Google pulling plug on FTP blogger. goodbye blog

Google sent me a notice that FTP publishing support for blogger is discontinued. I understand their reasoning, and it may mean I have to abandon this blog.

That may work out, though, as I've been considering two shifts in digital society:

1. Facebook is the new blogger

It's confusing to decide if an idea or link should be "blogged" publicly or shared with local community via facebook. Community seems to trump the public for most posts lately.

2. Most hits come from new video game posts

Why not focus on games, then, and invest in new titles, subsidized by google ads? We'll see. It'd mean a switch to wordpress or some other tool.

Chiseling my shoes free

The mud/clay near my home is so bad that I almost lost two pairs of shoes to it when doing some landscaping recently. The first pair I just threw away, the second pair I couldn't imagine a way to salvage until I grabbed a hammer and a chisel and started chiseling away these immense chunks of dried clay. The result was visually interesting - clayforms of my shoe treads below.

The new house is almost done

The new house is almost built, and it's interesting to see how it's starting to compare to the original artist's rendition.

They've just barely taken down the scaffold, and still need to finish trim/roof/landscape, though.

Pre-launch product hype is a mistake

I don't understand why marketers try to create product hype before launch dates. By advertising, posting reviews, and posting youtube videos of products before their release date, they just ensure I never buy.

Why? I have a life, and that life does not involve managing consumer product release dates.

I have responsibilities at work, and I manage them with Outlook, attask.com,and subversion. I have responsibilities at home that I manage with Excel, google docs, IMs, and a whiteboard on my fridge. I'm busy. I don't want another tool to manage future books, movies, music, and games.

...so when I hear an author on NPR discuss his new book, I check amazon.com to buy it. If it's not released yet, then we're done: he missed a sale. This happens a lot. Why don't they release products before they try to talk us into buying them? Do Sears salesman spend 20 minutes talking you into buying an appliance, then refuse to sell it to you? No, because that would be stupid.

I just saw a vid of gyromancer and it looks great*. I have my wallet out. ...but I can't buy it, because it's set to release "Q4 2009". They should have held the video until then. It's old news by the time it hits the shelves, which means fewer sales.

*all I ask is that they release it in English on PC.

Bad web designers sabatoge companies

This link for "maxonlift.com" provides a summary that only talks about the requirements of MSIE to use the website. This is the space where it's absolutely important to try to sell the viewer on clicking your link - it's imperative to use these short 21 words to summarize your company (or website) and make the user click-through.

Instead, a web designer ensured that an (unpaid) ad for Microsoft Internet Explorer takes that place. Didn't anyone at Maxon run a google search to see how bad it looks?

Wordle - fun with typography

I stumbled on Wordle today and made my own wordle with the first speech I could think of. Can you guess what it is?



I added it to the wordle gallery, too.

Thanks to wikiquote for the text, and to Jarratt Moody for creating Say What Again (embedded below).

Comcast broadband is baffling

My Comcast cable modem is fast - I get about 6mbps down and about 300kbps up, which is usually bout 45 kib/sec upload. I used to pay a $10 premium to bump that upload to about 60 or 90 kib/sec.

For some reason today I'm getting speeds at close to 300kib/sec upload on compressed files (i.e. I'm not enjoying escalated speed because of modem compression or other tricks). That's over 600% of the speed I bought.

I don't get it. Is the cap broken? Have they bumped the speed all basic accounts?

All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

So my wife Rachel walks up behind me last night as I sit at computer desk, with my boy Drew (4 years old) in my lap.  He's watching me as I furiously type into a text window on blogger:

all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy.

Rachel says "so ..."

and I say "Drew asked me what blogging is.  I'm showing him."

EFF event details and my picture with Cory

Follow up to this post: http://www.111minnagallery.com/2009/03/eff/

I had a great evening at the EFF fundraiser. BART made it easy to get there on time, and both the EFF staffers and I were glad about my donation to their cause. Minna gallery filled up slowly, but by the time Charlie Jane Anders started reading, seats were long gone and many were on their feet.


It may have been Senior Staff Attourney Fred Von Lohman who introduced the authors. (That's right! The Fred Von Lohman).


Going first, Charlie Jane Anders read an interesting story of a girl researching her biological father on the internet, and left it with a cliffhanger (i.e. - plz buy the book), but I spent too much time being disturbed by the broad shoulders, large adams apple, and deep voice this lady had. I guess I should be more open. This is SF after all.

