regifting

regifting is such a great idea. i am not a big fan of obligatory gift giving/receiving so regifting the presents you know you will never use saves time and money

getting feedburner comment count to work with blogger

so the feedburner staff does not advertise this well, but after hours spent browsing pages and pages on this topic, i have finally found the solution, and it is a very simple one: your burned feed MUST be an atom feed, not an rss feed. to change this:

1) log into feedburner and edit "feed settings" and get rid of the ?alt=rss from the url you are burning.
2) save.
3) you are done. to make the effects happen quicker you can resync your feed

$2.78 shipped on very cool implementation of bluetooth

i got one of these extremely small usb-bluetooth adapters for $2.78 with free shipping on 12/15/08 and i checked today (1/27/09) and its still the same deal. if you ever use bluetooth devices but dont have it built into your laptop/desktop, this is a great way to go. it is so small that you can leave it plugged in all the time, even if you are putting your laptop in your backpack. also it works with all operating systems.

http://dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11866

ZOMG [google] MAP HAX!!!!111one

View Larger Map

several pictures of the google maps larpers have been circulating recently, but feeds have been updating to report that this scene was staged. turns out the story is actually even funnier - the entire street where this scene takes place is full of random events as an art experiment put on by the carnegie mellon school of art. the funniest scene is the "love laser" ;-) see them all at:

www.streetwithaview.com

digital groundhog sees his shadow, 4 more months of analog

US senate postoned the DTV switch to June 12th today. the purpose of this being that they dont want to leave anyone in the dark on broadcast tv. at last count, there are about 6 million people who would be out of luck if analog tv died today, and a good chunk of them dont care, because they dont watch tv. tech news site ars technica explores why analog tvs are getting special government treatment to save them from obselecense while other technologies (such as computers) are ignored once they are too old to work. the onus is on the consumer, as it should be, and right now a hundred million people are ready for the switch. a delay means more money wasted. the amount of money that will be wasted far exceeds the amount it would take to replenish the converter box coupon fund (which shouldn't need to be replenished anyway)

Update: on Jan 28th, the house rejected the bill to postpone the transition, and unless something else happens to change this situation, we are back on schedule for the feb 17th transition date

capital one credit card

i got a credit card from capital one and they let you customize your card with a photo of your choosing. they expect you to use a family photo or one with your significant other (they manually screen the photo you choose to make sure it isnt copyrighted or offensive to anyone in any way) but i wanted to test them to see how ridiculous my photo can be. they explicitly say cartoons are not allowed, but i figured they meant the kind of cartoon you might find in a newspaper, or on xkcd, and perhaps not a doodle that a child would make... which brings me to the picture i chose to test their limits with:

i just received the email congratulating me that my picture has been approved and my new customized card should arrive in 7-10 days :-P

new macbook has no keyboard

impressively authentic looking news report on the new "macbook wheel". i laughed :)

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

psychology lesson of the day

Confirmation bias is where you subconciously ignore any evidence that disproves a theory you have. here is an excerp from wikipedia:

Among the first to investigate this phenomenon was Peter Cathcart Wason (1960), whose 2-4-6 problem presented subjects with three numbers (a triple):

2

4

6

Subjects were told that the triple conforms to a particular rule. They were then asked to discover the rule by generating their own triples and using the feedback they received from the experimenter. Every time the subject generated a triple, the experimenter would indicate whether the triple conformed to the rule. The subjects were told that once they were sure of the correctness of their hypothesized rule, they should announce the rule.

While the actual rule was simply “any ascending sequence”, the subjects seemed to have a great deal of difficulty in inducing it, often announcing rules that were far more complex than the correct rule. The subjects seemed to test only “positive” examples—triples the subjects believed would conform to their rule and confirm their hypothesis. What they did not do was attempt to challenge or falsify their hypotheses by testing triples that they believed would not conform to their rule.

this topic has come up several times recently so i thought i would share. my theory is that mcdonald's always places the pickle directly over the white circle in their cheesburgers.

obama's nick name?

I just found out Barack Obama went by "Barry" in highschool. http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/01/the-college-years.html

review: john tucker must die

imdb rating 5.5/10 14,903 votes
release date: 28 July 2006 (USA) more
plot: Three ex-girlfriends of a serial cheater (Metcalfe) set up their former lover to fall for the new girl in town so they can watch him get his heart broken. | full synopsis

this comedy really cracked me up. every scene was very funny, and its message is a good one (despite what all the trailers and posters would have you believe) also i watched the unrated version and there was nothing that would not be allowed on tv. this movie would be for fans of mean girls or clueless

absolutely hilarious

this cracks me up :-P



http://www.colectiva.tv/wordpress/lang/en-us/que-comience-la-fiestalet-the-celebrations-begin/

handy unit conversion tool

for those that want something that is faster to use than google calculator or a TI-89, etc to convert between units, here is a small, robust, and fast program (windows only) to handle every conversion you could think of. who knew a carat was 3.14e-5 stones?

