Head-lights

Choosing a mobile phone

2012-01-21T18:34:00.001-08:00

One of the best metrics I can think of for what smartphone to buy is customer satisfaction.

Wikipedia blackout

2012-01-17T20:24:00.001-08:00

Does anyone else worry about the wikipedia blackout? Somehow the world has come together to amass the most comprehensive respository of information anywhere, and yet it is still controlled by the hands of a select few people. If they want to shut it down, down it goes.

Something feels wrong about that. The mantra of wikipedia was that information should be free, and that wikipedia was to be the sum of the best minds in the world -- that willingly and freely improving the quality of information there was contributing to the advancement of humanity itself. But now the entire repository is being held hostage by a handful of people to protest some bill in Congress that most of us know nothing about.

What if a rogue admin at wikipedia were to plant some code that at a given day would wipe the entire database and corrupt all the backups. Is that not impossible? And how many man-millenia would be lost if it happened?

Either the US government or Google should be actively mirroring the entire website so if Jimmy Wales* or one of his people goes crazy and wipes the whole thing, all that information would not be lost.

* Incidentally, Jimmy is from Huntsville.

How to become exceptional

2012-01-15T19:57:00.001-08:00

From SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner:

"A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with," he says. "But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it." Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born.

And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls "deliberate practice." This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

The people who become excellent at a given thing aren't necessarily the same ones who seemed to be "gifted" at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love -- yes, your nana told you this too -- because if you don't love what you're doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.

I'm not sure how this applies to little kids, they have no idea what they love. A wise person recently told me, "Kids tend to like things they're good at."

Those last two paragraphs sound contradictory, but I have a feeling they're just true at different times in people's lives.

What to buy

2012-01-10T21:44:00.001-08:00

Mom, Dad, check out thewirecutter.com -- I agree with pretty much everything I've seen on there. Nice summary of the best of what to buy when it comes to electronics.

Via DF, of course.

Android phones come with spyware preinstalled?

2011-11-30T20:23:00.001-08:00

Not exactly sure what all this Carrier IQ stuff (via DF, of course) on Android and Blackberry is about yet, but the smartphone landscape right now reminds me of the middle ages when marauding bands would roam over the countrysides -- "pillage and burn". Castles were principally built for safety during this period, and I imagine they were enviable places to live.

When you choose Android, you're choosing life out in the countryside, free from rules and limitations, but at risk of having 30 guys show up and dragging you out, stealing all your stuff and burning the house down (spy- and malware).

When you choose Apple, you choose life within castle walls. Doors are closely guarded, and the vast grounds are kept neat and friendly. Come and go (i.e. surf the internet) as you please, but home (your phone OS and apps) are by all measures safe. Pretty easy to be happy as long as you trust the lords of the castle.

The question a smartphone buyer has to answer is this: do I feel safe inside castle walls, or imprisoned?

Apple vs. Samsung

2011-11-17T21:46:00.001-08:00

Wow, check out all those phones.

I wonder how many of them run the latest Android OS?

Moments That Matter Most

2011-10-30T07:40:00.001-07:00

Nest

2011-10-28T19:06:00.001-07:00

Nest thermostats.

We need more design like this.

Mormon Milieu

2011-10-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

For my LDS friends, on the 40th anniversary of its delivery one of the finest talks I've ever heard: Mormon Milieu, by Neal A. Maxwell.

The Gospel is really the counsel of a Super Intelligence as to how we may survive and progress in a cold universe that responds only to law. Man didn't get to the moon with random trajectories and with each astronaut "doing his own thing." The price for reaching the moon was obedience to universal law.

iPhone 4S announced

2011-10-04T21:39:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty sure this will be my next phone, so I was excited to read about the new features.

A quick summary:

faster (2x)
longer battery life
new antenna design
fancy 8 megapixel camera
voice integration (speak your texts instead of typing them, ask it random questions, etc.)
location-based reminders ("remind me to feed the dog when I get home")
iCloud
availability on Sprint

No near-field communication (use your phone as a credit card), no 4G (which is still an ambiguous term), no new form factor, still no data connectivity during phone calls on Verizon, and not waterproof.

So not everything everyone wanted, but overall a very solid upgrade. I can't wait (till I can afford it =).

Graphing Calculator (Lite) is here!

2011-10-01T23:45:00.001-07:00

In August 1996 I had just returned from Ecuador, and needed to get registered for the fall semester at the U of A in Tucson. I ended up crashing with some good friends Chris and Ivy Bonhorst who I'd known there in 1993 before I left. While I was there Chris had a PowerMac 6100 on his desk, one of the first PowerPC Macs, and he said I could poke around and try it out. I'd been away from computers for 2 years, so playing with the newest 7.5 (?) OS was fun and exciting...

I soon saw an application called "Graphing Calculator", and upon launching it very quickly came up with this:

It wasn't a static image either, it's like a sheet floating in space that you can grab with the mouse and spin in 3-d. Zooming and panning and animating were all perfectly fluid -- no ugly stepping, no entering in plot bounds, no "plot" button to re-click every time the view changes. Any mathematical relationship I could think of was instantly visualized. Any piece of the equation could have an "n" inserted which lets you animate that piece and see the sensitivity to that parameter. It was amazing! 2-d plots are great too, but my mind quickly was unsatisfied with only 2 dimensions. 4-d and beyond suddenly made perfect sense.

Within minutes I had knocked out half my unresolved math questions. What a thrill! Not only that, I'd never seen a computer do anything like that before, I didn't think computers would ever be fast enough to do anything close to what I was seeing right in front of my eyes.

And this was 1996. 66 MHz.

I immediately knew I needed a Mac, and worked like crazy to get one. Graphing Calculator sold me.

The story of how Graphing Calculator got on the Macs is crazy. Crazier still is that Apple didn't buy the guy out (I'm guessing his price was too high).

The advent of OS X in the early 2000s brought with it a crappy "Grapher" app replacing Graphing Calculator. GC was still available on the website, but it was $100 (?!), which I couldn't ever justify spending. For me that took all the fun of math back out of the Mac and has been a sore spot for me for the last 9 years.

Well, for anyone else out there like me, the wait is finally over. $10 on the App Store, the "lite" version has everything I missed. I didn't even blink between seeing the screenshots/price and clicking the "Buy now" button.

Math is already more exciting again. =)

Cleaning Apple products

2011-09-21T04:15:00.000-07:00

There's a very good chance that someday you'll need Apple's recommendations on how to clean their products.

Via DF, of course.

Dad, I'm looking at you...

2011-09-14T06:08:00.001-07:00

xkcd:

Ego

2011-09-12T21:21:00.001-07:00

Neal A. Maxwell, "But for a Small Moment", 1 September 1974:

"A third trap into which we can fall, if we are not careful, is to fail to notice that at the center of many of our challenges is pride, is ego. In most emotional escalations with which I am familiar, if one goes to the very center of them, there is ego asserting itself relentlessly. The only cure for rampant ego is humility, and this is why circumstances often bring to us a kind of compelled or forced humility--so that we may recover our equilibrium. ....

Ironically, for those of us who most need to serve to develop our capacity to love, our very egos often make us unapproachable so far as others are concerned. We, therefore, are underused and we wonder why. And this is typical of the trials that we impose upon ourselves."

'98 Ford F-150 won't start, part II

2011-08-24T19:16:00.001-07:00

Yesterday my truck wouldn't start again. All the lights would come on, but it would just do a heavy "click" when I tried to start it.

Going through the steps from last time, I quickly narrowed it down.

Bad starter.

A few tips for those trying to change a starter on this type of vehicle:

This is not an easy job -- maybe 3x harder than changing a battery. If you have the right tools, though, it's a lot easier. You'll need:
- jack and jack stands
- pneumatic socket wrench (otherwise you'll loosen and tighten the nuts one 16th of a turn at a time)
- regular socket wrench (since pneumatic ones can't fully torque the starter bolts (at least mine can't))
- 13mm socket (for the starter mounting bolts)
- 13mm DEEP socket (for the starter mounting bolt that has the ground attached)
- 10mm wrench (for the relay lead)
- 8mm socket (for the battery -- yours may be different)
- 3" and 6" socket extensions
Be sure to disconnect the battery first.
The starter is wedged up to the right of the oil pan, and looks sort-of like a large soda can with a large spice container attached.
There are two bolts that you can't see, and that are very hard to get to. Use the standard socket wrench with 13mm socket on a 6" extension to break those loose, then use the pneumatic wrench to get them out.
The rest is fairly intuitive...
Except don't tighten the nuts on the leads too tight when installing the new one! I snapped off the back of the new starter relay and had to start the whole process over again!

Hope someone benefits from my experience.

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO

2011-08-24T19:00:00.001-07:00

What better time to resign than after leading a company from the verge of extinction to being the most valuable company in the world (for a few days anyway).

Sounds like sad news, but he actually hopes to remain on as Chairman of the Board, director, and "Apple employee". Which means he spends less time on CEO stuff and more time squeezing miracles out of turnips.

I'd bet on Apple's best days being yet to come.

Global health database

2011-08-09T20:52:00.001-07:00

Imagine President Obama standing up and announcing a partnership with Google to build the most comprehensive anonymous health database the world has ever seen.

Google would be permitted to put ads in a small box off to the right.

Everyone in the world would be encouraged to create an anonymous account (or they could use their existing Google account if they trust Google), and input all of their health information -- i.e. diseases, medications, conditions, symptoms, diet, exposure, activities, cities lived in, etc.

Why would anyone do this?

Individuals could be completely anonymous in their inputs. It could be touted as patriotic, and scientists and doctors would encourage everyone to put in their inputs. The system would offer health recommendations and potential risks based on their inputs. They could see whether they have shots due, or if their yearly colds happen to line up with allergy season. Or if their particular symptoms have a new treatment, e.g. stomach ulcers can be cured with antibiotics now.

Google would love it, they make money any time ads are shown, and they could target the ads to your conditions. They'd get access to a massive database of coincident health conditions and could use that to improve ad targeting to others.

The gov't, hospitals, medical universities, and even regular individuals could go in and do searches and download data, such as "What percent of folks with arthritis also have strokes"? or "In what cities are cold sores most common?"

Reputable organizations could request more information from folks with a given condition, e.g. "Have you ever lived near high voltage power lines?" sent to to all folks who get migraines. Users who wish to help the medical community by answering these kinds of questions would only have to click the "Help with research" link to see/answer them.

No one's name nor address is never entered, or even requested. Fraud would be rare since there'd be no motivation for it, and it would quickly get washed out in the volumes of data. Google could investigate or weed out obviously false info.

I could see something like this changing the world.

Lion's out

2011-07-20T06:09:00.001-07:00

I can't believe I beat John Gruber to the news, but Apple's new OS called "Lion" has been out for about half an hour now.

John Siracusa does an excellent job of reviewing the OS for the highly technical folks -- his review came out 3 minutes ago. For the rest, see what's new at Apple.com.

I highly recommend John Gruber's advice on installing.

Be aware that Rosetta's not supported anymore with Lion, so if you're using old PowerPC apps your time is up.

Wealthy getting wealthier?

2011-06-04T11:46:00.001-07:00

Everyone should read this.

