ran across this band when watching some current in-studio performances online. i was completely blown away. a $5 sucking sound was nearly instantly emitted from my wallet. the aforementioned online video is available here. that dude’s dancing as an instrument. boom.

wilco :: the whole love

i’ve had this on again, off again thing with wilco. lately it’s been on again. there’s a lot to love in this album, particularly the title track, which just oozes cool. then there’s born alone, and i might, and … well, you get the point.

89.3 the current :: live current vol. 7 (various artists)

this is an annual thing. i can’t help it, when it shows up in the mail, it immediately gets ripped and onto the phone. i have an addiction to these particular compilation albums. the production is immaculate, the performances rock and i’m supporting the station. ’nuff said.

addendum

the decemberists :: the king is dead

WTF was i thinking forgetting about this. poor kathy had to endure my anticipation of this album and with manic episodes of checking to see if it’s available on amazon or not. this pretty much got all 5 stars upon touching my itunes instantiation. silly me.

orwell was an optimist.

but that really isn’t the point of this posting, i followed a link erix drexler’s blog the other day and ran across this little gem - How to Learn About Everything.  in this article he suggests the following workflow:

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
2. Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
5. Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
6. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

i’ve been surprised by how close this is to my knowledge acquisition process.  i don’t necessarily read Science and Nature (at least with the objectives he’s outline) but i do have a nasty habit of  hoovering information up from a wide array of sources and applying my filtration to things and establishing the linkages that are interesting or relevant to me.  this seems to be more than a little useful when it comes to tackling problems from different perspectives or understanding how to break things down into digestible chunks for research or fixing.  i don’t know how many folks apply a similar process to knowledge / information acquisition, but in a world where you have to constantly throw some information out on a regular basis, supporting this mode of knowledge acquisition is increasingly difficult.

however, there’s a need to have a competitive counter to iOS and something that’s open source provides a strong rationale.  the ability to manage and sandbox the phone in the same manner as a PC is still in its infancy.  i simply don’t have the confidence in the android marketplace right now in terms of device and app validation.  i’m left to puzzle it out as a consumer and most consumers simply aren’t there, or in my case, willing to invest the time to vet applications and their operation.

right now, i’m at a place in my life where i need things to work so i can focus on the problems at hand.  i lack the time to hack together the dependencies to make my phone workflow as seamless as i imagine you can get with android; nevermind working through the diagnostics to resolve conflicts.  you won’t see me ragging on android, i find it a compelling alternative, but i’m not willing to make that tradeoff at this point.

check out the research that russian scientists are doing on this front as well.

love him or hate him, he forced you to think and digest things.  i largely loved his columns and his books but i took issue with his iraq war stance.  i never wrapped my mind around the falklands bit and didn’t square with his socialist leanings. (real socialism, not the shit tea party definitions)

that said, i rarely missed the opportunity to read him.  though i’ll confess there were more than a few atlantic articles, where i just  shrugged a few paragraphs in and skipped to the next article.

• the atlantic obituary
• vanity fair obituary

i took an acela train from DC to penn station a couple of months back.  i couldn’t agree more.  high-speed trains with quiet cars (oh. my. god. what a great development) and wifi makes for a phenomenal travel experience.  i don’t share the misgivings that tyler does regarding lighting.  though, i suspect i’m not as picky on that front.  as someone who spends far too much time in airports dealing with a host of travel hassles, i would love to see some development on this front in the US.

it’s just a back of the envelope type of calculation, but if i were to look at the driving distance between minneapolis and san francisco (a pretty common travel destination for me) and round it up to 2000 miles (about 25% overage) and factor in an improvement over TGV speeds (bump it up ~ 25% to 250mph) you can make it to san francisco easily overnight including stops in other cities.  given that a trip to SFO typically takes me about 6 hours flight + airport hass, this would definitely make me think 2x about flying vs. taking a train.  as it sits now, to take amtrak is pretty inefficient.

the narrative throughout the book is a look at what your personal energy utilization is (skewed towards the behaviors of a UK reader) and then layers a range of sustainable energy technologies against this energy use and shows how much of each technology would be required to address your energy use.  the scenarios are readily digestible and if you’re genuinely interested in the viability of living a sustainable lifestyle or getting an understanding where you should be pushing for technological development in either the market or regulatory space i can’t recommend this book enough.

