Slashdot Streak Hits Four In a Row
02/26/2006 09:30
Slashdot is the premier site for geek-related news, insight and updates. After all, they bill themselves as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". Slashdot, one of the first and strongest community-focused Weblogs out there, has amassed significant pull and traffic - delivering what's know as the "Slashdot Effect", where a single story's posting can push so much traffic to the original URL that the site's server will slow down or in some cases, keel over.But as the site grows in popularity, and users spiral upward, the number of stories submitted on a daily basis for editorial review to the site similarly expands, and the likelihood that what you find interesting will get accepted is decreased. That's why I've been intrigued with having seen the last four suggestions I posted be accepted. I don't know what the standard admittance rate is, but I'm sure it's well below 100 percent. But my feeling is the reason the last four I proposed made the site is because they were focused on news that hadn't yet been covered, they were written up concisely, and in a way that would be interesting to their core audience.
This morning, my comments on the proposed acquisition of Disney by Apple were posted to the site. Adding on to two I posted at the end of last year, and one earlier this month, I've got a streak of four going. It's like a little badge of honor, but I won't let it go to my head, will I?
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Power Shortage
02/24/2006 00:51
It's one thing to live in a modern society and have access to the finest things - reliable transportation, high-speed Internet, comfortable housing, cable TV... I'm sure your list is different than mine... but with the Internet dominating our communications tools, and near exclusive 24 by 7 reliance on the power, telephone and cable wires into our homes, any interruption is, needless to say, very annoying and undesired.We got home late this evening to find all our digital clocks flashing "12:00", and the cable Internet out. We then checked the cable TV and found it too was on the blink. We managed to watch an archived TiVo show of Jon Stewart before everything came back to normal, just in time for my wife to be surprised by the lady's figure skating results - hours and hours after the rest of the world had learned of the outcome. Just after the competition had concluded around midnight, everything went dark and we lost power again. More than halfway through an online submission form for the office, I knew that effort had been in vain, and I shut the laptop, while my wife got out candles and the flashlight so we could stumble around and hope power came on before we were to wake up.
Obviously, it did. We were out for only 30 minutes... this time.
Our leaders hem and holler and worry about outside risks to our infrastructure or massive disasters, but all you need are some teenagers, some booze, and a well-placed telephone pole to knock us off the grid, and that's ridiculous.
Should Presidents' Day Be Canceled?
02/20/2006 10:40
There are some holidays that are huge events steeped in centuries of history and tradition - Christmas and Halloween being obvious choices, with the 4th of July and Thanksgiving making a run for it here in the US. Others are more like Hallmark holidays - you're aware of them, and have some obligation to fill, such as St. Patricks Day, Valentines Day, and Memorial Day.But Presidents' Day is such a hodgepodge. It used to be two distinct holidays commemorating Abraham Lincoln and George Washington's birthday. When I was in elementary school, we got both of the days off, so February was a relatively easy month. Now, with it consolidated and falling on the most convenient Monday available, neither Lincoln or Washington get their due - after all, we will be working on Washington's birthday, and Lincoln's birthday was on a Sunday - where's the fun in that? And now that we're actually out of elementary school, it's not as if anybody celebrates what those two leaders did for us anyway. All it means is that the stock markets are canceled, schools get a day off, and most people don't have to go to the office. But I don't think you've given Lincoln and Washington more than a cursory thought today.
Let's scrap the idea. Either celebrate both men's birthdays individually, two weeks apart, or kill the idea, and make room for other days to be celebrated. I know I could always take my birthday off, or my wife's. That would make more sense.
Sacramento: Guaranteed to Flood
02/18/2006 17:40
According to flood experts, St. Louis and Sacramento are the two most-likely metropolitan areas in the U.S. to see flooding disasters, mostly due to increased development in regions flooded by ten feet or more of water in the last century, surrounded by insufficient levees. In fact, according to one UC Davis professor, there stands a better than 2 in 3 chance that in the next 50 years, there will be a "catastrophic levee failure" in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.He says, "In California we know we have two kinds of levees -- those that have failed and those that will fail. We are reinventing Katrina all over again."
In addition to over-crowding and under-planning, the Sacramento region is particularly vulnerable due to seismic activity native to California, and increased warming, which is promising heavier storms coming in from the Pacific Ocean.
The story: St. Louis, Sacramento face flood danger: experts
Insomnia - I Can't Get No Sleep
02/10/2006 00:42
It's not that I can't sleep - it's that I don't want to. Sleep is such a waste of time, after all. There's plenty to do, but in theory it's too late to do it. Even worse, I still have to wake up at the same time, whether I go to bed now, or in an hour, so what's the point? Might as well stay up, catch up on things that haven't been getting done, and reduce the sleep element. There's no real good reason to lay stationary and inert for such a significant time anyway - how horribly inefficient!Speaking of "Insomnia", the very best song ever with the word Insomnia as the title has to be from Faithless.
