Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
As usual, I feel pretty much out of step with many of those in the tech. industry. Google announced that they are against California Proposition No. 8. The proposition would prevent same-sex marriages. Google’s position is that this would infringe on people’s personal lives and eliminate the fundamental right of anyone to marry the person they love.
First off, marriage is not a private act. Even if you don’t believe that it was instituted by God, it is at least a governmental institution. I’m really at a loss to understand how something that requires a government issued license is a private act.
Next, nobody has the fundamental right to marry the person they love. What if the person you love doesn’t love you, is already married, is related to you, or a child? Do you still have a right to marry the person you love?
When you don’t understand what marriage is you sound silly, even if you are as smart as the people at Google.
Posted in Christian, Citizen, Geek | 8 Comments »
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
We started using Blockbuster’s alternative to NetFlix less than a year ago and it was great. For the same price as NetFlix, you also got unlimited in-store rentals. If I didn’t have a movie my daughter wanted to watch, I could just swap one of the DVD’s for one at the store. Blockbuster had NetFlix beat by a mile.
Then a few months ago, they bumped the subscription price up a dollar and limited the in-store swaps to 5 per month. I thought about switching back to NetFlix, but I thought the 5 rentals might be worth it. A funny thing happened, I almost never went back to the store. The 5 rental limit had put up a giant barrier. I now had to consider if I had used up my 5 rentals and when my billing period was up, etc. This mental exercise caused me to simply stop using the option.
Last month, Blockbuster bumped the price another dollar and kept the 5 rental limit so I just switched plans to the “no in-store rental” plan and have the same service and price as if I were using NetFlix.
In a few short months, Blockbuster took me from being a big fan to considering switching back to NetFlix or no service at all.
Posted in Geek | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007
I made my first Wikipedia entry! I added “The Wilken Diagnostic.”. This is Pastor Todd Wilken’s method for analyzing a sermon. I also added an entry for Todd Wilken himself. Both are minimalist pages and I hope others will flesh them out.
Posted in Christian, Geek | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
I don’t know which format will win, but Microsoft and Intel are backing HD-DVD. Kinda interesting since Intel’s new best buddy, Apple, backs Blu-Ray. My guess is that it will be much like DVD-R vs DVD+R in that eventually drives will do both. At this point, I don’t think anyone cares about formats. People care about price and availability. If the price is too high, or the content is not available in their format of choice, people will get it themselves off some P2P network.
Posted in Geek | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 27th, 2005
I had never heard of Sturgeon’s Law until I heard it used in presentation by Cory Ondrejka about virtual worlds. Sturgeon’s Law is that “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” I’ve been following The Long Tail idea for awhile. The basic idea behind it, is that when you get rid of physical limitations, the crap (the 90%) becomes very important. I wouldn’t say that these “Laws” contradict one another, I think it just says that you can make money selling crap. Nothing Earth shattering, just my way of understanding what every MBA and sales-dude knows.
Posted in Geek | No Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2005
Robert X. Cringely is involved in a new TV show called NerdTV. Cringely will be interviewing various tech. personalities. I hope it gives the same kind of insights as Triumph of the Nerds! The interesting thing is that the shows will be available free for download and sharing, free and legally. What makes this possible is that the internet in general and broadband specifically have lowered the cost of distribution for video content. PBS is involved so it must be a least partially subsidized, but if this experiment is successful, maybe we’ll see more stuff that bypasses traditional broadcast television.
Posted in Geek, Micropreneur | No Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2005
Subversion is up and running. Took one evening and only a little bit of googling. My biggest problem was that I wanted to use https and had a little trouble setting up the certificates and Apache.
Posted in Geek | No Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2005
I never thought about using anything than the web interface for blogging. But since typo doesn’t have trackback functionality from the web interface, I thought I’d look for something that could. I stumbled across ecto and I think it’s great. I never thought about posting pictures before, but the idea of an interface to iPhoto is cool. The Amazon link creation idea is awesome. I typically have to go to Amazon and look for the ASBN number, but you can get to items from the ecto. I bought 2 copies minutes after playing with it. Good looking software. I wanted to make sure development continues.
Posted in Geek | No Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2005
Well, I’m going to start blogging again. If this attempt fails I’ll just have to concede that it’s an unnatural act for me.
My first attempt at blogging was 3 years ago, before I had heard the term. I was The Golfing Dad. I blogged about being a golfer and a new father. That didn’t last because I didn’t have any blogging software. I was manually updating HTML pages and this heavy workflow was too time consuming for a new dad and golfer.
When I ran into blogger.com, I thought I’d blog about software development so I started “From the Software Development Trenches”:http://sdfromthetrenches.blogspot.com/. I figure I had a lot to say about the industry because it is such a big part of my life. But it’s not the only part of my life I wanted to blog about, so I started an “iLife blog”:http://sdfromthetrenches.blogspot.com/, a “Getting Things Done blog”:http://gtdlife.myblogsite.com/, and an “opinion blog”:http://imnsoho.blogspot.com/. Well, needless to say, too many blogs and too much overhead meant no posting.
Obviously these topic based blogs aren’t working for me. In each case I was hoping to reach a target audience. After all, the blogs I read are all pretty targeted. So am I trying to reach an audience or what? I guess some part of my ego would like an audience, but the real value of blogging for me is to provide a thought trail for myself and this doesn’t lend itself to a single topic.
Posted in Geek | No Comments »
Saturday, September 10th, 2005
I spent most of last weekend setting up typo and lighttpd on our iMac (what else would a geek dad do on Father’s Day weekend). I’m not yet convinced we need to spend the money on a hosting package and since the iMac is always on, I thought I’d learn something and see if I could save us the money. I found some good resources on the web for lighttpd setup and typo setup (broken at the moment). So this weblog is hosted on our iMac running lighttpd and typo.
This weekend, I’m going to try to install Subversion (svn) on the iMac. I found these svn setup instruction so I’ll start from there.
Posted in Geek | No Comments »
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