Smoke and Mirrors

Did some traveling this last week so I’m glad I was mostly able to stay on my training schedule. I was away mornings (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday), but was able to train Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday night we stayed out until almost midnight and when I woke up Friday at 6 to work out I decided to just sleep in, knowing I had a redeye that night.

That turned out pretty well… yesterday I got in at about 10am… picked up my bike from the shop, and took a nap for a little while.
Later on around 6:30 I went for a nice bike ride.

Hobson/Page and Cornwallis are pretty good roads to ride on. Cornwallis is so smooth and there is a nice bike lane. Hobson/Page is just empty. Hardly any cars on the weekend. TW Alexander aren’t bad either - there are a couple of cars but it’s easy for them to pass you. All of these roads are long stretches of uninterrupted riding, though, which is great.

Today I have an hour run on tap…

NSFW unless you have headphones.

Hilarious.

Message-Plant.com

Wacky. It’s too late for Valentine’s Day for shipping, but maybe you will find another use for it.

Smoke and Mirrors: Bringing you the best of the web, every day. And who said content isn’t king?

I’m lazy. This is a reminder to myself to read this book later.

Ideas: Moral Luck: Part II

I’ve been following David Friedman’s series on Moral Luck, since I find this type of stuff fascinating. Seems strange, I know, but I was on the Debate team for 6 years in High School and College, and way back in High School I had a decision to go to the Geek Side (Electrical Engineering) or the Dark Side (Law). The Geek Side of me won out and the rest of history. Don’t we have too many lawyers anyway?

Incidentally, my debate partner in college ended up going to Georgetown Law and now is in corporate law in Boulder Colorado, after living for several years in Manhattan working for a law firm.

Anyway, here’s the crux of the article:

…why it is that, in both law and morality, we judge people in part on the basis of factors over which they had no control. The assassin who hits his target is guilty of a more serious crime than the one who misses–and most of us see him as a worse person.

Many people send around information without doing a quick Google search. In this case, I got blasted today with an e-mail from a friend telling me that I had to sign up for the list or else I would start getting telemarketing calls on my cell. Given that I dropped my home phone (useless) and am using my cell exclusively now I was a little disturbed by this prospect.

This is not true. Cell phones are illegal to send marketing messages to.

See the straight dope from the FCC website.

I hate to even have to post this type stuff.

Electric Sheep

Don’t ask me how I stumbled across this, this is a neat site for those wanting “cool looking” screen savers.

Hard to use as heck, and poorly documented, but when you finally get some sheep, they do look nice. Not sure why they don’t use BitTorrent for their distribution.

A friend of mine at work uses his laptop to store his photos, etc. Now that’s he’s a recent proud parent, and the fact that he’s run out of space to rip all of his CDs into iTunes with, he’s starting to look at storage options.

His first message to me was “I think I need a Mac”. He went into this whole thing about how he could make these cool photo albums, etc., really though, these types of things aren’t unique to the Macintosh. They just happen to be easier to find since they are built into the iPhoto website.

At any rate, I talked him down from that cliff. It was funny because I had been looking at USB hard drives a few months earlier. Based on discussions with him, I decided to search a little more and found that networked solutions were just as cheap as straight USB solutions…. and IMO much more convenient because you attach them to your router once and never move them… and even more important if you have a laptop: they don’t have to be with you on the kitchen table, taunting your wife

He ordered the Maxtor unit and it arrived the next day. Turned it on, plugged it into the network, installed the drivers on his laptop, and within 5 minutes he is copying his CD and picture collection to the networked drive. And, most importantly, he is thrilled as this is exactly what he was looking for. Cool, eh?

He mentioned to me that Buy.com has good prices on the Maxtor units now. There are other places online as well.

btw - I have nothing against the Macintosh. My wife has had a Powerbook G4 for a couple of years. She loves it. I have no doubt he would have liked it, and he agrees. Sometimes, though, the challenge is simply finding the solution to the problem rather than reinventing the wheel. The primary challenge was needing more storage. There are in fact other challenges he had, but they weren’t the primary one. Those other challenges do, in fact, have other solutions.

also btw - Online photos were part of the game, but only part. Music, as well as videos were in it as well. And he wanted local copies because he’s paranoid like I am that these types of things can go away if you don’t have your own copy. And things like your first born’s photos going away is a bad thing.

As if I were begging to find an instance to prove myself wrong, I found occasion to use Meebo for a couple minutes this past week while visiting my parents.

The scenario: away from the office, at another computer, wanting to check in at work (we use a lot of IM). If I can login for 5 minutes and not get any frantic IMs, things must be going well enough to log back out again

For my use cases I don’t think I’d use it more than once in a great while, but others probably do!

Installed Yahoo! Widget Engine tonight. After a lot of wrangling I got it working.

Suffice to say that the Yahoo default of installing the “My Widgets” folder under My Documents causes a lot of problems for anyone who has their My Documents folder synchronized, which might be many corporate users. Or maybe it was just my experience. I got a range of errors from “Visual C++ runtime error” to “Invalid parameter”.

But, I figured it out and moved on with the help of the Forums.

I have a couple of these doo-dads installed. WifiSignal/miniBattery/miniCalendar/miniWeather. I looked through a bunch more and nothing jumped out and grabbed me. I looked through a couple threads on favorites but didn’t see any that jumped out at me either. I just installed Blogliner as well.

The list of all Yahoo! Widgets is here. The big thing I noticed that was missing on this page is a way to find “Top Rated” and “Popular” widgets, kind of like Firefox does with its Extensions directory.

The primary navigation for the Yahoo! Widget directory is either search or time-based. Time-based is next to useless. Search is good, but when you are starting out you are looking for the killer apps. It would be nice if Yahoo! helped me find the “killer widgets” first rather than having to hunt around for them.

Just this user’s perspective. Anyone use the Widget Engine and have favorites to share? I will probably uninstall it in a month if I don’t find anything that compelling. My problem is that a lot of my cool widgets are already Firefox extensions.