Car Thief Bait

I love this stuff... Just wait until you hear this.

On Obscure Store [typepad.com], I saw a link to an article about Minneapolis police [startribune.com] who are using cars as bait to catch car thieves. They park the car somewhere, and wait for someone to steal it. The car has a GPS and a hidden camera in it, allowing the police to find the thief after the car has been stolen. According to the article:

"The conviction rate is nearly 100 percent -- because it's tough to beat a case with your face on tape, and often your voice, as you steal a car, authorities say"

Of course, I'm skeptical about the methods they are using (for instance, if the police left the keys dangling from the ignition, they wouldn't be catching the types of criminals they should be going after), but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sharks

I had mentioned previously that I have an irrational fear of sharks. It's something that causes me to get an unbelievable amount of ribbing from my friends:

• "Hey, do you want to go to the Indians game on Friday, or are you afraid there might be sharks in the stadium?"


• (at dinner) "Hey, what's that behind you? IT'S A SHARK! AND IT'S DISGUISED AS AN AMWAY SALESMAN! RUN!"

Anyway, I love how Amazon has picked up on this too. It's like every time I go to their webpage to search for something, it taunts me with its recommendations (see far right of image):



Tomorrow, my recommendations will probably include "Avoiding Getting Eaten by Sharks for Dummies".

Remaindered

I hope you all had a great weekend. Maybe I'll write more about mine later this week. But anyway, there are a bunch of links that I want to post, so that I'll be able to find them again when I want to:

• Heather Armstrong [dooce.com] wrote an amazing post to commemorate her wedding anniversary. Here's one of the funnier parts of the post:

  "When I was a 19-year-old sophomore in college my roommates and I lived in an apartment complex we called The Retirement Community. The average age of the other college students who lived there was 28, and none of them were married or actively dating."



• On dangerousmeta! [dangerousmeta.com], a link was posted to one (lone and pessimistic) economist's predictions [marketwatch.com] of a recession next year, caused by the bursting of the housing bubble. Quote:

  "'This is the biggest housing slump in the last four or five decades: every housing indicator is in free fall, including now housing prices...' And the impact of the bursting of the bubble will affect every household in America, not just the few people who owned significant shares in technology companies during the dot-com boom... Prices are falling even in the Midwest, which never experienced a bubble, 'a scary signal' of how much pain the drop in household wealth could cause."



• Oil Output Set to Peak [reuters.com]. Basically the gist can be summed up in a short quote:

  "Oil production looks set to peak in the mid-to-late 2020s, but the decline will be offset as high fuel costs accelerate the quest for other energy sources, notably natural gas, UBS said in a study published on Wednesday... 'Exactly when it will occur is very difficult to estimate ... However, the fact that consumption is outstripping new discoveries by more than 400 percent suggests that further increases in global reserves may be nearing an end.'"

  The thing that amazes me is that we probably won't do anything about it until it becomes a crisis, because we haven't learned how vulnerable our dependence on foreign oil makes us. And even though a lot of people have shown they are willing to pay a premium to buy hybrid cars, I'll bet that we won't see a serious diversification in our transportation energy supply in the next 20 years (although I'd love to be proven wrong).

Sandisk Sansa

A few months back, I talked about how I managed to drop my mp3 player n+1 times, and now some of the buttons don't work. So, I started looking for a replacement, but couldn't decide because none of the ones available had all of the features I was looking for.

Sandisk just announced [itnews.com.au] that their Sansa e200 series (which is Flash memory-based) now has an 8GB version [sandisk.com] in their lineup. Despite the fact that it doesn't have a jogwheel for fast-forwarding and rewinding, it looked like an attractive option. I like the idea of buying something that doesn't have a hard drive in it, but I typically use about 10GB on my current player, so getting a 4GB iPod nano just wouldn't cut it.

So, I started looking through the reviews. One thing that I really don't like about the iPod is that you have to use iTunes, and the way that all of the filenames are changed to needlessly obfuscated ones. But according to this review [engadget.com], you can just drag and drop music files onto the e200 series players without using something like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

I also found this review [thetechlounge.com], which has a whole bunch of screenshots of the e200 series during use.

