ajmcguire

If you looking for me, you can find me...

2011-01-24T18:40:00.000-08:00

You can find me on tumblr: ajmcguire.tumblr.com

Or on google reader: google.com/reader/shared/aj.mcguire00, but you should really follow me in google reader so you can view comments.

Beijing bound Feb 11 - 22, 2010

2010-02-07T19:42:00.001-08:00

Header to Beijing to
1. catch up with expat archeologist and marketing professional: Jaggermouth.
2. Go sledding at the Bird's Nest stadium.
3. Peep the great wall.
4. Eat some street food.
5. etc

Atul Gawande caught in the crossfire

2010-02-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

I tried to order Atul Gawande's new book after reading the review in the Sunday Times book review a couple weeks ago. I logged onto Amazon to spend the second half of a giftcard I had hanging around and lo and behold... Macmillan is Gawande's publisher!

You might have heard of Macmillan as the publisher butting heads with Amazon right now over the pricing of their digital editions. Amazon went and pulled all of Macmillan's books off Amazon only to back down a few days later.

Despite capitulating to Macmillan's demands The Checklist Manifesto still isn't available on Amazon. It looks like I'll be reading Seth Godin's new joint on the plane next week.

Animated GIF

2010-01-25T19:21:00.000-08:00

Its surprisingly hard to make an animated gif from a youtube video... here is the easiest way I could figure with a few minutes of goolging:

1. Download video from youtube with AVC.

2. Convert it to an AVI file.

3. Download Windows Movie Maker (v2.7). This was not standard with Windows 7 for some reason.

4. Find the 3 to 5 seconds you want for the animated gif and save that as a video file.

5. Use gifninja to convert the video into an animated gif.

6. Hilarity.

7. OK -- maybe thats a little choppy. Lets try Super.

8. Mission accomplished.

Assumptions:
1. You are running Windows 7.
2. You don't have QuickTime Pro.

Making Health Care Better

2010-01-15T10:09:00.000-08:00

David Leonhardt wrote a piece in the NY Times Sunday Magaine last November called "Making Health Care Better". Pretty much every health care blog out there linked to it and chimed in with their 2 cents. Along with Atul Gawande's New Yorker article "The Cost Conundrum" and David Goldhill's The Atlantic article "How American Health Care Killed My Father" it was maybe the most widely read piece of writing on American Health Care published last year. I even saw a guy with a printed out copy sitting on his briefcase on a US Airways shuttle flight to DC nearly a month after it was published.

In Leonhardt's article he talks about Jerome Groopman, and his book How Doctor's Think. Groopman worries that Bayesian decision making can lock Doctor's into narrow thinking that is not appropriate for dealing with situations of "uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict". Groopman declined to be interviewed for the article - which is really interesting to me. He is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a published author; he is already a part of the public discussion about clinical decision making.

There is a nuance to evidence-based medicine that doesn't seem to have made it into Groopman's book or Leonhardt's article. This is the distinction between Intuitive Medicine and Precision Medicine as described in Clayton Christensen's The Innovators Prescription. I believe the idea of moving diseases from the intuitive spectrum to the precision spectrum and what it means to facilitate that movement is going to be central to the discussion of health care costs and health care reform through 2010 and beyond.

JQuery Polaroid Viewer

2009-07-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

When I first saw that promo page for Cloverfield where you could shuffle around around some photos and flip them over to read notes on the back I wanted to do something similar. However my web programming skills are just not up to that level.

But it finally fell into my lap when I read through a demo of how to do (functionally) the same thing using Javascript and the JQuery framework. I haven't written a line of Javascript since college, but I just copied this up to my website and was ready to roll. I can't believe how few lines of code this application actually uses. I realize its because of the framework, but the javascript e-commerce site I wrote in college was absurd in its length.

bidhardcore.com/polaroid_photo_viewer/

Ideas to expand on this:
1. Integrate with photobucket developers API, so it pulls all the photos from a certain photo album.
2. Add functionality to flip the photos over with a doubleclick like on that Cloverfield site.

bidhardcore.appspot.com

2009-06-17T21:14:00.000-07:00

Bidhardcore isn't completely dead yet -- too soon for a proper eulogy. There is going to be a redesign and a relaunch of sorts. Of course it all depends on CC being able to find the time to contribute content so I've made some efforts to try to simplify that process.

EXHIBIT ONE: bidhardcore.appspot.com
The goal of this web app was to make it easier for CC to build his affiliate links. This app has a text box to submit a ebay url and does the following with it...
1. checks to make sure its actually an ebay url
2. Double encodes the url.
3. Puts the encoded url together with the affiliate details and print the complete affiliate link to the screen.

Very impressed with google appengine. I included the google login functionality on this app just because.