If you didn't think #1 was the right answer from the start, I'd love to hear what your first thought was.

Modern Android

2011-06-02T20:29:00.001-07:00

A very good review of the Nexus S Android phone.

Love the last paragraph.

Sure, it comes with a whole host of freedoms that I can exercise, like installing a third-party keyboard component to replace the system keyboard, but I didn’t exercise those freedoms because I don’t care, I’m just not that guy. I never themed my Windows installations, never jailbroke my iPhone, never turbocharged my car. I want a phoneputer that just works and lets me pursue my own goals; goals that don’t include being a sysadmin.

Our grandparents lived through this

2011-06-02T20:25:00.001-07:00

Always good to remind ourselves why dictatorships shouldn't have nuclear weapons.

Faith will always remain a matter of choice

2011-05-27T04:52:00.000-07:00

Terryl L. Givens on the FAIR podcast:

If we were to ever reach a point in our lives where we felt the evidence -- for, or against, Christ's divinity or the Book of Mormon, or Joseph Smith's prophetic calling -- were overwhelming, then there would be a kind of intellectual compulsion involved, and our faith would not be a matter of choice.

I've been trying to put that thought to words for almost 2 years. My experience so far has been that whenever I feel like the evidence weighs more heavily on one side than another, it's only because I haven't looked hard enough for the counterpoints on the other side.

But why faith? Because this life is principally a test of spirit. Sure knowledge eliminates the wrong answers from the test, and it ceases to be a valid test for the spirit, and instead becomes a simple test of will, which is interesting, but insufficient.

Russian soldiers in WWII who ran from the front line were shot by their own men -- how do you award medals of honor when valor is forced on you?

Japanese Earthquake

2011-03-15T19:20:00.001-07:00

I had heard it was bad, but I hadn't seen this...

Mountains out of molehills?

2011-01-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

Good thing we're all worrying so much.

By their fruits ye shall know them

2010-11-22T06:11:00.001-08:00

A new sociological study just came out with much to say about the LDS church.

I can't imagine a better set of metrics for a church to score highly in.

How to "move" instead of "copy" a file into your iTunes Library

2010-10-31T06:32:00.001-07:00

Handbrake users, rejoice! This seems to work:

Make a "temp" folder inside your Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder
Whenever you get a new file you want iTunes to manage, e.g. from Handbrake, drag it to that temp folder
Then drag it from there into iTunes

It should disappear from the temp folder almost immediately. Note, you need to have "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" in the Advanced Preferences pane.

If you do this a lot, try making an alias to that temp folder on your desktop.

If you *really* do this a lot, leave a comment and I can probably be persuaded to make a folder action script that will automatically send those files to iTunes when dropped there.

(Update, I wasn't the first to discover this.)

Crossing the line in new and surprising ways

2010-10-19T06:33:00.001-07:00

A few weeks back I thought I heard offer this quote during a lesson, but nobody remembers it being said or saying it, and I can't find it anywhere on the internet (which knows everything, right?).

Still, worth sharing:

If you set the example to your kids that it's okay to cross the line, they'll cross it in ways that are new and surprising to you.

On getting, learning, becoming

2010-10-16T10:56:00.001-07:00

"They Shall Ask the Way to Zion", Shawn Miller:

Stuff beyond our basic needs does not liberate. Consider the overall investment of your time. You have to shop for stuff. You have to clean, maintain, and organize stuff. You lose stuff. You look for stuff. You polish stuff, secure it against theft, trip over it, recharge it, upgrade it, accessorize it, pack it, move it, unpack it, insure it, fix it, and eventually sell, trash, or bequeath it. Stuff has no use beyond this life, and it takes a lot from us.

Very much unlike stuff, knowledge has few such liabilities.

Eder Patrick Kearon

2010-10-03T08:43:00.001-07:00

Another excellent talk from last night.

I've never even heard of Elder Kearon before, but he's an excellent speaker. (He's from England, in case you're curious.)

Elder Uchtdorf on pride

2010-10-03T08:16:00.001-07:00

These talks usually take days to get online, but this one's already on YouTube -- Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf to the priesthood brethren on pride:

Spreading "culture"?

2010-10-03T07:51:00.001-07:00

Remember my post on culture?

Looks like the "stool donor" approach is getting some traction -- Dr. Gordon is Director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air a couple weeks back about doing exactly that:

Dr. GORDON: Well, in this particular case, a fecal community was transplanted into a diseased individual's gut and there was a beneficial effect observed over time, reflected in improvement of their symptoms. ...

GROSS: I guess one of the things I find so interesting about this fecal transplant is one, its a fecal transplant. It's so odd to think of using in this case, a spouse's feces or the community of microorganisms in those feces to transplant into the ill person's gut. Its a way of transplanting good guy bacteria instead of using antibiotics to just kill the bad guy bacteria and in the process, kill the good guy bacteria too.

I still think someday it will be more common for doctors to administer bacteria cultures than anti-biotics.

Also interesting from this interview is that 90 percent of the cells we carry around aren't actually human -- but bacterial and other non-human microbes. By count, we're ~10x more bacterial than human. Surprising, hard to believe, but also very interesting.

Having politicians kiss your babies? Maybe a good way to get healthy/successful peoples' bacteria on your kids.

iPad wall hangar

2010-09-20T05:17:00.001-07:00

Sounds expensive, right? How about $2.98 + tax?

Via make. I love stuff like this.

He can get anyone hanged.

2010-09-16T18:31:00.001-07:00

Cardinal Richelieu:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

I bet he's not the only one with this kind of skill.

Elderly couple's house raided by police 50+ times because of computer glitch

2010-08-22T20:28:00.001-07:00

I can't stop laughing about this.

'98 Ford F-150 loose gear shift and gear indicator

2010-08-08T21:42:00.001-07:00

The gear shifter in my truck was a mess. The whole mechanism was sloppy, and it was almost impossible to get it to go into the right gear without overshooting the one I wanted. And the indicator was always pointing half a gear to the right.

What gear is that? I was sure it'd be very expensive to fix.

But while I was in checking out the ignition switch problem I decided to see what I could do about this shifting problem.

Looking under the dash, here's what I saw:

Not the best picture, but see the brass-colored plate with the pin and two torx screws? Those two screws were horribly loose, by at least 1/2"! I tightened them back up, and the shifting now as tight as it was the day I bought it.

Success!

And the gear shift indicator? Check out what else I saw under the dash:

Turning that wheel adjusts the position of the gear shift indicator, left or right. A half-turn later and the indicator is in the perfect spot.

More success!

Total cost to me: $0, plus a few minutes finding a torx wrench, and several months of irritation not knowing the fix would be this easy.

Not everything is this easy to fix, but some things certainly are. Hope someone finds this useful someday.

'98 Ford F-150 won't start

2010-08-08T21:25:00.001-07:00

Last Tuesday I went out to start my truck, turned the key and nothing. Lights all on on the dash, but no clicking or anything when I turned the key.

I learned a few things about how to troubleshoot the problem in the process, here's what I learned, i.e. what I'll do next time:

Battery terminals? Battery terminals get corroded and end up with weak connections. If they look corroded, clean them (google is your friend here).
Dead battery? Get your battery checked out. They go bad every few years, so this is a common problem.

In this case I learned that it wasn't the battery, so here's where it gets interesting.

Bad starter? To check your starter, connect the two big terminals on the ignition solenoid with a screwdriver:
(Watch out for sparks close to the battery.) If the starter turns over (acts like it wants to start), you know the starter's good.
Bad ignition solenoid? To check the solenoid, disconnect the rubber coated solenoid wire off the solenoid (small wire attached in the center above the main terminals), then take a length of wire (#12 or bigger, maybe a coat hangar?) and connect the positive (+, red) post on the battery to that solenoid terminal. If it tries to start, your solenoid is good.

My solenoid was fine, so on to the ignition switch itself.

Bad connection in the ignition switch? There's a hole underneath the ignition switch on the steering column that leads to the release pin.
If you push that pin up (with a pen or coat hangar) while you turn the key to the "on" position the whole ignition mechanism will turn and then you can pull it out. Check the electric connections on the sides and make sure they're not loose/broken.

In my case, I pulled out the ignition switch then reseated it and the truck starts fine now. Loose connection in there I suppose.

I'm sure there are other things that can go wrong, but hopefully that'll help someone.

The value of a happy friend

2010-08-08T20:39:00.001-07:00

Mental Floss this month cites a study* that found that if you add one "happy friend" to your life, that your probability of being happy yourself goes up by 9%, and that's worth about $45,000.

I still generally assert that happiness comes from keeping the commandments, but still, if those findings have any truth to them, I need to reassess my net worth.

I wonder if we should be actively trying to befriend happy people. If one happy person can make several new friends happy simultaneously, and they in turn, the world would obviously be a happier place.

* How Do I Put a Price on Friendship, Jul-Aug 2010, p21, citing a study in the British Medical Journal.

The Rise of a New Generation of Mormons

2010-08-01T08:44:00.001-07:00

Interesting article from the Financial Times.

Drowning doesn't look like drowning

2010-08-01T08:03:00.001-07:00

Parents, don't miss this.

(via DF, of course.)

Cheerful, pleasant, lively, and good-natured

2010-07-22T22:06:00.001-07:00

Elder Heber C. Kimball (via Conversations with Dr. Kelly and Marcia Ogden):

I am perfectly satisfied that my Father and my God is a cheerful, pleasant, lively, and good-natured Being.

Why? Because I am cheerful, pleasant, lively, and good-natured when I have His Spirit.

Discovery Middle School shooting

2010-07-17T22:16:00.001-07:00

The real story is starting to come out, and it lines up well with what the kids at the school have been saying (I know two of them).

What a sad story -- group of middle class, middle school kids join one of the LA gangs over the internet, one wants out, which necessitates a just-short-of-fatal pummeling, so when he's threatened with it he opts to take out the one making the threats.

I think just being part of one of those gangs should be a crime, and the whole group should be punished for that (maybe it already is, I don't know). But once you're in that situation -- where you're told you're going to be almost fatally pounded for getting out of the gang -- what should he have done?

With the mind of a 35-year old guy, I'd probably tell my parents and go to the police, change my name, and hope that we'd move out of state, then carry pepper spray (or an air horn or something) around in case they ever cornered me. I doubt they could, though, since I'd probably never leave the house.

But can we really expect a 14-year old to think like a 35-year old adult? Maybe that was really the result of his best thinking.

I have to go back to what John Holman told me years ago when we found out just how bad someone else's life had become, roughly quoted: "But it's never just one bad decision that ruins someone's life -- it's a series of bad decisions, every day going down those same lame paths instead of waking up and deciding, every day, to make today different and better."

This kid didn't wake up one morning and find himself a member of a gang -- I'm sure he lied awake in bed more than one night thinking about whether he should do it. And it's those times when we're all alone and deciding what to do that make all the difference.

Dyson's Air "multiplier"?

2010-07-17T22:05:00.001-07:00

I wonder how well Dyson's new air "multiplier" fan thing actually works?

As an aside, did you know James Dyson is British? I thought he was Swedish for some reason.