review: nine inch nails - ghosts i-iv

trent reznor's open source summer project plays like a movie soundtrack. It is very enjoyable music that even non-fans can find very accessible (easily listened to and easily downloaded) except for the tracks with distorted guitar. the guitar tracks are rough and metallic, while other tracks are just ambient piano. it is a little eccentric to not have names for any of the tracks, but seeing as how this is an entirely instrumental experimental album that was improvised in 10 weeks, it is acceptable. what is really impressive is that this was released as a free album on nine inch nails' website and yet it still managed to be the top selling album of all of 2008.

google adsense for blogger

after taking way too much time to figure it out, i have finally gotten google's advertising system working on my blog feed. for some reason, i felt like i should have these ads even if i dont make a penny. that is odd. maybe i just appreciate the way google handles ads so much that i want to support that kind of advertising. so far the semantics dont seem to be working, as every post has an ad about blogging, but i remain hopeful. also, the ad on my blog's main page side bar does not show up in my adsense account, but i will wait on that also. it will be interesting to see what happens with these ads :)

Update: now the ads are very targeted. it is almost scary

new all natural redbull cola

tastes really, really awful.

self-handicapping excuses

productivity blog lifehacker recently posted an article about escaping your self-handicapping excuses (e.g. "I barely slept before that test") and asked for examples. I commented that i frequently use bad traffic as an excuse, because i am in control over when i leave. but how can you plan for a morning that lengthens your commute by 100 minutes? one part of me wants to get rid of excuses, but there are times when no amount of planning is preparation enough. i mean if the reason you were up late the night before the test is your house was struck by lightning and burned down, arent you justified in your excuse?

brr

this morning was the coldest minnesota morning since january 2004, and that translates to the local language as "it'll take more than two hours to drive to work"

bad traffic

it snowed a little today, and this is the result (click to enlarge):


this is a good example of a time to use D:?

new version of dota

6.58 - i miss the old blademail :(

best driving songs: a list in progress

here is my partial list so far for the best songs to have playing in the car:

bodyrockers - i like the way you move
jet - are you gonna be my girl
foo fighters - one by one

comments? additions?

review: step brothers

imdb rating 6.8/10
release date: 25 July 2008 (USA)
plot: Two spoiled guys become competitive stepbrothers after their single parents get hitched.

if you have ever liked a Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Wedding Crashers, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, or Old School, then you will certainly like this movie. i found it funny but very deserving of its R rating. some bad themes are found, but the main theme of the movie is bringing families together (but dont see this with your family)

review: the water horse

imdb rating 6.7/10
release date: 25 December 2007 (USA)
plot: A lonely boy discovers a mysterious egg that hatches a sea creature of Scottish legend.

simple entertaining kids movie with enjoyable special effects

new accounts

I recently changed usernames. this is something i do not recommend to anybody. the best thing you can do in this day and age is a) have a very unique name or b) come up with an interesting and unique screenname at a young age and stick with it. I have a name that ranks in popularity somewhere between bob jones and john smith, so using my name is out, and unfortunately for me, i never had a consistent username for anything when i was younger. when i was about 12 or 13 i would use simple names like "tiger" or "maverick" for games like doom, quake, and warcraft, but these are no less common and every time i came up with a new name i got sick of it quickly or found some flaw with it.

I am now on my fourth gmail account because of these same reasons. I wanted a name that is pronounceable, unique, robust (6-12 characters, no numbers or special characters), and a name that would typically be at the top of an alphabetically sorted list. the last stipulation led me to something related to "aardvark" for its double a, assuring alphabetical superiority. variations of the word aardvark are more common than i would have thought (uniqueness was measured with google searches) and somehow i came upon "aarduous", which just added an extra "a" to "arduous". it was a common enough typo (about 50 hits on google) but none of the links appeared to be profiles. This became gmail account number three and i began the process of creating accounts for everything i could think of with this name, hoping to reserve every site for myself. one of the last sites i checked was aim, and aarduous was taken. i have tried emailing aarduous@aim.com and have been watching to see if he/she logs on to aim, but nothing yet. this, and the fact that aarduous is an adjective, not a noun, led me to reconsider it as a username.

as evidenced by the name of this blog, i settled again with aandroyd. the extra a and y instead of i make it extremely uncommon (as seen here, there were no results when i published this. i hope that soon there will be results and every link will reference me)
Just by posting this i suppose i run the risk of somebody taking an account with this name just to spite me... i hope nobody would do that though :( be nice.

my goal is to stick with this name and use it whenever possible to build up my web presence, but at the moment i find myself sacrificing functionality to reach this goal, as many sites (gmail, last.fm, any site that grows in usefulness with time) have no way of transferring information, emails, logs, w/e between accounts. with gmail, it is certainly possible to copy all my archived emails between , but i hit snags with slow internet at home, and proxy bloxy at work. last.fm comes right out and says they do not allow transfering of accounts.

this was a long rant for me, and i forgot my point now... but if you are young and dont have a name picked out, find one ;-)

Obama worries about getting screwed by DTV transition

News site Ars Technica posted an article today about Obama/Biden calling for a delay in the DTV transition, set to take place feb 17. While his team cites problems with the converter box coupon program (which has no money left) and concerns about the "low" number of operators on staff to take calls the week of the transition (2300), it seems clear to me that the real reason president elect Barack Obama is worried about the transition is that it takes place less than four weeks after he is sworn in and if it turn out to not go well, he have this nationwide fiasco associated as being his failure. while that may be unfair, it would be irresponsible to change the date now. the DTV transition date has been changed twice already, long before it was a financial issue to do so. but now that we are a month away from the transition and every network has been preparing for a year, it would be more cost effective to double the amount of money in the coupon program fund (another $1.5 billion) and double the number of operators taking calls than to push back the date.