Download it now on iTunes
Sample lyrics:
Deep in the bosom of the gentle night
Is when I search for the light
Pick up my pen and start to write
I struggle, fight dark forces
In the clear moon light
Without fear... insomnia
I can't get no sleep
The full lyrics here.
I Hate Stanford
02/09/2006 19:49
I attended college at the University of California at Berkeley, and in my four years there, I learned many things - some of which that ended up helping me in the job world, and a great many things that had no impact. One thing I learned there that I will never forget, even if was never on any midterm, was the clear and unquestioned truth that Stanford sucks. The school openly panders to affluent families willing to overpay for their children's education - and over-grading is rampant. Students are capable of dropping classes even after having taken the final, if they think it would poorly impact their A- average. Their campus is like open farmland with no personality, the surrounding city has no history, their sports teams are mediocre with the worst band in the history of the universe, and - in contrast to Cal, they have no named elements on the periodic table - that's a big one.Why do I bring this up?
Cal and Stanford (Stanfurd) play tonight in Men's basketball at Berkeley. The two teams are battling for the second position in the Pac-10 conference, and how well they play each other could have significant impact on which team makes the tournament, and which makes the NIT - and it's no guarantee both will make it, with so many other good teams out there - especially on the East Coast.
Cal won the Big Game this year, handily, but it'd be great to double down on those Cards and take them out tonight too. Go Bears!
Miss a Week, Miss a Lot
02/04/2006 18:40
The blog has had to become a background project for now - with presentations and meetings consuming the last several days, and plenty more work is left to do. But the Super Bowl looms tomorrow, and it should be a fun weekend. My father in law and I have a side bet on the Big Game - $5 a question, more than 140 questions. Last year we played, and I ended up owing him all of five bucks. But we'll see. Should be fun. More later.Seven of Nine and The Click Five
01/29/2006 11:03
Site referrals can often deliver good insight into what a visitor is looking for, and how they happened to stumble upon your place in the World Wide Web. But they can often be confusing rather than helpful, as well - especially when a visitor is looking for something that either was never mentioned on your site, or through some odd coincidence, has seen a rise through the search engines - presenting a false positive.The latter has certainly been the case with louisgray.com. As you already know, this last year, I started authoring a weekly comic strip for AthleticsNation, called "The ANtics", highlighting the A's players, and trying to deliver a new form of amusement, while leveraging some fantastic software. After amassing about ten or so of these episodes, I created a dedicated page on the site as a comics archive, and listed them out from one through ten and beyond. But my simple writing out of these numbers has done wonders for pushing louisgray.com forward in Google's image hierarchy - for terms that have nothing to do with the site.
For example - "Seven of Nine", from Star Trek: Voyager... there is an immense following on the Web of folks looking for her picture (I don't even want to know why) from around the world. My site statistics from SiteMeter show visitors looking for seven of nine from The Netherlands, Virginia and Seattle, Washington, just for starters. I'm sure they're very disappointed to see I am not a Trekkie - or ever will be. Another example is the band "The Click Five". The combination of the word five, and a simple "Click Here" message has similarly promoted the ANtics comics through Google's image directory - and I have NO IDEA what those guys play, so again, the wrong place - but again, I have visitors from Denmark, Baltimore, Maryland, and The Netherlands (again), looking for news on the band.
You can see the offending Google image results here: (Seven Of Nine) and (The Click Five). Very amusing.
Asypta: Simple, Yet Pointless
01/28/2006 20:48
Nearly six years ago now, while working at 3Cube, we were putting together collateral and Web page templates for a new product roll-out, and as is common, one of the tasks was to create faux persons and companies, as placeholders. Rather than go with the standard "John Smith" from "ABC Company" or "Acme Inc.", I tried to dress it up with more real sounding names, while staying generic. I believe "Linda Johnson" from GoodFiles Inc. was one of the chief participants in our FAQs...During one of these meetings, I presented an example which included a company by the name of "Asypta". It didn't mean anything, but it sure sounded good, especially at a time when companies would rebrand themselves, or spin off subsidiaries with neat-sounding names that added no real value. For some reason, I got all sorts of questions about "Asypta". It sounded real enough that my colleagues wanted to know if I had an in on the ground floor of a top-secret pre-IPO start-up or something... but I kept using the example and sounding mysterious.
