Skepticum

Every now and then I like to post some of the interesting things I notice people search for when they land on my site.

Here are this week’s recipients for best search and most shameful search:

1. Best search:

• “politicians involved in homosexualit” which probably landed on my post on Brownback and Homosexuality.

2 . The most shameful search:

• “virginia romanian professor lie” which probably landed on one of my posts on the VA Tech Shootings.

Oh and a few weeks back I noticed someone was looking for a certain person with a first name as mine… I hope the person who was searching found their lost connection…

There was a time when failing to parallel park could cost you your driver’s license, as the writer of the post found out when she failed her first ever driver’s test because she ran over imaginary people, walking down an imaginary sidewalk while trying to parallel park.

These days if you can afford a new Lexus, you don’t have to worry about parallel parking, and the potential failed driving test. That is, if you would dare give your expensive Lexus’ keys to a driving noob.

But what’s smarter, a car that can parallel park on its own or a cheaper car? A new Hyundai ad has some wisdom (or is it smartness…) for us:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAvGwWAPwX8"]

And here’s the video of the self-parking (with assistance) Lexus:

[youtube="http://youtube.com/watch?v=q9sP-w-xxAI"]

Postifthen has done it, he has finally started his own blog.

The most verbal opponent of  Johnny’s theism vs atheism arguments has started his own blog on nothing else but beer… No, he’s not turning water to wine but to beer instead.

I’ll drink to that!

From the Wired today:

Since 9/11, some security experts have pushed the idea that peer-to-peer alert systems that rely on openness and the crowd can save lives, particularly when centralized communications and decision-making break down.

That argument is back in force following Monday’s mass slayings of 32 people at Virginia Tech.

As the carnage unfolded, eyewitnesses IM’d terrifying firsthand accounts to their friends, some of which appeared on blogs and MySpace within minutes of the shootings. Yet students complained that the first official word they heard about a killer on campus came a full two hours after two students were shot to death in a nearby dorm, just as their suspected attacker opened fire again in an academic building on the other side of campus.

“The kids demonstrated that in a disaster, we will use whatever tools are at hand to communicate,” says W. David Stephenson, who has been advocating for innovative and collaborative disaster tools since the World Trade Center terror attack. “It adds up to the stark reality that the first incident should have resulted in an immediate lockdown, and the second round of shooting — unless there’s something that hasn’t been reported yet — should never have happened.”

Read full article… 

In a Slashdot post today someone asked “Why are Websites Still Forcing People to Use IE?”

Funny that I should read this today, same day when a coworker asked me “What is Firefox?” and another claimed that our company’s policy is to no support Firefox…. ?!?!?!

As it just so happens that I’m an Internet marketer I know that “the company” I work for has nothing to do with the compatibility of the sites across browsers, but the business decision-makers do. We require that site development be done so that our sites can look and function in a number of browsers including Firefox. The days of “best viewed in IE” are over, and the companies that don’t jump on board will not only frustrate their customers but will manage to make themselves look older than “vintage.”

Cross-browser compatibility development is a pain in the ass but it has to be done. And that’s why some “web masters” are promoting their sites as IE compatible only. Of course there is more to it, developing sites that can perform across browsers can be expensive because it involves additional work hours as well as additional testing. Also, a lot of development work is done to improve existing sites which a lot of times means code on top of code, stylesheets overwriting stylesheets, and every now and then a bit of code slips thru and throws everything out of line.

Continue Reading »

I cannot leave my blog open to trivialities this week.

I wrote earlier today on Professor Librescu who died yesterday in the VA Tech Shootings. And there are 30-some others to mourn, but due to my allegiances I will be one of the many to write about Professor Librescu.

Here is a quote from CNN’s victims roll that so reminded me of my grandfather:

Professor Edward Smith of Penn State University wrote:
“Professor Librescu was well known in the aerospace engineering community. I have known professor Librescu for the past 18 years, ever since I was in graduate school. We attended the same annual conferences and worked in the same research area (composite structures). He was a true gentleman. [He was] always very professional and ‘formal,’ dressed in a business suit and very serious about his work. Professor Librescu had a good sense of humor and had many friends in the aerospace community. We are all deeply saddened by this tragic loss.”

Hey, how about we do some bullet control here, as Chris Rock would say.

In Wired today Leander Kahney is wondering “What’s Happening to Our Lovely Cult?”, by which he means the Mac cult. As he mentions, the days when the Mac geeks were hanging out at the Apple Store is over. These days, the Apple store is “full of teenage mall rats and iPod noobs.”