My proposed solution for the government to save money: make the converter coupon worht only $30 instead of $40. this would actually make the coupon program fund go much farther than a 33% increase, because when there is an option to get two of something for free instead of one, people will choose two even when only one is needed. making the cost of each box small but not free will lessen the hoarding effect, and stretch the fund to double the number of household for the same amount of money.

ben and jerry's is hilarious

the puns that they come up with crack me up :-P

is this a real thing?

so the FCC's website on the digital television transition has a quiz that allows anyone to become a "DTV Deputy," and while the entire dtv.gov site looks aesthetically unappealing, this quiz is laughable. i took the quiz and aced it (13 very general multiple choice questions like "what does DTV stand for?") and was rewarded with this generic certificate. It makes me laugh a little to think that this is an official government produced document and it looks like a certificate i got for participating in a model rocket competition when i was 12. on the other hand, perhaps i should be glad that the FCC is clearly not wasting extra money spicing up their website when the fund for subsidized converter boxes is empty.

40 days and counting!

analog channels will be shut off soon (feb 17th 2009), and although there are bound to be thousands (millions?) of households without tv because they do not know what is going on, there will be many times that number of households that can say goodbye to fuzzy or static-y tv :-D

this is good, but i am more excited for more networks to broadcast more content in HD. currently, most networks broadcast in HD, but they are broadcasting analog-converted-to-HD content, and it looks just awful. I am really hoping that they are waiting for more people to have access to digital signals before they invest in better content, and in february we should hopefully see a surge in digital viewership.

i am pretty sure there is only one person in the world who sees these posts right now, and even he might not read this because he might not care. however, i will take a reader poll nonetheless:
Are you ready for the switch? do you care?

get prepared at http://www.dtv.gov/

thanks, wikipedia

wikipedia, while entertaining and useful for trivia, is also actually a fantastic knowledge building tool. It gets slammed all too often for not being a legitimate encyclopedia, but for technical learning, you don't care about accuracy of dates or whether a source is cited correctly, you just want to learn how things work. Use some common sense. If you need to write a report about the life of barack obama, do not use wikipedia. but in my experience, no prankster will ever get his jollies by modifying the entry for Wheatstone bridge to make it look like an actual bridge. also the moderators are not stupid, and they are aware of all changes. if a change is obviously wrong they fix it quickly. if anybody believes that it is easy to fabricate facts on wikipedia, i dare you to try it ;-)

when i first started my professional career, i had much to learn that school could not have prepared me for, and wikipedia was the biggest helper in teaching me what i needed to know. so for this, i plan to repay wikipedia with a donation of $100, and even that i consider to be a steal, as the information i learned on the site would have cost thousands in tuition. The founder has already thanked the world for donating enough to run wikipedia through mid 2009, but any extra can't hurt :)

I am excited :)

http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/wildthingsbeastboy1200.jpg

another emoticon post

i use the emoticon D:? often. It was inspired by a friend i went to highschool with. he used it alot and i never knew what it was but thought it was a guy with a weird hat until dave (the originator) told me it was a scared face with a literal question mark over his head. he is a scared and confused face. he can be used when you are worried and dont know what to do (not in a serious sense). people seem to see different things in this emoticon, but this is what it really is.

don't analyze things too much

dwelling on any one issue (specifically a social issue) will make you crazy because you make up hypothetical situations and start to believe they are true.

theWarehouse emoticon pack

So for a little while now I have been wanting to create a gaim/pidgin smiley theme that replaces all the default smileys with samplings from Carl Huber's theWarehouse web comic (i.e. replace with ). A friend of mine and I have made this singular replacement and everytime i type :-D it cracks me up. I have emailed Carl about him creating this pack to spread warehouse humor, but there has been no response yet. The following is a short list of potential emoticons:

blogging instead of google reader

google reader is great for reading RSS feeds, but it lacks many social aspects. Sure, you can share your thoughts or other's posts on your greader blog, and your friends can get your shared items, but the direct link to your shared items is always something ridiculous like http://www.google.com/reader/shared/01265451620713717669 and there is no way to comment on the things others have shared, so if you want to comment on a friends comment, you have to reshare the post.

A friend pointed out that friendfeed.com is similar to google reader but with the social aspects, and it is nice, but I think from now on i will share my thoughts in an actual blog.

-AJ

work after holiday break

going back to work after 2 weeks of sleeping in and lounging around sure does suck. I'm sure it always has sucked; in highschool, college. But going back to a 9-5 job seems worse somehow. maybe its just recentism...