Category Archives: Web Finds

Post-a-Day 1/2/13 – Resolutionistas

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Daily Prompt: Resolved | The Daily Post.

Have you ever made a New Year’s Resolution that you kept?

I have been quite successful in losing a lot of weight, but I didn’t really start it as a resolution. It just started when I made up my mind and took a very long while to accomplish. I went from about 300 at my heaviest to about 230 where I am now. My goal is to reach 200, but that’s taking far longer than even the first seventy pounds did to lose.

There have been other resolutions, but again, they were made because I was very tired with living some other way and just decided to change. One of the only other things I did was to stop biting my fingernails. Once I did that, they started to grow in nicely and I no longer have to hide my fingertips and be embarrassed.

I’ve found that resolutions can be made anytime and to stick to them, all you need is an effort of willpower and to make up your mind. Not waffling around helps a lot, and not backsliding into old habits.

Day One Migration

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My Day One Migration is moving along well. I’m grabbing low-hanging-fruit and copying in those posts from my old LiveJournal that didn’t have comments attached to them. I’ve decided to include comments as one of the most frequent commenters on my LiveJournal was my dearly departed friend Ryan. Seeing his words on my LiveJournal help bring him back to life, if only in a very small way, but they are important to me as are all the other people that I love. So far, with some original Day One entries, the copied in Notes from Facebook (Where my blogging went between LiveJournal and Day One) and LiveJournal so far I have 547 entries, spanning 327 days with items spanning back to 1999.

Once I have everything moved over in Day One then I can search more easily and look at different posts and maybe repost some things from my old LiveJournal that I think are either still relevant today or at least entertaining enough to share once again.

Nuts.com

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My love affair with dates actually only started when I ordered as part of a tapas brunch one of the plates being “bacon-wrapped dates” which was wonderful when I tried it. This event was being held at a work function far away, one of our spring get-togethers for a database system I manage for Western. After we all returned from the event that exposure to dates stayed with me and I went looking for them locally. I found that Sams Club, of all places was selling the “Bard Valley” brand of Medjool Dates. I started buying the bins of them and enjoying the dates as snacks during my breaks at work. When I got them from Sams, they were listed as a “Seasonal Buy” which in my mind meant that Sams wasn’t going to permanently carry them, that they could sell out and not be restocked and I’d be left high-and-dry without any way to procure my favorite treat. I’ve written about this before, especially the prices for these treats in another older blog post, Sticker Shock. I knew that Sams would eventually stop carrying them and I’d have to find another vendor so I went online and found Nuts.com. They sell sample size bags, and then pound and multiple-pound bags of everything they have for sale and their prices are just as competitive as anywhere else except for Sams. While Nuts.com can’t compete for price with Sams, they can over quality. There is something about the dates from Nuts.com that make them far better than the ones from Bard Valley. They seem fresher, fuller somehow, better.

When I put these Medjool dates on my Amazon wishlist one of my beloved family members sent me a gift box of them from Nuts.com. Of course, Nuts.com has more than just dates – I can also highly recommend their Turkish Figs. The figs and dates are a great combination together. The dates have pits, so you must be careful eating them, you just can’t chomp away on a unpitted date unless you hate your teeth, but the figs are almost all edible, except sometimes for the stem which is a little too hard to chew sometimes. The prices are quite excellent at Nuts.com, but where everything gets in trouble with them is shipping and there is no way around it. I think if a bunch of people ganged up in one big order from Nuts.com you’d be able to defray the cost of shipping that way, otherwise it’s only meant for a treat when you can afford the cost of the produce plus the extra shipping charges.

If you have a sweet tooth and like Fig Newtons like I do, you can save yourself a lot of needless calories and enjoy a healthy wholesome snack by going to Nuts.com. Your local Sams, or even a health-food-store might carry Dates, but the prices will blow your head off.

Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

When it comes to installing things on your Macs I often times advocate a rather carefree attitude. One thing that has always been true, and this article just nails home the point, is that even the most secure system can fall if the person holding the keys is tricked or cheated into opening the door.

I have said to many people whom I’ve given computer advice, if you have doubts, please contact me and I can look at it and give you advice. It’s free, and I’d rather help in the vein of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

12/21/12 6:14am

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I’ve been thinking about what might be tomorrow. I’ve talked about it with coworkers and friends and family and everyone is at least popularly concerned as I would expect. The natural assumption to make is the null hypothesis, that is, that tomorrow nothing remarkable will happen and the world will continue to spin on it’s axis and life will go on.

Except that the Mayans were so good at constructing really good calendar systems and they were so accurate. When the long count calendar expires, supposedly on the Winter Solstice, which is 12/21/12 at 6:14am it’s an event that is remarkable. What will happen? I’ve heard the most popular response that people have to this millennial event: “If anything will happen, it’ll be a huge move forward for people and those feeling good feelings will reap the rewards of those good thoughts and the others will end up elsewhere.”