Anyway, the air it's blowing is pulled up through the base, presumably with regular fan blades -- I mean, it can't be another "multiplier" in there, right? The multiplier doesn't actually get any air moving in the first place, it's just the way that air gets sucked into the flow-stream. So then the air has to get pushed up, and through that narrow opening and out. So I can't imagine it's any more efficient than a regular fan with the air having to turn all those corners, nor can I imagine it actually moving much air. And based on their drawings I'm pretty sure a regular fan does all that same "multiplication" stuff too.

Still, it does look pretty cool.

(And Shelly wouldn't have gotten her hair caught in one of those. =)

The problem with living in the YouTube era

2010-07-10T07:00:00.001-07:00

... is that nothing I can do is cool anymore.

Gators in north Alabama?

2010-07-05T08:17:00.001-07:00

In case you were wondering (like I was), yes.

Mariano Rivera's pitches

2010-07-05T06:59:00.001-07:00

Impressive clip about Mariano Rivera's pitching.

I especially love the "here are the nearly 1300 pitches Rivera threw in 2009" part. Do they actually have tracks of every single pitch every pitcher throws? How do they get those tracks, I wonder?

Via DF, of course.

"Mormon" proposition?

2010-07-04T08:44:00.001-07:00

Apparently there's a new movie on its way.

For folks who are so opposed to "hate", why do I have a feeling people will come out of that movie hating the Mormons?

I'm willing to bet of all the people yelling in the trailer, not a one is LDS. We're just not that kind of people.

I love that they pulled a quote from President Monson: "There can be nothing that can defeat us." Stirs up images of Stalinism, doesn't it?

They had to work hard to extract that one. Here's the full quote from his May 2009 talk, after just telling a story of a woman after World War II who had overcome great difficulty going from East Prussia to West Germany:

"I testify to you that our promised blessings are beyond measure. Though the storm clouds may gather, though the rains may pour down upon us, our knowledge of the gospel and our love of our Heavenly Father and of our Savior will comfort and sustain us and bring joy to our hearts as we walk uprightly and keep the commandments. There will be nothing in this world that can defeat us."

Other quotes from the trailer:

"This is how much you make, this is how much we think you can give -- or you might lose your membership."

The horrific implications in this statement are patently false.

"I can't believe that people could hate us this much, they don't even know us."

We don't hate gays. Please read this interview with Elders Oaks and Wickman about our feelings towards them. That's what we believe.

"If God puts in the scriptures that it's a sin to live that lifestyle, then he's not going to have them born this way."

So she's saying homosexuality is hereditary?

Are there any sins that we're not born wanting to commit? Lying, stealing, coveting, etc., are all things we're pretty much born wanting to do. This idea is broken on so many levels.

"Gays interrupt the Mormon plan for heaven."

There is nothing about this sentence that is true. Gays don't interrupt anything, governments do -- if refusing to honor gay marriages is labeled "discrimination", all kinds of bad things happen. The interview linked above has examples where that has already happened.

And "Mormon plan for heaven"? What does that even mean? If I got to plan it I'm pretty sure it would look like a bad copy of Disneyland.

"This is about making a stand for what is right."

Ah, finally some truth!

The story's not over. I'm sailing on a ship where people are happy and generally kind and loving, but we do have to work hard. And people on other ships make fun of us and even think our captain is a deluded dictator. We don't think that... They also think our ship is eventually going to be smashed on the rocks. Really? How do they know? How would I know?

Let's assume that the LDS doctrine is an elaborate series of fabrications created 180 years ago, and that good people filtered out the worst of it years ago and the rest is just normal christianity with some irrelevant stuff bolted to the side. How would you recommend I go about finding the true church, assuming you believe one exists? Or if not, the "right church for me"? How will I know when I've found it?

Public opinion of the Mormons

2010-07-04T08:05:00.001-07:00

There's a new study out by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that reports a relatively high percentage of people have "unfavorable" views toward the Mormons. (via LDS.org newsroom blog). I wonder why that is?

It looks like most people have focused their distaste on the polygamy practice of the 1800s.*

My first semester in college I was staying in the dorms at the University of Arizona. A few weeks into the semester, my roommate came home one night from a Baptist meeting where they had spent the entire evening talking about the Mormons. He wasn't shy, and proceeded to chew me out for belonging to a church that was "just pure evil".

Wow.

I'm trying to remember the specific concerns, but they were along the lines of "Mormons aren't Christians", "Mormons have changed the Bible", "Mormons are polygamists", the church is "racist", the church requires "that new brides sleep with an apostle before marriage" -- and a few more.

Now, if any of those things had a half-scrap of truth I'd be out of there in a heartbeat.

But that's not the point. Somehow within the borders of an institution of higher learning, a young freshman had his mind filled with lies and distortions intended to create division, distrust, and hate. So I guess it doesn't surprise me that so many people have an unfavorable view of us.

It's just that everything people know about the church is wrong.

* How do they feel about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I wonder?

So, do people actually like the iPad?

2010-06-30T21:44:00.001-07:00

See the results. Scroll down to see the charts. (Via daringfireball.net)

And no, I don't have one yet. The new Hulu Plus has promise, I'm excited to see where that goes.

One Maxwell

2010-05-02T22:26:00.001-07:00

Now that we know our next baby is a boy =), we've been trying to select names. One name we both seem to like is "Maxwell", after Neal A. Maxwell. The talk reminded me of him, and I spent a few minutes thinking about the man today.

I found this quote from 1973:

Man can learn self-discipline without becoming ascetic; he can be wise without waiting to be old; he can be influential without waiting for status. Man can sharpen his ability to distinguish between matters of principle and matters of preference, but only if we have a wise interplay between time and truth, between minutes and morality.

Note the trademark alliteration -- he was very good with words.

I had to look up "ascetic" (which is a word suggestive of "severe self-discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons", New Oxford Dictionary). I'm so glad asceticism isn't a required trait.

I'll never forget the moment in April 1997 when Elder Maxwell stepped to the pulpit, having recently been diagnosed at age 70 with leukemia, suddenly bald and frail. I didn't know that only a few weeks earlier he had emerged from 1100 hours of chemotherapy and medical treatment. He joked:

"My thanks to the First Presidency for this opportunity, during which, as you can see, the lights combine with my cranium to bring some different 'illumination' to this pulpit."

Then, a little later:

"Those who emerge successfully from their varied and fiery furnaces have experienced the grace of the Lord, which He says is sufficient (see Ether 12:27). Even so . . . such emerging individuals do not rush to line up in front of another fiery furnace in order to get an extra turn!"

As an aside, the gospel isn't something that comes naturally to people -- I don't think it's supposed to.* For most of my youth the gospel to me had always been a dark fog, where only occasional sparks and flashes illuminated pieces here and there. They mostly made sense, so I was generally happy and interested in seeing more. Then one day (a couple years before), Elder Maxwell came along and sliced the curtain of fog wide open, and the sun shone in like broad daylight on the whole scene, gospel and world.** For me it was blinding, and amazing. Here finally was someone who spoke my language, and knew exactly what I needed to know for the gospel to finally make sense.

So sitting watching conference, I trembled a little to see him like this -- how would he respond to being pushed to the edge of death?

Brothers and sisters, if I have any entitlement to the blessings of God, it has long since been settled in the court of small claims by His generous bestowals over a lifetime. ...

Mortal experience points evermore to the Atonement of Jesus Christ as the central act of all human history. The more I learn and experience, the more unselfish, stunning, and encompassing His Atonement becomes!

When we take Jesus' yoke upon us, this admits us eventually to what Paul called the "fellowship of [Christ's] sufferings" (Philip. 3:10). Whether illness or aloneness, injustice or rejection, etc., our comparatively small-scale sufferings, if we are meek, will sink into the very marrow of the soul. We then better appreciate not only Jesus' sufferings for us, but also His matchless character, moving us to greater adoration and even emulation.

He spent the next 8 years battling leukemia, and yet he continued delivering powerful sermons and writing books, while still attending to all the duties of an apostle. President Hinckley said he "accomplished more in these last eight years than most men do in a lifetime." Most of us slow under drag -- this man accelerated.

One of my few heroes.

* "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned." - 1 Cor. 2:14

** Of course there are many things still well beyond view...

Watch a stadium go down -- from the inside

2010-04-29T20:07:00.001-07:00

Wow.

Camping joy, part 2: Pictures

2010-04-10T20:17:00.001-07:00

	I think these are rhododendron trees, I love all the character in the branches, and how bare the ground is underneath.
	I'm standing right by the water taking this one, the roots make for a surreal landscape by the water.
	The water here is clear and beautiful. It's also moving pretty fast, I love how the flow stays laminar (is that the right word?) for the first part of the drop here.
	This is what that stream does another couple hundred yards down.

Camping joy

2010-03-21T20:18:00.001-07:00

That title is admittedly part sarcasm.

For those who expected me to do other things Friday and Saturday, here's a quick rundown of what was supposed to be a simple overnight campout. The rest of you can skip to the end -- the middle is mostly complaining. =)

Review girls' packing job; Kennedy has packed 6 pairs of socks, and no pants.

Vacuum out the van, looks like a vending machine exploded in there.

Get the van loaded.

Discover the battery is dead (girls left the van dome light on)

Van won't shift out of park without battery power, so I have to pull the battery completely out of the truck to take it in and jumpstart the van.

Van radio requires you to enter a code after a power outage or it won't work; the code is filed away the basement.

Usual stops at Walmart, gas station, McDonalds...

GPS unit says my 2.5 hour trip will take 4 hours (?!); how does it know I have kids? Finally get on the road 3 hours late.

15 minutes later, all 3 kids need to go to the bathroom "NOW!" (45 minutes later, they need to go again, unsurprisingly.)

Why does TomTom send me the wrong way in EVERY state park? Seriously, it's 0 for 3 so far.

Campground is nice, play for awhile, roast hot dogs and marshmallows, had a nice evening.

Getting cold, time for bed! Uh, oh, really cold...

Uh, oh again. Did we pack a binkie for Kennedy? Of course not.

Spend about 2 hours trying to keep Kennedy from waking the whole campground with her crying about being too cold (despite kicking off the covers) -- I'm pretty sure she mostly just wants her binkie.

It's getting colder, I can't move because I'll wake up Kennedy, and I can feel the cold pushing up through my hips. Not good.

About 1:30 am I give up -- cover the girls with the 2 adult sleeping bags to keep them warm, and get up.

What do I do? Go turn on the van and sit in there with the heater on for 6 hours? So I go and rouse the fire with little sticks (and a firestarter =).

20 minutes later Eric comes out of his tent in the same boat, so we get the fire going. Eric: "Old indian saying, 'Indian stay warm tending little fire, white man stay warm finding wood for big fire.'"

An hour later, we hear rustling behind us -- "Something's over there," I whisper, but we don't have flashlights. I finally go get one, and shine it off toward the table. What do I see? A giant raccoon finishing off my lunch! "Hey, get outta here..." Ah, I forgot to put all the food away trying to keep Kennedy quieted down. He comes back a few times, but since we put the food away he didn't find much.

About 4 am Regan comes out and wants to sit by the fire too.

About an hour later, Kennedy's up and crying. Woken up, Scott and Jill offer to let her sleep in their tent by their space heater (!!), but after setting up a bag, her crying has woken up Scott and Jill's kids, yet she refuses to sleep there -- grr. She wants to come sit by the fire. Glad she woke everyone up.