I have some news for the Mac cult, the fracking (anyone love BSG?) iTunes is fracking ruining it for you! iTunes has managed to make me forget my frustration with Microsoft, it’s that bad. A few years ago I partitioned my hard drive to run on both Linux and XP… But I couldn’t run my fav games on Linux, so I needed XP. Then I had to upgrade because the games were getting too intense (reads as I was getting too competitive) and I went with XP (iTunes doesn’t run on Linux yet anyway, uhm officially it doesn’t). And then it was iTunes vs. XP… the neverending war. I finally upgraded to a dual core and currently run my games and iTunes separately (set affinities to core 0 or 1). Now iTunes and everything else play well together, but it was a long and expensive road.

However, I thought it was the interaction between the two until I found out iTunes is misbehaving on OSX as well, so iTunes released patch 6.0.4 only for Mac users….

In other words, until I started to research matters I thought iTunes was optimized for Mac. Apparently I was wrong. But think of all the Intel/Microsoft OS users who are having trouble with iTunes… They’re flooding Mac stores thinking that their iTunes will perform better on a Mac.

And is it possible that Apple is doing this on purpose to get more customers for their computers? The release of Mac Mini certainly points to that possibility.

CNN reported today one of the victims of yesterday’s Virginia Tech massacre was professor Liviu Librescu. Professor Librescu, a survivor of the Holocaust and professor of Engineering, blocked the door to his classroom in an attempt to allow his students to flee the shooter. He never made it out of that classroom alive. Ironically, April 16, 2007 was Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day).

The engineering department website was displaying an”In Memoriam” today.

The history of Romanian professors being murdered on the grounds of a US University is not new. In 1991, Romanian Historian of Religion Ioan P Culianu (desciple of Mircea Eliade) was shot dead in the University of Chicago Divinity School bathroom.

According to eMarketer in 2006 the number of women online users in the United States has surpassed that of men–52% to 48% of all Internet users.

Estimates from other research sources concur that females represent the majority of US Internet users, ranging from 53% (Arbitron and Edison Media Research, for Internet users ages 12 and older) down to 50.6% (comScore Media Metrix, for Internet users ages 2 and older).

The eMarketer article also states a larger percentage of the US female population ages 4 and older are online users–78% of the US female population, versus 77% of the male population. Studies on adults only show a larger percentage of adult males use the Internet. The high rates of online usages in the teenage US population probably accounts for the difference.

The eMarketer article concludes that there is no gender gap when it comes to Internet usage in the young population. Also knowing that females are the ones who make most shopping decisions, and largely the ad and marketing industries design campaigns around this fact, these changing statistics have important implications for online marketing as well.

Having some minor hand surgery tomorrow, which will side-line me from blogging for a little while. However, it might be a shorter break than the breaks I’ve taken during my business trips and vacations… but this time I’ll be very tempted and might have to adapt to blackberry thumb blogging.

Outside of that… it snowed in Chicago this morning. The flowers that decided to come in the previous weeks are pretty much destroyed. The Elephant and Castle on Adams in the Loop wrapped their planters in newspaper, which made for an interesting view. I also saw a guy sleeping on the L platform today, so I’m hoping spring is on its way or we’ll have more casualties than just flowers.

And I’ve made my 4th call in to Amazon to get a defective DVD player returned to them (we received it on Friday and it didn’t work out of the box, and we have been trying since to get it returned), and I got to hear a 4th and different story on how I should return it… all but one require that I make the effort to return in (go to post-office, pay and ship), and the one that didn’t proved to not be true (said UPS will come pick up the package–turned out to be a lie…). Which made me decide to never buy electronics from Amazon again. Do you think something happens to companies when they get too big?

I’m reading the first book in the Dresden Files. It’s a sort of a Harry Potter for adults. I’m not sure yet how much I like it. I don’t think it’s got the emotional build up in the plot to get me hooked. It’s no Stephen King, let’s just put it that way. But it has potential and I’ll stick with a couple of the books to see where it goes.

Oh, and I’ve added a few more comedic videos to my Laugh Your Pants Off VodPod. Check it out, especially the neuticals piece (from my ever favorite Pen and Teller: Bullshit!).

Cheers!

After having been introduced to PC hardware building some time last year I became very competitive and decided that I have a mind of my own when it comes to hardware (should read as, I think I know better than…).

After my first successful build I realized that things change way fast in the world of technology and I have to keep up.