Analee Newitz was less complicated and read a more playful story, and I considered picking up a book. My reading list is long, though, and I have yet to do so.


The third reader, Rudy Rucker, started by taking a pic of the audience, then starting an audio recording to blog later. You get bonus points if you can find me in the audience.


Rudy went on to tell a story that made me keep checking my watch. It was a monotonous delivery of an oddball fantasy of a postal worker in a weird living dreamscape. He got some laughs out of the audience, but it was lost on me.


Finally Cory Doctorow read from Little Brother, and made some noise. He selected a passage depicting civil unrest, and was animated & engaging in his delivery.


Afterwards, I took a pic with Cory.


I was interested by the different texts the authors used to read from: Charlie had a bunch of wrinkled printed 8.5x11 sheets. Analee used an ultra-thin notebook (macbook air). Rudy used a bound prinout. Cory brought a published hardcover.

It was a fun night, but after an early day at work in Hayward, a jobsite walk in Santa Cruz, a night in San Francisco and a long BART ride home, I was pretty beat. It was worth it to get Little Brother signed by Cory, though.

Buy my car

My civic is for sale, and it has it's own website at mattmullen.net/civic. I even outfitted it with mp3 and bluetooth cell phone support.

they aren't lying - these blends are unique

This chocolatier features sweets like "stracciatella" truffles (wikipedia calls stracciatella egg-drop soup), pear flavored chocolates, or chocolates filled with pistachios or chili peppers.  wild.

http://www.lindtusa.com/category-exec/category_id/7/view_all/1

I met Cory Doctorow tonight

I had a blast at the EFF book reading [ http://www.111minnagallery.com/2009/03/eff/ ] tonight in San Francisco, and got to meet Cory Doctorow afterwards.  I'm tired now, but maybe pictures posted tomorrow.

Cory Doctorow is coming to SF on Monday

Cory will be in SF Monday night for an EFF fundraiser.

link: http://www.111minnagallery.com/2009/03/eff/

I wonder if he'll sign my book.

The Singularity approaches

Well, this is weird news. There is actually a NASA-sponsored university of singularity, if this website is not a hoax. If you know me in realspace, you probably already heard me warn of Ray Kurzweil's expected technological singularity (where I may have appeared to be a fanboy who'd been reading a little too much scifi), but I'm still very surprised that an organization exists to teach people how to cope with it. I mean, do we have a global warming university yet? It seems out-of-order.

Children are great for reminding us of our mortality

So my son, who is 4, and rather cute, tells me in his bubbly-cheery voice "Dad!  When I'm a daddy, you will be the grandpa!"

I know he's just learning his family roles & relationships, but this particular comment struck me as purely morbid.  He may as well have said "dad, when are you going to pay for your funeral arrangements so we're ready - for you to die?"

I have a 32% chance of surviving the zombie apocolypse

How well will you do on Z-day?  Take the quiz to find out.

I guess I need to buy some canned goods and do some weapons training soon.

32%

The evils of fiction

About reading, a coworker once told me "I don't understand why anyone reads fiction. What's the point? It's all made up. I only read nonfiction."

I thought this was amazing. The logical extension of this would be to never look at artwork, avoid almost all music, certainly never watch a film or a play. After all, that stuff is all made up. All of these types of art an extension of story-telling: fiction.

I'm picturing this guy making a ruckus at a comedy club:

"So, a priest and a rabbi are on a boat ..."
"You mean a priest, a rabbi, and a stand-up comic, right? Since you must have been there to witness this happening? Otherwise I want my money back."

Plants twitter you when they need water

If I ever bothered to plant any houseplants, I would absolutely depend on these sensors that twitter you when the plant needs water. Too bad it's almost $100 and requires assembly.

Ode to Courier New

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
fixed-width fonts maintain spacing for easily readable tables despite the rendering application,
and variable-width fonts are pretty but not very functional for engineers.

Thanks Courier New.
(Spaces weather changes in rendering applications much better than tab characters, too. Courier+spacebar=legible crossplatform tables. yay.)

Time to buy a house

I like to watch the Case/Schiller Housing Index updated regularly by Standard & Poor. The last published index value is 145, a number as low as it was in summer of 2003 (The peak is ~220). I haven't looked at buying a home since summer 2001, when the index was 130, but it may be headed back there shortly. Maybe it's time to look at property.

Feeding dollars to dogs

I spent some time tonight trying to feed a dollar to my wife's dogs.  The first dog turned up her nose at it, but Missy was more suggestable.  I totally missed the best shot - the camera was between frames when she really started chewing it up.