So, I was all set to buy one of them when they came out. But then I read the reviews on Amazon, which included this review [amazon.com] which said:

"It takes 1 minute to advance 14 minutes into a recorded program. It takes over 4 minutes to scroll through an hour long program."

Unfortuantely, if true, that is a total dealbreaker. I find myself seeking through hour-length mp3's all of the time. With my current player, I can easily do that without looking at the player (which allows me to seek while driving). But it sounds like this one is insanely slow at fast-forwarding and rewinding. I will have to look for more reviews on this subject.

A few months ago, I also mentioned that I was looking for a wireless bridge. I did end up buying the Buffalo wireless bridge that I talked about in that post. But I haven't used it enough to really write a review. So, that is still on the to do list.

A Tale of Two Actors

Adam recently quoted [livejournal.com] someone else talking about how Hollywood's treatment of Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise has been markedly different. The original quote [mererhetoric.com] is:

"Tom Cruise says that Ritalin isn't good for kids and Paramount breaks off a 14 year relationship. But Mel Gibson makes a movie fixating on the single moment in one of the four Gospels that damns all Jews for all generations, declines to distance himself his dad's Holocaust denying lunacy, and is all around a raging anti-Semite - and waves of industry flack rush to protect him."

I hate to sound cynical, but it just comes down to having the right publicist.

The deal is that Tom Cruise had a great publicist in Pat Kingsley [slate.com] a few years ago, which basically guaranteed him great press. But then he lost his mind and fired Kingsley and hired his sister (Lee Anne DeVette) to be his publicist. I'm guessing that her prime qualification was her status as a scientologist.

Since then, all we have heard have been crappy things about Cruise. We're hearing about is how he's jumping up and down on Oprah's couch [abcnews.com], saying there is no such thing as post-partum depression, criticizing Brooke Shields [hollywood.com], and telling everyone they're not allowed to even look at his baby [dailymail.co.uk]. And suddenly, it's a dissapointment that Mission: Impossible III "only" earned 48 million during its opening weekend [ctv.ca]. 48 million! In one weekend! Think how much money that is. I don't care how much the movie cost to produce -- how many of this year's movies earned that much in their opening weekends? It has been an avalanche of bad press, representative of a publicist who is way out of her league.

Mel Gibson, on the other hand, had the good sense to hang on to a good publicist, and probably brought in a special crisis unit (of publicists) to handle his latest debacle. They're planting "news" stories in every major media source, and suddenly, he doesn't sound so bad. Instead of painting him out to be some drunken, racist bastard, the articles are all about how contrite he is [cnn.com], and how he is seeking rehab [abcnews.com].

WordPress

Sometime in the near future, if you check this weblog and it's not there, it doesn't mean I have stopped weblogging.

Currently, I am using Blogger to handle all of my weblog posting. Blogger has a bunch of really nice and really horrible features. But it was a huge improvement over the way I used to do things (which was manually editing all pages).

I am probably going to be switching over to WordPress in the near future. I'm not saying that I'm going to be doing it this weekend, but it will probably be unannounced. It's going to depend on when I have time to do it. Hopefully, I'll be able to set it up to use the same URL (but will lead to some downtime).

One of the things driving me to convert is the frequent downtime of the Blogger service. About once a week, I try to post, and find that the service is down and inaccessible. It's really aggravating.

But anyway, that is the story.

Computer Recommendations for Grad School

One of my friends, who is about to enter graduate school in an engineering discipline, asked me whether I would buy a laptop or a desktop if I were in his position. And I really didn't know what to tell him, because things were so much different when I was starting grad school.

For instance, it has been kind of important for me to have two monitors on my primary work computer. It is just so much easier to use things like Microsoft Visual Studio, etc. when you have two monitors. And when I was starting grad school, it just wasn't possible to get a laptop that allowed you to stretch your desktop across two monitors. Of course, that is totally different now, so that restriction no longer exists.

I also tend to do a lot of number crunching, whether it is with dynamic simulations or Matlab. So, raw speed was important for me, because the speed of the computer could determine whether it takes 3 days or a week to finish an analysis or a simulation. Unfortunately, the fastest laptops are still pretty slow, compared to desktops (especially when you compare a desktop that costs the same amount). And clock speed continues to be a horrible indicator of laptop performance. Fortunately, a lot of institutions and labs have computer clusters available for heavy number crunching (again, something that wasn't available to me when I was starting grad school).