As the months passed, I became extremely frustrated with iTunes, its greedy and hungry use of PC resources, and its dislike for microsoft software (which I share). iTunes does not play well with other software in XP, and it was eating up my gaming resources. Basically I could not run iTunes and a game at the same time. While playing F.E.A.R one doesn’t need musical ambiance outside of the game, but for some long hours of WOW I needed something other than the ever-repeating WOW music. Yet iTunes was too hungry to allow appropriate running of WOW.

So there was my challenge–surpass Intel Dual Core and find a solution for iTunes and WOW to play together. Just buying a mini-mac to use as a media center was too easy of a solution. So I decided to spend that money instead to rebuild my system.

So I recycled the mobo and replaced most everything else. After careful shopping around I bought my parts and built following: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800, on an ABIT KN8 Ultra mobo, Thermaltake CL-P0257 Blue orb, 2X250gig Samsung Spinpoint 250 Raid 0+1, A-Data 2048MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz (1024×2), XFX GeForce 8800GTS, Antec Truepower Trio 650W, OS XP sp2 +cd/dvd read/write accouterments.

I’m not super happy with the mobo–North bridge fan died after 5 months of use, and ABIT had it “out of stock” (you think more than one KN8 user had this problem… uhm I’m pretty sure most everyone did) so I replaced it with a N bridge heat sink.

I also am very displeased with Microsoft (surprise, surprise), whose buggy software and retarded install requirements (was asking for a floppy drive to update the raid drivers??? who uses floppies these days) make the operating system installation a pain in the ass.

Also the videocard is running hot. Turns out the cooling paste used between the core and cooling units is of the cheapest kind. However, the Thermalake cpu cooling unit, together with the case fans seem to create enough ventilation through the case that the videocard stays relative cool. Before introducing this cpu cooling unit I was considering a water cooling unit for the videocard, which I might have to invest in regardless. For now I’m just observing how things go.

So now I run iTunes on one core of the CPU and WOW on the other and they’re both happy campers and I am even happier.

What did I learn? Building hardware is fun fun fun. It’s like shopping for shoes, only that you end up with smart shoes in the end–they sing, and play movies, and let you geek out. Hardware is piece of cake. It’s like fitting squares in square holes and so on. Specific pieces of hardware go together and you shop for them, link them together, and with some experience you can build good computers. Software? That’s another story and that’s where you can see the true measure of a computer tech. There are compatibility issues, buggy software, patches, add-ons, etc. Microsoft is the king of labyrinthal software (hey I just made up a word–hope you like it!). Apple’s software (at least for Microsoft OS) is starting to become such as well. Not to talk about all the rules and limitations that come with pieces of software such as iTunes.

So in the process I learned to appreciate good hardware, and avoid bad software. I’m becoming a software minimalist of a sorts. I stopped installing all non-essentials and in my case that includes MS Office (replaced with Open Office) and Photoshop (replaced it with GIMP). I also have a better understanding of why the open source and free cultures movement have been so appealing to me. I used to intuitively understand these concepts, however now I also have a practical understanding.

So, hobbies are a good thing (did I just sound like Madden?).

Thanks Johnny for nominating me as one of the 5 bloggers that make you think. To follow the chain I have to nominate 5 myself. I have to admit that I am a converservative blogger in that I don’t have much time for blogging and I stick pretty loyally to specific blogs. I probably am most active on Johnny’s blog but that’s only because I fear his wife (kidding, kidding…). Johnny does keep me on my toes and I get to learn tons by reading his blog. So his blog is the uber-thinking blog and I will list here the great thinking blogs only:

So, some of the following are blogs of people I don’t know, blogs of people I know (IRL) and blogs I just recently started to read.

Mike the Mad Biologist:

If Johnny thinks I have straight-forward opinions wait until you read Mike’s blog. The blog is heavily science based and has no-nonsense posts. Mike is the best debunker of creationist myths out there, and also a very good writer. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand Mike’s arguments. Also there is no fear of calling things by their true name in this blog.

Tikkun Olam in Nicaragua:

M. is in Nicaragua and doing some great deeds as well as sharing her thoughts about this strife-ridden country. This is a very honest travel blog of a sorts, with a social and political twist to it.  M. is also recording some of the trips she’s taking with the addition of some great pictures.

