We currently transfer our shreds to Stella’s cage by hand. That may no longer be needed. The only think that I can think is that the falling paper would scare her and she would stop running!
We had her out last night and she decided to try to hide under the bowl of soup. Suffice it to say, that did not work, and ended up just making her jump at the noise she made herself! No one can say that hedgehogs are smart.
Looks like someone (whose client actually got off anyway) is about to sue the city against the no cell phone while driving law. Personally I love the law. From a statistical perspective driving while talking on the cell phone has problems of the same level as driving drunk (pdf), though with different indicators. In any event, I hope that this law is upheld if for no other reason that the city can’t really afford to shell out all the money that it would otherwise be getting from these tickets.
As a side note, driving while using a hands free device only minimally improves your capabilities, meaning that overall the law may not have the desired effect. The most important effect that the law can have in terms of safety is that it might force people to think about the current driving conditions before picking up the phone. As well as the proximity of the police. And a little bit less phone driving is better than more.
Wow. Never update without backing up first, but normally I am more worried about system updates rather than normal program updates. The latest QuickBooks updates has an amazing bug though. Wow. I hope that I never have to face a bug that bad.
I drove by this mess twice and thought it was just the facade of the building pulled down by ice. Apparently it was actually an SUV that did the damage. I should have known, the damage was almost identical to an accident I witnessed a couple years ago.
Drive safe people, and slow down in the snow and ice!
I have been using JUnit 3, pretty much since I started doing test based development. (OK OK I haven’t been doing it for that long.) Unit tests have become a standby in my general development now though. I also really love the features of Java 5 (the new looping constructs, generics (templates if you speak C++), and annotations). In particular I love what annotations does to unit testing. However the past couple projects I have worked on required Java 4 (grrrr….). So I was particularly excited to get the opportunity to jump on a new project and use JUnit 4.
Unfortunately, the documentation is shockingly slim on the JUnit web site. Pretty much just java doc, which doesn’t really give you the “this is standard operating procedure.” And it also doesn’t say “if you did this in 3 now do this in 4.” It does have a cookbook for the most basic of tests, but I am a more sophisticated user of JUnit than that. I want to know how to do all the complicated stuff I always do. Enter an excellent java today article by Ralf Stuckert. Just enough detail to convert all my tests from 3 to 4, with no extra text. And he adds in examples of three new features: timeout, ignore, and parameterized testing. Very useful. I’ll be using that as a reference until I get used to the new style.
Or Something. Turns out there are seven copies of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” out there. All handwritten by J.K. Rowling and exquisitely bound. Six were given to close friends, people who worked with her on the harry potter books, and one was auctioned off at Southeby’s. Turns out the winning bidder was Amazon. They got it for a cool £2 million. They put up a bunch of pictures and are going to be putting up reviews of the different stories over time.
The book is amazingly beautiful. I can’t even imagine holding something like that, let alone reading it. Reading a two million dollar book? No thanks. And yet… How amazing would that be, just to see it?
Also, what is up with the JKR is Satan in the comments section?
I generally have doubted people’s claims that “oh it’s all the lender’s fault, they didn’t tell me all the details”. I mean really, if you are going into $300,000 in debt, aren’t you going to figure out how much it is going to cost you? Aren’t you going to look at worst case scenarios? And if you aren’t, don’t you think you are being a little greedy and reaching beyond your means? Well, my mind has started to change a bit on that. First of all, I’m sure people thought that if they got in trouble they could always sell. Turns out it is pretty hard to sell a house right about now. (Ask my neighbor who had to move, couldn’t sell for 6 months and is now renting his place out.) An mike pointed out recently, that people who we are set up to trust really are giving out bad advice. Now it looks like some of the things that these companies were doing were so bad that Madigan is getting in on the action. Outright lying to lenders, and as if that weren’t bad enough lying to the approval agencies. When someone pulls their number together and gives you pay slips showing 2k a month, and you report 9k a month, something actually wrong is happening there.
The borrower still has some responsibility because they should know what they are going to be paying month to month, but to be lied to directly about that. Ouch. I guess that is why I would never buy an ARM. And why I get mad at my bank for trying to get me to take out a home equity loan.
Let’s say you are meeting your girlfriend’s parents for the first time. That first handshake with dad might mean more than you think.
Did you know that your TV is about to become obsolete? That nice piece of solid state analog sub-carrierwave decoding device we call the color television will be obsolete on February 17th, 2009. One of the longest living common usage standards ever, RS-170a, or the NTSC standard, was an expansion of the 1941 NTSC standard (for black and white television) is being pitched out the window. The FCC even has a countdown timer on their truly horrific website. The interesting thing is that most people (more than half in the US) have cable anyway, so this won’t really effect them. This is only for broadcast TV. I don’t actually watch TV so it doesn’t really matter personally to me, but I find it a really intriguing cultural phenomenon. And my TV will no longer be able to pick up television signals. It is DVDs only for me moving forward. It is interesting also because so much money is at stake. The TV manufacturers stand to gain, the FCC has already gained (selling off freed up spectrum to the tune of billions), and companies that help people set up their new (more complicated) tvs stand to gain.
