The Rotary VOIP Phone

This is a project I've had brewing ever since the extraordinary Raspberry Pi project was announced.  It's a fully-functional VOIP device cased in an old Western Electric rotary phone!  You can use the dial to place calls, and talk via the receiver.  Calls end when the receiver is placed back on the hook.

The Supreme Court Might Kill 1.1 Million People Today

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation:

Assuming the Senate Bill, the 95% of the nonelderly population of the USA (or 86.7% of the total) would have insurance by 2021.  Assuming 325 million people in 2021 (1), and 82% coverage without the legislation (2), an extra 36.6 million people stand to be covered (this number is pretty close to the one estimated by the CBO-- 34 million (3)).

Assuming the uninsured face a 3% increased mortality rate over eight years (5), overturning this legislation will be responsible for roughly 1.1 million deaths from 2021-2029.

Citations below the fold.

My Face When Economic Data Over Time Isn't Adjusted for Inflation

Two Serious Questions

How often do you click "Follow us on Facebook" links from a company's website?

How different is this from a web ring?

Thank you John Carmack

A note about something I just realized.

The most anticipated computer game ten years ago was Quake 3.  It was one of the few core games that seemed guaranteed to transcend the core market-- Gamers would see it as the next way to compete.  Normal people would play it casually with friends.  Geeks would play it for the dynamic lighting and curved surfaces.

When the demo was released, the Mac and Linux versions came out first, which sent an enormous amount of Windows users scrambling.  Because this was years before installing Linux convenient in any way, it forced a great number of people to learn about booting from floppies, partitioning, filesystems, the command line, installing proprietary video drivers, and a host of other Linux-y skills.

It took me four days to get to the point where I could even run the game, but I got to enjoy it three days before my friends.  And it set me on a path that I've been on for ten years.

Thanks, John!

An Open Firefox Feature Request

I love tree-style tabs.  It suits my [scatterbrained] working style to have 50+ tabs open at a time.  I almost always middle-click links to put them in a new tab. This way, I can leave parent pages completely untouched while I go off on tangents, compare notes, etc.  I eventually return to the page I started on and continue on my merry way.

Increasingly, links no longer point to discrete pages but DHTML elements that are meant to change the appearance of the parent page.  They can't be opened in a new tab, and there's no reassurance that they won't mangle the page beyond recognition.  Not only that, but they're hard to identify-- Generally their destination ends in an anchor tag (i.e. "#content"), but other than that they are indistinguishable from normal off-page links.

I propose that middle clicking these links opens an overlay that can be easily closed.  This way, the damage can be undone, and the browsing experience can continue uninterrupted.

Well, that was an experience

This morning, I decided to take a short detour to Radio Shack to pick up some magnet wire.  While the decision seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, it lead to a very unreasonable series of events-- Starting with a bike ride across town to visit three different stores, and finally culminating inside a local machine shop where a toothless, semi-drunk store employee wrapped five feet of wire around a pencil and gave it to me free of charge. 

It's not that I'm upset about the day's events per se but the confused expressions on people's faces when I asked to buy such a common item.  Magnet wire is in virtually everything.   I concluded two things:

1)  I visited three very bad electronics stores.
2)  Tinkering with electronics is not as common as it should be.

In my dreams

Last night I had a dream that my parents had chartered an Antonov 225 cargo plane for a family trip to Pierre, South Dakota.

The plane had been massively upgraded.  Inside, it featured essential creature comforts like champagne, wi-fi, and a racquetball court.  The engines (and structural framework) had also been upgraded at great cost to allow for supersonic flight.

This unfortunately meant that I would reach destination of Pierre much faster.

The Most Disturbing Part About Twitter

...is that suddenly people like John Cleese, Shaq, and Ted Nugent have a better understanding of an applied technology than I do.

Jason Belmonte, Bowling Radical

Two days ago, an Australian man named Jason Belmonte walked away with the PBA tour title.  He's the first person to win using a two-handed technique:

Apparently, involving both hands allows him to achieve a greater amount of spin (630rpm versus the average professional's 400rpm), creating a significantly more forceful pin strike.

It's amazing to me that a sport as old and as simple as bowling can be revolutionized by single, somewhat obvious innovation.  I suppose Jason Belmonte can now join the ranks of Dick Fosbury, Rick Barry, Pete Gogolak, and other sports luminaries who did things the "wrong" way to great effect.