Fortunately both Regan and Kennedy get to see Swiper the Raccoon poking around behind us a couple times.

About 7 am I finally fall asleep slouched back in the camp chair, sleep for maybe 45 minutes. McKinley appears around this time, she seems to have slept fine.

After a slow start, we finally head to Fall Creek Falls (pretty), then on to Piney Creek Falls, which were much more impressive.

Actually, the area under the suspension bridge at Piney Falls is one of the prettiest places I've seen out here. Fast and beautifully clear water near a pretty little rhododendron forest. (I'll post a picture here soon.)

The drive back? TomTom messes up getting us out of the park ("so we're supposed to ram the gate into the youth camp?"), and if Regan hadn't specifically prayed for me to not crash, I'm pretty sure I would've. At one point I'm sure I would've failed a sobriety test, so I pulled over and took a nap. Why don't they make the seats in cars more sleep-friendly?

So, apologies for being MIA over the weekend. Hope your weekend yielded more sleep than mine. =)

Part of the test.

2010-01-30T20:54:00.001-08:00

Elder Neal A. Maxwell (1926-2004):

Why should it surprise us, by the way, that life's most demanding tests as well as the most significant opportunities for growth in life usually occur within marriage and the family? How can revolving door relationships, by contrast, be as real a test of our capacity to love? Is being courteous, one time, to the stranger on the bus as difficult as being courteous to a family member who is competing for the bathroom morning after morning? Does fleeting disappointment with a fellow office worker compare to the betrayal of a spouse? Does a raise in pay even approach the lift we receive from rich family life?

Fixed-schedule productivity

2010-01-29T10:24:00.001-08:00

I practiced this in college, I just didn't have a name for it.

Every college student should read it.

(Thanks, Eddie.)

Chainsaws

2010-01-28T06:01:00.001-08:00

Think chainsaws are scary when they're running? ~~How about when they're *not* running?~~

[ UPDATE: Just heard back from him and got a different story than the one he told that day -- not quite as surprising if it was running. ]

At a community service project, our HOA president (an older fellow) was cutting down brush with a chainsaw. At one point he ~~shut the saw off~~ let go of the trigger which stopped the blade, then in swinging it down happened to bounce the bar/chain across the front of his thigh and the blade jerked forward:

For those who are wondering how it turned out for my leg, after the job I cleaned up and went to the ER where they had to put in 7 stitches to close up the wound. I’m Ok but little sore now, that will learn me to leave off my chain saw leggings.

He was bleeding pretty bad, looked about as bad as most sword-slash wounds in the movies. And he was wearing jeans!

Watch out for chainsaws.

Weather radio fatigue

2010-01-23T19:11:00.001-08:00

I really don't like my weather radio.

I got it for the tornado warnings, but it seems to be going off all the time. Thunderstorms, tornado watches, etc. Even if we snooze it, if something changes in the warning they reissue it and the thing is blaring again. The worst part is that if any part of the county is affected, all of the county is warned, both with the radios and the sirens.

Thanks to our visit to the WAAY TV station with the scouts the other night, I learned that their station has a $7/yr service called "weathercall" that will call your phone or send you a text message* whenever your address is actually threatened by one of those storms.

I love it, no more guilty feelings at 2am when the sirens go off and I go back to sleep, instead of getting up and going downstairs to turn on the TV.

And no, I'm not connected to them at all, I just think it's cool. Hopefully someday they'll have the same thing but keyed off the location of my cellphone...

* Actually it will call/email up to 3 numbers and 3 email addresses.

UPDATE: It's not just an AL thing, it works for any address across the country.

UPDATE 2: I just got an email from the weatherguy saying that the iPhone app is on its way -- I wonder how it'll know where I am if background apps aren't allowed?

MiniDV loses its voice

2010-01-08T19:15:00.001-08:00

I have some bad news for those of you with miniDV camcorders -- our camcorder was stolen back when we lived in Tucson, so this week I'm finally getting around to borrowing one from a friend so i can get the video off the tapes and onto the computer.

Now the bad news-- much of the audio is trashed on some of the tapes, and even the video in a few places. So much for miniDV being a durable format.

It could be dirty heads, though I tried a cleaning tape and it didn't seem to help, and newer tapes worked fine. It could be that this camera is a Panasonic where mine was a Canon, but that's not much consolation if you're looking for a format that will survive companies going out of business or halting production of a particular piece of hardware. It could be that the tapes weren't well cared for, but they've been stored in the camera case, inside the house since the camera was stolen -- not overly humid or hot.

So what format lasts forever? Stone carvings? Engraving on metal plates? I think the lesson we learn is that all of our precious data needs to be maintained -- moved from old media and formats to new ones as the old ones go obsolete.

I wish it weren't so.

2009 Huntsville Christmas Festival

2009-12-20T20:25:00.001-08:00

Enjoy this years' Huntsville Stake Christmas Festival.

Don't miss #3 and #8.

* If you'd like to load those files in iTunes, just go to Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast... and paste in this link: http://harrisfam.s3.amazonaws.com/other/091220-HSVStakeFestival.rss. It should appear in with your other podcasts; depending on your settings you may have to click "Get all" to have it actually download them. Let me know if you have trouble, this is my first podcast feed. =)

Dilbert creator on making decisions with incomplete knowledge

2009-12-18T15:09:00.001-08:00

When my kids first go out on their own, I hope they read this.

Slow Dance

2009-12-18T11:32:00.001-08:00

David L. Weatherford:

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won't last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?

When you ask: How are you?
Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done,
do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?

You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won't last.

Ever told your child,
We'll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time
To call and say, "Hi "?

You'd better slow down.
Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.
The music won't last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life is not a race.
Do take it slower.

Hear the music
Before the song is over.

Maybe we're not supposed to "love" our jobs

2009-12-13T07:58:00.001-08:00

Scott Adams:

There's a natural limit to how happy a person can be at work. If work becomes fun, your boss will stop paying you to do it and start charging other people to have that fun in your place. So let's agree that work has to be a little bit unpleasant, at least for most people. Still, despite this unpleasantness, many people have a feeling called job satisfaction.

Car keys stopped working?

2009-12-09T20:15:00.001-08:00

Just a tip, my truck key has been sticking a little for years now, but today it got so bad I couldn't open either door. I borrowed Kyla's key, and it didn't work either.

My first thought was that the key was just old and worn down, but then I thought -- "Hmm, why would both keys be worn down, since mostly only my key gets used? Maybe it's the tumblers in the door part? But then why wouldn't the keys work on either side?"

Then I realized, "Ah! Maybe one of the pins is just stuck in there!" So I put some 3-in-one oil on the tip of my key and pushed it in and out a few times, and voila! Now both keys work perfectly in both doors.

Hope that helps somebody.

Changing hairstyles, part 3

2009-12-08T20:18:00.001-08:00

Oh. Snap.

Looks like battery acid may not be the end of this story.

Any chance this lady had a headlamp with leaky batteries like mine?

Still running out of fossil fuels...

2009-12-02T19:20:00.001-08:00

You mean we only have a few years left of fossil fuels? Again?

In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said that U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said that the world had 13 years' worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought, and the postwar boom was fueled. In 1951 Interior reported that the world had . . . 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped, and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, scold in chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves.

- George F. Will, Awash in fossil fuels, Washington Post, November 22, 2009

On the plus side, if they keep saying we're about to run out, eventually they'll be right.

Unemployment grows

2009-11-22T13:45:00.001-08:00

Check out this animation (via Daring Fireball) of how the unemployment situation has deteriorated over the last couple years.

It looks like the plague spreading, pretty scary.

The coloring is skewing your perceptions a little, though. My brain tends to watch how the brightness changes instead of the hue differences, but watch it and look at the scale. From 0% to 5.9% the brightness is roughly the same, but above that it tanks, implying a drop off a cliff.

In real life, going from 5.9% to 10% unemployment means another 4 people out of 100 are out of work. This is obviously not a good thing, but not the catastrophic death implied by the blackness of the picture.

Can somebody explain to me what makes Nebraska so special?

Bird book

2009-11-21T10:44:00.001-08:00

See something beautiful today.

On cancelling Verizon service

2009-11-19T19:25:00.001-08:00

Wow, switching cell carriers is apparently a big deal to the carriers. They go to a *lot* of trouble to keep people, which says to me they're making a lot of money on us.

Anyway, all I wanted to do was cancel my Verizon service.

Try #1

This afternoon I called their customer service line. I kindly asked them to cancel my service, saying that we'd already switched to AT&T. (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess why.)

That operator proceeded to literally spend an entire hour with me on the phone, taking me down different paths obviously designed to keep me with Verizon: "With all cell carriers you have 30 days to change your mind, just go back and cancel." "You owe it to yourself to try this new Verizon phone, no cost or obligation, I'll even ship it to you free and give you both lines next month for $15. If you don't like it, ship it back free and you pay nothing." "AT&T's coverage is bad, their support is bad, and they're more expensive, you should definitely select your network carefully." "You know you can give your lines to someone else? Or convert one to a landline?"

Literally a whole hour of this!

Wow. That was emotionally draining. I had great reasons for switching, but this lady had several strong avenues, totally dodging my reasons and trying to remove any excuses I had for not staying on.

Finally, I just said, "You know, you're right, I need to think about this before I make any decisions. Thanks..."

"Oh, you're quite welcome. We're so glad to have you as a Verizon customer."

(As an aside, I am sad to go -- in any group of people I always had better cell coverage than everybody else. Verizon's been good to us. It's only 2 years, though, and a lot will change by 2011.)

Try #2

Two hours later, I was a little smarter.

me: "Hello, I'm calling to cancel my service."

Verizon: "Oh sure we can help with that. Were you concerned about the cost, or the phone? or the network?"

me: "No, just personal reasons."

Verizon: "Uh... Okay, I understand. You know you have several options for these lines .... Have you considered any of those?"

me: "Yeah, we understand all those things but we just need to do this."

Verizon: "Okay. It's asking me to put a reason in here and they won't let me put 'personal reasons' in there..."

me: "I guess 'expense' would be the best thing to put, but it's complicated."

Verizon: "Okay."

Done and done.

"Why would anyone buy a Mac now?"

2009-11-13T08:16:00.001-08:00

There was a bit of a lively discussion the other night about Macs and PCs. A friend had picked up an Acer Laptop for about $350 with a pretty impressive spec sheet (15" monitor, dual-core processor, 4 GB RAM, 256 MB graphics card, Windows 7). He had looked into Macs but the closest thing to that was the MacBook Pro 15" for $1600. Ouch, what a price difference!

Then he poses the question: "Why would anybody buy a Mac now?"

Hmm. Well, I can't imagine he came to me looking for objectivity, I'm fairly well biased. Still, are we really that disparate now? A $1250 premium for a Mac laptop does seem pretty onerous, especially since Macs and PCs were supposedly on par pricewise for awhile there.

We should probably mention here that at least some of that cost savings on those PC laptops is advertising -- apparently companies pay PC manufacturers to include their software on the machine. So when you boot it up, you get a ton of ads, spyware, and other junk you have to turn around and clean back off. What a mess. I'd pay $100 just to not have to mess with that. So we're up to $450, but that's a far cry from $1600.

