My Delusional Dream

When the iPhone was first released it was hailed as the "Jesus Phone". The one phone that would surpass all other phones and bring a new era of non-suckiness to our personal communications. With the release of the iPhone App Store, it's only gotten better. However, I believe in all the marketing about the iPhone 3G and it's new features like GPS, they forgot one tiny fact out. It allows the user to time travel. Witness this undoctored screenshot from iNetworkTest:

Wow, I sent 256KB in -14.707 seconds!

Today was the day for my yearly homepage update. The full diff of which appears below. For more history see the following previous posts: 2005, 2006.

Index: index.xml
===================================================================
--- index.xml   (revision 326)
+++ index.xml   (working copy)
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
 <my:infobox title="A Little About Me" minheight="255">
 <p>
 <img src="resources/images/me.jpg" align="left" class="margin10pxright"/>
-This is the requisite bit of information about me.  I'm a 27 year old graduate
+This is the requisite bit of information about me.  I'm a 28 year old graduate
 student in the <a href="http://www.epp.cmu.edu/">Department of Engineering and
 Public Policy</a> at <a href="http://www.cmu.edu/">Carnegie Mellon
 University</a>.  I'm currently looking at various aspects of software policy,

Today was the day for my yearly homepage update. The full diff of which appears below. For more history see this previous post

--- index.xml   (revision 230)
+++ index.xml   (working copy)
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@
 <my:infobox title="A Little About Me" minheight="255">
 <p>
 <img src="resources/images/me.jpg" align="left" class="margin10pxright"/>
-This is the requisite bit of information about me.  I'm a 26 year old graduate
+This is the requisite bit of information about me.  I'm a 27 year old graduate
 student in the <a href="http://www.epp.cmu.edu/">Department of Engineering and
 Public Policy</a> at <a href="http://www.cmu.edu/">Carnegie Mellon
 University</a>.  I'm currently looking at various aspects of software policy,

Yesterday was a sad day for baseball with the surprise death of Twins legend Kirby Puckett. If something happens to Cal Ripken in the next few days, I'm just going to curl up in a ball and give up on baseball. However, today something good also happened, unfortunately, it taints the sports of baseball.

That's right, Barry Bonds is a druggie. I talked about this over a year ago. If the allegations are true, which lets face it, look at the pictures of him and tell me they're not true, then he deserves to be banned from baseball and have EVERY award stripped from him. If they find that other players took steroids, they deserve the same punishment. Pete Rose only bet on games, these guys ruined the game. No, I think banning them for life might be too easy on them. For so many kids, people like Bonds have ruined baseball. And that makes me very sad.

On the positive side, its a good day beacuse Bonds is exposed for the fraud that he's always been. A worthless, jealous, shell of man who took post-menopausal drugs drugs to cover up for his steroid problem. Sorry Barry, you're no good. Sulk away, enjoy those trophies for a little while longer, because they're going to disappear soon enough. You'll never make it to Cooperstown, unlike the real hero we lost yesterday.

Baseball lost a hero today. It's sad that there is so few of them left.

Kirby Puckett after his home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series

Another issue that I've been dealing with is spending too much time reading email and blogs, so I've decided to reduce those issues. To that end, I'm unsubscribing from a lot of mailing lists and putting lots of blogs on their two weeks notice. If I don't notice that they're gone for a few weeks, they stay gone.

Combined with throwing all of my email from last year in a DMZ, I hope this reduces the amount of time I need end up killing with useless email and blogs.

Welcome to my first entry of the 2006 fiscal blogging year (which mere mortals know as the 2006 calendar year). If you're an astute reader, you may remember that I did a similar entry to this two years ago. In that entry I lamented about being fat and not finishing the bible. Fast forward to 2006, I still haven't finished the bible, but I'm not as fat, although I need to loose the excess weight I've gained over the last few weeks in Texas and Minnesota.

Also, you may recall that I said that I don't usually make new year's resolutions. Well, a lot of stuff can change in two years that cause you to rethink that. That means that this year I've decided to do some new years resolutions. As I formulate them better I'll post them in this blog. Here's my first one:

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is the incredibly popular sweetener found in just about everything. From Coca-Cola, to Smucker's Jam, to Frosted Mini-Wheats. If it tastes good and is sweet, there is probably high fructose corn syrup in there. There are some good aspects of the sweetener, it provides additional income for farmers and reduces reliance on foreign sources of sweeteners. It's also good virtually forever, which is why so many sweets last forever. More information can be found on HFCSFacts.com - a project of the corn refiners association. This page makes HFCS look like pretty good stuff, and it might be.

But you had better beware. Because even though HFCS is found everywhere, there are questions about the actual ramifications of HFCS. A few weeks ago, Sprol did a nice writeup of the possible dangers of HFCS, however, like many Sprol items, it's a little speculative. Fortunately, I've found some other articles from The Washington Post, and The Seattle Times indicating that HFCS might be highly related to the increase in obesity in the United States. Personally, I think that American's are just lazy.

Well, in any case, I've decided that I'm going to try and eliminate it. This means no regular pop, no regular jelly, no frosted mini wheats. I also will be staying away from diet colas because I find they cause joint problems. I'll post an update in a few weeks on my progress here.