increasingly i’m of the opinion that folks who want to wax poetic from one end of the spectrum or another without having done some personal research on the topic should really just STFU.  if you’re really concerned about global warming / climate change and you think we need to take dramatic steps to halt our carbon consumption and exhalation, then you need to be prepared to think long and hard about where you stand on topics like nuclear energy (classic or novel new designs) and how to make some serious modifications in your lifestyle.  if you don’t think that global warming / climate change is human influenced, well, you’re suffering from other problems and i suspect you don’t do a whole lot of thinking for yourself so this is kind of pointless.

if you’re interested in the tl;dr summary…

this stuff is hard.  really, really hard, there are no easy answers and ones ability to make effective personal changes in their lifestyle has limited impact.  sure, you can put a turbine on your roof, but the impact is negligible.  PV on the roof top is a good thing if you’re in the right area, etc..  still, there’s a lot of retooling that needs to be done, and that’s going to chew up carbon.  in a stroke of, go check my math, brilliance, all the content is online. (http://www.withouthotair.com) go check the facts, go check out the analysis, run the numbers for yourself.  more books should do this.  particularly those on contentious topics.

p229 – has a rather handy chart that outlines individual actions which can have a rather profound impact on your personal energy footprint.  going vegetarian has some notable bonus points other than the health benefits.

lowry hill east – nov 13, 2011 – between 10:30p and 11:30p - a 40 -year-old man said his ex-girlfriend used keys he did not give her to enter his apartment. she gained access to his Facebook account and changed the settings on his match.com account so that she would receive the same email notifications as he would. she admitted to doing this in an email to the man.

whittier – nov 14, 2011 – 11:30a - a 25- to 33-year-old man said he intentionally left his car keys in his parked car. when he returned to the car his keys were gone. he demanded that police file a report.

here’s a remarkably detailed breakdown of the elements contributing to this ranking.  i suspect that rick perry for all of his regulation hatin’ might do well to rip a page or two from the kiwis.

as an aside – on the international economic statistics front, you would do well to download the OECD’s iPhone Fact Book app.  there’s a crapload of interesting stuff in there and the next time you’re wondering where a country sits economically or in the development curve you can do so from the comfort of your couch.

from Melvyn Leffler’s recent essay in foreign affairs, 9/11 in retrospect:

Rather than thwarting proliferation, U.S. interventions on behalf of regime change provided additional incentives for rogue nations to pursue WMD. Iranian and North Korean leaders seem to have calculated that, more than ever before, their countries’ survival depended on possessing a WMD deterrent (a message that has probably been reinforced by the Obama administration’s decision to intervene in Libya in 2011 following Libya’s renunciation of its nuclear capability several years earlier).

this little bit about the interventionist (albeit limited in scope) activity wrt to Libya poses an interesting dilemma for U.S. foreign policy. there’s a populist moral perspective that assisting uprisings which lead to the establishment of democratic governments is a good thing and on the whole this is likely the direction that we’d like to see our government take. but the secondary signals that emerge from this are more than a little thorny and certainly have the potential to encourage less than peaceful behaviors of governments which are at risk of populist rebellion and with nuclear ambitions.

what a total PITA.

A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting - if you’re looking for a  portable means to do an efficient multi-subkey record sorts this is a great run down on the machinery within perl to make it faster.  acquaint yourself with the Schwartzian Transform. it’s a good thing.

yes, i know, you could just use Sort:Key:IPv4.  but that’s not very portable and self-contained, now, is it?