So what'd I say to him?

I told him different people value things differently, and I could think of at least 25 things I valued enough more on the Mac to make it worth it for me.

"No way!" he says. "You can't think of 25 things."

Easy:

No viruses. What is that peace of mind worth?

Awesome process scheduler. The mac prioritizes the user interface much better than Windows. Doesn't seem to matter how busy the computer is, I can still move the mouse around, switch windows, etc. Windows (and linux for that matter) have always let the interface suffer when the machine gets busy.

Window manager not in the kernel. Huh? This means that the part of the OS that draws the windows is wedged into the core of the OS, but runs as a separate process. Why is this good? Ever have your Windows-windows stall, i.e. stop drawing? You drag them and they act like a cutout of that part of the screen? Happens all the time on Windows, but rarely on the Mac (actually never, but I hesitate to use that word).

Time Machine. Plug in a spare drive, accept the OS's offer to make it a Time Machine drive, and it builds you a back up, taking regular snapshots as incremental backups (but not wasting drive space!). Their solution is quite elegant (uses unix hard links), each snapshot looks and acts like your entire disk file structure. Very nice!

Spotlight. Fast system-wide contextual search. Maybe Windows 7 does this better, but none of the Windows versions I've ever used have done this well.

Expose/Spaces. Supposedly Windows 7 just stole this from the Mac, but I'm guessing they did a half-keister job of it. I love being able to invoke expose or spaces in the middle of a drag.

Unix. The Mac is a unix machine under the hood, and it's very nice. I have written lots of perl and awk scripts to do stuff for me, and it's great being able to have perl create emails for Entourage (Mac equivalent of Outlook), or to pipe the output of a unix command to my text editor. Also has X11, so much of the open-source stuff from the linux community is available as well. I love rsync. Love that I can type "open ." in a terminal window and have the Finder open a window of that subdirectory; or drag a file from the Finder into a Terminal window and have it insert the path to that file. SSH/sshd built in. Find. Apache webserver. Super stable. Etc.

Robust networking. I come and go on my laptops, and they always just happily connect to the network wherever I am, wired or wireless. I could never get Windows to do this.

Column view in the Finder. I've grown to love this view. The sidebar shortcuts are also a huge time saver.

Long battery life. My work laptop gets 5-6 hours off a single battery charge. My home laptop is older, but usually gets 2-3. I was lucky to get 45 minutes out of my Windows laptop.

Built-in PDF generation, editing. Anything you can print in the OS you can make a PDF of. I use this *all the time*. Also, you can delete and reorder pages, then save a copy. All built-in.

No reboots necessary. I seriously can't remember the last time I restarted either my work or home laptops. I put off OS updates just because I don't want to have to reboot. I love an OS with long-term stability!

Good sleepers. I just close the lid, and when I open the lid, they're back up and usable faster than I can get the lid opened all the way. My Windows laptop would always drain the battery whenever I just closed the lid, and the machine would be off the next morning when I opened it back up. I wanted to drop-kick it into the parking lot. On the Mac, when the battery's about to die it writes the contents of RAM to the hard disk, and when you power up it reloads the RAM in about 10 seconds and you're back in business. Awesome.

Multi-touch trackpad. Windows laptop trackpad stunk -- no multi-touch, inconsistent response, etc. Mac laptop is a joy -- 2 finger scrolling, 3 finger page turns, 4 finger expose control, and more.

Quick window zoom. Hold down control and swipe 2 fingers up or down on the trackpad (or hold down control and spin the mouse wheel). Fun, and I use it all the time.

Best of 2 worlds. A platform with native MS Office, Photoshop, Quicktime, and unix terminal all in one. Any other platforms do that? I can also run Windows and Linux in a virtual machine, having all 3 platforms on one machine.

Great keyboards. I love the new flat keyboards, they have a nice touch.

Auto detect monitors. Everybody at work who plugs their Windows laptop into a projector or external monitor has come to expect trouble. Not me, monitors come up fine, even hot-plugged.

iChat with screen sharing. If mom calls needing help with her computer, I can be looking at and controlling her screen in about 20 seconds, all with built-in software. Awesome. Pretty rare, though, she doesn't need help very often.

One-click flash drive eject. Why does Windows make this so hard? Snow Leopard made ejecting flash drives a joy, no more "you can't eject this drive because an application is using it..." errors.

Built-in screenshots. I can take a snapshot of any part of my screen with a single keystroke, very cool.

Built-in zip and unzip. No WinZip necessary. I prefer tarballs myself, and also has bzip2.

Built-in dictionary/thesaurus. I use this all the time. You can even do a spotlight search for a word and one of the options is the definition in the Dictionary app.

Applescript. System-wide almost user-friendly scripting tool. Lets you do things like automatically build a spreadsheet from the contents of an email filtered through a unix command, then email it to someone, all automatically. Does require some skill but not a CS degree.

Quicklook. Highlight any file (or files) in the Finder and press space and get an instant preview of it. Another huge timesaver.

Mounts and compatibility. NFS, SMB, AFP, FTP, VNC connections supported natively (probably more). Macs can read FAT32/NTFS drives, but PCs can't read Mac HFS+ drives.

Disk images. Built-in support for encrypted and non-encrypted drive images. I store all my sensitive stuff on one of these and don't worry about my laptop getting stolen.

Acceleration sensors. Laptops have acceleration sensors such that if it detects that it's falling, it quickly parks the drive heads on my hard disk before it hits the ground to keep from damaging my drive.

Drivers. Almost no futzing with drivers. With my current batch of hardware I didn't have to install goofy drivers for any of it, not my printer, scanner, digital camera, or digital video camera. Ever try installing a printer under Windows? Never works the first try, often not the second either.

Unobtrusive. Somehow on PCs I feel like I'm always tripping over the interface, it's always asking me dumb questions or notifying me of things I don't care about. Or not working for reasons I can't determine (and my Windows using friends can't either). The Mac works, and stays out of my way and lets me work.

There's 30, want me to keep going? =)

A little bragging...

2009-11-01T05:52:00.003-08:00

Can I just take a timeout from my usual blogging fare and brag about my wife for a minute?

*Kyla and her running partner Kathy after their last race*

Yesterday morning she ran a half-marathon. Yes, a real half marathon. Just over 13 miles in just over 2 hours. How cool is that? To be able to just start running and keep going for a couple of hours, now that's just incredible to me. She wasn't even sore afterward. Awesome.

Way to go, babe!

Go To The Source

2009-11-01T05:52:00.001-08:00

Joseph Smith:

Search the scriptures-search . . . and ask your Heavenly Father, in the name of His Son Jesus Christ, to manifest the truth unto you; . . . you will then know for yourselves and not for another. You will not then be dependent on man for the knowledge of God; nor will there be any room for speculation. - Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp 11-12

Brigham Young:

I have uniformly exhorted the people to obtain this living witness each for themselves; then no man on earth can lead them astray. - Journal of Discourses, 6:100

John 16:13:

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth...

Matt. 7:7-11:

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

I love it that when it comes to religious things, we don't have to take anyone's word for it.

Scale in biology

2009-10-31T14:32:00.001-07:00

Ever wonder how big a red blood cell is compared to the flu virus? Or a single chromosome compared to an atom?

This is the coolest thing I've seen all week.

Healthcare Costs

2009-10-27T06:32:00.001-07:00

I never paid much attention to my medical plan at work, until a few weeks ago when people started complaining about healthcare premiums being higher in AL. I hadn't noticed.

So when my benefits-selection stuff showed up, I decided to do a little research on the plan I had selected.

Check this out:

Year	My healthplan cost as a percentage of my salary (gross)
2001	1.4%
2002	1.5%
2003	1.7%
2004	1.9%
2005	2.2%
2006	3.0%
2007	3.1%
2008	3.5%
2008 (move to AL)	3.9%
2009	3.9% (good raise)
2010	4.2% (also good raise, but not good enough!)

Can you believe how fast this is climbing? And this is adjusted for my salary!

Surely there are better alternatives, especially for people like us who aren't getting as much as we're paying.

One idea is to just save the many thousands of dollars we're putting into health-plan premiums, pay cash for whatever services we need, and if someone needs a major operation, get it done in New Delhi or Costa Rica.

I have no confidence that Congress will come up with a healthcare plan that works on purpose. But they might get lucky...

Whose fish?

2009-10-02T17:19:00.001-07:00

*Not a Walleye Pike*

Yesterday I ran across a puzzle on Coudal.com, supposedly created by Albert Einstein and accompanied by the assertion that only 2% of people can solve. Looked like fun so I tried it.

In case that link ever goes down, here are the clues:

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

The question is-- who owns the fish?

Hints:
The Brit lives in the red house.

The Swede keeps dogs as pets.

The Dane drinks tea.

The green house is on the left of the white house.

The green house owner drinks coffee.

The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.

The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.

The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.

The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.

The Norwegian lives in the first house.

The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.

The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.

The German smokes Princes.

The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

There are no tricks, pure logic will get you the correct answer. And yes, there is enough information to arrive at the one and only correct answer.

There are a couple of references on ways to solve this on Coudal's website, but none of them seemed very good to me. I solved the whole thing in only 15 minutes or so, and their approaches looked hard. So, once you've got the answer, check out my approach here. If your way is better, put it in the comments, I'd love to see it.

Good luck!

Malware on the Mac

2009-09-26T07:35:00.001-07:00

I've said it before, but after this story from Computerworld, I'll say it again: your Mac can't stop you from downloading and running malware*. This time it's video codecs from Russian websites. "For helping you play diss videos our vebsite, download diss program and it help you."

These days, as long as the website looks reputable you're pretty much okay. That may not be the case forever, though, so make sure you're being careful. "But hey, how am I supposed to know what a reputable web site looks like?!" Here are the websites for a few of my favorite Mac apps: Firefox, Keyboard Maestro, MarsEdit, CSSEdit, Transmit, 1Password, BBEdit, Delicious Library, Google Earth, MacTracker, and Adobe Photoshop.

Caveat websurfer.

* "Malware" is not a virus. Viruses self replicate, often without the user even knowing. Viruses are rampant on Windows. Malware, on the other hand, is a program that does bad stuff that the user installs willfully, usually because the they think it's a game or free software.

Bodybuilding

2009-09-18T06:23:00.001-07:00

*No, this isn't me.*

Okay, so I'm not much of a bodybuilder, most folks who've seen me in person could probably guess that. It's too boring. I always preferred to be doing something, like playing tennis or racquetball or sand volleyball or rock climbing.

Well, if you're at all like me, you might enjoy this article, Bodywork, from Outdoor magazine. Notable quote:

What I didn't know [in high school] was that my favorite machines and free-weight lifts were destroying me. Those contraptions and benches are designed to isolate and supersize muscles. But isolation is the enemy. Every sport we do as outdoor athletes demands that the full body participate. You don't biceps-curl your way up an ice climb or bench-press your way down a river. ...