I love this idea as it’s very tidy. I can’t help but think about some other possibilities that might come to be as well. The Mayans drew out their calendar and built in the terminal point (which is coming along) and I’ve read various theories, including an ancient astronaut theory that a Mayan God will return to earth when their exacting Calendar expires. I’ve found that my suppositions follow two distinct paths – a positive angle and a negative one.

Under the positive angle what may come of tomorrow?

1. Reappearance of Magic in our world. Imagination becomes easier to impress upon our material world, perhaps.
2. First Contact. This one actually has some feet to it. The Mayans were quite particular about their Gods returning someday and why not tomorrow?
3. Cures for modern plagues. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find the magic bullet that cures AIDS or switches off Cancer. This one could also go hand-in-hand with the previous point and be something we learn from First Contact.
4. Expansion of consciousness. We all see ourselves as individuals. Perhaps tomorrow will start a new spiritual development in humanity and help us connect to each other in more meaningful ways.

While the positive things are wonderful to think about, there are more entertaining and more dramatic negative events that may happen.

1. The Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. This would change the shape of North America and put a serious dent in America.
2. The New Madrid Fault could break and release a huge amount of earthquake energy, although this would be really scary for just the southern states.
3. A nearby star could have undergone a violent supernova and that fact could be enroute to Earth and arrive on 12/21/12 at 6:14am. We’d see a new star in the heavens and if it was close enough, it could raise radiation levels across the planet. It may be that our Sun and our own planets magnetosphere protects us from the worst of it, if it’s inbound at all. The problem with this is that nobody would know, there really isn’t any early detection for an event like this that I’m aware of.
4. Captain Trips – There has been some talk about H1N1 and other super flu viruses that just would require some generations to spread to humanity and then only a few more to become airborne. What would be worse? A Captain Trips event, or perhaps a re-emergence of something as nasty as the Spanish Flu of 1918?
5. Failure of the magnetosphere. Earth is protected from a lot of nasty space-based radiations by our atmosphere and our magnetosphere, to say nothing of the more impressive magnetosphere of our Sun. What if these fields failed for some strange reason? There would be less to shield us from solar radiation to say nothing of the stray cosmic radiations that come from space all the time.
6. First Contact. Just because a Mayan God was nice to the Mayans when they were developing doesn’t necessarily mean that any first contact event will be a positive one. One of the big lessons that popular science has been saying for a while is that a future First Contact event may not be a peaceful event but one fueled by hunger or some resource conflict. Instead of civilized explorers making first contact with us, they could be carnivores looking for a new food source.

One of the biggest things I have noticed while thinking about these things has been that people have clustered their thoughts around this event. Some are rooting for it, some are afraid of it, and some have even let the event change their natural way of behaving. Preppers getting ready for an event that may be impossible to dodge while on Earth. We just don’t know the scale of the event, or if there even is one. One thing is definitely for certain, this is a fantastic source of dramatic storytelling. The fear and the hope that battle over what is coming, or not, in a few short hours in the future make for great smalltalk and water-cooler conversations.

So, as the inaugural post for my relocated blog I will post this entry and invite people to write comments to this post. What do you think may happen in a few short hours? Will it be good, will it be bad? What do you think?

Workflow with Pocket

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I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. 😉

Acquiring Language

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I have been reading this article and an idea struck me while I was reading along. It’s really just a hypothesis honestly, but wouldn’t it explain so much that acquiring a mother-tongue involves the cortex and the amygdala as a cooperative pair. It helps explain features covered in the linked article and helps explain to me why secondary language acquisition later in life, after adulthood, is not as easy as acquiring whatever language it is that is your mother tongue.

This idea was spawned actually by an episode of Arrow and in the episode the lead character defeats a polygraph test. Perhaps if you consider a question in your secondary language then it’s a job just for the cortex and because it misses the amygdala completely, there is no emotional qualities to your thought process and maybe there won’t be any galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, or pulse changes. Thinking about a false answer in a secondary language may be the key to defeating something like a polygraph testing session. This is something that would be very compelling as a study. You’d need test subjects that acquired a secondary language in adulthood, say French where their native language was English and present them with a polygraph that they were encouraged to try to defeat, and then deliver questions with emotional weight in their home and foreign languages and see if this makes sense.

I think it would be very interesting at least… It opens questions like is adulthood the seal on the amygdala from acquiring any more language/emotion content. Hmmm…

Citizens from 15 states have filed petitions to secede from the United States – Dallas Top News | Examiner.com

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Citizens from 15 states have filed petitions to secede from the United States – Dallas Top News | Examiner.com.