I stumbled on the idea of "Asypta" as companies often can be found with an A at the beginning, consonant, vowel, consonant, A. Think about how many you can name... for example... Avaya, Asigra, Altera, Atipa, Asera, Altria, Ariba, Aceva, Acterna, Acteva, Adexa, Azanda... and I'm sure there are many more. At one point in 2001, I had registered the domain name Asypta.com, with the dual intent of acting as if it were a fake company, or secondly, to "grade" company names by their "Asypta factor". Ariba would be a 10 on the scale. Avaya another 10. Something like Alhambra... not so much. Asypta eventually came to stand for "A simple, yet pointless, technical acronym." It's worth noting that almost none of these Asypta companies explain their corporate name on the Web site. Simple, yet pointless.
New York, New York
01/26/2006 23:19
Our two-day jaunt in Boston is complete - we had nine meetings with about 25 people in total, and have three more to wrap up the trip tomorrow, just not in Boston, as we've landed in New York, and get to spend one odd night (for $279) here, with it 27 degrees outside, before doing our work in the morning and flying back cross-country to make it back to the West Coast late tomorrow.Aside from being surrounded by East Coast snow this week, and walking duck-footed to avoid slipping on icy driveways and sidewalks, we've enjoyed the other East Coast tradition - of wearing suits and ties, and topcoats, to each of our stops. Often, we're expected to look like laid-back West Coasters with a casual dress and attitude, but have put our hosts to shame. It's not quite "Project Runway" on the WB, but the team cuts quite the pose. In preparation for the trip, I bought a new pinstripe suit at the Men's Wearhouse, the first one I've bought myself, and the first one I've purchased to match my increasing waistline, which is now officially more round than my legs are tall. I preferred being a 32 by 32 "square", but it was not meant to last. Days of being out on the road, eating out for every meal, and jamming back into cars or planes aren't helping either...
One problem with these quick stops in New York is there is zero time to "see the sights". I've been here three times in the last two years, and still haven't even glimpsed the Statue of Liberty or anything. Don't know which way to look out of the plane... someday maybe I'll come on a more-relaxed pace and stay for fun.
Too Early At the Airport - Again
01/24/2006 12:08
You know, just when you think you have it all figured out... the schedule gods go and muck everything up. With a flight to the East Coast set at 1:45, we thought it made good sense to have plenty of time to check in, go through security (with baggage including two laptops), and still have some clearance for catching my breath before the flight. But I didn't expect it would go so quickly! There was no line to check in, I whipped through security (only 3 ahead of me), and made it to the flight gate by 12:05, a full hour-plus before they begin boarding! I guess being too early is much preferred over being too late, but this is clearly not an exact science.One upside to getting in early is finding a remote chair with easy access to power. That's a good thing. Let's hope that this kind of luck continues, in the unexpected chance one could find power plugs below the seat during the flight... but that's probably too much to ask for.
Cable Internet Annoyances
01/24/2006 08:40
One of the first things I do every morning is pop open the laptop, check e-mail and catch up on news and anything I may have missed in the six or so hours I was asleep. I'm not as rigid as to have a set order of sites or time allotted to each, but the routine is fairly... routine. That's why when I woke up this morning and opened the laptop, only to learn there was no Web access, that was a little over the threshold for annoying.Was it the Airport base station? Was it the cable modem? Was it the Comcast service itself causing the issue? Too many choices! Of course, I reset the base station. Nothing. I unplugged the cable from the base station and connected directly to the laptop. Nothing. I reset the cable modem. Nothing. I unplugged each and let sit for a while, and then plugged back in. Nothing. Grrr...
So I set back to my original spot and connected the laptop to power. I tried to ping Yahoo!. Nothing. A bit later I tried to ping Google... and after some delay it came through... slowly. But then it was as if everything else fired to life. Mail reported I had messages. WeatherPop kindly informed me it was 36 in Boston, where I'll be headed later. No good reason for the Internet being down, and no good reason for it coming back up. I hate that.
Morning Notes: Jan 23, 2006
01/23/2006 07:32
What's the difference between an occasional feature and a regular feature? Consistency. So here's the first of what I expect will be an irregularly occasional feature - Morning Notes, when things are too interesting to ignore, but time is limited.Last night was the first night the NBA's made a good fight to stay relevant in the face of playoff football, and baseball's Hot Stove League. If I wasn't a half-hearted Sacramento Kings fan, one would hardly know the season was on, if we didn't have news of players entering the stands or demanding trades... but last night, rapist turned ballplayer Kobe Bryant put on a show, scoring 81 points, the second most in league history, behind only Wilt Chamberlain. On the same night, the Phoenix Suns and Seattle Supersonics combined for more than 300 points in a 152-149 double overtime thriller, capped by a 30-foot buzzer beater at the end of second overtime.
In non-sports news, rumors are still flying fast and thick about Disney buying Pixar, or was that Steve Jobs buying Disney? It's all so confusing! Oh yeah, and the Republicans keep proving themselves incapable of avoiding scandal. (here, here and here).
Enjoy!