fear->anger->hate

If you make calls from within Gmail, don’t upgrade to the Hangouts option:...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:37:42 -0500

If you make calls from within Gmail, don’t upgrade to the Hangouts option: http://vrge.co/10dDFwG

"Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government..."

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:30:00 -0500

“Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. ‘Monday morning quarterbacking,’ he said.”

- NYT

Rampant Fish Mislabeling in US, according to study by Oceana....

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:30:09 -0600

Rampant Fish Mislabeling in US, according to study by Oceana. 74% of sushi samples fake!

feltron: Fifty states with equal population.

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:30:19 -0600

feltron:

Fifty states with equal population.

Netflix usually has me pegged, but they think I’d like Downton Abbey WAY more than I actually...

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:30:06 -0600

Netflix usually has me pegged, but they think I’d like Downton Abbey WAY more than I actually do.

"If predicted temperature trends verify, Chicagoans will see temps by Friday morning 66-degrees..."

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:17:27 -0600

““If predicted temperature trends verify, Chicagoans will see temps by Friday morning 66-degrees colder than Tuesday’s record-breaking, April-level 63-degree high. That would qualify as the largest four-day January temperature plunge on the books here since records began in 1871, easily surpassing the 61-degree four day decline which occurred here from January 31 through February 3, 1989.””

- Tom Skilling. So yeah, it’s not just you, this weather is officially strange.

Italian flag made from food, part of a series.

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:30:04 -0600

Italian flag made from food, part of a series.

Windows 8 Pro promotional pricing ends Feb 1st

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:57:17 -0600

If you have any interest in playing around with Windows 8 on your existing hardware, now is the time to buy a license.

Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system is about to become a lot more expensive. An upgrade of Windows 8 Pro will go from costing $40 in a promotional offer to a much more expensive $200 at the beginning of February.

Microsoft offered up an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $40 to try to get consumers more interested in the OS. It claims 60 million licenses of Windows 8 have been sold to date, but we don’t know how many of those copies have actually been activated.

While the price of Pro jumps up considerably, Microsoft will offer an upgrade to a more basic version of Windows 8 for $120. That’s still quite a bit more money than the $40 offer — and you get less features.

$40 dollars ain’t bad, but you can get it for $15 if you follow the instructions outlined by Emil Protalinski at The Next Web.

"Don’t want people to take your milk from the fridge at work? Put it in a weird container e.g a..."

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 11:30:02 -0600

“Don’t want people to take your milk from the fridge at work? Put it in a weird container e.g a jam jar. Nobody drinks weird-ass jam jar milk.”

- Some dude on Reddit

Rick Scott (R-FL) adopted a rescue puppy during his campaign for...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 11:30:26 -0600

Rick Scott (R-FL) adopted a rescue puppy during his campaign for the governorship. Took lots of photos with him and had a naming contest for his supporters (winner: Reagan, of course), lots of great humanizing press. But then it sort of disappeared after Scott’s inauguration. The Tampa Bay Times started hounding him about this in recent days, until Scott admitted abandoning the dog after it barked at too many of his staff members, replacing him with a more suitable dog. Perfectly sensible solution.

Politico has some stuff about how eager Republicans are for another standoff: “I think it is...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:30:20 -0600

Politico has some stuff about how eager Republicans are for another standoff:

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.” …

“It is more likely you default than you raise any taxes,” said a senior GOP aide…

To pacify conservatives, [Speaker Boehner] made two promises to his members that will greatly restrict his ability to craft a compromise in the spending fights ahead. The first promise was to bring to the floor only legislation a majority of his members support and do it through the committee process. The second was to increase the debt limit only in exchange for a dollar-for-dollar decrease in spending in the time period covered by that debt increase.

So, no negotiation, no new revenue, and a demand for one billion dollars in cuts on top of the $1.2 billion already scheduled due to sequestration. And if recent history is any judge, they’ll be waiting on the President to specify the cuts, so they can blame him for them. That’s a hell of a starting position.