% sudo scutil --set HostName ZenHound

for that matter, scutil is an incredibly useful tool which allows you to probe the configd state in a lot more detail than i realized. very useful.

dennis ritchie died – he gave us UNIX, we all learned C from him and we stood on his shoulders to build the internet and tools we have today.

now, let’s come back to that concept of the dopp kit. this is the first sign of a clue-fucked fashionista article. dear author, where the hell have you been for the last 8 years?  how on earth did you miss the whole 3-1-1 thing?  what? you’re checking luggage? move along amateur.   there are two kinds of luggage; carry-on and lost.  if you can’t fit your kit into your reasonable allocation of the overhead bin and under the seat in front of you, you have no business wasting my time with a packing article.

luggage

if you recommend a hard sided case on wheels and you’re not european and checking that thing (or like a coworker of mine from south america and you’ve been forced to hermetically seal it in one of those saran wrap winder machines at the airport) this is a sign your article is pretty much worthless.  every time i see some asshat trying to wedge one of these things into an overhead bin i engage in a small mental escape where this thing slides back and knocks them unconscious so they can free up space for folks who have more practical perspectives on sharing the precious space that is the overhead bin.  hard sided luggage is for sensitive equipment and belongs in the hold.  only poseurs and idiots (but i repeat myself) bring that shit on as carry-on.  compressibility and the size are key purchasing criterion here.  if you’re on a regular sized jet and you can’t fit your bag in with the small side visible, you’ve messed up.  do us all a favor get something that is durable, squishy and fits in the small dimension.  oh, and be come less precious about the contents of the luggage.

it doesn’t have to be expensive, but if you’re traveling a lot, durable luggage with quality handles and shoulder straps are a huge plus.  personally, i’m not a huge fan of the tag-along (it’s tough to run to the next flight with them), but they certainly have their place and sized appropriately i can appreciate the appeal.  lots of dangling straps and such will be guaranteed to wrap around every protrusion you run across.  pull those massive open loops closed a bit. please.  how about including a little something in packing articles that has people cutting off or pulling in all of the protrusions apt to catch on whatever isn’t sanded smooth on their luggage? please?

3-1-1 

it’s just the situation in our fear addled country, suck it up and get a durable baggie.  put it in an outside pocket and make it readily accessible.  if you have meds, do us all a favor and make sure they’re clearly marked and packaged appropriately.  the TSA folks will get hung up on the dumbest stuff and we all have to wait for you.  your designer dopp kit is not going to impress anyone and it doesn’t work for the TSA folks.  don’t subject us to some photo spread of dopp kits.  life sucks at times. i know ziplocs aren’t fashionable but we need you to keep your fabulous ass moving.  lose the dopp kit.

make peace with the iron in the hotel

seriously, your stuff’s going to get wrinkled,  use the time you spend in the hotel in the AM to iron your stuff.  if you’re stuck traveling with a suit, hang it up immediately in the bathroom and figure out the steamer option on that iron.  if you’re endorsing carrying along a steamer in your luggage, your article sucks.

bufferbloat

you know how stuff zooms up to incredibly high xfer rates and then just stalls.  this is an interesting journey down a series of passages all twisty, not necessarily all alike.  this stuff is not for the faint of heart, but there’s definitely some interesting work going on there.  jim gettys’ has been doing some interesting work here and while the knobs available for turning are a little arcane, following these lists will get you to poke at your OS’ networking stack in new and novel way to see what happens.

of perhaps even more interest here is the BISmark project over at GA tech where there’s some interesting instrumentation work afoot. i’ll handily step aside from the various political and service provider motivations around measurement, deriding measurement, etc..  (these machinations hit acutely close to home for me.) but i will point out that measuring the performance and the characteristics associated with a beast as unwieldy as the internets is incredibly fascinating … as an engineering problem.

LISP

i’ve been poking at LISP in some form or another for the past couple of years.  as it’s matured and is starting to see more enterprise applications and deployment i’ve been finding all sorts of novel uses for this.  if my october weren’t so packed, already i would have my ass glued to my seat for the upcoming NANOG session discussing the various map-n-encap flava’s that are floating about.  i can’t quite put my finger on the appeal here.  still, it’s fun.

fwiw – the lispmob folks just shipped a reasonably useable implementation of the mobility functions that LISP provides.  worth reading the docs and reviewing the use cases if nothing else.

DIY book scanner

when we were at the maker faire in NYC i checked out this guys stand.  he had a remarkably slick book scanner assembled and was demonstrating it.  the design is slick and the speed with which you can do the scanning is pretty impressive.  they’re talking about being able to scan 1000 pages / hour.  every library should have one of these.  there doesn’t appear to be one of these at the twin cities hacker space either.

do-it-yourself ikea

more stuff from  the maker faire.  these folks have a few designs that you can download and tweak.  subsequently, you get someone to laser cut it and you assemble it into your custom, one of a kind furniture.  bespoke household items and one-off manufacturing was a persistent theme at the maker faire, and these folks seemed to have some of the most polished stuff in the mix.