Google, we hardly knew ye

News broke today of Google's latest wave of layoffs-- 200 employees in marketing and sales.  This adds to the 100 layoffs in recruitment and the 40 in the now-defunct radio program.  So, 340 since January. 

The company wrote:

"In some areas we've created overlapping organizations," Google said. "We over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time."

Two years ago, the phrase "overlapping organizations" would have been unthinkable in the same breath as "Google".  Now, it's hardly a surprise-- In fact, their stock actually rallied today despite the announcement.  Google, once organized into perfect and discrete elements, now sprawls into social networking sites and blogs-- a sort of slow bloodletting for its formerly iconic brand image.

Its core applications like Mail, Maps, and Docs have been suffering at the hands of the Labs, Gadgets, Themes, Gears, "Older Version", and other features that have added complexity without improving extensibility.  What's worse is that these features are totally inconsistent-- Labs and Themes only work for Mail, Gadgets only works for Sites and iGoogle, Offline only works in certain browsers at certain times.  Of course, none of these things work in Google Apps. 

Confused yet?  I am.

I don't think it's premature to say that the Google is finished as an innovator.  Many large tech companies have followed a similar arc:  A single great brand that spawns an entire culture, leading to the hiring of young talent, bonuses, a blockbuster IPO, and years of industry dominance, followed by a slow dissolution of the brand as the company grabs at new and seductive revenue streams.

Obviously, this isn't the end of Google.  With the sheer amount of talent and money they have locked up, they'll continue to release new and sometimes excellent products.  The game-changers, though, are all used up.

Let there be light

Those of us who have lived in the Northwest know the importance of sunlight in our energy, mood, and productivity.  Even if you hasn't self-diagnosed with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, appropriately), there's no doubt that summer hours are a welcome transition.  Google trends shows in the greater United States, searches for "depression" are about 50% more common in the winter than in the summer.

According to this map of solar insulation, the Northwest is perhaps the darkest part of the mainland US during the winter:



While I don't know much about the biology of sunlight, I do know that the Northwest has a reputation for chemical imbalances.  It manifest in our music, politics, propondance of serial killers, our glut of cafes and bars.  Individuals tend gravitate towards opposite ends of the extreme:  A long, deep, brooding in the winter, followed by bouts of impulsiveness in the summer.  Loathing self-desctruction combined with fitful creativity.

What's more is that during the late summer, it actually becomes brighter than just about anywhere in the east:



So why am I bringing this up?  Over the year, sunset and sunrise times vary according to a sine wave, and we're just about to enter the period of the most dramatic change.  In one month, we can expect another 96 minutes of daylight.  Sunset happens about 1.6 minutes later each day.  With daylight saving time (March 8), most of us will probably enjoy another hour of waking sun each day. 

So, Northwest residents, armed with this knowledge, I urge you to use your early-spring manic cycle wisely.

San Francisco

I'll be in and around San Francisco from 1/22 to 1/29.  Just sayin'.

Harper's Index 2000-2008

I always skip to the "Numbers" (or is it "Figures?") section of TIME magazine before I read anything else. So  imagine my excitement when I found this huge list of figures, compiled by Harper's, for the Bush era:

http://harpers.org/archive/2009/01/0082319

It's a little bit factual, a little bit editorial, and a whole lot of sad.  I love this kind of format, though.  Numbers don't lie.

An Update

Since Tuesday, I have been more flu-ridden than I ever remember being in my adult life.  The last time I remember being this ill, the Princess Bride was a relatively new movie and I was being spoon-fed chicken noodle soup and drinking 7-up through a straw.  This time didn't go as well, beginning with a distinct lack of chicken noodle soup and eventually transforming into an annoying and expensive case of pneumonia.  There's a lesson to be learned, here.  However, I'm finally on the road to wellness, and for that I am grateful.

Moving on.

I'm excited to say that I finally reconfigured one of my favorite applications for any platform-- MobilePushr, a Flickr uploader for iPhone.  It's a stunning example of how high function can be met with an absolutely minimal interface.  It's a very simple program in concept (push a button, upload all photos that haven't already been uploaded, done) but its existence completely changes the way I use my cameraphone.  It just does exactly what I want it to do and nothing else.  The author exercised remarkable restraint by not including a bunch of useless features.

