34% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

From the digg comments on a page which asks "Is China the Next Japan?":

theinept - The difference is that Japan gave us Sony and China gives us Sorny.

A BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. A BLAH BLAH... BLAH BLAH!!!

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH

Blah blah????

Nobody had really understood him.

Against the backdrop of the sun's last moment he sat, overlooking the endless ocean. The soft flicker of the fire, originally birthed from drunken boredom, now warmed the close group of friends.

He dug his feet deeper in the sand. The sand barely covered his ankles. He reached over and scooped up some sand and sprinkled it over his legs. The cool warmth of the sand brought relief.

The beer, which once unleashed feelings of brazen raw joy, ushered over the group a warm feeling of quiet contemplation.

His mind raced with questions. He had long since quashed his self-doubts, and the self-esteem issues that had long dogged him were long behind him. He didn’t bother asking the big philosophical questions anymore - too many sleepless nights had taught him better. Instead, the minutia of life … the little battles of everyday replayed in his mind.

There she sat, next to him. They both watched the embers from the fire carry into the azure night sky laughters of the day.

His mind raced back into the present. He looked over at her. Like a camera, his mind captured her profile at that moment. Like a child capturing a firefly in a glass cup, the longer he stared at her features, the long he held that sense of perfection. A sudden gust played with her hair. She carefully tucked her hair behind her left ear and huddled closer to the fire. She then noticed his admiring gaze and smiled back at him.

Their hands reached out to each other. He pulled her closer. She rested her head on his shoulder and pulled his hand into her lap.

There they sat, as one, silently enshrining the memories of that day eternally.

I got a new gmail interface, but it always crashes in Firefox when i try to leave. Firefox reports that the js****.dll (I forget what it is) to blame.

Is anybody else having these problems?

So I was in the elevator with a neighbor with a bike. For some reason, I started talking about the time I was riding and almost got leveled by some idiotic Californian driver. I'm not sure why I did this - as if this person needed more insecurities about riding around California on a bicycle.

So I send an anonymous "sorry" to that person through this Tabulas - I should have shown more tact. Hopefully the person thought I was an idiot and ignored what I said.

You really couldn't make up stories like this.

I didn't realize daylight savings came into effect Sunday morning. I've been literally living my life one hour ahead of everybody until tonight. Today, I realized my wristwatch had a different time than the computer, so I set it to the correct time. This had happened a few times before (strong magnets throw off my wristwatch), so I thought nothing of it.

When I came home, I noticed that my stove and microwave clock were different than my wristwatch and my cell phone. I thought it was really odd, but still no connection. I figured I screwed with them in my sleep, so I reset them.

I came online and remarked to my friend about the oddness of my clocks, and then I was told that daylight savings had happened over the weekend.

Wow. I mean, really. WOW.

Because I've been working late at night for my job, I had been coming in (or so I thought) ***really*** late. Nope. I was actually coming in moderately late.

You know what's really sad? I had just discussed the intricacies of daylight savings the other day - in fact, I had Wikipedia-ed a list of locations where daylight savings is observed.

I mean, WOW.

Today for lunch: Mexican Fiesta California burrito.

Today for dinner: In'n'Out cheeseburger.

Currently my heart and my stomach are both being very grouchy.

Stupid me. And I did so well to eat healthy over the past few weeks... sigh.

I've been listening to Jimmy Eat World's latest album: Chase This Light and it's been growing on me. Like other Jimmy Eat World songs, the lyrics really stand out, especially the track "Big Casino" (which I can totally relate to):

Before this world starts up again
It's me and night
We wait for the sun
The kids and drunks head back inside

Well there's lots of smart ideas
In books I never read
When the girls come talk to me
I wish to hell I had

Get up, get up
Turn my ignition
Get up, get up
Fight off the system
I play my little part in something big

I'll accept with poise, with grace
When they draw my name from the lottery
And they'll say all the salt in the world couldn't melt that ice
I'm the one who gets away
I'm a New Jersey success story
And they'll say: "Lord give me the chance to shake that hand"
They'll say...