First published in September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses fowards, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

you have to love that.

stephenson alludes to the reason for stagnation as being certainty and something of a litigious environment. but i can’t help but wonder if the reason is simply laziness. as we’ve become accustomed to the ease with which we can get novel new things or fat with the artificial abundance that we load our fridges with have we lost some drive? is it simply easier for the corporations to tell us what we need? as we spend ourselves into oblivion is the big stuff simply too expensive for us to care about if the corporations keep the price just on the right side of painless enough? *

mr. lofgren manages to capture democrat cowardice and the cynically deep execution really well here.

• Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult – mike lofgren

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

of course he nearly immediately fixed his gaze longingly upon the nearly discarded iphone 1st generations that were sitting on the shelf and he somehow persuaded me to see about jailbreaking the phone so he could use it for an upcoming trip. given my need to just have my phone work and not having the time to hack away on my phone, i have largely ignored the jailbreaking phenomenon. i simply pay for the phone that works on the network where i get support and i move along.  it’s not interesting, but the focus is the workflow.

for folks who hack on iphones as a matter of hobby, this is the mythic maze of twisty passages all alike and there’s no shortage of lore, clueful and clueless folks and tons of poseurs in this particular subculture.  however, a few googles and i’m knee deep in the world of colored sn0w jokes and DFU mode on the phone.  now here’s the rub, when you’re hacking devices which are nearly 4 years old and have subsequently gone through numerous iterations, this culture seems to leave a lot of poorly organized detritus in its wake.  folks have moved their attentions to hacking the 3G versions, the iPhone 4 and dealing with the various baseband hacks that apple has rendered useless. this involves no shortage of following scores of spotty web sites to dead ends and working one’s way through oodles of lame message boards.  in the end, the cable and a little bit of redsn0w got the job done.  followed up by a jailbreakme.com fix to correct a horked cydia installation.

some interesting tangential observations:

• there are some teenagers with some impressive technical savvy that pull together some reasonably decent screencast and tutorial videos.  i lacked the patience to wade through them, but i was surprised how google is willing to prioritize video search results and how these things seemed to have pretty high hit and watch #s.  good job guys.
• oh. my. god. is the 1st gen iphone slow, or what? we thought this shit was amazing at one point. how quickly we get spoiled.
• t-mobile coverage in our house is for shit.  if little dude wants to use this as a phone he’s going to have to go out on the deck to make his calls.  i might be forced to reconsider how crappy i consider AT&T’s coverage to be.

• org-mode – if you haven’t heard about this, well, get out from underneath your rock.  this is where i do 90+% of my outlining and meeting note capture.  C-c c is the catchall for things which require more verbiage than one can capture with the omnifocus pop-up.  if i need to start grabbing shit freestyle, this is where i go.  it’s a dessert topping, floor wax and an organizer all wrapped up in one.  did i mention that there’s a handy twiki export mode as well?  oh, and the latest version includes support for opendocument text format export.
• ns-toggle-fullscreen – this is a patch to emacs for OS X.  if you build emacs.app from the ports collection you simply need to include the +fullscreen variant and you’re golden.  this removes all the chrome from emacs (which should be turned off for the most part anyway) and forces emacs to take up the entire screen.  it’s incredibly useful.  you have the ability to split the display, etc. but you’re doing it over all of you display.  bigass router configs and code can line up side by side and you’re not going to have email, etc. getting in the way.
• darkroom-mode – while ns-toggle-fullscreen gets you about 90% there for a distraction free environment, it’s nice to have large margins on the side of the screen to focus the display right in the middle.  darkroom-mode emulates the popular writeroom, scrivener and other applications focused on minimizing distraction. but it gives you all of the power of emacs. very nice. you don’t have to retrain your fingers only to pull it back into emacs to do the cleanup and organization anyways.
• solarized theme – when i’m not in full screen writing mode, this theme is incredibly easy on the eyes.  i’ve basically embraced this across the board for X11, term, iterm, vim, emacs, etc.  the dude who assembled this, did his homework.  folks have ported this theme to pretty much everything, it’s worth adding the git repo to your collection of stuff to keep track of.