Finally, there is the cost issue. When I first started, laptops weren't as common, and were much more expensive. Nowadays, you can get a decent (albeit heavy) laptop for well under $1000.

A number of people have tried to convince me that portability is really important. But I guess the value of portability is up to the user. My observations of other people make me believe that most don't require portability, and their laptops don't leave their workspaces. The idea of being able to go to a coffee shop or a picnic table outside and do work is nice, but I have never personally done that myself, and haven't seen many other people do that, either.

So, for me, the question comes down to how much number crunching are you expecting to do, and whether you have the resources to do number crunching elsewhere. My preference was to use a desktop computer, but the computing landscape looks dramatically different today. Laptops are cheaper and far more capable. And almost everyone else is buying laptops, so there is probably a reason why.

Dog Bowling

One of my friends recently pointed Dog Bowling out to me. When I heard the term "Dog Bowling", I immediately conjured up this horrible image in my mind. Like, what kind of sick bastards would torture their dogs by throwing them into some bowing pins?

But the reality is actually amusing, and not abusive at all:



There are a whole bunch of videos on YouTube, showing various people going Dog Bowling. Samson, in the above screenshot, is featured in this video.

Basically, what happens is a dog is convinced to run into a bunch of plastic bowling pins by following the dot of a laser pointer down the "lane". It probably wouldn't be as fun to watch if the dogs weren't so cute.

By the way, I recently had the privilege of seeing the pinsetting machines at a bowling alley up close. One of the people who works there told me that the bowling pins are rotated out of the machines and stacked so that they can "rest" for a little while before being rotated back into the machines. If the pins are not rotated out, they will start cracking a lot earlier. I googled for more information on this topic, but came up with nothing. If anyone has any information about this phenomenon, please let me know.

PhDs and Timelines

In his weblog, Eldan recently implied [eldan.co.uk] that one of the things adding to his level of stress was people repeatedly asking him when he was going to be finished with his PhD.

I got a disproportionate (and some would say sadistic) amount of amusement from reading that. People who ask you when you are going to be finished with your degree are invariably people who have never pursued a graduate degree before.

I don't know how far along Eldan is, but attaining a PhD is such a long process. You first have to spend a lot of time carving out a niche of research that is your own -- an area that people haven't looked at before. And you have to make sure not to fall into the trap of defining a problem that can't be investigated fully in a reasonable amount of time.

Then, because you're trying to do something that no one else has ever done before, you have to try a bunch of things that inevitably don't work out, before you eventually find something that does. But before you find the thing that does work, you're in this deep, deep trough. You make attempt after attempt that fails, and you start to think that you're never actually going to find the solution to your problem.

And that's exactly when people start asking you when you'll be finished with your degree. Non-scientists and people outside research don't know that they are metaphorically kicking you in the balls when you're down. One of the things that I've always loved about PhD Comics [phdcomics.com] is the way they nail this subject right on the head.

Weird places

Two weeks ago, I started talking about weird places I have been, and then I followed it up last week with another weird place. Well, I remembered another one.

A few years ago, I spent a night in Europe sleeping in a fire escape.

Heimlich and I were trying to visit Vienna, but we were having problems finding a hotel or a hostel that wasn't completely booked already. And to complicate problems, there was a chance that the trains were not going to be running due to a strike on the day that we wanted to travel there. The strike did occur, so we arrived in Vienna on Saturday, instead of Friday (and we knew in advance that it would be much easier to find a room on a Friday).

When we arrived, we immediately started calling around to hostels in the area, to see if they had anything available. One of the hostels said that they had one room left, but it was... unusual. The conversation was occurring in German, so I didn't understand all of it, but my ears pricked up at certain words I wasn't expecting to hear in a room reservation conversation. The hostel convinced us to come and see the room they had left before deciding.

So, we trekked out there. When we arrived, they told us how to get to the room. We wandered up there, and when we found the right room number, there was a gigantic sign on the door, explaining that it was a fire escape.



They offered half off the cost of one of their other rooms (remember, this is a hostel, so rooms don't cost that much in the first place), and we took it, not having many other options. The door, of course, didn't have a lock, and the room was only mildly warmer than it was outside (meaning cold, being in November). It was much more humorous in retrospect... ;)

Filenames and File Searches

Someone recently said to me: "I've never had as many conversations about file names with anyone else..."

