January 2009 Archives

I've been vibing off of this for a couple of weeks now. The Hype Machine is an aggregator for music blogs. The cool part about it is that you can play the songs directly on the blog. You can also "favorite" your, well, favorite songs. Check out my favorites here.

Some of it is more avant-garde music, and some of it is indie rock. But there's a lot of other good, popular stuff I've heard on the site, too.

There's also a lot of stuff that I don't like. Not saying that it's bad music - it's just extremely eclectic. I like it a lot though.

Oh man, I did something really embarrassing over email at work the other day. Discovered it today when searching through a bunch of threads. I had written something like this:

U had corresponded with so-and-so about...

Mortified, I puzzled over this for about five minutes. How could I have let text-speak creep into my work email? Substituting "U" for "You"? That's something I might do with close friends, via text message - and only if I'm lazy. But a work email? How could I have done that? So unprofessional - and kind of disrespectful, in a way. This had gone out to five people. No externals, luckily, but still.

Eventually, I figured out that I had meant "I" rather than "You". Notice the letter "U" is adjacent to "I" on the keyboard. And reading the email, it was clear that that was what I had meant.

So I had solved the problem, but I was still pretty embarrassed. I tossed off another quick email to the five recipients that said something to the extent of, "Uhh, I meant I had corresponded with so-and-so..." Doh!

Speaking of email, ever find yourself sending an attachment to someone, only to find days later that you never actually attached the file? I'm chronically guilty of this. Seems to happen every other week.

GMail has come out with a new extension that attempts to detect whether you meant to attach something, but did not. It does this by checking the body of the message for certain phrases. This isn't exactly new, but it's useful. Check it out. Phrases that trigger the autodetector:

• I have attached the file.
• See attached file.
• See attachment.
• Spreadsheet is attached.
• Heather and I are attached.

Phrases that don't

• Check out these pix!
• I hate this spreadsheet.
• Find the spreadsheet here.
• What do you think of this?
• Is this spreadsheet correct?

Still has a way to go, but a good and interesting start.

Ugh. I've been incommunicado for a while, and it's because I've been really sick since last Wednesday. What I like to call, "lung-vomit" sick. I truly hope that you have no idea what I'm talking about.

But I'm feeling a lot better now. Especially since Tuesday, really. Although this week I'm getting about five hours of sleep a night, which isn't making me healthy as I would be getting otherwise. Ah, well.

Last week, I went out to my car after work and found this on the hood (click to enlarge):

Taken via cell phone and posted to my brand-new TwitPic account.

What do you make of it? Surely this isn't a natural phenomenon, is it? It looks like someone drew a smiley-face into the snow.

Or is that a death's head? Maybe I'd better watch my back... ;)

It does look pretty weird and disconcerting, though.

Fred Wilson wrote a post about StockTwits, which is a free web service built atop Twitter. The idea is that StockTwits account holders are stock traders, and they tweet about news events, trades they're effecting, or other security-related tidbits that might have some relevance. StockTwits is positioning themselves as Bloomberg for the little guy and gal.

I thought this was interesting because this is really the first real-world, potentially useful app that uses the Twitter infrastructure. I use Twitter - have done for a while (http://twitter.com/JohnUmbaugh) - but I hadn't really figured out its value. Now perhaps I can.

Here's a short video that explains the product:

Introduction to StockTwits from Knut Jensen on Vimeo.

I'll be interested to see if/how they monetize this service.

I ran across this article about some of H. L. Mencken's depressingly pessimistic - perhaps too pessimistic? - observations about the American politicians (and politicians in general) - Mencken's timeless insights by Donald J. Boudreaux.

"The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc or convince it hypocritically that he has done so while cherishing reservations in petto. The result is that only two sorts of men stand any chance whatever of getting into actual control of affairs -- first, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe what the mob believes, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold their jobs."

This does seem to be the case, doesn't it? By the way, in petto means in the breast/heart in Latin - I had to look that up.

Mencken blamed this blind trust in government to "the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in the black days of absolutism -- the concept, to wit, that government is something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human institutions -- that it is, in essence, not a mere organization of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards."

It does seem to me that many of us do hold the government in high regard as if it is some eternal, almost holy institution. Government has certainly done its part of equating patriotism - a trait celebrated in American culture - with upholding/defending our government - which is decidedly un-American.

"When we say that (government) has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this or that -- usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of us -- we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we examine this group of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common decency."

For me, Mencken does go too far with this statement. Sure, politics is dirty, and that often the agenda of the powerful is often advanced at the expense of the less powerful, but I don't think that that's always the case. If the "government" decides that a certain course of action will increase value (or decrease cost) for society at large, I think that they do it, and we all win. If this aligns with some special interests of government stakeholders, then from their viewpoint, so much the better. Not a great thing, but probably inevitable. I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.

Maybe I'm an optimist, but I have a little bit more faith in government. Talk to me after more comes to light about where our $700 billion dollars of relief money is going.

What do you think?

This game was my game addiction for last year. It's a simple game, all done in Flash.

The premise is simple - and possibly stupid. You are driving a motorcycle on a crowded highway in a paper world. Creeping up behind you is a paper shredder, bringing on the end of the world. Your job is to - well, just play it, and you'll figure it out: Paper Way.

I've only beaten in on hard a couple of times. That's out of several hundred trials.