Back when I was younger
I was someone you'd have liked
Got an old guitar I've had for years, I'd let you buy
And I'll tell you something else
That you ain't dying enough to know
There's still some living left when your prime comes and goes

Get up, get up
Dance on the ceiling
Get up, get up
Boy you must be dreaming
Rock on young savior
Don't give up your hopes

I have one last wish
And it's from my heart
Just let me down
Just let me down easy

Like a lot of their other songs (A Praise Chorus), this song seems to talk about a protagonist who is floating through life, daydreaming of the day when success falls into his lap. Of course, by the end of the song, the protagonist realizes that the dream's not happening... In an odd way, the song is pretty inspirational. We can't wait for things to fall into our laps - we gotta work for them.

How would you define your life in one sentence so far?

Mine would be something like: "Tried desperately to manifest ideas into something that somebody else could understand."

Sometimes I have these elaborate images and scenes in my mind - like when you have a dream, and you want to describe it's beauty to somebody.

Sometimes the urge to take an idea and try to share it is so great I can't sleep until I try to share it. A few nights ago, I was falling asleep to "Firefight" (on Jimmy Eat World's "Chasing the Light") when this little scene played in my head. I woke up immediately to try to capture that scene.

That was the lame-ass story I wrote a few days ago.

Sometimes these images are beautiful and elegant ideas - many of my web projects were an attempt to realize an idea into a digital form. This explains why I've always worked by myself on a project; it's so hard to communicate the way I want things to be, and to sully the project by having somebody else add their input was unbearable. This is also why I rarely have an interest in commercializing my projects - they don't exist for that reason.

I read a really interesting theory on art:

"I've long held a little theory (unpopular amongst my friends) that great artists have only one story to tell and once they've told the perfect version of that story they are doomed. Nothing they do from that point on will ever be as good, their story has been told. Some artists escape by fashioning alternate versions of their story, never actually telling it perfectly, always leaving a bit of mystery in the center, always working their way around and around the one truth they know, but maybe these artists are doomed too as they will always fall short..."

Not to say I'm an artist (that'd be an affront to the real ones!), but I can definitely see this line of thought and how it applies to me. At the end of the day, I really am interested in breaking down communication barriers between people. I truly believe that the goal of our generation is break down the barriers of communication and to offer free knowledge to everybody.

Of course, this is a tall order - it'll never be achieved. This I know. I'll continue to create imperfect versions of the idea (see every one of my side projects) in my pursuit of my one story.

You may now call me ... POSEIDON!

Growing up in North Carolina, I'm really used to live things being around me all the time. Feeling that urge to be living with some living things in a downtown loft, I figured a good first step might be some houseplants. I bought some Japanese Peace Lillies two weeks ago... but somehow it wasn't enough.

So yesterday I got a decent deal on an 60 gallon aquarium set-up from a local guy off of Craigslist (who helped me deliver it too, since it wouldn't fit in my car ... thanks, Dan!) and set-it up last night:

It came with the gravel and filtration set and some ornaments:

I know you're supposed to cycle the water, but when I woke up this morning, there were tons of snails all over the sides! Not to mention that the ornaments were covered with algae... I did a chemical test and the levels seemed safe enough to get a few fish. So today, I got:

• 1 Betta fish (who seems very listless - if you want to see why, go to your local PetCo and see how they're packaged)
• 10 Danios
• 4 Black Lyretail Mollies (one of them which was super sickly from the store, but he joined his other 3 friends and it seems to be doing alright now)
• 4 Sunset Platys (one which I don't think will make the night - it was looking really listless at the store, too)
• 3 Bamboo shrimp

I've had a lot of fun just watching them all day. After I get back from NC at the end of November, I'll see how these little guys are doing, and fi they'd be willing to pick up a few more neighbors.