Why am I up at 4:50 am? Oh, no reason at all…

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 03:57:59 -0600

Why am I up at 4:50 am? Oh, no reason at all…

Nothing beats the AwesomeBar; right?

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:30:18 -0600

I’ve switched to the Chrome browser a few times before, but I always come back to Firefox. My reasons shift over time; sometimes it’s over website support or better browser extensions.

But really, the key for me is the Firefox AwesomeBar. Finding pages that I’ve visited before in Firefox takes only a few keystrokes, and I only have to remember a word fragment to get where I need to. The Chrome Omnibar has a very clear bias toward making a Google search for whatever I type. So if I’m looking for a recipe for butternut squash that I looked at yesterday, Firefox will take me right there (assuming the page title, URL, or bookmark tag contains the word “butternut”), but Chrome will give me generalized Google results, unless I happened to have found the recipe at butternut.com. This is aggravating and I tire of it quickly.

Still, the Omnibar is very clean. Maintaining a separate search bar clutters the interface. But I’ve really liked flipping between special-purpose search engines to get to content (e.g. book searches on Amazon, movie searches on IMDB), and the flip-down list in the Firefox search bar was a convenient crutch. Recently, though, I’ve ditched the standalone search bar for the InstantFox extension, which makes adding and keywording new search engines quick and easy, all while reclaiming some screen real estate. This functionality is not new in either browser, but InstantFox implements it elegantly.

So I started this post to evangelize about my super-efficient browser setup, detailing how it’s just better than Chrome. But of course while writing this I found a new extension, this time for Chrome, that muddies the picture again. Fauxbar brings the deep history and bookmark search of Firefox to Chrome. It implements Mozilla’s “frecency” algorithm (frequency+recency) to sort results.

There are some limitations here:

the fauxbar cannot replace the omnibar default behavior, but must act as a keyworded search engine of its own. (So instead of Ctrl+L-[searchterm], you have to press Ctrl+L-f-[space]-searchterm to get to your history
to allow for this deep search, you have to grant this extension pretty much complete access to your browser data. Another codebase and developer to put your trust in.

Still, worth taking a look if you’re committed to Chrome.

(Paid) Cloud Sync

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:30:03 -0600

I use cloud storage solutions extensively, often to sync files between my different machines and collaborate with others. I’ve been able to get by on the free tier up to this point, juggling files between services. But I recently took a truckload of photos in digital RAW, and needed to make a buy. The following charts were helpful in my process:

First up is The Verge with a head to head feature breakdown:

Followed by Ars Technica with pricing:

Both of these were compiled last April when Google debuted its Drive service, so of course, some things have changed. Two big ones are that Google Drive does have an iOS app now, and Dropbox halved its costs to keep competitive with the giants stepping on its turf. But they still helped tremendously with my decision.

For now, I’m going with Google Drive; it has all of the features I need, is one of the cheapest, and offers monthly payments, which is nice since I anticipate my needs fluctuating.

"Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only..."

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 11:30:21 -0600

“Democratic House candidates earned 49.15 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans earned only 48.03 percent…Nevertheless, thanks largely to partisan gerrymandering, Republicans have a solid House majority in the incoming 113th Congress…In order to take control of the House, Democrats would have needed to win the 2012 election by 7.25 percentage points.”

- Think Progress. That’s a helluva house edge.

5PM and pitch-dark. Back in winterland!

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:06:12 -0600

5PM and pitch-dark. Back in winterland!

Guns as religion

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:30:08 -0600

Lots of people noticed Mike Huckabee doing his best Pat Robertson impression this weekend, blaming school shootings on the lack of organized prayer in certain types of buildings or the wrong kind of communion wine or something. So there’s that. But Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books writes about a different religion, the worship of the gun itself:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Exaggeration? Here’s Larry Pratt, executive director of Ron Paul’s favorite no-compromise gun lobby:

Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones. The only thing accomplished by gun-free zones is to insure that mass murderers can slay more before they are finally confronted by someone with a gun.