During a frigid mogul-skiing contest in New Hampshire, my left humerus squirmed from its cozy socket on a misplaced pole plant. I credit the shoulder injury to the military presses, which, with their extreme range of motion, stretch and degrade the ligaments that are intended to hold your shoulder in place. Shortly thereafter, I herniated a disk in my lower back, a condition that had me nearly crippled for most of my twenties. Thank you, bench press, which makes your lower back weak relative to your chest, arms, and shoulders. Much later I would blow an ACL skiing powder in Canada. Didn't even fall. My quads simply overpowered my hamstrings in a turn and pop! Blame the seated leg press.

Another interesting point, the bodybuilders aren't the strong ones:

Michol Dalcourt, a longtime professional hockey trainer in Canada, witnessed this dynamic firsthand when he compared the performance of seasoned pros, placed on machine-dependent workouts, with rookie skaters just off the farm. "Ask a farm kid what they do and it's 'Chores,' " says Dalcourt. "Moving stuff. Shoveling. .... They never set foot in the gym, but they were stronger."

I always associated strength with exercise, but now I'm starting to think the connection should be strength with work.

Work generally adds value to things too, often making money, or at least improving the value of your property. Better than the "stir water" approach of gym exercise, which costs you both time and the price of a gym membership.

I'm sure my wife will be happy to take me up on this one. =)

Changing hairstyles, solved

2009-09-07T05:28:00.001-07:00

Those who've had any interaction with me in the last 6 months know that I've had an interesting time of things.

Laptop and fire issues aside, perhaps most notable was my unusual haircut:

Except that's not a haircut. Back at the end of March my hair started falling out in a stripe around my head.

But let me back up, I have to tell you this other story first.

Tuesday, March 10th. No lunch, and a rather stressful day at work. After work I head over for my racquetball league match, which proves to be one of the most intense games I've ever played. I lost too. =(

Getting home, stepping through the back door, I knew something wasn't quite right. I couldn't see quite straight. Looking at Kyla, it almost looked like I was looking through a gemstone or something, with pieces of my vision fractured and shifted around. Scary.

I went in to the living room and lay down on the floor and soon was asleep. I remember Kennedy (2 yrs old at the time) kept trying to climb on me, and I kept pushing her off since I was feeling dizzy and hurting oddly -- I'm sure I scared her and hurt her feelings.

When I woke up I knew things were worse. I was more dizzy, and it sort-of hurt, almost like the pain you get from really loud noises except it was quiet. I laid my head back down and stared at the TV. I watched as the closed captions go by, but quickly realized I couldn't read the words. I could see the shapes clearly, it's not that they were blurry or anything -- I just couldn't process those shapes into letters or words. Now I'm really scared. I can't read!

(Note, curiously I tried to say the alphabet and I could...)

I tell Kyla something's really wrong, that it might be a stroke or something, so she goes in and starts checking the internet for symptoms. I go in and grab my cellphone and call my dad. I describe my symptoms (poorly), and he says, "Sounds like you're having a migraine, go take a couple of aspirin." I go in and grab the medicine, the whole time feeling dizzy and almost like I'm going to pass out. I pick up the bottle that looks like the aspirin, but I can't read the label. "Regan, does this say aspirin?!" Maybe I'm having an aneurism??* I take two aspirin and go lie down on the floor. Dad, still on the phone, says, "Yeah, something's wrong with you, you're not making a lot of sense." Great.

I hang up and Kyla calls our paramedic friend, Greg, who suggests that it might be a TIA, and says we need to get to the hospital asap.

Long story short, we call 911, freak out our neighbors, and they put me in an ambulance. About the time we leave for the hospital, I can start reading things again. Ah, finally things are starting to improve.

Sort-of. Except the medicine is worse than the disease. Hospitals are miserable places, not due so much to people as to process. I was moved 4 times over the course of 1 night, and was woken every 30 minutes or so by someone wanting to check my blood pressure, get another blood sample, or introduce themself as the new nurse on duty. I don't care, I'm tired!

The EKG, CAT scan, and MRI went off fairly quickly, before midnight. I had to stay, however, because they wanted to do an ultrasound on my carotid (?) arteries, and nobody could do those till 8 am. (So why wake me up every 30 minutes again?) Thankfully Kyla was able to come soon after I got there and stayed with me through the worst of it -- it would've been much worse without her.

Bottom line? They don't find anything. No stroke, no evidence of TIA, nothing. (Except a little plaque in my carotid artery, which is apparently normal.) "Atypical migraine" was the diagnosis. They said they'd tell me what to do different in life, but they couldn't think of anything to tell me. I don't drink, smoke, do drugs, not overweight, etc.

Then they tried to put me on cholesterol medication. What? Was my cholesterol high? No. So why put me on that? Oh, because it might have contributed to your arteries getting plaque in them. But that amount is normal, right? Uh, well it's just a "preventative measure"... Uh uh, no way, I'm not doing it. I'm really bitter about the shotgun trial-and-error approach the medical community uses for making medications. As David Hamlin says, roughly, "you don't get to shoot the side of a barn with a shotgun, draw a circle around the hole, then take credit for a bullseye." Especially when you have no clue what you just destroyed inside the barn.

They send me home.

Another sidenote, in case you're curious, this is how the hospital and insurance company reconciled:

Click to see the whole thing. So the hospital collected less than 3% of that bill. Make sure you have your "97% off" coupon the next time you go to the hospital, nice to save a little money here and there.

Okay, anyway, back to my hair story.

Three weeks later my hair starts falling out like the picture above. Now I'm really scared. I immediately make an appointment with the doctor. They think it's a bad haircut. "You should go see a neurologist about your migraine, maybe it was a TIA. No idea on the hair."

At the neurologist: "No way you had a TIA or a stroke, you have none of the risk factors or signs, and looking at the test results, the likelihood is pretty much zero. Let's talk about migraines. Family history of them?" Yes. "Unusual stress?" Yes, some. "Missed meals?" Yes. Consistent symptoms, bingo. "Migraine symptoms depend on where in the head they occur. Yours was a little lower in your brain than where most people experience them, but about the same."

But what about the hair?

"I don't know, I thought it was a bad haircut. It's not neurological, that's for sure."

Great, back to square one. At least it's not some form of cancer, insanity, or known alien abduction torture technique. We talk to about a dozen other doctors -- and the best we get is maybe an allergic reaction to latex on a headband on the MRI (wait, what headband?)...

I spend a few months like this. I practically shave my head so it doesn't look so creepy, and people who don't know the story think I was just being weird. Still no clues on the cause.

Then, a break.

In ~July I go to climb in the attic and put on my Energizer 1W headlamp**, and instantly realize that the headband on the headlamp follows the bald line around my head perfectly. Perfectly.

Ah, now we have something! There's no way that's a coincidence! I mention it to Maureen at work, who says she might be able to help. "Somebody put Nair on your headband, I know it! Bring it in, I'll get it tested." You know someone who can test it?? Like CSI? I don't know anybody who would put Nair on my headband.

Another couple weeks go by, and then the verdict comes back from the chem lab. Ready for this? Battery acid. All over the headband.

Oh sure, that makes sense, I remember one of the batteries in there blew up a few months back and I dumped them in the trash and put new ones in. And yes, as a matter of fact, I do wrap the headband around the whole lamp and battery compartment.

The tech was apparently quite surprised that I didn't have burns on my skull. Maybe my hair protected my skull.

Here's how I look now.

So, mystery solved. Hair's back, and no new migraines. Lessons? Learn to relax better, and watch out for Kirkland (Costco) batteries leaking in your headlamps, I guess.

Glad we finally got answers to that crazy sequence of events. And I hope it never happens again.

* BTW, I learned that aspirin is the *wrong* thing to take for strokes and aneurisms, as it makes the blood flow easier and therefore bleeds more freely into the brain. It's a good thing, however, when minor inflammation in the brain (?) constricts blood flow to take an anti-inflammatory like aspirin or ibuprofin.

** Energizer actually calls these "headlights". I think it's ironic that the guy whose blog is called "head-lights" has an experience like this actually being caused by one.

President's address to the kids?

2009-09-06T06:11:00.001-07:00

There's a lot of uproar around here about President Obama's upcoming televised speech to the kids in schools.

What do you think? Should parents keep their kids home that day?

Canon networked printer and Snow Leopard

2009-09-04T06:21:00.001-07:00

A very short post -- a couple days ago Canon released new drivers for their MX700 (and probably others) that makes it so they work over the network with Snow Leopard. Hooray.

What I still don't understand is how SL is supposed to automatically download the drivers you need for your printer -- how's that supposed to work, and why didn't it?

BTW, wanna know what *really* changed for Snow Leopard? John Siracusa answers that in a massive 30-page in-depth review.

Snow Leopard: First impressions

2009-08-29T08:02:00.001-07:00

A few first impressions of Apple's new OS:

Easy install. The simplest (and therefore best) install experience I've seen.
Snappier. A little, at least -- I haven't really noticed huge increases on anything yet, though. Maybe 10-20%?
Weirdness on first run. For the first few minutes, spotlight couldn't find any of my apps -- then a few minutes later it could. System Preferences (under the Apple menu) wouldn't launch, then a few minutes later it would.
Keyboard Maestro/Spaces weirdness. Any of my Keyboard Maestro macros that switch spaces occasionally require me to run them twice for them to actually switch. Not sure what's going on there...
More disk space! Hmm, where did that extra 10GB come from on my disk? Uh, maybe some of it came from here -- a "GB" represents about 74 MB fewer actual bytes in the count now, so what looks like an extra 10 GB is actually closer to 9 under the old accounting.
Scanner. Preview can grab images directly from my scanner.

There doesn't appear to be anything else that's really changed.

One thing I'm really excited about (but haven't seen yet) is in ejecting disks -- the old OS would just basically say, "No, this disk is in use..." SL will actually tell the apps to let go of that disk, and if they won't, it tells you which ones are hanging on. Very nice.

Worth $29? I guess so -- though from what I've seen I wouldn't break any speed limits getting to the Apple store.

UPDATE: My mom tried installing SL and in the middle of the install it seemed to crash, so she force-quit and restarted, only to discover that those steps corrupted the HFS+ disk catalog. Proceed with caution, and make sure you have all your stuff backed up (including those painfully large Entourage databases).

Colors in light

2009-08-15T06:33:00.001-07:00

Pretty good explanation of how colors in light mix, and how some aren't "real", only perceived.

I'd seen this image before, but now I finally understand it!

The Big Picture: Hiroshima

2009-08-09T19:45:00.001-07:00

Stunning.

When I was in grade school, most kids seemed to think that a nuclear bomb would blow up the world. Apparently, however, there were structures within blocks of the "hypocenter" that were still standing, at least in part.

Crayons on an LCD TV?

2009-07-30T05:44:00.001-07:00

Ah, the joys of having a 3 year old.

I tried the "soft cloth, water, and mild soap" that Sony recommends, but it did nothing.

Crayola has whole document on cleaning crayons and other of their products off of things. They recommend WD-40 for cleaning crayons off of plastics.

So I tried it lightly in a small spot in the corner, and it seemed to worked great, so I went for it. Sprayed it on one of those Viva cloth-like paper-towels (since I didn't have any other soft cloths around), then lightly wiped over (and up off) the surface. The crayon seemed to dissolve almost on contact.

There was a slight residue left, so I used water and the Viva towel to dampen it, then a dry one to dry it. To my eyes it looks great.

