I've been using Bloglines for several months now to keep up with the sites I read. It saves me loads of time since it notifies me when I site I care about has been updated. And with a growing list of sites to keep track of, that can take up a lot of time. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, you can view the sites I read here.
The other useful thing I've found is that I can read the new articles from Bloglines itself, instead of seeing something new and clicking on the site. I've gotten used to doing it that way.
The problem comes in when I go to sites like My Boring Ass Life where the feed only contains the first sentence or three of the article. Then I have to spend about twice as much time to read it. Honestly, it makes me less likely to read it.
The only reason I've come up with for them to set it up that way, is that I'm forced to look at the ads on their page to read the article. But honestly, I tend to change the channel during commercials so this really isn't going to get my attention.
Imaginary numbers are weird anyway, but add e, which is a weird constant and you just get a mess.
or approximately 2.7182818284
From What is e?
The value of "e" is found in many mathematical formulas such as those describing a nonlinear increase or decrease such as growth or decay (including compound interest), the statistical "bell curve," the shape of a hanging cable or a standing arch. "e" also shows up in some problems of probability, some counting problems, and even the study of the distribution of prime numbers. In the field of nondestructive evaluation it is found in formulas such as those used to describe ultrasound attenuation in a material. The sound energy decays as it moves away from the sound source by a factor that is relative to "e." Because it occurs naturally with some frequency in the world, "e" is used as the base of natural logarithms.
The Wikipedia has better information though.
But seriously, I think "e to the pi times i" has a nice ring to it. It'd be a fun band name.
So there I was, driving down the road on Sunday afternoon. I pull into the left turn lane and hear a loud “snap” sound. Then the car starts to bounce a little. I stopped about 15 feet shy of the intersection. I tried to push the gas, and the car didn’t move. Shit.
I got out of the car to see what had happened. Both front tires are turned inward. The tie rod had snapped on one side. There was no way I could push the car off the road. I had zero cash on me and no other means of paying for a tow truck. James was nice enough to loan me the use of his AAA card to get a free tow.
The problem was he was in Midwest City and I was on the south side of Oklahoma City. Duck was kind enough to bring it to me, but he was in the middle of something at the time, so I’d have to wait a bit.
While I was waiting, I called the non-emergency police number to let them know I was stuck in traffic (at James’s suggestion) rather than let them discover me themselves and be angry. About 20 minutes later, the officer arrived to block traffic so no one hit me. (While I was waiting there was a little fender bender that occurred ten feet away.)
The officer was patient at first, but after about 20 minutes he started to complain. After he’d been there about 40 minutes, another officer showed up to take his place. He was an ass from the start. The first one hadn’t even checked to see if I had an ID on me. That was the first thing this one did. After a couple minutes, he came back to talk to me after checking my license.
“Did you know your license was suspended?”
“What?”
“Your license is suspended.”
“Huh?”
“Why is your license suspended? What have you been arrested for or gotten a ticket for?”
After thinking about it for a bit, I decided it probably happened a year or two ago when my insurance had been canceled because I didn’t have the money to pay them at the time. The insurance company is required to notify the DPS when that happens. I didn’t receive the notice that it had been suspended. I’d even been pulled over once, for a broken tag light, and that officer hadn’t noticed, or was being really nice.
“You’re lucky I didn’t see you driving so I can’t arrest you.”
Asshole.
I’ve been driving Rachel’s car, even though we broke up over a month ago (that’s the one that broke). My car is currently sitting in the driveway with two dead rear tires, a dead battery, no gas, an expired tag and a need for an oil change. But before I can take care of that, I have to come up with the $350 to reinstate my license first.
Shit.
Missing Image
I almost miss trick-or-treating. But here's Chance as Thomas the Tank Engine and Anna as a Cat. They're my sister's kids. I haven't heard what kind of haul they got yet
Today, I finally got around to fixing several things that were wrong with this site. I should be able to prevent all the spam comments that kept cropping up now. Also, I've installed a different gallery software since the GeekLog integration for Gallery 2 is horrible.
