Go Mommy!

My wife just ran a half marathon… which is about a half marathon longer than I can run. Oh, did I mention she just gave birth to our SECOND child in as many years six months ago?

We had a little dude on the scene for support.

Go mommy! Oh, also... Go peanut butter and jelly!

Promote It!

Search engines are smart… but why did it take me forever to figure out how to import a self signed cert in Internet Explorer? It’s a hard problem. I must have tried a million different permutations of that link in order to find the result, and it was right there, exactly what I wanted when I changed “install” to “import”. Shame.

Actually, the people I blame is MS… it may be an edge case, but either you disable the feature altogether or, better, improve the help. I worked on the IE team and I know how much they’ve gone out of their way to make things dead simple, but there’s still way too much exposed to the user that will never make any sense to them, and WORSE, that they can do nothing about. “Mixed Content” error, I’m pointing the stink eye at you…

Windows 7 Faster Than Android?

I know it's a bit of a ridiculous statement, there are about a billion variables and at the end of the day, you still come down to comparing a sky scraper to a blue whale, but I had an impromptu experiment today which was pretty cool.

At the exact same moment, for whatever reason, both Windows and my new G1 phone alerted me that at a system level they had updates to install. Both required rebooting during installation. And I started both at the exact same time (and then got up to have a cup of coffee). I got back and watched the progress - and to my amazement, Windows was back up first.

I don't think this is a measure of anything in particular, except it does come as some surprise - I could have run this test in the past with a patch the size of a thimble on Windows against a slug in the hundred yard dash and Windows would still lose. Bravo guys!

D

Who’s Responsible?

One could write novels on who’s responsible for our current economic situation – likely thousands upon thousands of novels are already underway. I believe the failure lies entirely with the lack of regulation in the markets, both with rating agencies and with insurance credit default swaps. You solve both those (create a firewall/Glass-Steagall-Act-style barrier for rating agencies, and an open marketplace and regulatory requirements for anything that has even the slightest whiff of being insurance) and you would have prevented the whole disaster. I can’t say who is at fault for not enacting these earlier.

But I can say who the financial liberals (aka Republicans) think is at fault: Obama (and to a lesser extent, Freddie and Fannie Mae). Despite the fact that Obama took office in January of this year, some how he’s to blame. Or the fact that Freddie and Fannie, who rolled up around $5 trillion of the mortgage market and another $2.3 trillion in derivative transactions (http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11751139) – but the rest of the market was over $60 trillion in derivative transactions – these are the guys to blame. , Look at this snippet:

Since it became apparent that Barack Obama would be elected president at the end of September 2008, the stock market has steadily declined.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/03/022973.php

Ok, even that is stretching it a bit far. You’re blaming a guy who hasn’t even been elected president yet for the failure of the market? That’s like Obama turning around and blaming whomever is going to be elected in 2012/2016 for the countries current situation. Or the pilot who steps into the cockpit after the plane is already in a nose dive. Just ridiculous.

Data!

Seriously, I don’t know who at the NY Times has a statistics degree, but their graphs and data presentations never fail to amaze me. Even back in the day, they could present data that absolutely cut through the mess and get at the interesting story. Some things I remember particularly well are the Supreme Court Rulings graphed by Justices, the Graph of Words People Used during the conventions, the split in voting for Obama or Clinton with moveable squares or a graph of Parking Tickets in Manhattan for a year. Many times these are nothing more than just the data cross referenced with a map or interesting display. But doing that simple exercise clarifies the world and bring real knowledge to people who may have missed stories.

But this most recent graph of Twitter during the Super Bowl blew me away.

 

There’s got to be a place for disseminating information like this in the “new world.” Yes, I know that large media outlets are looked at about as nicely as professional dog fighting coaches these days, but intelligence and insight like this really should have a home. And for those that say, “It already has a home, and it’s called your blog” – I just don’t think that blogging for blogging’s sake is sustainable as a productive output. There are only so many coffee breaks people can take and steal from their corporate masters. If you’re lucky enough, you get to be one of a thousand or so people in the world that can actually make a living blogging, and then you can spend your full time doing analysis like this. But I don’t know if that produces this kind of quality.

Why am I Seeing This a Year Later?

It’s funny cause it’s true. VERY true.

New Media Douchebags in Plain English

Also I hate it. Follow all the things I hate on my awesome blog, Linked In, Facebook Profile, Twitter Account, Friend Feed, Yahoo Buzz, StumbleUpon, Plurk, and many others!

Also, you can follow all the things I’m directing my COMPANY to hate as well, on our Soundbite Facebook App, Blog, Now Playing Feed, and lots more!

It’s cool to hate! Also cool? Not working.

So Rad. SO Rad.

Up working late at night, and came upon this infomercial:

I don't know what's cooler... that you can wear it around or it kind of makes you look like a wizard while you do it.

I think I have a new God. And that God is whomever came up with this garment. BTW, is it a garment? Is it a blanket? How would one classify this in a catalog anyway?

You Spent HOW LONG On That Project?

Interesting from the delivery suite discussion - to haver a pregnancy is 9 months, which to us, seems like quite a while. I would imagine it seems even longer for women, where I can merely assume it seems long, having never been pregnant myself (

). But then we expanded out to talking about other animals, and my Google-fu had to kick in... How bad would it be for other animals? Thanks to this site (which put all the data together as a statistics exercise) we can know!

Species  Maximum Life Span Gestation Period Percent of Life Dedicated to Creating a New Life
African elephant 39 645 4.57%
Giraffe  28 400 3.91%
Cow   30 281 2.56%
Donkey   40 365 2.50%
Asian elephant  69 624 2.48%
Guinea pig  8 68 2.45%
Gray seal  41 310 2.07%
Sheep  20 151 2.07%
Goat  20 148 2.03%
Horse  46 336 2.00%
Baboon  27 180 1.83%
Gorilla  39 252 1.76%
Mouse    3 19 1.63%
Rhesus monkey  29 164 1.55%
Red fox   10 52 1.45%
Water opossum  3 14 1.28%
Chimpanzee 50 230 1.26%
Raccoon  14 63 1.26%
Rat  5 21 1.22%
Jaguar  22 100 1.22%
Arctic Fox   14 60 1.17%
Pig    27 115 1.17%
Golden hamster  4 16 1.12%
Gray wolf     16 63 1.06%
Ground squirrel  9 28 0.85%
Man   100 267 0.73%
Cat  28 63 0.62%
Little brown bat  24 50 0.57%
Big brown bat  19 35 0.50%
Rabbit  18 31 0.47%

Man, compared to all these other mammals, has it easy! African elephants get screwed... this would be the equivalent of spending 4.5 years in pregnancy! Youch!

An alternative is to convert all time spent doing anything into percent of your life - One hour meeting that makes you want to eat a gun? Congrats, you just wasted 0.0011% of your life!