And that's funny, because I'm /that guy/. I'm the guy who creates ludicrously long filenames to preserve as much metadata as possible, in the hopes that it'll help me find what I need later.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that it doesn't help that much. I still probably have as many problems finding the right file as anyone else. The whole problem being that I don't think that we think in terms of metadata.

When you read through a book, you can probably flip back through and find a particular passage that was memorable. And it is relatively easy to do that, because as you flip through the pages, you catch little glimpses as they go by, which give you clues as to when you're getting close.

When I'm looking for something in a file that I've saved, what I need is to be able to flip through and get glimpses of the contents. Currently, the model in computers is to have desktop search tools. But that's not nearly as useful. Partly because you have to know what to search for -- but a lot of times, I only know what it is that I'm looking for when I see it.

Reading List

I haven't talked recently about what I have been reading, because I have kind of hit a string of mediocre books. The last one that I really got excited about was Colin Powell's biography [amazon.com]. I still feel that was the best book I have read this summer. And it's amazing how it was written 10 years ago, but still has so much relevance to current world events.

The current one I am reading is Miss Wyoming [amazon.com], which was written by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Coupland (who also wrote Generation X and Microserfs). Like many of his other books, Miss Wyoming features a really screwed up plot that is chock full of irony and hilarious twists. Whenever I read one of his books, I *never* am able to predict where it is going to go next. His plotlines are crazy.

Miss Wyoming has been pretty enjoyable. But I have really been looking forward to starting the book that I currently have on deck: The Chariot Makers [amazon.com], which is about Formula 1 racing.

It is a book written by Steve Matchett, who is now a Formula 1 commentator (one of the few that is actually good at commentating, I might add). But he used to be one of the mechanics for the Benneton team back when Michael Schumacher won a World Championship with them (his first two of seven).

I love watching Formula 1 because of the constant technological advances, the astounding complexity of the cars, and the crazy strategies that are engineered to win. So, I am really looking forward to reading that one.

F4 Phantom vs. Concrete

On dangerousmeta [dangerousmeta.com], I saw a link to an incredible video.



Apparently, it is a video of a test designed to determine if a concrete wall designed to withstand a nuclear blast will be able to withstand a jet aircraft hitting it. The airplane is an F4 Phantom [wikipedia.org], and in the collision, the jet just disappears.

Remaindered

Recently, I saw two different links that I thought were pretty interesting:

• On Kottke.org [kottke.org], I saw a link to an article that explains the rules of the game of Cricket from the point of view of an American [cricinfo.com] (or more importantly, explained in a way that an American could understand).
  
  I found the article interesting, because before reading it, I never understood the game at all. All I had heard was that the game takes multiple days to finish, and that a bat with a flat face is used. And every time I had seen the rules written out, my brain has exploded instantly from the complexity.


• On digg [digg.com], I saw a link to a list of the highest rated Wikipedia articles [grupthink.com]. They are hilarious. The list includes:
  
  
  
  • List of English words containing Q not followed by U
  
  
  • Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116
  
  
  • List of Cognitive Biases
  
  
  • List of people whose first name is not commonly known
  
  
  • List of strange units of measurement
  
  
  • Gay Bomb
  
  
  • List of songs featuring cowbells ("I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell!")

Weird Places

Last week, I wrote an entry about a weird place I had been (after being inspired by Andy's similar post).

Ok, here's another weird place I have been: the CIA Headquarters Building (both the old and the new one).

The entire experience was a very surreal. I saw so many things that day, that it took me a while to really process it all. Perhaps the most moving was the Memorial Wall [cia.gov], where intelligence officers killed in the line of duty are honored with a star, along with an entry in the Book of Honor that accompanies it. The officers who were killed in actions that are still classified only have a star with a blank space in the Book of Honor -- their names are entered next to their star only after their actions are declassified. It was amazing to see how many names are still unfilled, given how long ago those officers died.

A number of amusing things occurred during my visit. For instance, one hallway that we walked down had a circular pedastal in it. And on the pedastal sat a mass of tanks and hoses rising about 6 feet high. The hoses and tanks were very shiny, and there was no evidence of any damage at all. Without any context, it was difficult to tell what it was. So, someone asked, and we were told that it was a Scud missle rocket engine that some analyst had lying around their office.