the RFC while largely tongue-in-cheek in intent as an april fools RFC has repeatedly proven itself to be rock solid philosophically.   who knew that a mere …

zendoggy[sulrich]% wc Sites/rfc/rfc1925.txt
     171     576    4294 Sites/rfc/rfc1925.txt

ahem, 576 word RFC would be chock full of so many koans.  re-read this one often.

then i tried mint, it was good, but i couldn’t enter transactions manually, the projection and cash flow tools were poor and the budgeting tools were horrid.  but, it was free and if you could come to terms with the faustian bargain that was having a 3rd party collect financial information on you, it was reasonably workable.  then they got big, their feeds and their back end started to suffer, the customer service interaction was pretty horrid.  WTF – forums?  i know that’s very web 2.0 but i need to get resolution to these issues, not fuck around in a forum commiserating with a bunch if like-irritated customers.  if i give you money to provide me with a reliable, secure and supported service will you hook me up?  there’s a lot to love about what you’ve got going there.

then quicken/intuit acquired them and the community puckered up their bungholes.  quicken for the mac had been a train wreck, quickbooks is an application that pretty much everybody loathes but there really don’t appear to be better options so everyone just sucks it up and deals.  but, there was a contrite blog posting about how mint would be the same old mint it ever was (talk about a mixed message) and this would provide the infusion of cash to make the enhancements, etc. that we’d all been clamoring for, etc. then they added goals,  nice.  they improved a number of things but you still had the anemic customer care / support and it seemed to require a lot more hand holding than you would expect something along these lines to require.

we plugged along then back in feb / mar time-frame, they made some sort of unholy change to the back end and all hell broke loose.  i had dead accounts which couldn’t log in, i was asked to duplicate things, merges were horribly horked up, etc. i gritted my teeth and worked through these issues.  this necessitated periodically dealing with erratic duplicate transaction explosions which threw off budget tracking and a host of other things.

then about a month ago i did a little cleanup, following the directions that mint helpfully provided. which i found irritating given that apparently there were enough people experiencing these problems that they had to develop documentation to facilitate manual cleanup on the part of their users.  how messed up is that?  seriously, you make back end changes to your system and you provide your customers with instructions to address the scorched earth situation that  you’ve created?  WTF?

following this “clean up”, i was left with a collection of accounts for which i could apparently get budgeting and expense information but i could not see the actual transactions within the accounts.  double WTF?  i did what you told me to do and you don’t even give me the courtesy of a new opportunity to clean up some freshly created mess?  you just hide a bunch of stuff i need, from me, your apparent bitch.  well, it’s a free service so it’s not like i’m out any money, just a lot of irritation and time.

so here’s the recurring punchline – i’m quite willing to spend a reasonable amount of money for a solution that works.  mint had a good chunk of the stuff that was useful to my household and they were pretty bright about sending me reasonable information on optimizing my finances and usage.  i would happily pay a monthly fee for online tools that work and straddle the various accounts that i have spread hither and yon.

now let’s talk about desktop software packages.

after trolling through various software reviews and looking at inscrutable screenshots, perusing feature lists and getting my wife’s input we settled on kicking the tires on a few packages …

MoneyDance 2011 for the mac – sweet they have a demo i can try.  crap,  it’s limited to 100 transactions. oh, and they’ve disabled the online banking integration elements.  shit. next.

iBank 4 – great a 30 day non-transaction limited demo.  seems intuitive enough, handy tool to check out the supported financial institutions for direct access. looks like the interesting banks, brokerages, etc, are supported, sweet.  start adding them. login failure, are you sure?  what?  wait a second here, seriously?  try again, INBOX blinks. too many login failures? account locked? oh hell.

the balance of the options out there look like crap. i’m loathe to wade through that morass. best make one of these work.

update – 16-july, 2011

it’s worth pointing out that we did in fact settle upon iBank.  i worked through a handful of the foibles that i had.  its ability to interact directly with the bank in terms of getting transactions, etc.  the trial leaves some of the annoying warning dialog boxes in play despite your request to not keep showing them in the future.  this is addressed in the production paid-for version.