This time, I'm using Media Gallery, which is the same software I'm using on Fenux vs. the Iron Kingdoms. I've got most of the pictures back up now, as well as a few that didn't make it the last time.
I'm also going back and cleaning up old entries and topics so that the site has better focus. I think the idea of keeping a couple sites will let me focus each one on a different set of topics. And on that note, I've migrated some recent entries from my LiveJournal account to the site because they really belonged here to begin with.
I can't help myself sometimes. The idea popped into my head and I just had to do it.
And then I took the bad idea, and made it worse...
Joel on Software was talking about how much of a time saver phone interviews can be because it can weed out half of the people who looked good on paper. I thought the article was interesting from a psychological point of view too though.
From The Phone Screen:
With a phone interview, because you can’t see the person, it’s easier to focus on the quality of what they’re saying rather than other external factors not relevant to their job, like their appearance, or their nervousness. Ever since Malcolm Gladwell wrote Blink, I’ve been terrified of the prospect that we might be judging candidates too quickly based on things which are not relevant to their ability to do their job—their appearance or confidence or height or general nerdy demeanor might make us way more apt to look on everything else that happens during the interview with rose-colored glasses.
The great thing about a phone interview is that it’s much harder to form these kinds of snap judgments; you actually have to listen to what the person is saying and decide if that corresponds to what a smart person might say. This isn’t completely true, of course: you may have prejudices about certain accents or dialects. But at least you are moderately less susceptible to appearance prejudice.
From the Wikipedia:
Cybersex is sometimes colloquially called "cybering". Channels used to initiate cybersex are not necessarily exclusively devoted to that subject, and participants in any Internet chat may suddenly receive a message with any possible variation of the text "Wanna cyber?"
But WHY?
Why would you drop the part of the word that actually gives it meaning? Am I supposed to think that anytime you go to phone someone that you're having phone sex with them?
Why not shorten it to something that still has meaning, like eFuck? (Or if it's an Apple Product, iFuck.) That would make fucking sense.
And who gave them the right to turn an adjective into a verb at their own discretion? Stupid people making up their stupid words.
For the record, this has bugged me for years.
I opened up ArsTechnica a minute ago and came across two articles I had to pass along.
How difficult could it be to find a Murphy Brown clip?
To learn just how difficult it can be to gain access to archival television material, a researcher tries to reconstruct the 1992 debate between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown as it played out on television. He doesn't get very far. Read the article here.
Boy Scouts get MPAA-approved copyright merit badge
The Motion Picture Association of America has partnered with the Los Angeles Boy Scouts to produce a "Respect Copyrights" merit badge. We wish we were making this stuff up. Read the article here.
From this article on The Old New Thing
Help text is not the place to put logic puzzles.
In Windows Vista, when you go to the System control panel, you are shown a number that describes your computer's rating. But are higher numbers better or worse? If I had a choice, would it be better to have a 1 rating or a 5 rating?
In earlier betas of Windows Vista, you had to have a degree in philosophy to figure this out. If you clicked the "Help" button on the System control panel page, you were sent to a page of help text that tried to explain the performance rating. When it got around to explaining what the number means, the text said, paraphrased, "When looking for software to run on this computer, you should choose programs whose rating is less than or equal to the rating of this computer."
So does this mean that bigger ratings are better?
"Well, if a program's rating is small, then the computer's rating needs to be bigger than that, so a program wants its rating to be as small as possible so more computers can run it. If my computer's rating is small, programs will be fighting to get a rating low enough that I can run it. That's a good thing for me, right? No wait, but what if the program I want has a high rating? Then my computer will need a higher rating. If my computer had a low rating, then that wouldn't be less than or equal to the program's rating. No wait, I got it backwards, it's the program that needs to be less than or equal to the computer, not the other way around. If the program's rating needs to be less than or equal to the computer's rating, then that means that the computer's rating needs to be greater than or equal to the program's rating. If my computer rating were higher, than it could run more programs."
"I think."
"Why can't they just say, 'Bigger numbers are better'?"