Of course YMMV. (i.e. don't blame me if you try it and it messes something up! =) Hope that helps somebody.

BBEdit "invisibles" characters

2009-07-27T07:22:00.001-07:00

Thinking about building a font for BBEdit, and wondering what characters it uses to represent invisible characters, like spaces and tabs?

Of course you're not.

Unless you got here via a google-search, in which case you might be. Here's what the BB-folks came back with:

Carriage returns: 0x00AC (172), unicode name "NOT SIGN" (¬)
Nonprinting characters: 0x00BF (191), unicode name "INVERTED QUESTION MARK" (¿)
Non-breaking spaces: 0x2022 (8226), unicode name "BULLET" (•)
Tabs: 0x2206 (8710), unicode name "INCREMENT" (∆)
Spaces: 0x25CA (9674), unicode name "LOZENGE" (◊)

Hope that helps somebody out there.

Firefox 3.5 tip

2009-07-13T18:58:00.001-07:00

Finding that Firefox is opening links in the current tab in Firefox instead of in a new tab as you'd prefer? Me too! =)

This seemed to fix it:

Type "about:config" in your browser location bar, then accept the warning
Right click in the window and select "New" -> "Integer"
Paste in "browser.link.open_external" as the name, and "3" as the value (no quotes)

If that doesn't work, type in "browser.link.open" in the filter bar, then right click on each of the preferences that match and select "reset".

That seemed to work for me.

Good luck!

Kenneth Cope, and music for kids

2009-07-12T05:20:00.001-07:00

A couple weeks back Kenneth Cope happened to be coming through Huntsville and accepted the invitation to come and talk and sing at our church in Madison.

I wasn't even really sure who he was when they made the announcement, but I decided to go when I realized that he wrote and sings a few of my favorite LDS songs, such as "Once Upon a Time", a song about miracles in the scriptures. Or "Brothers", a song about Joseph Smith and his ever-faithful brother Hyrum, who Joseph begged not to follow him back to Carthage where he knew he was soon to be killed, but who would not leave his brother's side.

Kenneth was also going to do a "fireside" for the youth as well, but that was cancelled. Unfortunately many inferred from the wording of the cancellation that *all* of his presentations were cancelled, so when we arrived, there was almost no one there -- just the Bishop and his wife, Kenneth, and one other member.

At 15 minutes before it was to start, I got up to use the restroom, but as I got up I saw Kenneth in the back, and he seemed to think I got up to go talk to him, so I walked up and introduced myself. He's a very friendly, happy guy (a former bishop, too), and I chatted with him for a few minutes.

So here's why I'm writing this post...

In talking to him, I asked him if his kids were interested in music, and how he fostered that interest. He said that all 3 enjoyed playing instruments, and the key was just making it fun for them. "Find music they like, and they'll want to learn to play it."

It sounds obvious that people do things they find fun, but like most parents I tend to default toward the mindset that the kids should be doing the things we tell them to. Fun? What does that have to do with anything?

But I didn't really get into piano until it became fun, i.e. when I got a book of Enya sheet music. I hated most of the music I had to play in my early lessons. Similarly, I loved soccer as a kid because I had only ever played it for fun. Baseball, on the other hand, was a serious sport according to my coach, and fun wasn't the point. Come to think of it, whether I enjoyed something depended a lot on the attitude of the guy (or gal) in charge.

And when it comes to my girls, I'm the guy in charge.

His presentation was excellent, by the way, very spiritual. Not many dry eyes at the end. Curiously he mentioned my name during one of the songs, basically complimenting my smile -- the downside of being complimented for something is that you end up putting in extra effort to live up to it!

On Michael Jackson

2009-07-05T15:32:00.001-07:00

Well said.

FileVault performance on OS X, Leopard (10.5)

2009-06-20T19:34:00.001-07:00

A couple of data points on FileVault performance on a new 17" MacBook Pro with Leopard (10.5.7):

Write speeds (4 tests):

1 GB (from /dev/zero) write to non-FileVault space: 16.43s, 15.97s (about 60 MB/s)
1 GB (from /dev/zero) write to FileVault space: 39.18s, 39.03s (about 28 MB/s)

Read speeds (6 tests)

1 GB read from non-FileVault, write to non-FileVault: 16.52s, 14.60s
1 GB read from FileVault, write to non-FileVault: 16.32s, 14.25s
1 GB read from FileVault, write to FileVault: 36.3s, 35.41s

It's possible that disk caching might be affecting the results -- anybody know how to tell??

Bottom line:

It looks like there's a nearly-2.5x penalty in write speeds when writing to a FileVault-ed account, 27 megabytes/sec vs. 60 megabytes/sec. You do pay a price for some peace of mind. On the plus side the read speeds appear to be about the same.

Don't forget, if there's a chance someone's going to walk off with your machine, make sure you power it down. =)

What's new with the iPhone 3G S?

2009-06-13T07:35:00.001-07:00

People keep asking me this... Well, here's the answer, from MacWorld. This is a list of all the hardware improvements in the latest version, coming out next Friday (bracketed comments are mine):

The faster processor, more RAM, and new video circuitry
Improved battery life
The improved camera hardware [autofocus, tap to focus, 3 MP instead of 2]
Video recording, trimming, and sharing
The digital compass [also maps will rotate based on which way you're facing]
Voice Control [dial and/or control the iPod-part with your voice]
Accessibility improvements
Built-in Nike + iPod support [no dongle required, just the sensor in your shoe -- why doesn't it just use GPS?? maybe for people who run on treadmills or inside...]
HSPA7.2 compatibility
Open GL ES 2.0
Hardware encryption
Environmental improvements

The new iPhone OS 3.0 supports a bunch of new stuff too, including whatever was keeping the TomTom folks from releasing their software. The TomTom offering looks awesome -- though I wonder how hard it is to answer the phone when it rings... Or if you're on the phone if you'll miss a turn??

See the MacWorld article for more info on the new OS.

"... and why don't you have an iPhone yet?"

The lack of TomTom software was one thing keeping me from buying one. The other two are (1) having to switch to AT&T, and (2) the cost.

All my family (and my wife's family) is on Verizon, so a switch would mean going back to counting minutes (yuck).

As for #2, a pair of $200 phones plus $89 (1400 minutes on 2 lines (or $199 for unlimited)) + $30 data plan (required) + $30 unlimited messaging = $149 per month still feels a little pricey -- that's about twice what we're paying now for cellphones. It would save me from having to cart around a TomTom and an iPod, but I could buy new iPods and TomToms pretty often with an $80/mo. savings.

I figure our time's coming, just not yet.

Hostnames with Airport Extreme

2009-06-06T10:41:00.001-07:00

Just a quick tip for a narrow segment of the population.

If you have an Airport Extreme* (APX), and you want to refer to the other machines on your network by name instead of by IP address, set the "Computer name" in System Preferences -> Sharing. That computer will then be available at "(computer name).local".

The APX may need to restart to recognize the new name, which is done by going to "Base Station" menu -> "Restart..." in the Airport Utilities tool (in the /Applications/Utilities folder).

If you don't want to add ".local" on the end, go into System Preferences -> Network, Airport, Advanced..., DNS tab, then add "local" to the search domains. Looks like this has to be done on each computer.

Enjoy.

* One sidenote -- the APX is a $179 wireless 802.11 dual-band (g and n) router. I absolutely refused to pay $179 for a device that I can get from Linksys or Belkin for $59. Until, that is, after 3 years of irritating reboots (and trying to talk my wife through reboots), painful setups, and irregular behavior, I finally had enough and bought the APX. I had always figured I just wasn't a networking guy, but the manual setup of the Apple router required understanding of all the same concepts and it worked consistently right out of the box. Sorry Linksys and Belkin, try again.

File templating on the Mac

2009-06-03T05:33:00.001-07:00

Have you ever been looking at a folder in the Finder and thought, "Now, what I want to do is make a new Word document here..."

It's not easy. Without this, that is: New File Here (AppleScript)

Setup

Download this file, double-click it to decompress it, then drag it into your home directory -> Library -> Scripts. (Create the Scripts folder if it doesn't exist.)

Then you should be able to select "New File Here" from the scripts menu when you're in the Finder:

If you don't see that icon, go to Applications -> AppleScript and run the AppleScript Utility, and select "Show script menu in menu bar".

I use Keyboard Maestro to link that script to ctrl-n.

Now what do I do?

Step 1: Go ahead and run the script. It'll offer to create a templates folder in your library directory, and then it'll open it for you.

Step 2: Copy whatever templates you'd like to use into that folder. I went into Word, Excel, etc., and created blank files that looked exactly like I want new/empty files to look when I start one, and dragged those into that folder. Or you can use templates like envelopes, letterheads, etc.

Make sure you use the right extensions on the filenames. That's how the script knows what type of file you're wanting to create. (If you don't specify an extension when it asks for the new filename, it makes BBEdit text files.)

Enjoy.

Update: Now the file's actually readable! - BH, 4 June 2009

What I learned by reading Alan Greenspan's book

2009-05-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Reading Alan Greenspan's book, The Age of Turbulence, has been a fascinating experience for me. I always struggled to understand how the world's economy works, and I think (perhaps dangerously?) that I mostly get it now.

So here are the questions I wish my kids would ask me someday about it, and the responses I think I'd like to give. Not sure how much is directly attributable to AG (some of it's probably Warren Buffet too), but I won't take personal credit for any of it that's right.

So how does the economy work, anyway?

Simply, the world is full of people making things other people want.

You (or someone you love =) makes or does something for someone else, and they trade you for something you want -- usually money.

Another way to think of it is "adding value". If you buy parts for $10, put them together and sell the product for $100, you created $90-worth of value. People make money and provide for their families by adding value. That's how places like Hong Kong and Singapore and Japan, with very few natural resources, manage to be such wealthy places -- they've figured out how to add lots of value to "stuff".

We're constantly consuming that value too, e.g. making a $3 burger disappear, putting miles and years on our cars that decrease the value, etc. So if we just stopped working, we'd quickly consume the value we've stored in the fridge, bank accounts, gas in the car, etc. -- and that's when the pain starts.

But as we figure out how to create value faster, our standard of living improves.

How come the US is so much better off than places like Africa and South America?

We in the US are incredibly more productive than they were a few hundred years ago. Why? Division of labor is one reason. If you have enough people around, each person can do one thing and get really good at it, and therefore be really efficient.

Education is another. It helps us figure out how to waste less time and make stuff better, faster, and cheaper.

Time is yet another -- it takes awhile to figure out how to build really good cordless drills, but now that we've got it worked out, lots of people can have one and use them to create value faster than we could before. We as a society invested the time, and now are reaping the benefits.

Here's an example. Suppose I could build 50,000 incredibly awesome dishwashers a day for $10 apiece, everyone would certainly be impressed at my efficiency =) -- and pretty soon everyone would have an incredibly awesome dishwasher, and their lives would (arguably) be better for it. Although an extreme example, that's a big part of what's going on. We build lots of great stuff faster and cheaper than other places, and have been doing it for awhile now.

... But China makes lots of things cheaply, how come they're still so poor?