PR Wave:

The blog of a Romanian PR professional. This blog makes me think first because it is in Romanian and I never got to experience the language in a professional manner, and second because it is a very insightful and poignantly written blog. I learn lots about professionals in a country that’s up and coming — how they conduct business, what they aspire to, how they navigate new and old laws…  and who they add to their blog roll
Æsahættr:

I recently started following this blog and I’ve had a blast reading it. Mel addresses religion with charm and humor and somehow finds some of the oddest resources (or is it just damn good research and readership) for her blogs, such as the faith flow charts.

 Scienceblogs.com:

The motherload of all major science blogs. I can’t even start to mention all the great blogs on there such as P.Z. Myers’ Pharyngula, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, A Blog Around the Clock, and others. It’s all about science, and some really smart cookies.

And I have to mention one more, the one without a blog, Postifthen.

I read an article this morning that just broke my heart. The article shows the struggle of Romanian shepherds to continue their craft under the new European Union food safety laws.

As I’ve mentioned before on my blog I was born and raised in Transylvania, Romania. I remember as a kid going to the open market and buying cheese with my grandmother. The shepherds would let us taste the cheese and pick the kind we liked. My grandmother was a chemist working in a dairy plant, and she could tell good cheese by color, smell and taste. She could tell which cheese was cleanly made, and which had, as she called it “udder taste.” At the same time my grandmother knew that the shepherds made the good cheese, not the dairy plant she worked at.

Another part of the science of cheese was of course an acquired taste. My grandmother taught me the difference between Transylvanian cheese and Valachian cheese and later on in life I learned to distinguish Bulgarian cheese as well (during my 4-year living gig in Bulgaria).

In the United States I have a hard time finding what I call “real cheese.” There is a store down the road from me here in Chicago that sells “Romanian Feta” and “Bulgarian Feta” which barely comes within 60% of the taste that I’m accustomed to.

What broke my heart today is the thought that the ancient craft the Romanian shepherds employ to make the delicious cheese I grew up with will disappear. That I may never be able to go to the open market and pick which cheese I want. I might never be able to taste that perfect cheese.

There are 2 issues that are at play here. One is the issue of responsibility and the other is the issue of traditionalism. My grandmother taught me how to recognize bad or “unclean” cheese. She didn’t need a piece of law to protect our stomachs. I’m sure many mothers and grandmothers passed the lessons on to their children. So I am conflicted about laws that are meant to protect the consumer yet take away the consumer’s responsibility to be cautious.

The second issues is that with the European laws of “having running water and cooling units” they are forcing modernization on people who choose to live traditionally. This is not an issue of mass production, or of national modernization, but rather an issue of taxing the small producer who has a very specialized craft.

Also, few of the Romanian shepherds will be able to afford making the required changes by July of this year to be able to legally continue to make and sell their product. This will destroy the small farmer just as effectively as communism destroyed small business.

Aside of the fact that I think all about American Idol is a Shocker, I got the laughs when I read Maureen Ryan’s column in the Tribune this morning (especially the comments got me laughing). I love Maureen’s columns (who I believe shares my liking for Battlestar Gallactica as well, and wrote some brilliant articles/interviews on this topic).

Here’s a comment to this article that aligns the Americans voting for Sanjaya with companies that outsource, and the War in Iraq. Who knew American Idol can stir up so much emotion to get people saying, “If Sanjaya wins I’m moving to a different country.”

Sanjaya remaining in this contest is a point of a true American ignorance. Can’t sing and yet he remains in a singing competition. That’s as smart as invading a country because of weapons of mass destruction that, well…..uh….. Never existed. I have loved this show until this season and if sanjaya doesn’t leave the show soon, I WILL!!! Wake Up America!!!! Think for yourself and stand up for what’s right. When you make your votes next week, ask yourself something. Would you pay to see Sanjaya in concert? God know I wouldn’t pay to see him in concert or even on pay per view $0.99 night.

Posted by: American Ignorance | Apr 4, 2007 10:27:38 PM

Thanks to the Wordpress Blog Stats I get to see what searches send me readers. The winning search term of today was:

“We shouldn’t let legal immigrants vote”

If the search had said “voting rights of legal immigrants” or ” legal immigrants vote” I would have believed someone wants to know what voting rights legal immigrants have. But the fact that the search said “we shouldn’t let” makes it pretty clear what the intention of the writer was.

Aside from this asinine searcher, I get quite a few hits on my Ceausescu posts, via “Ceausescu trial” searches. I’m glad to see there are people out there interested in European history (I can’t believe it’s been 18 years since Ceausescu’s execution).

The next most popular search is for my favorite comedian Frank Caliendo impersonating Madden, Bush and others.