Part of the new tank: (bought some aquatic plants, moved some stuff around to create more nooks and crannies)

A few more things I want to do tomorrow:

Get a few more aquatic plants, and a few marble pieces - in case any of the fish start breeding (the platys and mollies bear their young live), I want to create a small area with lots of larger marble pieces that'll be safe for the fish fry.

Ok, so after ravaging my loft installing fish tank #2 (more on that later), I became a whirling dervish of cleaning. So now my area looks like:

Some things to note:

• My primary work machine is my tablet PC (the flat-screen monitor is attached to my Apple G4, out of frame)
• I can roll from my workstation to my refrigerator (which I do quite often... sadly)
• My first pet, the Roomba (shown by the refrigerator) who happily gobbles up all the dust in my loft!

I hope I wake up tomorrow and most of my fish are still alive.

Quick note for myself, before I forget: finished off my aquarium with 4 corys, +2 Sunset Platys, +2 Black Lyre Tail Mollies, 5 Silver Lyre Tail Mollies, and 6 Neon Blue Dwarf Gouramis. By my calculation, that just exceeds the "one inch of fish per gallon" rule.

I'm going to start sharing interesting tidbits from my morning readings, starting today.

Paul Phillips: "The basic laws of economics are simple, and it is madness that they are so completely ignored in public policy. But of course they're ignored by the government - why should they care? Who spends other people's money as carefully as they do their own? And given the choice between having the power to economically control people and not having it, why would any group choose not to have it?"

GigaOm:

Now, at today’s Defrag conference, semantic web startup AdaptiveBlue has announced ClosedPrivate, the latest strike in the worldwide social applet war. CEO and founder Alex Iskold apparently instigated the ClosedPrivate effort in a closed and private elevator meeting before continental breakfast on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency.

No one would admit to joining the ClosedPrivate alliance. "That’s private," I was told.

Tomorrow, we’re expecting AdaptiveBlue’s announcement of the BluePhone, a closed mobile platform with no vendors on board, no plans, and no software or hardware whatsoever.

I like it better than OpenSocial already. Check out their website for some closed and private blog posts.

Coding Horror: "Selling directly to the consumer via download means bypassing the entire brick and mortar sales chain. This should mean cheaper prices than retail, not the same prices-- and it should never result in higher prices. Paying a premium for the privilege of downloading software is complete ripoff, and it happens all the time." - I never understood this. I was trying to pick up Battlestar Galactica Season 3 DVD, and noticed it had been shipped out in the UK, but wouldn't be available here in the US until April 2008????? Amazon Unbox had it for ~$30, but I've had bad experience with Unbox in the past ... so :(

Freakonomics: "The same group at Alberta has just shown that their Polaris program is on the verge of taking down poker professionals. In the recent “Man vs. Machine” Poker Championship, Phil “The Unabomber” Laak and Ali Eslami barely beat Polaris two sessions to one (with one a virtual draw). After the tournament, Laak candidly acknowledged that “the bots are closing in." More reason to quit online poker :)

I can has cheezburger: "TACOCAT is a palindrome"

Reuters:

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, "is a fascist," Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. "Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Spain's current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

"Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people," he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, "Why don't you shut up?"

Gotta hand it to Chavez, he's good at making world news, and he's been pretty effective at getting things done in Venezuela (nationalizing natural resource industries, etc.), but sometime he just ends up with egg on his face.

Valleywag:

Microsoft wants to build its own Flickr. In a job posting, Microsoft said it's looking for a program product manager to build a "next-generation photo and video sharing service that will compete with Flickr, Smugmug and other photo Web solutions." We're all looking forward to the splashy launch of WindowsPhotoWebSolutionsLive.com.

Seriously though, sounds like it'd be fun.

Hot Online News. So Michael Bay takes a winning formula for the first Transformers and throws it out the window for the sequel? Huh?