The list includes Louisiana, Texas, Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, and New York. Of that list, I would be dismayed only for the last three, the others? I couldn’t push them out the door fast enough.

What’s most curious is that most of these states consume a lot of federal money. If they left the union, life would become very difficult for them. Just imagine the new tollways that would open up on their now-not-federally-supported-segments of the Eisenhower Interstate System. You thought the NYS Thruway was an expensive axle-mangler, just wait until Albany has to figure out how to fix it all on their own.

I think we can all say with a fair amount of humor, that Texas can leave whenever it damn well likes. Stop posturing and threatening, just do it already. I can’t wait to see how OPEC deals with The Great Christian Domain of Texas. That’ll be hilarious.

Hurricanes that slam into Galveston will now be regarded as Reality TV as “Those poor fools in Texas” try to cope without the rest of us. A lot of these red states think they can exist outside of all socialized connections with the other states and the Union, and I think they should be allowed to leave to feel what being truly alone feels like.

How fast they would rush back. And my, what sort of concessions they’d have to part with just to get back in. Just ask South Carolina about secession. It’s been more than a hundred years and they still haven’t recovered from the last time. But you never know, it might be different this time. (no, it won’t, it’ll be worse)

Confusing Worthless Passbook

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Apple has stepped in it quite badly when it comes to their Passbook app. It comes down to which metaphor they’d like to use and please, stick to whichever it is. I write specifically after updating my Starbucks app on my iPhone and the app asked if I wanted to add a card to my Passbook. So far my understanding of Passbook was that there was a stump-app which led you to the App Store to “buy” apps for different companies, so Target, Walgreens, that sort of thing and that those “Apps” were to be eventually organized in a Passbook folder.

So I start the Starbucks app, and it prompts me to add a Passbook card, so I figure there will be another app icon called “Starbucks” that I can put in the folder with all the other unused “Passbook” apps that I don’t use. And there is nothing. Huh. So I looked at the app for a while and couldn’t find where it put my Passbook “App” icon. I figured it must have been broken. That the download was buggy or broken. I completely ignored the Passbook app itself, because it was just a stump, why the hell would I use it again? It led to the App Store and that was how you entered the App Store if you wanted to waste time screwing around with Passbook bullshit. So I tapped on the app expecting to see the lame text and the link to the App Store, and there was my Starbucks Passbook card. As an added bit of huh, the link to the App Store is gone. So, okay. No more Passbook apps then for me, which I guess is fine.

It’s this really loopy “It’s an app” versus “it’s a card” metaphor that I’m griping at. It could have been more elegant, as for usefulness, eh. I don’t think of my phone when it comes to buying things. Phones don’t do that sort of thing, except now they do.

When it comes to Starbucks, we have a host of other problems that are going to pop up. I can’t use my Starbucks card at Barnes & Noble because it’s not a true Starbucks store, it’s B&N’s Cafe that serves Starbucks products. How many people will try to use their Starbucks card or this Passbook app? They’ll get irritated and be disinclined to use Passbook again. I know that feeling because I tried to use my Starbucks app at a Starbucks shop in McCormick Place in Chicago and was told they only accept cash or credit cards. That was the last time I used my Starbucks app except for just this morning to engage with this whole Passbook bullshit. So, even if you walk into a store that sells Starbucks, is a Starbucks, they may or may not use what you have. So having your phone out and ready to go and make things speedy utterly fails and you walk away without what you wanted, angry at the embarrassment. Then what are you supposed to do about some of those Starbucks that have drive-thru service? Do you honestly think people will hand their iPhones to a clerk for scanning? How stupid do you have to be to hand your expensive iPhone to anyone else? What if a compromising text pops up while they are scanning your iPhone? What then? I know why Apple would like Passbook to be useful and I’m all for new ways of addressing old problems, but there has to be a better way to do it. I suppose this really would only work well if you walked up to a Starbucks store, and there was some icon stating that the Passbook card would be accepted for purchases on the premises, then maybe then. But at that point how irritated would you be that you had to go hunting and searching for it? Then would you really even be interested in buying anything or just skipping it altogether?

So, the worthless Target and Walgreens apps, the weird App/Card thing with Starbucks, and how you can’t even be sure that any of it would work leads me to think that this is all just so much DOA technology. You aren’t going to use it because it’s too much bother. I can’t wait until some airline thinks they can stuff a boarding pass into this thing. Do you seriously think that a thieving TSA drone will give you back your iPhone? They’ll hand you back your Photo ID and pocket your phone. But that touches on the criminals that work for the TSA, but it’s still a REALLY BAD IDEA. Perhaps there will be something eventually that makes Passbook worth anyones time and trouble. I wouldn’t hold your breath.