Next steps for this app:
1. Add some radio buttons to select specific affiliate link details. (specific campaign, et al)
2. Add a miniature version of the app to bidhardcore.com so people can actually submit their own links. (major want)
3. Add some real functionality around the google login. (probably not)
4. Add photobucket integration so CC can build a link and upload a pic at the same time. (this photobucket api key is burning a hole in my pocket)

bidhardcore.com

2009-06-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

I consider bidhardcore a success. I made some money on it and was able to provide some modest incentive to Chris Corry that persuaded him to turn in some great writing just about every day for a year.

It isn't everybody who can write 1000 words about a band I have never heard and which I know I will not like but still have me riveted by every single word written.

The following is a partial list of the his best posts. All of his work here deserves a better fate than they are likely to receive if this turns into an abandoned (or somewhat abandoned) blog.
1. United Mutation - Fugative Family & Rainbow Person
2. Poison Idea - Feel the Darkness
3. Poison Idea - Feel the Darkness (side B)
4. Moss Icon - Hate In Me 7:
5. Floorpunch - Fast Times At the Jersey Shore

New Rig

2008-08-28T06:40:00.001-07:00

Core 2 Duo 8400 3ghz
Biostar P43 mobo
4 gig DDR2 800
Corsair|CMPSU-520HX RT PSU
Some old PCIE video card I had laying around
Some old DVDRW drive I salvaged from Owen's IBUYPOWER
nMEDIAPC media center case I got on sale almost a year ago
Vista Ultimate

TV card and TVersity coming soon

Is it still a rig if its only used for media? HD 4850 coming soon when I have time for games again.

muxtape

2008-07-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

lockinout.muxtape.com

edit: :(

Wrong IM

2008-07-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

IM convo from 3/19/08
(12:44:12 PM) Jay: ok i'll let you know if the cops ever call me back
(12:44:12 PM) Jay: oops
(12:44:12 PM) Jay: wrong im!

Awstats vs Google Analytics

2008-07-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Finally installed Google Analytics on bidhardcore.com and it blows away awstats in all categories except 1 -- its showing way less traffic than awstats!

Here is a comparison:
June 29: awstats - 355, google - 110
June 30: awstats - 399, google - 141
July 1: awstats - 385, google - 138

Whats going on? Google Analytics is saying I only get about 30% of the unique visitors that I thought I was getting. Awstats' numbers are more in line with the number of click throughs I'm getting on affiliate ads so I tend to believe those number, but then why is Google Analytics off?

Ideas:
1. File cache-ing - Awstats gets its info from web server logs so if a user visits the page but just looks at a page he has cached it won't register as a new visit. This would favor fewer hits from Awstats though.
2. RSS readers - If a user reads the page from an RSS reader that Google Analytics javascript is not going to get called. This is what I think is playing the biggest role here. According to awstats the most popular page being accessed on the site is /feed/.

Anyway - there are about a million blog posts on the difference between these two tools out there, but if Analytics is really just ignoring RSS Reader hits its only going to get less accurate as more people get their content through RSS readers.

Making the Most of Your Content

2008-06-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

Great pdf put together by Google on robots.txt, meta tags, cached links, etc.

I wish someone had showed this to me a year ago.

New structure for Ebay affiliate links

2008-04-17T08:33:00.001-07:00

Description of issue:
Ebay jettisoned commision junction, and is running their affiliate program themselves now. One of the changes they instituted is a new structure for their links. This means I have to change all my old links on bidhardcore.com and heatunitreport.com.

Troubleshooting:
Can I export the XML from wordpress for each site, edit each link with a find and replace and then re-import it? Will it double up all my posts? I have to test the export / import XML on a test blog and see how it works.

Resolution:
No resolution yet.

Update:
Did it by hand. :(

Sins of a Solar Empire

2008-04-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

Demo available here.

Kinda late on this, been busy with school. Will post comments here shortly.

update: 6/4/2008
Ended up buying the retail copy after playing the tutorial / and one solo game on the demo version. I have had time to play exactly three skirmishes since buying the retail version. All three games I played on easy and got whooped. This does not play like a standard RTS game at all, the 4X components of the game make this MUCH more strategic. This extra element is exactly the gameplay solution that addresses the concerns of those who say quick playing RTS games require less strategy. I can't just research all military / economy branches -- its too much to take on.

Lost my password to Word Press

2008-03-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Description of issue:
I have an installation of Word Press on my work laptop with Apache and mySQL running to support it. After I initially installed it I transferred all my entries from a similarly hosted blog on my old work desktop PC. So I was up and running for a couple days and decided to switch Word Press install folders. Doing this required me to log in again, but I had forgotten my password. I never wrote down my new password for my laptop installation. Ewps.

Troubleshooting:
Email it to me? Nope, I have an smtp server on my machine, but I must have disabled the option within Word Press' configuration. Check the users table in the wordpress db? Nope, encrypted. I could change it if I knew what encryption it was using. Reinstall wordpress and start over? I'd rather not.