Chicken Police

These chicken police are hilarious. Is this typical chicken activity? Will they regulate my dogs or cats when they fight with each other, too?

Morning fun: watch the DJIA fall

Every morning lately, I take a look at the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, and have noticed that sustained impressive daily losses over a work week have created this cartoonish graph of the market:



I remember a year ago I was given the option of connecting my health savings account with the market, I decided it was too risky to gamble with the money I need to pay for medication and doctor bills. That was a lucky decision - the DJIA has dropped 42% since then.

Another interesting view: the market is now 3% lower than it was 10 years ago, eliminating all gains made in a decade. I don't even want to check the status of my 401k.

On usability and the telephone ring

Last week xkcd had a great post of something I've been lecturing on for years. I've staunchly argued that all phones, mobile or otherwise, should emit a sound like a ringing bell when there is an incoming call. The Comic:



The issue is that the ringing bell sound has been the only option for the entire history of the device, including of a century of human usage. It's extremely easy to recognize that sound, even for very small children, and even in a crowd of other noise. All of society knows how to recognize it, what it means, and how to respond.

Enter: the custom ringtone, which obliterates all of that excellent usability. My wife puts a top-40 hit on her phone, and when we hear it at the mall on the PA system, she reaches for her purse. When her phone rings in the car, she turns down the stereo. It's a mess.

If you need custom tones because you just can't bear to let AT&T only collect their standard $50/month from you, and you must fill their coffers with a few bucks every time you like a new song, then please indulge yourselves by assigning tones to SMS, email, PTT, alarm, IM, and other alerts. Those don't have a rich history of standard usage to destroy.

What it takes to immigrate into the USA

Wow, this immigration-to-the-USA diagram from the October issue of Reason is very interesting, and well drawn. Why exactly do we draw lines around the globe to limit how people can live and be governed, anyway? Having your freedom limited by your birth seems a leftover from feudalism that should be eliminated.

Click through for full view:



Heavy-handed immigration laws inhumane and anachronistic. We should consider how we can manage & improve the world for all human beings, not only for people arbitrarily born near us.

I think that makes patriotism bad as well. Contemporary scholar of ethics, Paul Gomberg, makes the obvious comparison between patriotism and racism. You can't put your country & compatriots first unless you put others second. That's clearly prejudice, if not strictly racist, but just as unethical.

[ original here and here ]

woot.com: great return policy

I've got to give woot.com credit - I told them my Sansa Sandisk Sanmeister was broken, and they asked no questions. I got an email back saying that a new one was in shipment to me, and that a prepaid fedex box was provided for me to ship back my defective unit later. The new unit has a navwheel that's a little sluggish, but I'm not complaining as it's a whole lot better than having only one channel of audio.

Americans greatest fear: The Truth

I had to laugh today when my daughter & I were flipping through a catalogue of Halloween costumes. On a page full of Halloween props, I caught these labels for sale:



Note the very first label, which I like to think is the most scary thing available: not the red blood, spider venom, embalming juice, or the virus that makes humans become zombies, no - those aren't scary enough to lead with. The most frightening juice there is the truth serum. [scream!]

Yes, the scariest thing we can imagine is our friends, family, and peers hearing us tell the truth. Are our secrets really that bad, America?

1st Presidential Debate

I've been watching it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-nNIEduEOw I'm trying to be unbiased - which is easy, since I haven't investigated much into either candidates platform, so I'm genuinely eager to hear their opinions.

At 20:00 in, John McCain says "I want to provide a tax break of $5,000 so every American family can buy their own health care..." That scares me - does he want to set the precedent that the individual buys his health care, not the business or government?

I checked with Kaiser recently, when my business changed their health plan and I was suddenly faced with many more expensive options. I found the cheapest plan they had available for my standard-sized (or even small) family of four cost over $10,000 per year. Note that's the cheapest available kaiser plan, and that's just to enroll. Of course I'd still pay more than that every time I visited, or needed drugs, or had any procedures - it's not 100% coverage with no deductible.

That $5k won't help me care for my 3 dependants. Furthermore it would only be a change for people right now - in future years, new employees won't have a before/after picture to see a $5k tax break. They will just start new jobs at new salaries, where businesses are not concerned about their health, and they'll have 100% of the burden on them immediately.