the process of getting all of your financial information from these systems and understanding your cost-basis, etc. is largely subject to the whims of your financial institution and their willingness to give you access to all of that information.  jp morgan chase, you can bite me. 90 days of downloadable history is shamefully little history.

we’ve actually been able to get access to information via iBank that we couldn’t get via mint and this has proven to be a welcome addition.  the iphone app is pretty cheesy.  but it’s useful for periodically checking what you’re up to and manual transaction entry is handy.  things are looking up on this front, not great, but not bad either.

oddly enough this just seems to be  a regurgitating of the same old links on different sites and repetitive pontificating on italian designers and drooling over look books.   the silver lining in all of this is at least a marked reduction in douche driven fashion and at least a revived interest in quality over quantity.

i’m kind of curious to see how long this particular fashion trend will last.  for those of you concerned that this will mean you won’t be able to distinguish yourself through the exorbitant expenditure of cash, worry not, these guys still seem to fetishize all sorts of unreasonably expensive stuff.

clearly the guy’s a perfectionist with the composition and the delivery.  the photography is first rate and the mix is impressive.  but please, do we really need 30+ minutes of primorial soup intermingling and 2001 space odyssey-esque music and photography?  every time new fluids collided i needed to quell the urge to go do something different.

• i finally finished the black swan (nassim nicholas taleb – NNT) a week or so ago.  yeah, i know, it came out in 2007 and pretty much everyone has read it by now.  i’m suffering from a horrible reading backlog.  this of course triggered a cascade of adding a bunch of stuff from his web site to my instapaper queue and the papers collection.  of particular interest here is a blurb that NNT did for the drawbridge, be a gentleman on the treadmill.  a delightful spin on the notion that the fungible nature of entry level jobs provide greater freedoms than highly specialized and narrow job profiles.  this gives one a little pause when people talk about the dead-end nature of various jobs.  corollary - don’t let your expenses expand to match your earning potential and you can keep your FYI in alignment.
• foreign affairs – a crude predicament – TL;DR – you bought a big ass SUV in the past couple of years and you’re bitching about gas prices?  STFU and think things through.  wild gas price variability is here to stay.  oh and get on your bike.
• my philanthropy – george soros - we need more of this.  couple this with a reasonable interpretation of the political mind (get the newer edition) and if you can find some democrat strategists with some stones you might be able to move something progressive forward.
• michele bachmann’s holy war (rolling stone) – why, oh why does this crazy shit have to come from my state?
• don’t ask me where i find this stuff - a few hundred words on obsessive camera stuff for stanley kubrick.  there’s no getting around the fact that kubrick was a cinematic genius.  i don’t know how he ranked on the continuum of camera geeks, but i’m guessing a few SD from the mean.

ld: huh? what’s a chalkboard?

me: seriously? what’s a chalkboard? oh well – we can file that under sayings which are increasingly irrelevant.

sorry that should probably be “flirty-girl style”. (hyphenated)

wtf?

nice.

this nybooks article got me to thinking about the role of the library in my life over the years.  when i was a kid there were multiple trips to the library each week.  we were beneficiaries of what i can recall as a solid library system.  now, i don’t know how true that was/is, but the library certainly held a place of reverence in our home and i could count on it being open pretty much every day of the week.  this was how a cash strapped kid got his bicycling, transworld snowboarding and BMX bike magazine fix.  if there were research projects for school i could count on the availability of newspaper archives on microfiche (remember microfiche?) and i could get articles on that crappy waxy paper for $0.25.

through the 90s i used the library less and less as i made enough money to start buying those books that interested me and worked up close and personally with this new thing, the internet.  books have always been that impulse purchase weakness for me and disposable income shifted to spend at amazon, BN, borders, etc..  the library faded into the background and wasn’t something that remained a fixture in my life.  there was lurking sense of pride that we could have these facilities available for the public but i didn’t feel a need to draw upon.  further i had this, likely incorrect and still lurking, impression that the library wasn’t current enough for my tastes.