Apparently the GAO is kind of horked off at the FCC though. I guess they don’t think the FCC did a good job pulling this off. I do sort of wonder how many old people with old TVs are going to turn them on in February in 2009 and wonder why they aren’t getting any signal. Sure you can get you converter box coupon for $40, but I really have to wonder how many of the affected people are going to know about that beforehand.
The ATSC replacement is interesting, but I really have to wonder how long lived a spec that enforces a specific compression encoding scheme is (and the older MPEG-2 at that! Europe is generally using MPEG-4), given how fast the technology world changes. And of course, even if the digital aspect of it is all fine, there is still the issue of DRM on HD and blue ray DVDs. Although it looks like HDMI is winning out there, so that might be hashed out in time for the new TVs to come with the appropriate connectors.
For the record, the last time I bought a TV was 1994. And it was used.
Update: A good non-technical history of the TV through the digital and high def age. Though his timeline for the DTV transition is out of date, they pushed it back two years because of lack of uptake. (They technically need to have 85% digital TV household penetration before analog goes dark.)
Which is good, because my faith in humanity was lowered considerably recently. I’m on the ADT (house alarm) contact list for a neighbor. I got a call the other day from ADT, and it appeared that the alarm was going off in their house. I had a very odd conversation with the ADT people, once I was unable to reach my neighbor (meaning he didn’t accidentally set it off) where I asked them what I was supposed to do. I didn’t really want to walk in on a couple burglars! It was pretty funny actually, they didn’t really want to tell me to go there, but clearly the whole point of the contact list is that you will show up when they call.
In any case, they informed me that the police were already called, and got my car description to give to the police. I showed up and sure enough the door was kicked in. Fortunately the police were there already, and they determined that the guy didn’t actually get in, but was scared off by the alarm. (And possibly the quick response by the police!) So I took the report, and waited for my neighbor to get home, while my wife went home to look up the alarm code which I forgot. That thing is LOUD! (Even the police said it hurt their ears.) The police were really great, and very helpful, I felt much safer after talking to them, but listening to their radio while they were in the house was crazy. There was madness going on in the neighborhood. And he had to leave in a hurry, sirens filling the night air for the rest of the evening. I guess people were walking the neighborhood trying to kick in doors. Sturdy doors and alarms are good! (Turns out they tried to kick in another door that held well enough to not set the alarm off.)
I have to say, I am completely impressed. Pretty much everywhere I have lived in the past (in Chicago) people have been really bad about shoveling. Both in terms of maintaining their property (e.g. shoveling the walk) and keeping the common way open (e.g. putting furniture in the spot that their car was and they did a crappy job shoveling out). I look up and down my street now though and almost all of the houses have a clean side walk after each of the many snows we have had this past week. In addition, there is no furniture blocking the street. I’ve even seen neighbors shoveling their neighbor’s walks. No one asked, they were just out and it seemed the right thing to do.
Color me impressed. My faith in humanity has gone up some.
Yet a third electronic voting company has utterly failed California’s new voting machine security standards test. When will people realize that voting is hard to get right even without voting machines. The key is openness and transparency, so everyone can see what is going on at every step of the process. Hiding some of the process in a machine isn’t going to help.
My wife and I have stock phrases we use all the time. “You know what’s sad?” “Dead puppies.” That sort of thing. I’m afraid I know something sadder. Hedgehogs in a cast.
And dude those claws are impressive. My hedgehog has feet next to those talons. No meal worms for that guy. He eats PEOPLE!
The Pope recently announced a set of new Cardinals, including the patriarch of the Chaldean Church. It is not a big thing, but makes me happy none the less.
I realized that I have been remiss in posting world news lately. In general though, things have been going much better in Iraq, which makes it very interesting to watch the presidential contenders try to explain that away. *sigh* One of the things that I really like about Obama is that he is able to stay rooted in reality better than most. Unfortunately harping on the war seems to be of critical importance to the current race.
While it is true that the midwest is hit less hard by the vagaries of the real estate market, we are still hit by it. In particular, even if prices go up and down more slowly here, when people use ARMs to buy beyond their means, that is small comfort. The Sun Times has a good article talking about the increasing rate of foreclosures in Chicago, as all of those ARMs come due. I honestly don’t get them at all. Sure it lets you get more for less at the beginning, but you have to know that the piper is going to come calling. And on the flip side, it seems like the banks should have a vested interest in trying to make it work out. Isn’t it better to adjust up to something that the people can pay and get something back, rather than forcing them to foreclose by squeezing a little more short term gain out of them? It’s not like you are gonna make the rest back on selling the house in this market.
On a positive note, while increase of foreclosures in Roger’s Park was quite high (70%) (pdf), we are still only in the middle of the pack in terms of absolute foreclosure rate. And good lord what happened in Portage Park? 200% increase in foreclosures?
You know what sucks? 7 AM Meetings.
You know what sucks more? 7 AM meetings when you have to stay out late the night before. When you have been sick all week.
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