fedward, tumbling

Every now and then I have to do things I don’t...

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:56:23 -0400

Every now and then I have to do things I don’t particularly enjoy, but even then it’s satisfying to get things to work. This is still not done, but I’m on the homestretch in the preparation portion.

Next comes the tedium of upgrading eight servers, but with this working that should be less painful. And also? Dealing with kickstart on a “foreign” distro (I’m a Debian guy by preference) is probably some useful work experience.

unhappyhipsters: No time to marvel at his sheer luck: Larry...

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:09:01 -0400

unhappyhipsters:

No time to marvel at his sheer luck: Larry just ran.

(Photo: Unknown; Dwell, July 2009)

The other day I suggested this would be a useful thing. Lo and...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:34:17 -0400

The other day I suggested this would be a useful thing. Lo and behold, there it already was, in the View menu where I wasn’t looking for it (it’s a submenu item under Developer).

Chrome, I now want to buy you another cupcake.

Daylight Saving Time: Cui Bono?

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:09:00 -0400

I’m no fan of arbitrary adjustments to time, but I’m actually somewhat more ambivalent about Daylight Saving Time (note: “saving,” not “savings”) than a lot of people I know. But I should probably rewind a bit.

I’m an insomniac. Anything that messes with my ability to get enough sleep is unwelcome in my life. Changing the clocks by an hour twice a year always messed me up pretty badly, to the extent that I’d sometimes even fall asleep at work during the first week of DST. For the same reasons, I’m pretty badly affected by jet lag, and whenever I travel across time zones I now try to prepare a few days early so I’m already better-adjusted to the new time before I even arrive.

So a few years ago when DST started I tried something new: I didn’t reset my clocks. I’d been going through a rough stretch with the insomnia and it was just One More Thing to deal with, and I announced to my manager at work that I was probably just going to be late for a week, since the alternative was worse.

A curious thing started that week, though: I had quit using an alarm the week before in an attempt to reset my body clock, and I kept not using it that week. I slowly came into line with the rest of the world, and I never turned the alarm back on. And for the most part, years later, I still haven’t turned the alarm on for daily use.

My sleep cycles are more regular without an alarm clock than they ever were with one. I now have a so-called “dawn simulator,” an alarm clock that uses light instead of noise, and I use it when I have to get up earlier than usual (for me), but my mornings are almost entirely free of wretched beeping. Not everybody can go without an alarm, but it has worked better for me than any other single approach to sleep regulation.

Anyway, back to Daylight Saving: by common practice and law, we all agree to set our clocks forward by an hour in the Spring and set them back an hour in the Fall. What this means for the alarm users among us is a lost hour of sleep and several days of, well, jet lag. What happens when you’re jet lagged? Your reactions are slower, your mind is fuzzier, you’re a little bit clumsier, and you probably have more coffee than usual in an effort to perk up. This is supposed to save energy, but it turns out that the difference is within the margin of error, and all the best guesses were estimated anyway. So if we’re not actually saving energy, why are we losing sleep over it?

Who benefits?

It’s helpful to look at Daylight Saving Time for what it is: a shift of an hour of morning sun to an hour of evening sun. What is that good for, exactly? It’s not good for driving, it turns out, since evidence seems to indicate that there are more accidents in morning rush hour (and at work) that first week of DST. It’s not good for power usage, because in early Spring everybody cranks the heat for an extra hour in the morning, and in the height of Summer everybody gets home from work and cranks the A/C. Any savings in lighting costs are completely offset too, with the total number of hours of electric light the same regardless of whether they’re in the morning or the evening.

What DST does is make summer evenings longer. What happens during summer evenings? Shopping, barbecues, and sports. One of the biggest proponents of DST is the retail sector, as people apparently shop more during sunny Summer evenings than dark Winter ones. Longer evenings are also great for barbecues, since you have daylight after work to come home, fire up the grill, and eat while the sun sets. So I’m willing to bet the entire industry that exists to supply those barbecues (cattle ranchers and beef packagers, tomato, corn, and watermelon farmers, the charcoal and gas industries, and so on) probably have lobbyists here in Washington just to make sure nobody in congress gets any ideas about changing anything. The other big beneficiary of long evenings?

Baseball.

Think about it. You get off work, you go sit outside in a ballpark somewhere, and watch the sunset behind the bleachers as nothing happens for the better part of three hours. (Note: I’m not saying that nothing happens in baseball, I’m just saying that most of the time that passes during a baseball game passes without anything happening.) Baseball games that start in complete darkness just aren’t the same as the ones that start while the sun still shines. Even if the game ends under lights, it’s a better experience when it starts in daylight.

So when somebody says they love Daylight Saving Time, find out if they also love baseball (or maybe golf, for that matter). I’m willing to bet they do. If they say they hate Daylight Saving Time, ask what they do in the morning. People who already get up early do so for a reason, and messing with morning sunlight makes those people angry. Insomniacs like me probably hate losing an hour of sleep, but we also don’t mind having other people awake and active when we are, so it ends up being a wash.

I like my barbecues, but don’t expect me to show up anywhere any morning during the first week of DST.