i didn’t really start to pay attention to the library again until i met kathy and was exposed to the fickle nature and attention span of kids.  spending money on books simply to have them tossed aside when there was no longer any interest or to read and complete a book within the time span of 15 minutes (never to be read again) was an obvious waste of money.  the library seemed like the obvious solution to the kids book(s) dilemma.

we live in an area with a phenomenal neighborhood library.  it’s a building that evokes all of those nostalgic feelings one associates with the library in movies. it’s modest in size but there’s a cozy kids book section, nice reading areas and a surprising range of book selection.  i particularly love the travel book section there.  throw in the free wifi and it’s a great place to kill an afternoon.  that is, if i had idle afternoons to kill.

we’ve been lucky, our library’s only closed on mondays and sundays and the hours are pretty good.  but i do find myself wondering if we should be more ardent in our support of the library.   there are neighborhood where the utilization is high and the community support isn’t as strong and/or the community as effectively organized. these will be the recipients of deep cuts.

clearly it’s time to dust up the friends of the library membership.

filed under religion cause this stuff is all story and make believe anyways.

a serious pause while i realize that the “jimmy” he’s talking about is one of the staff members at his after school care.

“uhh, no, not for a little while, bro.”

+DRAWERS: FOOBARNAMEWITHOUTUNDERSCORESORPUNC

* first level shiz ** second level shiz

:FOOBARNAMEWITHOUTUNDERSCORESORPUNC: foo bar baz blurble plotz. :END:

i’m sure that the rules for drawer naming are well documented somewhere, but i can’t seem to find them. don’t use punctuation in drawer names.

sigh …

fun.

ZenDoggy[sulrich]% grep -i  2011  ~/Desktop/ipv4-address-space.txt
           2011-01-31
   039/8  APNI                                     2011-01  whois.apnic.net   ALLOCATED
   106/8  APNI                                     2011-01  whois.apnic.net   ALLOCATED

ZenDoggy[sulrich]% grep -i unallocated ~/Desktop/ipv4-address-space.txt
   102/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   103/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   104/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   179/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
   185/8  IANA                                                              UNALLOCATED
        UNALLOCATED: not yet allocated or reserved.

may you live in interesting times.  ahh – blessing or a curse?

worth every penny.

• america’s true history of religious tolerance (smithsonian magazine)

i initially purchased the iPad specifically for media consumption, primarily research papers, news, and books. i had no desire to make this replace my laptop (which is my desktop btb). rather it was intended primarily a means for me to catch up on my reading backlog when i’m offline and to eliminate all of the academic / work papers that i have chewing up trees. that it plays video and has a kick-ass web browser was a huge plus. but this looked to be the un-kindle for me. since then i’ve found myself re-evaluating a number of elements of my workflow to see if i could incorporate the use of the device in a portable manner more efficiently.  it’s getting progressively better, but it’s certainly not a laptop replacement for me by any stretch.

interaction with the cloud

this part of the ipad sucks. there’s no notion of being able to attach to local storage or effectively use an application with network based storage, unless of course this function exists within the application and in the cloud. the sync of docs between keynote and pages and the filesystem on your computer is abysmal and seems like a horrible afterthought on the part of apple.  they did a half-assed implementation for integrating with the iWork site and in the most recent release they added webdav functionality . this is certainly a welcome addition, but it’s a rather tedious means of interacting with the device.

i can certainly appreciate apple’s desire to eliminate the notion of a filesystem from the device, but this limits its laptop replacement utility for quick edits, etc. considerably. i now have to plan on how i’ll get the docs and very consciously plan the edit / review flow if i want to use the device for content creation.  this doesn’t quite put me where i need to be for a lot of my travel.  this has relegated the device to text editing and presentation.  useful, yes.  sustainable as a work flow? no.

utility computing device (for lack of a better term)

we have a room in the back of our house which is intended to be a library, but is effectively a mud room / storage area / library. we had put an old laptop back there to facilitate catching up on email, writing quick docs /notes, etc on the main level in the house as opposed to lurking in the office. we’ve since shoved the laptop aside and put a keyboard stand/charger in that location. the notion of being able to handle a lot of this quick stuff from the iPad is increasingly the knee-jerk reaction. however. there are a lot of times where you just want a real keyboard.  to address this, we ended up getting one of those ipad keyboard docs.  it does a pretty darn good job.  i fire up simplenote and away i go.  i can push the resulting output into something more durable when i get to a real computer.