TechCrunch : "Why Are Founders and Execs Leaving Second Tier Social Networks?" It's cause it's getting harder and harder to create social networks. The fixed cost of creating that initial network (along with the general fatigue of signing up for yet another new service) is harder to overcome by individual developers.

Via You've been haacked as seen on Twitter:

CodingHorror: Guitar Hero III for the PC/Mac has truly insane system requirements http://tinyurl.com/2c42fm and USB guitar = dongle :(

LazyCoder: @codinghorrorSo for only 1 billion times the computing power required to put a man on the moon, you too can fake guitar playing.

Related: last week's South Park about Guitar hero was hilarious. I miss VH1's "Behind the Music"...

Uncov:

Duncan Riley plugged this thing on TechCrunch, with the defense that "not everyone has the skills to do everything in a startup". News flash: not everyone should be doing a startup.

If you don't have a clue about the the engineering that goes into an internet company, then congratu-fucking-lations, you are Ron Gutman of Wellsphere. You know, the MBA type who is thinking "There's a lot of money in that there internet. How can I exploit other people to get it?"

By the way, check out my new favorite amusing anecdotes blog from a great writer. Especially interesting is her experience interviewing the YouTube boys.

So Saturday night, I had an inkling of a design idea that revolves around betta fish. The Betta fish (a subset being the commonly known Siamese Fighting Fish) is absolutely beautiful:

(credit)

So the idea was to get one of these from Ikea:

... and get some individual tanks for each Betta fish and arrange them like so:

I think it would look very attractive.

Unfortunately, the problems began when I realized that no Ikea shelf would support the weight I needed; assuming each of those jars is a 2 gallon tank for each Betta, that means the shelf has to support roughly 40 pounds of weight (~8.3 pounds per gallon for water, plus the tank itself). So the plans were put temporarily on hold.

Instead, I *did* want to pursue setting up tanks of Bettas next to each other (watching them flare up at each other is rather amusing, although I will state that none of the fish are stressed out - they simply swim away if they get tired of flaring!). So I added a 20 gallon tank and partitioned it with dividers (so each Betta fish gets 5 gallons of space):

You can see a bit closer the arrangement in the tank:

Unfortunately, the middle partition was makeshift and wasn't enough to keep the two center Bettas separated, so I moved one of them to the community tank (I haven't seen him attack a fish yet, so I may just keep him there!). When I get back from NC, I'll finish this tank by adding another partition and adding a few rocks (give them hiding space).

This morning, I woke up and found the betta which was in the left partition in the center! The only conceivable way this happened was that he jumped! Anyways, before I split for work, I put him back in the left partition... but when I got back from work, he had somehow found his way back to the center again!.

I decided to leave that guy in the center, and moved the guy who was previously in the center to the left.

(I have a tank cover, but it doesn't completely close due to the filter I have installed).

My community tank is doing very well - all the fish are incredibly active and seem to get along with each other very well. I had two fatalities yesterday, but those were of sick fish from the store, so I'm ok with it. I bought some larger rocks today, and I'm going to order a Java fern soon so I can help set-up a more fry-friendly (baby fish) part of the aquarium - I have a lot of live-bearing fish, so hopefully with some luck one of them will have a few babies which will make it into adulthood.

Jing is AWESOME. It's this simple utility which you can use to create screen casts and screenshots ... but it's dead easy to use.

Here was the process for me creating my first screen cast:

• Load Jing
• Define the area of the screen you want to make the screencast
• Click "Record" and do my screen cast
• Click "Share" to have the flash file hosted for you.

All in all, this whole whole screencast took literally three minutes to create and share. That is frickin' amazing.

Remember my post about the new Deki Wiki link dialogs? Well, check out the prototype in action: (this is using live data from wiki.opengarden.org.

Still very rough around the edges, and there's a few usability issues (search mode vs. navigation mode are still not distinct enough for my tastes, and that "back" button is confusing ... go back up the hierarchy or go back to search??)