Better would be gun-mandatory zones. Really, we ought to salute Nancy Lanza for taking personal safety into her own hands. Yes, she slipped up a bit by giving her deranged son free access to her vast cache of death-making. But that wouldn’t matter if all of the other teachers were armed and ready to return fire (with armor-piercing rounds), at all times. There lies true safety.

"Running distances of 0.1-19.9 miles/week, speeds of 6-7 miles/hour, or frequencies of 2-5 days/week..."

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 11:30:20 -0600

“Running distances of 0.1-19.9 miles/week, speeds of 6-7 miles/hour, or frequencies of 2-5 days/week were associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, whereas higher mileage, faster paces, and more frequent running were not associated with better survival.”

- Running and All-cause Mortality Risk - Is More Better, by Duck-chul Lee, Russell R. Pate, Carl J. Lavie, Steven N. Blair

"49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We..."

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 11:30:29 -0600

“49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.”

- Tom Jensen, Public Policy Polling

I recently read “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave,” a piece by Mac McClelland in Mother...

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:30:09 -0600

I recently read “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave,” a piece by Mac McClelland in Mother Jones about the experience of working in a fulfillment center for an online retailer.

Of course, McClelland wasn’t actually a wage slave, at least not any time recently. But on assignment from the magazine she did play the part for a week, and despite knowing that she wouldn’t be there for long, the job wrecked her, physically and emotionally.

“You look way too happy,” an Amalgamated supervisor says to me. He has appeared next to me as I work, and in the silence of the vast warehouse, his presence catches me by surprise. His comment, even more so.

“Really?” I ask.

I don’t really feel happy. By the fourth morning that I drag myself out of bed long before dawn, my self-pity has turned into actual concern. There’s a screaming pain running across the back of my shoulders. “You need to take 800 milligrams of Advil a day,” a woman in her late 50s or early 60s advised me when we all congregated in the break room before work. When I arrived, I stashed my lunch on a bottom ledge of the cheap metal shelving lining the break room walls, then hesitated before walking away. I cursed myself. I forgot something in the bag, but there was no way to get at it without crouching or bending over, and any extra times of doing that today were times I couldn’t really afford. The unhappy-looking guy I always make a point of smiling at told me, as we were hustling to our stations, that this is actually the second time he’s worked here: A few weeks back he missed some time for doctors’ appointments when his arthritis flared up, and though he had notes for the absences, he was fired; he had to start the application process over again, which cost him an extra week and a half of work. “Zoom zoom! Pick it up! Pickers’ pace, guys!” we were prodded this morning. Since we already felt like we were moving pretty fast, I’m quite dispirited, in fact.

“Really?” I ask.

“Well,” the supervisor qualifies. “Just everybody else is usually really sad or mad by the time they’ve been working here this long.”

It’s my 28th hour as an employee.

We should all be really sad or mad about the conditions that these folks have to work in. The workers are treated horrendously, walked through metal detectors several times a day, prohibited from leaving the premesis during work hours, harangued about their almost universal failure to meet quotas, paid to give testimony to invalidate the disability claims of their coworkers.

But this isn’t the story of the evil factory manager in Oshkosh, or wherever. The magazine anonymized the company in question, because this is a portrait of an entire industry. As far as fulfillment centers go, it’s apparently one of the nicer ones; you wouldn’t be fired for speaking to your coworkers. They’d already installed some fans “because in the summer people were dying in here.” Many of the supervisors showed some empathy, even as they relentlessly drove their (largely temporary) employees on. No laws were being broken, the employees were desperate to stay, and the loudest complaints were when the two-day free shipping slipped to three.

The reality is that far away from the scrutiny of their adoring customers (guilty here), companies like Amazon and Zappos and Overstock have stripped the last inefficiency from their supply chains: human dignity. Aside from the higher nominal wages, I’m not seeing a lot of distance between this and Foxconn, the infamous electronics assembly king in China. How long before these warehouses have barracks?

We really need a new labor movement.