Sadly, I wasn't able to get a glimpse of the famed Kryptos sculpture [wikipedia.org] while I was there.

Freakonomics Blog

Over on Gulfstream [beebo.org], I saw a link to a post [freakonomics.com] on the weblog of the authors of the Freakonomics book [amazon.com].

A few aquaintances who have told me they have read the book have made me interested in reading it. The subject material (economics explaining everyday mysteries) seems interesting at least.

Anyway, the post linked to above asks the question: why is it that adults now deliver newspapers? Maybe the problem is that I'm not old enough to remember when kids delivered newspapers, but I've never actually seen kids deliver my newspaper before. That leads me to wonder whether there is some sort of mass-amnesia going on -- you know, the way that people tend to romanticize the past... For as long as I can remember, I have always seen the paper delivered by someone in a car.

Ok, assuming that kids delivering newspapers was more prevelant in the past, I have to think that more and more people are getting their news from other sources. Despite the fact that I love being able to sit down at a table on a Sunday afternoon and read the entire New York Times, I seldom ever have time to do that anymore -- which is why I don't subscribe. Nowadays, I get my news almost entirely off the internet.

I would imagine (although I have no data to back up my hunch) that due to the distance in between houses that actually receive a paper in the morning, it would be much more difficult these days for a child on a bicycle to cover the necessary distance while carrying enough papers.

New York Guggenheim

The people over at Gothamist [gothamist.com] created a very surreal panorama from inside the Guggenheim museum in uptown Manhattan:



That's amazing. The photographer included some tidbits about how he created it in the comments of the post on Flickr [flickr.com]. However, that really doesn't satisfy my curiosity.

It is interesting for me to see what the building looks like without the enormous floor to ceiling mirror installation (called Eye of the Storm by Daniel Buren [artnet.com]).

Debian Etch

About two weeks ago, I mentioned that I went ahead and installed Debian Testing (Etch).

I had been using Debian Stable (Sarge). Sarge was working out fine for me, but I wanted to get the features that were in the newer versions of the applications I was using. I could have picked and chosen applications from Etch to install, but in the end, it was so many applications that I tried to do a "dist-upgrade", which mostly worked, but left tons of crap littered around my hard drive. So, I wiped it and installed from scratch (but saved the /home partition, which saved me a lot of time).

I have a writeup of the install process [fluggart.com] posted. It includes instructions for recompiling the kernel "the Debian way", and compiling an NDIS wrapper to get my Wifi card working.

With each new version, the install process gets cleaner and cleaner (and more easy to understand for new linux users). The one gripe I do have is that the sound card isn't configured by default when you install X.org. It seems like it would have been easy to configure that to work right out of the box, but you have to manually download the correct packages and configure the soundcard to get sound to work.

I'm glad that I upgraded, though. X.org has nicer visuals, and seems to run a little quicker. The newer versions of the applications have more features that I have wanted (uploading to Flickr from digiKam, Thunderbird has an inline spell-checker, etc). And I have yet to run into any bugs, so the distribution seems relatively mature so far.

My New Neighbors Are Weird

Check out this article [yahoo.com] that I ran across recently:

"WESTLAKE, Ohio - A bar waitress checking to see if a woman was legally old enough to drink was handed her own stolen driver's license, which was reported missing weeks earlier, police said."

And apparently, the person trying to use the stolen license lives in Lakewood, which is where my new house is. My neighbors are weird. That is an unbelievable story.

It's stories like this that remind me why I'm not a criminal. I'm sure that if I tried to pull something like that, my luck would be so bad that I would run into the person who owns the stolen license I was trying to use.

Walk and Roll Cleveland

One of my friends recently told me about Walk and Roll Cleveland [walkandrollcleveland.com]. Apparently, on the next two Sundays, they are going to close down MLK Drive (the cultural gardens section) for so that people can bicycle, rollerblade, etc and enjoy that section of town (without having to dodge traffic).

For those of you not familiar with the Cleveland area, that section of MLK Drive is a few mile stretch which connects the University Circle area (where Case Western Reserve Univesity [case.edu] is located) with Lake Erie. There is a bicycle path that runs along the roadway, as well as a lot of cultural gardens, picnic areas, tennis courts, etc.