Tomorrow morning, I fly back home to Chapel Hill for about two weeks. Two loooong weeks away from computers for me! As soon as I land, I'm heading off on a 5 hour drive to the mountains to a cabin right here. Yayyyy!

Everybody have a wonderful weekend and a great Thanksgiving! (although I'm sure I'll post again before tgiving).

. . .

Interesting factoid of the day (courtesy of Aaron):

Google's total revenue last quarter: $4.3 billion.

Microsoft's total profit last quarter: $11 billion.

Microsoft's profit is nearly triple Google's total sales. Wowza.

It's so easy to lose sight of the fact that Microsoft is still making cash, hand over fist.

Just got back after an exhausting (in a good way) trip from the mountains. It's good to see close friends and to have fun. I can say that not ONCE during the whole trip did I think of anything computer-related!

The drive there was rough - my flight landed much later than I expected; as soon as I got home from flying all day, I got into a car and drove five hours west into the mountains... but it was all worth it. All sorts of stress... melted away!

The best group photo was the one without me: (actually, that's me in the top left valiantly trying to adjust the camera on the car)

I found out Chuck Klosterman released another book when I went to Borders to go hit on chicks (HAH, kidding). It's been a great read so far; any students of pop culture and pointless insights into bands will enjoy it greatly. I also highly recommend Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, a book of random essays.

I just got back from bowling with Bert and Linda: 3 games above 100! Huzzah! (I am a bowling newblar).

It feels slightly weird being back - I find myself falling into the same traps as I used to when I lived in NC: buying used DVDs from Blockbuster, late night runs to Wendy's, staying up late watching movies ... even when I felt like I wasn't doing much in San Diego, I was doing a lot (compared to here).

Funny how that is.

Thought of the day: human society progresses to allow individuals to becomes their own gods.

Via my personalized Google page: "The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time." - George Bernard Shaw

AWESOME. Justification for writing on a self-centered online journal!!!!

Speaking of amusing arrogance, this picture always cracks me up (for reasons unknown):

(It's Desmond Howard doing the Heisman pose after scoring a TD off a punt;he actually ended up winning the Heisman that year).

Sigh, me wants:

As much as you can compare SLRs with dSLRs, this camera seems to be pretty close to my Canon Elan 7 in terms of technical specifications (although Canon doesn't seem to offer the eye-tracking on the Elan 7E on prosumer dSLRs???). But $900??? Rats.

An autistic guy who was singing the anthem at Fenway got a case of the giggles halfway through and got some help:

How touching.

I'm into about my fourth hour or so of debugging why all the crossposting functionality broke for Tabulas over the past few weeks.

Xanga, which lacks a real API, broke cause they renamed the location of their editor. I updated the screen-scraping application so this worked again on my unit tests.

Wordpress was an easier fix - some reason I had a bug in my code which was overwriting the XML-RPC path.

Now ... (deep breath) ... the Blogger problem makes me want to blow my brains out (literally).

First, I find out that their XML-RPC interface is gone. Flat-out ... gone. As in, doesn't even resolve a proper HTTP response. Awesome. I don't care if we had big fat warnings about its experimental status - once a community starts springing up around the API, the site needs to support that API.

I don't want to get too much into an engineering pissfest, but is it that hard for some Google employees to maintain the old API? I mean, it's like ... 6 methods. Given that tons of old applications are built on top of it, it seems it might be nice to spend a little time for backwards compatibility.

So after bitching and moaning to myself about this, I finally started diving into the documentation for Blogger API. Being lazy, I just googled for a Blogger Atom API PHP library and decided to see if I could hack together something that worked.

I set-it up ... and ... "Authentication against the AtomAPI endpoint failed. Please check your username/password."

Apparently I had to switch my Blogger account to their "new" system using my Google single sign-on. No problem.

But I was still getting the error. Was I supposed to use my old Blogger username/password for the Atom auth? My Google account? Both failed. Sigh, time to search the Blogger Google Groups. The response:

"Sounds like you're trying to use an outdated client. Blogger's Atom 0.3 endpoint is no longer operational."

