I found this fairly hilarious review of the HCSB Bible on Amazon:

In honor of mother’s day, I’d like to share a recent story of tech-love.

Like most mother’s, mine is behind my generation’s tech-curve; but there is a certain power she finds in being significantly ahead of hers. Her most recent technological conquest, Google Reader, has become an excellent chance for me to see what she finds interesting without getting a email with a subject line that reads “FW: Fw: FW: FW: Fw: It’s funny how you…” In fact, she often shares things from my own feeds that I miss or to which I didn’t pay close enough attention.

Not even a week ago I witnessed a moment akin to watching a child pedal a bicycle for the first time without assistance of training wheels or a hand holding firmly to the seat. I had just finished watching a video on a feed we both read, and I shared it to my followers with a comment to the effect of “wow.” Thirty-minutes and four seconds later I get a response from my mother stating: “I almost shared this one myself. It is fascinating to watch!”

Allow me an interlude here for those of you unfamiliar with the online community, or really any community based around information sharing. There’s an odd trend in how, as membership lengthens, there comes a certain joy in being ahead of the consumption curve. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen the game yet!!” or “How could you not have heard about the breakup??” and “You just heard about this now? I listened to them a year ago.” I do this all the time despite often thinking otherwise, and I usually wind up sounding like a royal jackass. I firmly believe that coming off “coolly“- all the while ensuring maximum credit for your diligence-is something of an art. Ralphie said it best when discussing the contemporary arts: “My father worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium, a master.”

So on this Mother’s Day I’d like to point to the Picasso from the macaroni artist, the motocross champion fresh out of training wheels. My mother, a woman who has been a mother for at least as long as I can remember her being a mother at all, comes off as smooth as glass as she slides in the “oh, I to-oh-tally read that before you” bit. She’s a fast learner all right; two months on the RSS job and she’s pulling off moves like a pro.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I welcome you to the cool kids table. Try the Sunny D…it’s pretty boss.

There’s been a lot of news coverage surrounding Osama bin Laden’s death. Even over one day, it’s changed my feelings at a fundamental level. For many years there was a man out there who hated some aspect of the world I occupied, and he fought to take that away. I don’t believe this consumed all parts of him, but it was clearly a belief that he used to motivate himself and those around him. It is amazing how all of his beliefs, all of his ideals, are completely forgotten by the world when faced with the violence he perpetrated through the hands of his servants. I challenge American’s to think of a single ideal that he represented beyond his hatred for mankind.

He’s not alone in this aspect to his nature. Like Hitler, this man believed there was some justification for murder of the ‘unclean’. Something in him twisted aspects of political power, religious fervor, and raw hatred down a course of action that literally rocked the foundations of our collective psyche. Only those who dig in to the depths of Hitler’s story can separate his heinous acts against humanity from any greater ideology (the author makes no insinuation of legitimacy here). And instead of “religious warrior”, the name ‘bin Laden’ will forever associate with the murder of innocent people, the willingness to sacrifice one’s own people, and the unadulterated selfishness of the cowardly.

I don’t cheer his death, and I encourage you to avoid the same. It must be agreed that the universe is certainly better off without him, but perhaps the mistakes and evils seen in his life can inspire others to find alternative, peaceful paths. Certainly, it is an immense tragedy that he is better to the world for having left it than he was for living within it. But it will be far better for mankind if we take the time to mourn the life of Osama bin Laden rather than simply celebrating his death.

This is obviously a very difficult subject, and I encourage you to express your opinions as you feel the need. My last word is to send a deep, heartfelt thank-you to the servicemen and servicewomen of the United States armed forces; they’ve fought this battle in kinetic and psychological battlefields for far to long to send the credit anywhere else.

I was sitting at a bus stop yesterday and a guy with a Droid X asked me how I liked the phone. He was much older and said he was reticent to start, but bought one a few weeks ago because he was impressed with the amount he could do. He commented on how people on the metro stare at their devices the whole trip, and he hasn’t yet figured out how/why. I gave him my guess: the Kindle App.