Resolution:
Found this site: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/phpmyadmin/. Embaressingly easy! But there were two things I didn't know: 1. That Word Press used MD5 encryption and 2. That phpMyAdmin had such an easy way to encrypt a string.

2008-01-28T13:05:00.000-08:00

"ice cold! jewels got no flaws"

The Auspicious Event

2008-01-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

"...wrested from the Greeks in 1453."

2007-10-16T07:36:00.000-07:00

"I know the price, know the risk, know the wrongs, and the rights. Still my blood flows ice, its just my life."

"In this land of sorcery - Vision through T.H.C. - Holy feedback, it will free - Three wizards crowned with weed"

"Been cold as f- before ice, not before Christ, but a long f-ing time. Get your mind right."

"Check out my hat, peep the way I wear it."

"Im hurtin for you dog; but ain't nobody pain is like yours. I just know that heaven'll open these doors."

Rich Boy

2007-09-18T10:32:00.000-07:00

"Martin Lee, innocent, he ain't even have a chance"

A lyricist without a clue, what year is this?

2007-09-04T08:03:00.000-07:00

1. Extortion, snortin, supportin abortion
Pathological liar, blowin shit out of proportion
The looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic
Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict

2. Since you were a baby coward, we been sprinklin the world with baby powder
So fresh and so clean, been an outcast since I was a teen
But I out last cause I out blast any body who bring
You got it, the prophet, I told ya'll, then I showed ya'll

En tu kulo Dio

2007-08-26T22:15:00.001-07:00

Salonika

Danilo is a sehpardic Jew, evident because he yells out in Spanish when Cyprian sets his leg. On page 839 (we're talking about Against The Day here, plz try to keep up) he talks about his youth:

Danilo began to talk about Salonica, the city of his youth, the women by the fountain in the mornings, his mother's pastel de kewzo, parades in the streets of wrestlers and Gypsy musicians, the all night cafes. 'At first I tried to get back there as often as I could, but responsibilities in Sarajevo piled up, and one day I woke to find I'd become a Bosniak. I wish I could show it you someday, Latewood, Salonica is all the world in a single city, and you must meet my cousin Vesna, she sings in a hasheeesh joint down in the Bara, you'll love her as I do...'

Its crazy that Pynchon would make such a off hand reference to the Jews of Salonica who I just read about elsewhere. There used to be a lot of Spanish Jews in Salonica, almost 60,000 of them, but when the Nazis occupied Greece they wiped out 97% of the Jewish population. Today there is hardly any Jews in the city nor any trace they were ever there. A cemetary of 500,000 Jewish graves is now a city plaza w/o even a plaque on it.

Arustide D. Caratazas has this to say:

From classical antiquity through the begining of the fifteenth century, Salonika was a Greek city. The Greeks were expelled by the Turks, who then welcomed the Jews. Its true for 500 years, the Jews dominated Salonika; and in historical terms, they preserved the city for the Greeks, who only reclaimed it in the 20th century -- partly due to another Turkish expulsion, this time from Asian Minor to Salonkia. But in Greek politcal mythology, Salonika can only be Greek. There can be no mention of the Jews. The building of a national consciousness in this part of the world sometimes means that what everybody knows privately is what can never be openly stated or admitted.

Blakan Ghosts

2007-08-26T14:29:00.000-07:00

Papandreou

The Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX had forced his wife, Zoe, and the Senate to officially ratify the power of his mistress, Sclerena. Psellus writes that "despite their embaressment, the senators still praised the agreement as if it were a document send down from heaven." Psellus might have been writing about PASOK.

p. 274

Stepinac

Before this humble monument, Pope John Paul II has also wished to fall to his knees. For this specific wish, the federal authorities in Belgrade -- Serbs mainly -- long refused his permission to visit Zagreb.

p. 12

Delchev

Bearded and bandoliered terrorists like Gotse Delchev [founder of the International Macedonian Revolutionary Orginization] planted bombs at cafes, open-air theatres, and railway stations.

p. 57

King Carol I of Romania

Carol I was just what the country required: an anal-retentive, workaholic Prussian who preferred spartan accomadations to luxury and paperwork to diversions of the flesh.

p. 93

From the Black Forest to the Black Sea

2007-08-24T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Danube is more than twice as long as any other river in Europe, touching seven countries on its 1776-mile journey from Germany's Black Forest region to the Black Sea. This makes it a unifying symbol: a river of hope, inspiration, and cliche. The Danube's "flood harmonizes every dischord and nationality and its sprit is the sprit of pan-Europe" write Walter Starkie, an Irish eccentric who travelled with the Gypsies through Hungary and Romania in 1929.

Balkan Ghosts p. 101

Blood will flow in Northern Epirus

2007-08-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

This was a time capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions, and ecstasies. Yet their expressions remained fixed and distant, like dusty statuary. "Here we are completely submerged under our own histories."

Balkan Ghosts p.xlix