I am still working at Old Town Computers and enjoying it immensely.  I'm also working on my web design side-project, XOdesign.  Yet, I am becoming wary of those guys who call themselves "Web Producers", wear business casual even though they work at home, and hammer out 15 identical Wordpress-based Web 2.0 disasters every day, then keep a blog about the newest trends in typeface.  I never thought I'd come close to becoming one of them, but here I am at the gates of the lamest Internet fraternity.

It's supposed to snow six inches tomorrow.  Maybe I'll take some pictures of that happening.

For being a city of 500,000+ people, Portland can feel pretty small. It can have all of the self-consciousness and introversion of a small school. The "Portland Bubble", I guess.

Take for example this pair of images-- Both taken from my couch at about 4:30 today:

Factcheck Dot Org

I'm a huge fan of Factcheck.org .

If you haven't heard of it already, it's a nonpartisan research organization that validates (or, more frequently, invalidates) claims made by prominent public figures. It truly is nonpartisan, going as far as to give Obama and McCain equal billing on their site and in their newsletter.  I think it can be hard for liberals to accept the format despite the obvious gravity of McCain's factual errors as compared to Obama,  but it's extremely important.

In a politcal climate often characterized by "facts vs. dogma", it's very easy for an organization like Factcheck.org to assuage its liberal readership by swaying to the left.  After all, facts are (at least in theory) the backbone of the liberal media.  Without facts, the left might say, there would be no Truth in reporting.  Yet Factcheck.org bites the proverbial bullet and doesn't actually suggest that facts make Truth.

That's Truth with a capital T.  

It's hard to overstate just how important it is to remember that the goal of facts isn't to achieve Truth.  Truth happens by manner of faith, not facts-- by persuasion, coercion, hypnosis, and trust.  Facts are useful as a means to that end-- to convince a more skeptical audience to believe in a bigger message, perhaps-- but they don't make Truth on their own.

Ideally, the media shouldn't be concerned with Truth; only facts.  And it is indeed when we see programs offering the Truth that we see the biggest factual errors.

New job

Hey, it looks like I'm working part time at OId Town Computers.  I'm pretty excited, since OTC is actually located inside of my favorite cafe, Backspace.  I'm getting paid to do something I was doing for free before (i.e. drinking coffee and fixing people's computers) so no matter what, I've come out ahead.

"Outsourced"

I watched an excellent movie last night called "Outsourced".  It's not very well-known, which I suppose makes sense considering that it's a lighthearted, American-style, romantic comedy about a subject that makes Americans extremely uncomfortable.  Worse yet is that it was (mostly) written and developed by an Indian staff, who take an ostensibly positive stance on outsourcing.  So, for obvious logistical reasons, the movie never got its due in the theaters.

As is often the case, the parts of the movie that made it unattractive to the studios are the same things that made it interesting, funny, and believable:  It's a travel/adventure movie without an us-versus-them mentality, it's a romantic comedy without silly hijinks or cheap laughs, and it's an American film where the ethnic leads are smart, independent, and worldly.  It's well-paced, has several interesting plot lines, and rarely succumbs to sitcom humor even when the situations are rife with opportunity.  Case in point:  It goes to India, and escapes with only a few digestion-tract jokes. 

Overall, the movie is smart, simple, clean, and polished.  From start to finish.  It's the romantic comedy version of a piece of high-end Scandinavian furniture.  I can't recommend it enough.

Bloggin'

A quick update before I hit the hay:

I've been mostly offline the past few weeks because of work and general business.  I know this sounds weird coming from me, but it's the honest truth.

I'm temping at Nike for the time being, fixing their Macintoshes.  I've met a lot of interesting folk, including the people behind the Nike+ system and many, many shoe designers.  The gig ends at the end of the week, though, so I'll be back out pounding the pavement while spending some quality time on my pet projects.

As ever, I'm looking to build my portfolio for web and graphic design.  Don't hesitate to ask if you're interested in building an online presence.

There's much more to come over the next few weeks pending unemployment.  Portland is still treating me very well, however, I still don't have a bike.  We'll see if I can't pick one up next week.