They're doing better now, actually, but they still have problems. One, even though they produce *tons* of stuff, in many cases they're not adding as much value as their US counterparts. I'm sure iPods are made up of 5-cents worth of raw material (silicon, lithium, carbon, etc.), which (mostly) Chinese companies turn into a $15 unit (that's a guess) that Apple sells for $149. Apple's adding the lion's share of the value with their engineering, design, marketing, distribution channels, etc.

AG talks about another problem that other countries have: limited (or absent) property rights. If every time I get something it gets taken away from me (stolen by thieves, confiscated/taxed by the gov't), I'm going to start putting my energy into protecting or hiding my stuff instead of building whatever it is I'm good at building. So I go down to only a hundred $10 dishwashers a day and spend the rest of my time putting bars on my windows and a wall around my house. Then we might as well be in South America. And a lot fewer people will have incredibly awesome dishwashers.

Why can't the government just pay for everything?

It could.

China and Russia are great examples of the government trying to do and pay for everything. Have you heard about hordes of people wanting to emigrate there? Me neither, those places are mostly economic wrecks. Yet how funny is it that the Obama administration's policies look a lot more like socialism/communism than what brought us to where we are today.

AG talks about "economic populism", which is what South American presidents tend to end up with -- promising to spend government money to do all kinds of things for the people that the government can't afford to do. It gets them elected, but isn't a sustainable way to run a government.

For example, just because you promise free national healthcare doesn't mean that a bunch of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists will start working for free -- someone has to pay them to do all that work. In other words, somebody somewhere has to be producing the "value" that will be given/paid to those doctors and nurses -- and if it's not the employers of productive employees, who will it be? Likely you and me. And if you get sick more often than most, you probably like the sound of that. If not, though, you'll be paying for other people's doctor bills. Simple as that.

Remember, it's *our* money the government is spending! And although I'm fine with them building roads, maintaining the military, running the courts and police, etc., I'm not thrilled about government giving money to abortion clinics, paying for everyone's health care, sponsoring people's unemployment, subsidizing farming, etc.

So why not let American businesses foot the bill for the national healthcare system?

Consider how much of the value created in this country comes from American businesses. A lot! Jobs too. But our businesses are competing with those from China, Singapore, Japan, etc. Pushing the healthcare burden onto our businesses slows them down and drives up their prices. My $10 dishwasher will have to get a bit more expensive if I have to pay ten thousand dollars a year in healthcare for each of my employees -- and that makes it easier for a Chinese company to come in and undercut me. And if they do and drive me out of business, I'm out of a job, and not only do we lose my business' contributions to the national healthcare system, we also have a few more unemployed people to support.

American business is the engine that drives our country forward and creates value -- let's streamline it, not burden it down!

...

This next one's a little different from the other questions, but I'm not sure where else to put it:

If we get a lot of our oil from the Saudis, why don't they jack up the prices? It seems like they've got us stuck, a rich country with an oil addiction seems like a perfect target for price gouging.

I never understood this, I just always assumed they would be happy if the prices were to skyrocket and stay as high as possible.

But as with every balancing act, AG points out that as prices go up, people start figuring out how to get their energy elsewhere, or how to go without. And if pressed, we could come up with some cool stuff that would permanently lower our consumption rates. With Venezuela and Russia also churning out oil, a drop in consumption would upset the balance and put a glut of oil on the market and force prices to instead go far lower. (If everybody in the country already had one of my incredibly awesome dishwashers, how much do you think I could sell one for?) According to AG, that scenario happened in the 70's and the rate of "growth in consumption" "never fully recovered even as prices fell".

If that's the Saudis primary source of income, you can see why they don't want to mess too much with it.

Interesting.

Just a reminder, none of this is really mine (except for the wrong stuff) -- credit goes to AG (and to a lesser extent Warren Buffet). Still, if you made it this far, I hope that means you found something interesting or useful. =)

The Decathalon

2009-05-20T22:38:00.001-07:00

I heard an interesting story a few months back (not sure on the source).

Supposedly a guy entered a decathalon. He was a pretty good athlete, but not really the best at anything. In the 100m he was fast, but only came in 3rd. He wasn't great with the javelin, came in 7th. In fact, although he did fairly well on most events, he didn't win any of them.

When the last event was over, he was feeling pretty down on himself for not doing better. However, once the scores were tallied, this apparently mediocre athlete won the gold!

Why? Because in the decathalon, it's not the single event that matters, but the overall performance. That's true for life too.

Many extraordinary businessmen have extensive resumes and train-wreck marriages. Others have hundreds of Facebook friends but can't run half that many yards without collapsing. Still others have nice cars and neglected kids.

The key is balance.

This is the best counsel I've found so far for finding it:

"Most men do not set priorities to guide them in allocating their time and most men forget that the first priority should be to maintain their own spiritual and physical strength; then comes their family; then the Church and then their professions, and all need time."

- Harold B. Lee

I like the "all need time" part -- start with solid priorities, but be sure to allocate time to all.

Amazing bicycle skills

2009-04-30T21:04:00.001-07:00

This guy's incredible:

FYI, his name is Danny MacAskill. He's 23, and has been riding for 12 years. Given this video, I would be very sad but not at all surprised to one day hear he'd been killed doing this stuff.

Until that happens, though, I suppose I'll just sit here and be amazed. Don't miss the part starting at about 3 minutes in. Wow.

The spam that almost got me...

2009-04-29T23:04:00.001-07:00

Check out this email I got today at work:

I'm pretty cautious, but I just about clicked on the "To see it, click here" link.

It's a good thing I didn't, that link points to a .exe file located on a server named "mail.formens.ro". For those really not into computers, that link points to a Windows "executable", i.e. a program that very likely will do bad things to my computer. Clicking on it could have downloaded and run it (maybe with a dialog box asking me about it, I didn't want to press my luck trying it).

I think what kept me from it was seeing that "received" is misspelled. Misspellings are common in phishing and other spam emails.

The other thing is the link itself. I don't trust *any* emails I get, including the links in them -- especially HTML ones. Again, for the uninitiated, there's really two main types of emails you can receive -- plain text, and HTML formatted. HTML allows you to have formatted text with underlines, bold, multi-colored, etc. text. With plain text, it's just letters and numbers. Links in plain text emails look like this: http://www.amazon.com. In HTML emails, you can make links with pretty much any text, like this. Even worse, if I were malicious, I could make a link that looks like a link to CNN, but takes you to Amazon's webpage: http://www.cnn.com. In this case, the bad guys put a link to a trojan horse (I presume), masked as "here".

So how can you tell? Most email clients (Entourage, Outlook Express, hopefully others) will show you the real url (address) of a link down in the status bar at the bottom of the window when you hover over it with your mouse.* In this case, I did that and immediately saw that the link wasn't at hallmark.com, but at that "mail.formens.ro" site.

If you're not totally sure where the link goes, try to copy the link and paste it into a text editor (TextEdit on the Mac, Notepad on the PC), then if it looks okay, you can copy/paste it into your browser's address bar. That's much safer.

Lastly -- was I worried? A little, I still don't have a replacement Mac at work so I was using a Windows PC. Do .exe files affect Macs? Nope. =) Macs can't natively run those types of files**, so they're not really dangerous.

* Sadly, that does *not* always work with your browser -- malicious websites can fake the text shown in the link on the status bar. Google's search results pages even do little tricks with that text, showing you the bare link you're going to, but really linking to another google url that keeps track of which result you clicked before actually taking you there.

** ... unless you have vmware or parallels installed and run it through there.

Swine Flu in Madison probable: Madison schools closed till Monday

2009-04-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

See here.

Wow, I never expected schools to shut down over an illness like this. The news today said 36,000 people in the US died in 2005 from the flu/pneumonia. A tiny fraction of that die in Mexico from this thing, and when it shows up we shut down all the schools in town? Curious.

Imagine a real pandemic where we're asked to stay in our homes for 3 weeks. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to race to the store hoping there was food left to keep us going that long? =)

* Full disclosure: we'd be lucky to make it 3 months without access to a store! But we're working on it!

"Mac-Specific Virus Threat"?

2009-04-23T09:16:00.000-07:00

Oh, FoxNews, you're really starting to get on my nerves with your lame, inaccurate reporting!

You imply with your title that there's a new virus in town specifically targeting Macs. What you don't say is:

Trojan horses are *not* viruses -- viruses replicate on their own. To get this trojan horse, you had to download a hacked copy of iWork '09 off a pirate website and install it.
This thing's been around for months, it was discovered in January.

This is one of the first instances of a malicious trojan horse on the Mac. There have been other proof-of-concept vulnerabilities in Safari and QuickTime, but those were pretty quickly patched.

Bottom line, Mac-using family and friends -- don't go to pirate sites, free mp3 sites, or any porn sites. If you stay away from those, you're still pretty safe using a Mac.

Oh, and watch out for FoxNews, too. =)

How to avoid one traveling nightmare

2009-04-18T20:50:00.001-07:00

You may have noticed I haven't done much blogging in the last few months, and with good reason -- it's been a rough few months!

Quick summary: my work Mac blows up, I can't work, bring my personal Mac into work with tacit (not explicit) permission from my boss, corporate suspects me of industrial espionage and confiscates my personal laptop for 3 weeks, now I *really* can't work, that finally blows over, but I still don't have a workstation; I accidentally burn half my front lawn to the ground; check engine light comes on in my truck, diagnosis seems easy to fix, but I mess up the bolt head on the part trying to get it off, still not fixed; have a *terrible* migraine after losing a game of racquetball, so bad we think it's a TIA (mini-stroke), so I go to the hospital they do $12k-worth of tests and find nothing wrong, though some lightheadedness and headaches linger; 3 weeks later the hair on the sides of my head starts falling out, leaving me looking like I got a bowl cut, maybe caused by slight hypothyroidism which was maybe caused by the contrast dye they used in the CT scan -- or it's all caused by the stress of thinking I could've been about to die? doctors have never seen it before, no mention of anything like it on the internet; despite the fact I got a flu shot, I get a nasty case of the flu perfectly coincident with an out of town meeting to kick off the last of our work on a program, since a week or so earlier it was announced our program was going to be cancelled.

In summary, I hope spring '09 never happens again!

Back to the subject at hand, my flight yesterday from Tucson to Dallas was delayed by 3 hours, which made me miss my flight to Huntsville -- the last one of the evening.

So at 9pm I called the travel services company, and they made me a reservation with a Holiday Inn -- "just catch the shuttle from the airport". So I got on the HI shuttle, and rode for half an hour only to discover that it was the wrong Holiday Inn! Grr!

Lesson? If you take an airport shuttle to a hotel, make sure it's going to the right hotel! Just because it has the name of your hotel on it doesn't mean it's the right one!

Easter bunny

2009-04-07T06:42:00.001-07:00

I found this on the counter this morning:

I'd like to know the answers to these questions too. =)

Some sweet moves

2009-02-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

Sacrament prayers comparison

2009-02-01T14:25:00.001-08:00

There aren't many prayers in the LDS church that are written down or that need to be repeated word-for-word, but the two prayers blessing the sacrament are examples of ones that are. Our priests are asked to memorize them to get their Duty to God award, but it's tricky because they are similar but not identical.

So today I put together a comparison of the two that should make it easier to see and remember the differences:

Click to download a .pdf.

Any other priests quorum advisors out there? Hope this helps someone.