Are you serious? So after they trashed the XML-RPC interface, they trashed the Atom 0.3 API endpoint?

OK, so maybe I need to write my client from scratch. Hopefully their expansive documentation will let me copy/paste something so I can just play around with the goddamn thing. From Google's documentation: "This document provides detailed examples for using the Zend Google data Client Library to work with Blogger."

Awesome! So not only do I need to learn a whole new API from scratch, but I also get to learn a whole new PHP framework just to add a "hello world" post to my Blogger.

At this point, I'm pretty sure their API endpoint is https://blogger.com/atom/, but the damn thing is returning a 404, so I don't even know. Am I supposed to autodiscover based on meta tags from my main Blogger account?

So amusingly enough, what (in theory) should be the easiest API to support is quickly turning out to be the most difficult.

It'd be really nice if Google respected APIs and kept them up, and didn't force developers to keep changing code at Google's whim - this is exactly the type of arrogance that makes me dislike Google.

Back in San Diego. While I was gone, there were two casualties in my community tank (one gourami, and the betta), but the black and white mollies both had babies! I count two white frys and one black fry. Let's see how long they live.

My other bettas seemed pretty pissed; they don't look too healthy, but I just gave them some food (I had to use one of those 7 day feeding tabs, and that probably ran out 4 days ago) so hopefully I can nurse them back to health.

Looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow ... (no, I'm not being sarcastic)

What a wonderful gift: terrain view on Google Maps.

The terrain view is incredibly sexy - I'm surprised they did this ... it seems to be one of those things where the work/reward ratio is way too large... kudos!

Happy birthday to my newly married coworker Pete (or as I shall now call him .. ."Mr. Erickson"), and to my buddy Borst. All *sorts* of cool people were born on November 28th... ;)

You *MUST* see this site if you enjoy rap music and/or mathematics.

Whoever put together this site deserves a Nobel Peace Prize!

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings. [Full article]

I was adding some movies to my Blockbuster queue, when I noticed that this lame-ass pop-up kept trying to load while I was navigating through pages. It was the infamous Facebook beacon pop-up!

You know what's super annoying? Adding a movie to my queue, waiting 2 seconds for the stupid pop-up to appear, then clicking "No thanks."

For. Every. Fucking. Movie.

Apparently I opted-into participating in this new media revolution. Now every one of my friends get spammed whenever I do anything online. Awesome. Technical evolution at its finest.

Of course, I should note that you can prevent this from happening - if I want to disable Blockbuster from being annoying, I have to go to Facebook and disable it. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

From now on, my online experience can be summarized as:

• Delaying any activity I do online for 2 seconds to make sure a lame-ass blue box doesn't pop up for that site
• If it does pop-up, clicking "No thanks."
• Breaking my buying experience by going to Facebook, finding the "External Websites" privacy and then telling Facebook to stop spamming my friends
• Never shop at that affiliate again.

So, Blockbuster, you have lost my business. Off to Netflix I go! (Although the Netflix representative seemed a little unsure when I asked her if they participate in Facebook Beacon ... god, I really hope they don't). Any other site that participates in this Facebook Beacon nonsense will also receive the blunt end of my boycott banhammer. I hope Facebook issues a PR release espousing their glorious affiliates so it'll make my life easier; if I find a list, I'll be sure to post it.

As a side note, I .. uhh... intentionally decided to spam my friends on Facebook by adding "My Little Pony - A Very Minty Christmas" to my news feed. Of course, when I hit "Okay" ... it didn't work. Sweet.

WHY IS THE INTARNETS SO HARD???

Update: Yay, Facebook *did* publish a list! Looks like I hate most of those companies already - this should be a pretty easy permanent boycott.

Update 2: Apparently I'm not alone. Those quotes from the digital advertising agency are absurd - we opt to provide FB with information, but we definitely dont' give them a free pass to stalk all our activity on the Internet. Sheesh.