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Lisa Grossman wrote an article about Fire Ant Rafts in Wired that starts:

In the first serious study of the physics of fire-ant rafts, researchers have described how the insects form floating, waterproof islands.

I’m fascinated by the raw intensity of the first few words, if read properly: “In the first serious study..” Grossman is clearly furious with the previous, bull#### research farces that tried to tackle fireant rafts.

The warning: Don’t play bush-league ball in ant research.

I opened a ticket with @VerizonSupport this morning via their help form:

I experienced significant problems all of last night and this morning. While my router was connected to the internet and some traffic could go out, there was almost no response coming back to the box. So websites would say “connected” and “waiting”, but content would never arrive. I could perform traceroutes and get responses all the way to the endpoint devices, but the content simply wouldn’t come back. I didn’t have Wireshark installed on any of my PCs so I couldn’t check my local network traffic, but it’s definitely a problem with the service.

This was tested with multiple configurations with wireless (phone and PC) and wired (pc) configurations (4 devices total tested). All were working fine recently, but last night and this morning they were not. In addition, it was taking 10-20 minutes for my Verizon FIOS modem to lease an IP address from the WAN.

Please check if there was an outage in my area or what is going on.I wasted my entire night trying to fix the issue and I’m very, very displeased with the quality of the service I am seeing thusfar. I don’t know who to blame right now, but so far FIOS seems to be the only untested piece of the equation. (EDIT: Not true, see below)

Update and Closure:

When I came home last night (Day 2), the problem was still happening. I did a little more testing and swapped some more cables. In my previous testing I hadn’t tested the WAN cable from the company. It turned out that their outbound cable had a minor disconnection in it and packets were getting lost like crazy. Once I put a new cable of mine in there was no issue. I guess Verizon wasn’t [really] to blame since the problem was a cable that had come with the network setup in my new place.

Verizon never got back to me through the form I submitted. I didn’t include my account information, but I would have liked a phone call. I will say that @VerizonSupport was persistent in getting me to fill out a whole different form. I don’t know why there are two, but this new one has social account info which is really fun! I now have to get back to @VerizonSupport and close the loop. Thanks for following up, Verizon!! I’m still on your team.

Today is the last day I get to pack up my stuff. I’m moving to a smaller, and more awesome apartment up north of DC. Unfortunately, I’m the world’s worst packer. I take, literally, days of puttering around and multiple “last-minute” deadlines to get housework done.

One of my other problems is that, as I put things away, I like to use them for something before they go in the box. It’s like saying goodbye with one last hurrah. Well, today I have to pack the keyboard, so when I woke up I went straight to it and got a little creative. As I say in the comments, it’s called The Irish Run because it’s “an odd pairing of electronica, irish melody, and some sort of weird pacific guitar. Need better voices.”  I think the Irish influence is probably a Sunday morning thing. This style is the closest I’ve gotten to church in a while unless you count that wacky Moog thing I’ve been working on (Play “Metal Church” clip).

The drum rhythms were way easier this time because I actually bought a couple pairs of drumsticks, and it turns out that the keyboard pads respond much better to those than they do fingers. The only problem is the significant delay when playing with these drum pads. I had to listen about a half-beat behind and play it in. It’s unfortunate, but luckily the digital notes are easy to manipulate and move back.  One concern is that there are some really weird artifacts in the audio stream. I suspect the drum voices aren’t playing well with the others.

Anyways, best of luck on your housework as I get to work on mine. See you in Maryland, the state of ranks skewed by proximity to DC.

<Note, I’m still making modifications, but here’s my draft so far. I’ve got to get to work!>

Do you often find yourself in Twitter debates regarding the effectiveness of public sector labor over the private sector? This always seems to happen to me.