Amazingly well-done robot flash game

This robot-programming flash game is just really fun. I got to level nine before I had to leave for an appointment. How far can you get?

http://www.gameroo.nl/games/light-bot

Recycling Traffic

Oops. I created a paper recycling box in my office, hoping to encourage others to do the same (since a very high percentage of office waste is cardboard/paper recyclable).

All I've seemed to do is increase foot traffic in my office as people visit me to drop their papers in my recycling box. hmm.

Two spaces after period killed by HTML

This MLA page talks about how single-spacing after period is becoming more common and should be considered the standard in writing: http://www.mla.org/style_faq3

I wonder if HTML helped the downfall of double-spacing after period. Before the majority of the web was created by html-generators, authors typed their content in HTML markup that ignored whitespace beyond a single space, without explicit use of a non-breaking-space code ( ).

It could be that the wealth of websites whose users's browsers refused to render more than one space helped make single-spacing more common and accepted.

An interesting aside: Wikipedia is a very specific about spacing, quoting the standard spacing after a period as 1 em. I'm always surprised when wikipedia shows me extremely well-documented details, formalities, and histories of topics that I took completely for granted.

Cory references X references Cory

Cory Doctorow seems to be caught in an elaborate palindrome with the internet. Today I noticed it with Bruce Schneier.

Of course Cory already blogged about Bruce's blog (and he must have referenced Bruce in Little Brother, I'm sure ... almost sure... ok, not sure). Today Bruce blogged about gait recognition applied to shadows read by satellites, and he threw Cory a bone with a link back to Little Brother's discussion of low-tech gait recognition defeating techniques (i.e., rocks in shoes).

Cory already played this palindromatic game with Randall Munroe's webcomic. Cory blogs XKCD (actually a few times), XKCD comics Cory¹, then the comic is cosplayed by Cory and readers alike.

If the rate of references continues to accelerate, this could become an internet stability problem. Let's call it the Doctorow Vortex. Who will make a wikipedia page about it for me?

1. Yes, 'comic' can be used as a verb, just like blog. Thanks for asking.

Time to delete blog?

OK, it's been a month since a post, which probably means I'm bored with this and may need to stop blogging. I'll give it a few more weeks and see what happens.

The 49ers need Brett Favre

This morning's news is that the bucs or jets are likely to get Favre. I think the 49ers should be fighting for him. Favre only missed the superbowl by a mere 3 points in last year's NFC championship, and he had success all season even with unreliable rushing. With the train wreck of an offense that the 49ers have fielded for years, and the complete failure of #1 pick Alex Smith, Favre could be a 1-season or 2-season savior that put people in the seats and give SF some hope.

Woot: No Coincidence?

The woot-off today has been interesting.

However, I like the geographical statistic shown here:

http://www.woot.com/Forums/ViewPost.aspx?PostID=2443749

Apparently, remote-control boats are teh HUEG in the northwest.

Note that the vast majority of the sales of these 235 "wet bike" units went to Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, North & South Dakota - that's a solid wet-bike bloc across the great American Northwest.

Remind me not to challenge anyone to an RC boat race the next I'm in Cheyenne.

Also, how come Minnesota was left out? I hear they have a few lakes there.

It's 105 degrees and climbing

It's only 2:15 pm, and it's already 105 degrees Fahrenheit outside. It's still going up. Google told me it'd only be 97:



I've spent some of the day sealing duct leaks and repairing duct insulation in my attic - which should help my AC handle the heat better - but it's got to be over 130 degrees up there. I have bad timing.

Chicken Bomb

My first C application was a game called 'bots', in which warring robots fired lasers, grenades, and a dreaded chicken bomb at each other in a struggle for dominance.

I can't believe someone deployed a real live chicken bomb on America's streets. wow.

Endless rows of tombstones

My wife is a member of a doggie-rescue group. They are very digital and communicate with forum posts and emails. An email tagline from one of them read something like "better underfoot than underground".

That seemed overly morbid to me.

It makes me want to join and write my own competing morbid taglines, like "better in a home than in a graveyard; a graveyard packed full, with endless rows of dead dogs."

Trying Blogging Again

My first shot at blogging was more about writing my own blogging tool (and getting some perl practice) than it was about communication. My tool worked fine and did it's job, but I stopped using it when I realized I just didn't have that much to say.

I'm going to try again - this time with someone else's tool (google/blogger), and this time to use it for it's intended purpose.

If I can convert the archive of those 2 years of posts into a blogger friendly format, I'll retroactively apply them here.

In the meantime, here's a handy place for me to broadcast ideas for those of you who care to read.