MLK Drive is only a two-lane road in that section, due to all of the beautiful stone bridges [flickr.com] that span over it (which are only wide enough to allow for two lanes to pass underneath them). I have heard that years ago, MLK Drive used to be four lanes in between the bridges (necking down to two lanes under the bridges), which must have resulted in constant battling among traffic during rush hour.

After they redrew the lines so that it was a two-lane road for the entire length, they also reduced the speed limit to 25mph. I have heard from people who commuted along that road that people frequently illegally passed anyone driving that slow. Currently, the speed limit is 35mph along the entire length.

Years ago, I remember that there used to be a pack of feral dogs that used to live among the woods lining the road. So, when I first moved to Cleveland, every time I drove down that road, I would play the Spot the Feral Dogs game.

SiriusRecorder, part 2

On Monday, I wrote a review of SiriusRecorder. After using it for a few more days, I have another thing to say about it.

I mentioned that I had problems with it failing to record when I thought I had scheduled it to. I think I have figured out a workaround for that problem. By default, when you try to set SiriusRecorder to record audio at some point in the future, it defaults to recording in 1-hour chunks. You can, of course, record in larger or smaller chunks. But by default, it is set up to record in 1-hour blocks.

So, if you want to record from 2PM to 4PM, it will try to record from 14:00 to 15:00, and then set up another block to record from 15:00 to 16:00. For the first few days that I used it, I used the default settings. But I think that the software needs some time to write all of the data out to disk. So, instead, I would change the first block to record from 14:00 to 14:59. That allows the software 1 minute to dump the buffer, and has fixed the failed recording problems (although it'll miss recording the last minute of every hour you have set up like that). I think that the defaults should be changed so that people won't fall into the same pitfall that I had (although I have only run this software on one computer, so I don't know if the problem is caused by my soundcard or hard disk).

In reaction to my post on Monday, Barry [cwru.edu] sought to inform me of the proposed PERFORM Act, which seeks to limit the way that audio can be recorded from radio (satellite or otherwise). He also mentioned how you can contact your congressperson to urge them to oppose the bill.

I can't tell you how many times I have written to my congresspeople. A lot of times, I haven't received a response. But when I do receive a response, it is almost always a form letter. Not that I really expect them to take time out of their schedules to meaningfully respond to every crackpot that writes to them... But at the same time, I can't help but be discouraged by the system. I feel as though ordinary citizens have no hope to influence lawmakers, and that the big wallets of corporations ensure their victories.

I am not interested in sharing the recordings that I am making from satellite radio broadcasts. I am interested in time-shifting the broadcasts, because I have no hope of listening to them in real-time. Furthermore, because it is talk-radio that I am interested in, it's not like I can just buy a CD or DVD and hear the broadcasts that I missed. You either hear the broadcast, or you don't. And I'm already paying for the privilege of receiving satellite radio. So, the recording industry is not losing any money by allowing me to record the audio (and indeed, there isn't even anything more I could buy). However, customers like me seem destined to be treated like criminals and legislated like crazy, even though it is analogous to the cassette tape recordings of terrestrial radio people have been making for decades.

Weird Places I've Been

A few days ago, Andy [livejournal.com] wrote about some weird places he has been. That was a fascinating entry to read. And I sought to write a similar entry, but most of the places I have been cannot match up (in terms of weirdness, that is).

The only memory I have that could possibly be in the same league was during my first visit to Seattle (which was sometime in the 90's). After making the obligatory visit to The Space Needle [wikipedia.org], I took the monorail to Westlake Center. And upon exiting the mall to the street, we saw a ton of police pull up and start shooing people away from the area.

It turns out [historylink.org] that some crackpot had driven his pickup truck into the pedestrian zone, slashed the tires, and then ran away. And in the back of the pickup truck was a metal sculpture of a human heart, and the word BOMB had been written on the front bumper. The police wanted to clear everyone out in case it was a bomb. And then (from several blocks away), we were able to watch as the police used a robot to take a peek inside (before determining that it was not a bomb).

So, I guess this story is more of a weird situation than a weird place. This might become a multi-part series, as I have remembered some other interesting places I've seen.