"3. HOW TO ENTER Visit your Twitter account and confirm that you have read and agree to these..."

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:16:58 -0500

“

3. HOW TO ENTER

Visit your Twitter account and confirm that you have read and agree to these official rules. You may enter the sweepstakes by incorporating “#Macallen12” and “#Macallen15” in your Macallan tasting notes twittering, derived from current or previous Macallan tasting experiences. The content of all twittered tasting notes will be featured in a topic cloud hosted on the http://themacallan.com website.

”

- The Macallan Tasting Notes

Um. If it’s your own brand, wouldn’t you know how to spell it properly in the hashtags you’re using for your sweepstakes?

One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:08:34 -0500

One of the things that annoys the crap out of me is when a single web page runs away with my CPU. With Camino I would occasionally either kill the whole browser and start over or meticulously start closing likely culprits until I got to the window that actually took all the CPU time and caused the fans to spin up.

Google Chrome, on the other hand, has every window in its own process. So today when the fans spun up I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed the Google Chrome Helper process taking 6% of CPU all by itself.

None of the tabs went away so I couldn’t tell at a glance which window I’d actually killed, but I found it. This was the offending page. Note that I completely removed Flash the other day so all that CPU was just going to the NYT’s heat map generator, dictionary tool (which I find useless), ads, and assorted frippery. None of those things actually provide value to me, so I ask why the Times assumes it can get away with using so much of my CPU for its own purposes (almost all related to click-tracking in one way or another).

Also? Props to Google Chrome. The fact that I could kill merely the offending window and leave everything else going is a game changer for me. The only way it could possibly be better is if the app itself had a display showing how much CPU each window was using, and/or an obvious URL in the “open files” listing in Activity Monitor. Regardless, I am in love with this feature and I want to buy it a cupcake.

Meeting Boy: Cellphone Ringtones in the Office: A Modest Proposal

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:13:11 -0500

Meeting Boy: Cellphone Ringtones in the Office: A Modest Proposal:

I propose the Ringtone Jar. It’s like the swear jar— if we hear your ringtone in the office, you put a dollar in. After $10 or so dollars, I’ll bet they remember to put it on vibrate when they walk in the office.

Wow. Meeting boy is much nicer than I am. At an old job the guy in the next cube had a bad habit of leaving his phone in his cube with the ringer on full volume while he was in meetings, and he was a manager so he was in a lot of meetings. I think I might have told him I was going to break his phone in half. It solved the problem, though.

Marco.org: News flash

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:02:12 -0500

Marco.org: News flash:

A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.

I dislike the intrusive…

Well-reasoned post from Marco that says much of what I think about pagination of longer articles on the web. The one site that really got to me was Slate, since the second page of many articles was a single paragraph, but Slate at least offers a link for a single page view. That one annoyance, which I did complain about, has in fact caused me to read fewer articles on Slate, and it changed my reading habits there. Now when I open an article the first thing I do is scroll down to the bottom of the page to find out if the article has been broken up, and then I scroll back up and click the link for single page view. There’s a link at the bottom of the page too, but that link sends you to the anchor for the top of the second page, which I find just as annoying. The “single page” link at the top of the page, though, is also annoying because it’s always there, whether the article spans multiple pages or not. The NYT has a similar setup, but their UI only displays the “single page” link when the article spans multiple pages, and once you click on it to get the longer view, the link is absent from the resulting page.

I know they’ve probably got some numbers to back their annoyance, but my willingness to deal with it is pretty low in general and depends on how much I value the content and how intrusive the ads are. But I’m with Marco - nobody owes me anything, and I’m willing to vote with my page views.

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: What's next for Google Maps now that they've added Bicycling Directions? (feat. Ian Cely)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:42:25 -0500

Neven Mrgan's tumbl: What's next for Google Maps now that they've added Bicycling Directions? (feat. Ian Cely):

Segway directions

Shriner go-kart directions

Walking and chewing gum directions

Angry-walking directions

Clowncar directions, with an algorithm that maximizes your ability to unload fourteen clowns at your destination

Heartbroken moping to a sad indie song directions

Just-got-laid…

I think they need skateboarding directions too.

"How good is the new breed of decaffeinated coffee? To find out, The New York Times held a blind..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:40:25 -0500

“How good is the new breed of decaffeinated coffee? To find out, The New York Times held a blind tasting of seven decaffeinated coffees. Some were rare, single-origin beans, others were more familiar blends. For reference, there was a pot of Chock Full O Nuts. All coffees were ground fresh and brewed in press pots for four minutes using water that had just come to a boil. Over all, the tasters were disappointed with the coffees, but did find some worth trying.”

- New Breed of Brewers of No Buzz - NYTimes.com

Ha. I should go ask my local roast monkey what sort method his decaf is.

And for the record, while Kate claims she has fooled me with decaf, I don’t think she has, although maybe me pronouncing a cup “weak” or “terrible” and muttering something about decaf under my breath still counts as my being fooled in her book. That said, I’ve been known to order a decaf gelato affogato for dessert, but I think that’s more about the gelato than the espresso anyway.