As a full disclaimer, I'm not eliminating HFCS immediately. Any products with HFCS laying around the house will be eaten rather than thrown away. I'll try to make sure new products have no HFCS. I'm not sure what I'll do when I need a product with HFCS - we'll cross that bridge when we reach it.

Like many people, I'm morbidly watching the upcoming disaster in south east Texas. I decided that now would be the time to play with Google Earth to see what it can do. I've been pretty impressed. Here's a snapshot of what I just did:

I've also posted a Hurricane Rita KMZ file for use with Google Earth. The images are links to the always updating ones on the National Weather Service's page, so if they move the map much, you'll get it all messed up. It also has links to the the wind maps for both tropical storm and hurricane force winds. Enjoy.

I was a geek and nerd back in High School. Yes, I played tennis, but only at the JV level, and even then I sucked. Most of my stuff was nerdy like Math Team, Science Olympiad, Oddyssey of the Mind, and Speech team. Yup, at must schools I would have been a walking wedgie. Fortunately, my high school was pretty cool about that stuff, so I escaped with no ripped pairs of underwear.

One of the nerdy things I did for three years was Mock Trial. Basically we'd play lawyers and witnesses and try to argue our case persuasively before a panel of real lawyers. The cases were standardized through the state and were distributed in a case book with depositions and background material. The witnesses role was to convincingly present their information, while the lawyers had to dig it out. Of course, each witness had juicy bits for both sides in their deposition.

In 1996 (I think), the case dealt with a high schooler who was shot by a police officer named Sidney (convinently, all witnesses had gender neutral names). Our primary defense team consisted of Jeff Firkell (Sidney) and Eric Myers (defense lawyer); I was on the prosecution, so I'm not really involved in this story. Now, neither of these two fellows was what one could call serious, in even the most loose interpretation of the word. This worked out very well because witnesses were basically given free reign to make their responses up if the question was from outside the scope of the deposition.

One of Jeff's biggest gems comes from a response to a question from the opposing lawyer that was something like "So officer Sidney, why, if you had a chance to aim, did you aim for the students arm instead of their knee?" To which Jeff took the liberty of replying "Well, you see, I was shot in the knee in Nam and wouldn't wish that on anyone," and then faked a series of twitches that would be the result of his traumatic experience.

But no, that's not the actual target of this entry. Rather, there is a much better gem that I wish to describe. The prosecution had been haranging Sidney about why he was near the fast food restaurant when he was supposed to be working at the school. No information was presented about the restuarant, but the question was designed to discredit Sidney's work ethic.

Now, there was a McDonald's right next to our school. We had our suspicions about its location, knowing that many people skipped cafeteria lunch and went there instead. Eric, the astute chap he was asked Jeff/Sidney "Wouldn't you agree that McDonalds are strategically located near schools?". No objection was raised. Sidney replied that yes it was and he was just checking on truant students. We won the case.

Imagine my surprise today when I see that fast food really does cluster near schools. Yes folks, your research was predicted by Eric Myers nine years ago.

It's was a hot and humid weekend in Pittsburgh this weekend. On such a Friday evening what's a group if mid-twentysomething married couples of graduate students supposed to do? Simple. Go see what sort of fun we can find out in Pennsyltucky!

This last week was the Butler Farm Show, and boy was it an experience. Apparently, everyone up in Butler goes to this basically every night, because it was packed. Admission was the bargain basement price of $7, plus $2 to get access to arena events. While that might initially seem kinda steep, it provided unlimited rides, which means quality time with carnies!

Of course, as liberal graduate students, we fit right in with our tiny Mazda3 and Bill's Volvo station wagon parked between the rows of pick-up trucks with the extra tires in the back for pulling horse trailers. Once inside we could have easily been mistaken for the locals with their "If at first you don't secede" T-shirts and copious amounts of yellow ribbons.

So why would a group of what is primarily environmental hippies (all the other grad students did stuff with the environment, I was the only geek) brave possible death and maiming? Two words, DEMOLITION DERBY!

Nothin is more relaxing than watching Pennsyltuckians take cars and beat the hell out of each other by ramming them at moderately high speeds. There were no flips or flying body parts, but profuse amounts of screeches, popped tires, and even a few little fires. It's a little disappointing because the system is set up where it's advantageous to be on the periphery and not that active. Frequently the winner of each round had just sat on the side of the arena until the refs began to count them out for inactivity. They need a better scoring system, so folks who really do damage, which of course the crowd loves, can somehow go on. Unfortunately, that means they would have to get their cars going again for future rounds.

There were three main rounds, where "fresh" cars were used. A fourth round featured second chances, where drives from previous rounds who somehow could get their car going again after their round, could try again. The last two people driving and hitting from each stage then went on to the fifth and final stage. Unlike previous stages, there would be only one one winner. The last car moving was to be the winner.

In this spirit, the demolition derby ended with two cars banging the hell out of each other and chasing each other around the arena. Finally, the cars revved up and ran at each other head one to massive applause and a wonderful crash. And...a TIE?! WTF? The head on collision disabled both cards. They don't even have ties in Hockey anymore. Nestor's repeated appeals for hand to hand combat were rejected.

Without a doubt, we're going again next year. It's one of those things that would be hella cool to do sometime too.