John Dvorak is right about something.
I uninstalled IE7 this weekend. It won’t be going back on, and I won’t recommend it for anyone. Sure, they fixed a few standards issues, but, tabs or no tabs, it’s a quirky little thing that is harder than ever to design for, configure, or even use (“Grandma, just click the little black chevron on the right to see the menu…”). Firefox is far superior for the average user and the programmer alike.
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I’ve had it with our system of government. Political parties have ruined our ability as a people to govern through representation. And here’s one more proof that our “elected” officials (party-appointed plutocrats running in gerrymandered districts and voted into office using insecure systems) are more interested in campaign contributions than constituent concerns.
You know that email going around about everyone not buying gas for a day? It’s a hoax, because people need gas, and not buying it one day will just mean making up for the purchase the next day.
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Unlike some camera phones, most consumer and professional digital cameras do not support tagging photos in EXIF/IPTC with geographic location. Nikon seems to be ahead of the curve here, but hopefully others won’t be far behind.
But I think I found what may be a better solution: the $250 TrackStick GPS Data Logger. It’s a tiny GPS receiver with a USB-only interface, it records location continuously to its 1MB internal memory using AAA batteries and exports its log in a variety of formats.
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http://yellowicon.com/
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Delanea purchased some Coke Blak tonight, but apparently the League of Melbotis has beat us to the tasting. He’s quickly becoming the Internet’s official cupbearer.
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Alas, Tax Day has now passed without me plugging the Fair Tax.
It’s the most reasonable, progressive, elegant tax system I’ve seen proposed so far–a distributed, trustworthy collection algorithm that the programmer in me loves.
It’s not perfect(*), but it’s a good start, even if Rory is doing just fine with the current system.
(*some loopholes I see: there are no exceptions written in for education services or purchases made to replace losses from disaster, and there is no oversight to prevent corporate “expenses” from being used for personal enjoyment of their shareholders.
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I’ve used uniqueidentifiers in databases before as primary keys, now I’m more serious about integrating them into my base O/R library, using the COMB method to avoid the INSERT performance hit and to get a freebie datestamp.
SQL Server allows constant GUIDs in both a character format (‘xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx’) and a binary format (0x00000000000000000000000000000000), but code I’ve seen exclusively uses the character format, but I would rather use the binary format. Doing this will ensure that any existing code that creates dynamic SQL assuming an int ID type will continue to work without having to escape the ID (I’m already protected from injection attacks, this is a few layers deeper).
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Some people I know have gotten all wrapped up in some conspiracy nonsense about Aspertame, telling me I’m going to diue a terrible death from drinking Diet Coke. Those are the people who won’t be reading about this study that just came out vindicating the artificial sweetener. Sweet.
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A review of recent studies on vegetarianism just came out that shows that vegetarians tend to lose weight.
I became a vegetarian once in college. Not due to any PeTA horror stories, worries about health, etc. I did it for Lent, just for the halibut since I’m theoretically a Protestant (ok, I protest Protestantism too, but that’s not the point).
After 40 days plus, I didn’t really feel healthier, and this was long before I started gaining weight (I was a beanpole when I got married 7+ years ago, now I’m 45 pounds heavier), so I don’t have any personal anecdotal evidence to support the review.
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I have a number of family members who are easily snookered by junk science: alternative “medicine”, “proofs” of short-earth Creationism, and the like. If I thought they would actually listen to something as reasonable as The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science, I’d send them a link. But, alas, every attempt to dissuade them from such nonsense has been met with anger.
A discouragingly large percentage of people will convince themselves of anything if that belief makes them feel special, exclusive, and in-the-know.
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