"There is a dicey — and misguided — aspect of Irish whiskey loyalty that splits along..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:30:38 -0500

“

There is a dicey — and misguided — aspect of Irish whiskey loyalty that splits along partisan lines. I’ve known a lot of older Irish Americans who will drink only Jameson because it is considered the “Catholic” whiskey, as opposed to Bushmills, which is perceived as the “Protestant” whiskey. During grad school in Boston, I drank once or twice in a hard-core Irish pub where you might come to physical harm if you ordered a Bushmills. (That bar also passed around a hat once a night, and you were strongly “encouraged” to donate to “the cause”).

This idea of Catholic vs. Protestant whiskey is bunk. For one thing, from 1972 to 2005, coinciding with some the worst of The Troubles, both distilleries were owned by the same company, Irish Distillers, before Bushmills was sold to Diageo. Jameson is now owned by Pernod Ricard, a French conglomerate. Also, John Jameson was a Scotsman, and therefore in all likelihood a Protestant.

”

- Spirits: For St. Paddy’s Day, make my whiskey Irish - washingtonpost.com

The more you know. I have to say, though, that my dad inadvertently ordered the “wrong” one in a bar in Ireland and the bartender gave him a hard time (but served him anyway, with a wink).

“We talked a lot about what the moral taco would look like, or...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:47:13 -0500

“We talked a lot about what the moral taco would look like, or the locavore taco, but this was the cheapest taco you can produce in San Francisco,” said Annalise Aldrich, a CCA student who helped present the group’s findings. Aldrich and another student, Rachael Yu, walked the audience through some highlights of their research. (via Your Taco, Deconstructed - GOOD Blog - GOOD)

How To Beat Up Anything: How To Beat Up Singer Aimee Mann (with a rebuttal from Aimee)

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:47:32 -0500

How To Beat Up Anything: How To Beat Up Singer Aimee Mann (with a rebuttal from Aimee):

I love that this web site exists.

Marco.org: How to post photos on the internet

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:54:58 -0500

Marco.org: How to post photos on the internet:

Rotate the camera 30 degrees before shooting.

Square-crop.

Yeah. All of that. He left out sloppy HDR though.

I Need a Job Title

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:23:17 -0500

I’m assuming the tens of you who read this already know what it is I do in general, but since 2006 I’ve been doing IT consulting. This has involved a mix of programming, maintenance, and support. Before I became a consultant, my job title was “developer,” before that it was “programmer,” before that it was “internet engineer, lead,” and before that (back in the dark ages) I was a “network administrator,” “system administrator,” or “webmaster,” depending on who was doing the asking (all of those titles at once, interchangeably, though).

Thanks to the recession, consulting is no longer even bringing in the medium-sized bucks, though, and I’ve been looking for full-time (or even serious part-time) IT work. And essentially I’ve been failing at this, because I’m still looking with no end in sight.

So now I think I need to write a new résumé from a clean sheet, and I’m coming at it from the perspective that I’ve been selling myself for the wrong job. I have fifteen years experience in information technology. There are certain specific types of expertise I don’t have, but I have touched a lot of technology in all that time, some of it in quite a bit of depth. I am now effectively “senior” in experience and presumed salary expectation, but I have never managed people. I did this somewhat intentionally, but staying out of the management track now appears to have been career-limiting.

Ideally in my new job I’d be responsible for:

Making decisions about what hardware and software to buy
Doing more software or database design than implementation, although some implementation is fine (and probably to be expected)
Deciding what to develop in-house and what to hire out for
Assigning both people and machines to get the most out of them.

Complicating this is the fact that I’ve never managed people (I’ve been a lead, and I’ve been senior-level, but never managing). So whatever title I’m aiming for has to be attainable given that lack of specific experience.

What’s the job title for all that?

Today is brought to you by Fatboy Slim, Bootsy Collins, Spike...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:21:27 -0500

Today is brought to you by Fatboy Slim, Bootsy Collins, Spike Jonze, and Christopher Walken. Be careful, it’s loaded.

"Ace Hotel NY is the city’s leading hipster hotel and hotspot. KAYAK members looking to stay in..."

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:37:00 -0500

“Ace Hotel NY is the city’s leading hipster hotel and hotspot. KAYAK members looking to stay in New York City will be delighted by the whimsical touches and the out-and-out coolness of this property. Even the unpretentious lobby manages to be one of the coolest places to hang out in the city.”

- (from an email I got from Kayak)

You’re doing it wrong.

legoexpress: legogogo: Mondrian & LEGO (via...

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:49:42 -0500

legoexpress:

legogogo:

Mondrian & LEGO (via martongazso)

Yay!

"Heat 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until melted, about 2 minutes...."

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:14:30 -0500

“Heat 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until melted, about 2 minutes. Continue cooking, swirling pan constantly until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Remove skillet from heat and, using heatproof spatula, transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl. Stir remaining 4 tablespoons butter into hot butter until completely melted.”

- Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies - Cooks Illustrated

tbridge: So, this happened today. Yeah, I actually went...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:36:09 -0500

tbridge:

So, this happened today.

Yeah, I actually went curling! It was a total blast.

Me too!