Kikkoman

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process.

Now there very next line where he says to do as little as possible at work I disagree with, but the idea of preparing to take “zero psychological damage” in interesting.

Interesting story of how a small local bank handled and is handling the re-de-session-pression.

Fascinates me. Its like corporate ankle-bitting.

They are my favorite posts on the consumerist.

Like in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whey the heros use the bureaucracy against itself.

iphone subsidy, prepay mortgage, mail back empty credit card offers, ditch land line, no cable, boston market kids meals, using a really old printer

Apple discount or no buy. No cheap netbook –> HP

This fascinating article describes the math behind mortgage back securities.

http://thismatter.com/money/bonds/types/collateralized_mortgage_obligations.htm

Unfortunately, my prepaying on my mortgage isn’t as destructive to their business model as I had hoped.

Nice flash slide show showing how lending and other financial innovations balloon the money supply.

Since my XP computer at work is memory constrained, turning off some services would be a good idea.

http://www.devotedgeek.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-tweaking-useless-windows-xp-services/

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

Really tho, I think any of those will just be scratching at the margin, really I need to get SQLServer off my box.

Aside from the usual stuff, this is the line to do a command line backup of the db.

mysqldump –user=<user> –password=<pass> –databases <db_name> –single-transaction <db_name>

Winner : Podcaster.

These days the “reason” I have jailbroke my phone has been the “illegal” Podcaster application.

Especially during the election season as it allowed me to keep on top of all the news. It was however buggy and crashy (version 1.2).

When Apple released the 2.2 firmware the primary feature I was looking forward too was the ability to download podcasts “out of the box” as it were, mainly because of how buggy and crashy Podcaster was.

Well, the 2.2 download feature while nice is still pretty useless, in that

1. You can’t setup a subscription on the phone and have it check for new podcasts. Instead you have to manually check each podcast.
2. You can’t delete a downloaded podcast once you are done with it.

Thankfully, Podcaster released a new version (1.4) that is much more stable. That and with Backgrounder, podcasts can be played and downloaded in the background.

ATT did two things recently that were actually pleasant surprises. To be fair tho, they weren’t really pleasant, just better than the normal douchbaggery.

First off, when you drop to a smaller rate plan, they actually let you keep some of your roll-over minutes from the higher rate plan. We had a family plan with 2,100 minutes, which back when there was lots of drama was necessary. Over the course of year tho, as the drama subsided, we built up over 6000 roll over minutes.
I delayed changing plans because the next step down is 1400 minutes, and we use just about that many, +/- 100 on the prior 4 months. So I decided that after Christmas when holiday calling should have dropped off, I would drop the rate plan, and just not use my phone in an effort to build up a small rollover cushion. On an average month, I use about 300 minutes, Isabeau uses 1000, and the kids use like 100 (they just txt).

Anyways, when I called to make the change, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that when dropping down in rate plan they let you keep as many minutes as your new monthly rate plan, aka 1400.

I also inquired as to another sore spot, turning off data access to phones that don’t have a data plan, aka the kids. They can do that now, and as a “bonus” it disables picture messaging, which teenagers (or anyone for that matter) don’t need / should have / will just cause trouble.

Last year, my nephew, while bored on a long car trip in California, decided he would watch a “free” tv show on his cell phone, which meant a $300+ data charge.

When the bill arrived I called ATT and bitched them out in an effort to get the charged dropped, aka why on earth do you allow phones without data plans to download large quantities of data! GRRRR They eventually ended up cutting the charge in half, but were unable to disable data access to his phone.

Lastly, they can enable and disable txt messaging for a phone now, which is provides a nice motivational level, grades or no txt messaging.

Good article on phone screening.

Which is very interesting. I’ve been nosing around the tutorials and bumped up against this concept but couldn’t name it.

What is interesting is that, this is the first languange that I might actually use that has a mix of functional and procedural execution. Functional languages seem to be the new hotness now for their ability to be distributed across multiple processors.

As a “working” programmer the only functional language I use regularly is SQL. :-/

Election night I got home early-ish to watch the returns. While a great night overall, it started out slow. That and I wanted to play Little Big Planet.

So I’ve made the first “productive” use of any of my TV’s Picture-in-Picture capabilities; news talking heads in a small picture and Little Big Planet on the big screen. The trick was that the TV could output the sound from the “smaller” picture.

Watching Obama win stirred a combination of pride, excitement, and historical significance. The nature and strength of the emotions stirred was similar to the feelings I got from the Pathfinder landing and exploring Mars.

It was between my sophomore and junior years and college, and I was back on Guam for the summer. I remember being glued the computer, downloading the “live” images of Mars from NASA’s website over our piddly 56k modem. Truly amazing.

Both of those events made me proud of mankind, excited about the future, and awed at the accomplishment.

Inspired by this article from Lifehacker, I set about suspending the cable modem, router, switch, and printer adapter from the underside of my desk.

This also provides much better wireless coverage / speed for the first floor of the house.

Great quote from Wired about it implying that it would induce “retinal diabetes”.

It arrived out of the blockbuster queue and would have truly been un-watchable without the fast forward button.

Awesome book. Went from good to great to awesome. It’s right up there with “Snowcrash”, but with a better ending.

Is the phrase that came to mind when I saw an add for Satellite TV on hulu….

Has taken on a new meaning for me lately. It has transitioned from the scholastic to the “manual labor” front with two home improvement / repair projects recently.

First the “The Pheonix Shed”

During a “wind storm” one of the trees in my backyard split itself down the middle. It was an odd tree in that it had a single “main” trunk to to about 5 ft, and then split off in to three smaller trunks. One of the “trunks” fell down, and naturally it landed on the shed. The first couple of pictures show the damage.

In a weakened state the shed eventually fell over. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn’t on flat / level ground, as can be seen in the 4th photo. So the project was to build a foundation for it.

This was accomplished with some smal CMUs and backfill (bricks on sale from Lowe’s and bags of pebbles).

Once the foundation was done the Shed went back up without incident. I am actually rather impressed by the design of it, aka interchangability of all the pieces.

The second project is “Finishing the Garage”. We are still in the middle of it so no photos as of yet.

The project is to repair all the holes in the garage’s drywall, and paint it.

Is wonderful. Read all about it here.

Works well. I created a single MobileMe account, and after cleaning up and organizing the my calendars and my wife’s calendars, I was able to get over the air push of Calendar updates to work.

Each person in the household has an iCal Calendar Group to themselves (and more importantly a unique color).

It is possible to just sync calendars, even though you can’t find a screenshot or mention of it on the official site.

Link to NYTimes science article.

“In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.”
…
“Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark.”

Practical upshot: If your at the top, you don’t crave the comfort of comfort food.

http://lifehacker.com/389595/slim-down-your-wallet-with-your-phone