The question arose from a recent article in USA Today:

Wisconsin is one of 41 states where public employees earn higher average pay and benefits than private workers in the same state, a USA TODAY analysis finds. Still, the compensation of Wisconsin’s government workers ranks below the national average for non-federal public employees and has increased only slightly since 2000. …

… The analysis included full and part-time workers and did not adjust for specific jobs, age, education or experience. In an earlier job-to-job comparison, USA TODAY found that state and local government workers make about the same salary as those in the private sector but get more generous benefits. …

You readers out there are very lucky to have me on your team; that second paragraph was buried halfway through the article. It’s funny, because it shows the absurdity of the metric. When you talk about government employees, even at state levels, you’re dealing with people in typically more  higher-level or managerial positions and higher education rates. The fact, for example, that all teachers in Wisconsin require rigorous certification beyond their Bachelor’s degree. If you average all the McDonald’s employees and receptionists of the world against people who are charged with classrooms full of kids, managing bus fleets, writing/reviewing policy, and carrying a badge/gun you should begin to notice a trend on the requirements that are expected.

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For those of you who haven’t heard, the Atrix 4G just came out and it’s theoretically revolutionizing the world of mobile computing.

The new Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone promises to “redefine the line between a phone and a laptop.” Motorola appears to be setting its sights on the smartphone, tablet, and netbook markets all at once as the Atrix 4G combines the features of all there products into one device.

I believe this WOULD in fact revolutionize the world, if AT&T realized how this technology is supposed to work. The problem is that with the AT&T bandwidth caps in place, there’s just no way this device is going to be useful and affordable. It’s way too much for just mobile data, and the bandwidth caps prevent any serious user from switching to this device exclusively. Here’s the pertinent excerpt from their website:

Just plug the ATRIX 4G into the MOTOROLA LAPDOCK™ for MOTOROLA ATRIX 4G to unleash a connected experience via the built-in webtop application.

Wait for it:

‡Requires 2-year voice plan & $45/mo. DataPro 4GB Personal plan, Card valid for 120 days wherever major credit cards accepted. May be used to pay wireless bill…MOTOROLA LAPDOCK sold separately. Full Firefox® browser use with AT&T Mobile Broadband requires DataPro 4GB Personal plan

As usual, AT&T has offered new technology at a foolishly prohibitive cost to the end user. Their hope? They want you to think that this is the new norm; they want you to think that spending $45 a month for 4GB of data per month is acceptable. $10.12 per gigabyte!!! Compared to the 5 cents per gigabyte provided at the host company level. Are you telling me it costs AT&T 200x the cost of a data center to provide connectivity to their end users?? Idiocy, especially since the AT&T networks aren’t worth the packets they don’t mind letting fall into the void.

Do yourself a favor, talk to Verizon or Sprint or any other carrier that offers unlimited bandwidth before you start barking up this tired old tree. What a pitiful excuse for a communications company. I hate to be so negative, but as an ex-AT&T customer I’ve been there too long and for too much money.

It’s not JUST AT&T, any company that puts additional tethering costs on restrictive bandwidth cap is stupid. It’s not going to increase the load on your network unless you figure that you’re selling bandwidth to people that they just aren’t going to use. If that’s the case, your offers are almost maliciously misleading.  Either it’s a tethering cost OR it’s a bandwidth cap, take your pick. And I don’t buy the “bandwidth” vs. “throughput” argument for one moment, not with iPhones streaming Netflix as it is.

A great quote I overheard in training today, I had to write it down:

“Man, what was the deal with that IPV6 stuff, is there an update on that?”

“IPV6? No, they said a date, but nobody did it… Yeah, it was like everything was supposed to have its own IP: toasters, dishwashers…. Matter of fact, I heard that over in China, they got a IP for everything.” (‘a’ left in for effect)

Man, that’s the truth if I ever heard it. You can’t swing a dead cat in China without hitting a 128-bit network address for packet switched networks.