it turns out that the simplenote workflow is deceptively elegant,  particularly when i coupled it with the associated simplenote sync capabilities that are provided by cefstat’s simplenote.el tools for emacs.  these and a little bit of org-mode happiness have given me a wicked amount of productivity when i’m waiting for things and when i’m crammed in a little seat on the airplane.  (a work condition i deal with, with alarming frequency.)

news / rss / etc.

news

i’m surprised by how pathetic the news situation is on the ipad.  the nytimes editors choice app seems to radically miss the mark it doesn’t provide much in terms of interesting interaction with the web site.  the content is limited to the, well, editors choice.  the reading experience is however, rather pleasant.  for content, however, it’s a lot easier to just go to the site.

rss

rss might be the salvation for news content on the web on the ipad.  i’m frankly shocked by how awesome the rss readers are on the ipad.  i use google reader to to read my rss feeds from my workstation/laptop, and reeder for the ipad has to be the slickest interface i’ve seen to date for rss reading on the ipad.  it’s fast, it’s engaging and works great offline.  however, there have to be about a half-dozen or so extraordinarily compelling rss readers for the platform.  this seems to be an area of considerable innovation.

twitter

while on the whole i’m largely ambivalent about twitter, i’ve found that i’m really impressed with the “official” twitter application for the ipad.  this was tweetie for the iphone.  with the integration that they’ve provided and the ability to drive pretty much any twitter feature from the ipad itself, color me massively impressed.

magazines

zinio – this app has been consistently improving over the past couple of months.  i’m a huge economist fan and more and more articles have been enabled with the text view readily available.  it used to be simple graphic snapshots of the magazine pages which were impressively rendered and readable.  however, now it’s taking the form of a more dynamic electronic magazine.

wired – i’m so massively disappointed and frustrated with the pricing on their application that i’m just going to let the subscription lapse until they fix it. i am of the impression that a good chunk of this is outside of their control with the manner in which apple handles in-app purchases, making subscriptions a total pain in the ass and/or unworkable, but shelling out more than i’d ever pay for the magazine is just vile.

runners world - i’m equally frustrated with their pricing and their model, but to be fair they don’t bill themselves as a technology rag, so i’m surprisingly willing to cut them some slack.

ny review of books – seriously, i need a proxy for instapaper for these guys.

instapaper – if one was looking for a succinct reason to purchase an ipad, this is quite possibly it.  this is a labor of love and it shows.  i’ll grant you there are a couple of annoying nits with the app (i’d rather that the trash can wasn’t the archive metaphor, i’d like to be able to actually delete an article from my history/queue which wasn’t worth keeping around, etc.) but in terms of being able to enjoy long form online content, this is the app.  this deserves a spot in your dock. period.

i was a little curious as to what kind of checks were implemented with the API and how interaction with the API actually worked. it turns out that the API operation is dead easy. however, they don’t do some things like check the realistic time difference between checkins or the distance between venues for consecutive checkins.  as such there’s no notion of physicality associated with the application and the check-in process and the game.

of course this means that they’re dependent upon well behaved client behavior. to that end you only have to present the coordinates for the venue(s) you’re interested in, in order to obtain (or maintain) mayoral dominance.  you can use this to periodically check into a venue, even if you’re not physically there to pick up the GPS coordinate.  given that there are often perks associated with being a mayor of a particular venue, there might be some value in squatting on a particular location.

this begged a little experimentation. yielding foursquatter. a perl foursquare client script which can be trivially used to squat on a venue, or venues.

code and such is available on github.

% mkdir path_to_repo
% cd path_to_repo
% git --bare init

from the local machine with your content/code, add the remote origin and push your code to the repo.

% cd path_to_local_source
% git remote add origin ssh://hostname/path_to_repo
% git push origin master

share it or get it from another location …

% git clone ssh://hostname/path_to_repo

assumes that the person has an account on the host with the appropriate permissions to modify or read the repo contents.

pull changes from the server to pick up the latest …

% git pull origin master