Google Wants Me to Rename My Wireless Network →

File this one in the Google tenet of "Do No Evil", right?

"We're introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with "_nomap." For example, if your SSID is "Network," you‘d need to change it to "Network_nomap."

So, if I don't want Google to map my (private) wireless network, I need to change the name of my network, and go around and update the 15+ wireless devices that I have around the house? How about if I want you to map my wireless network, I change it to "_map"? Wouldn't that be more fair?

(I realize that arguing about Google mapping a radio signal that's broadcasting from my house is sort of pointless, but this is more of a principle thing.)

Just another sign of Google's growing tone deafness.

(Via Search Engine Land.)

Testing Out the iPhone 4s Camera

The Magic Scenario

#10 Virginia Tech defeats North Carolina, Virginia

#9 Clemson defeats NC State, South Carolina

#8 Arkansas defeats LSU, loses to Miss. St.

#7 Oregon loses to USC or Oregon St. (or both)

#6 Oklahoma loses to Baylor, defeats Oklahoma St.

#5 Boise State lost to TCU

#4 Stanford lost to Oregon, ideally would lose to Notre Dame or Cal

#3 Alabama loses to Auburn

#2 Oklahoma State loses to Oklahoma, loses Big 12 Championship too?

#1 LSU loses to Arkansas, loses to Georgia in SEC Championship too?

If all of that can happen, then the Clemson/VT ACC Championship game should be between two top-5 teams. If VT wins that, they should have a clear path to play Houston in the greatest BCS Championship game ever.

Hey, it could happen … McWorld!!!

Ah, Somerville

Here’s why I dig Somerville:

• For lunch, the gf and I walked about 15 minutes down a reasonably tree-lined street to the Five Horses Tavern for lunch.
• We had awesome fried buttermilk chicken tenders and pork belly tacos (really good)
• I had a Hobgoblin beer (there were lots of good options)
• It cost about $30 for two of us
• For dinner, we went across town (could have walked or taken the subway, but we drove the 10 minutes) to meet friends for dinner. The place we were going was packed (we were going for a local beer tasting, so we walked next door, heard some live music and ate some decent, cheapish food.
• Oh, and drank some good beer.
• Then we went down a couple of doors and had a couple of beers.
• The whole thing was probably $30 for the two of us again.

A bunch of good beer, some good food, some live music, and most of it within walking distance. $60.

Today, if I wasn’t lazily watching football, I’d probably walk down that same tree-lined street and go see a movie. If I lived in the ’burbs, I’d have trees, but not the array of stuff in walking distance. If I lived in a bigger city, I’d be poor and stabbed.

I’ll take the happy medium.

Airlines Are Trying to Cut Boarding Times on Planes, Doing It Shittily →

"Airlines have been boarding passengers since the first commercial flight, but as they have added new classes of seating to their cabins and new fees for priority boarding — all in the name of more revenue — they have slowed down the whole process.

Checked-baggage fees have only added to the problem, because travelers now take more roll-ons onboard, blocking the aisles as they try to cram their belongings into any available space."

I took two flights yesterday (and will take two more on Thursday), and I spent most of my boarding time thinking about ways to make it better. The easiest way? Someone (flight attentdant?) should be roaming around bitching at people for doing stupid things (shoving a giant bag into the overhead and taking up the entire thing, sticking all of your belongings in the overhead before anyone else has a chance to even get on the plane, being a general douche).

The simplest fixes I've thought of:

• If you can't put something in the overhead due to its size, weight, or your physical condition, then you should check it. No exceptions.
• You get to put one item in the overhead until the doors are shut and everyone is seated. If you put your jacket or your purse up there, you better hope your carry-on fits under the seat. One item.
• In an economy-boosting measure, all carry-ons that are going in the overheads get tagged when you get to the ticket kiosk. At the gate, you put them in a pile. A team of baggage handlers takes those bags and plays Tetris with the baggage, trying to get your bag near your seat, and fitting as much in the overheads before anyone even sets foot on the plane.

I kinda like the last one the best. These guys (maybe two or three folks?) are working while the plane is getting setup. On a big flight, there's a couple of hundred bags going in the overhead. They throw all the bags on a hand truck, take it down the jetway, and start maneuvering. Assuming that you can reduce the amount of time it takes to board a plane, and that airlines can therefore get a few more planes out a day, there's no profit loss. You're getting more efficient, hiring thousands of new people across the country, and making the flying process might more relaxing for most passengers.

Sure, there are some exceptions. If all the bags won't fit, they will gate-check your bag for you, and give you your tag as you board the plane. If you're late, and you missed the pre-loading, they will gate-check your bag for you.

I'm sure there's some reason it won't work. But for now, this is the best plan I've got. And it's better than just charging more.

(Via The Brooks Review.)

Another iCloud Lesson Learned

Katie was managing 4 or 5 different versions of calendars between her iPhone, Mac, and Google Calendar. It was leading to dupes (and trips!) of things showing up and just making a general mess. So I thought I would help. I get everything reduced to just a couple of calendars synced to iCloud.

Then I go to move her Google Calendar to iCloud like I did with my own GCal. I export her ics file, import it into iCal, and merge it into her normal calendar.

Everything looks normal.

Until iCloud starts sending out acceptance emails to people for meetings from her work calendar (that had been synched with Google Calendar back in 2008 and 2009).

Yep, tens, maybe hundreds of acceptances to meetings that were years old. I’m sure there’s a setting that I missed somewhere, but that just doesn’t seem like the right thing, Apple, now does it?

Politics Be Crazy

The current Republican party is so crazy. They are legitimately behind someone (Herman Cain) who has no chance at all in an actual election, when they’ve got a real candidate (as douchey as Mitt Romney might be) who could potentially hold his own against President Obama.

I suppose that this dalliance with Cain is just the GOP’s way of showing Romney some tough love (like an abusive boyfriend). Drag him right, so he basically becomes unelectable. It’s a good strategy.

In the short-term, though, the GOP gets to push someone who thinks this tax plan is something that middle American can get behind. (Graph from On the Economy). Stay crazy, GOP.

Crazy Tax Plan

Moving from Google Calendar to iCloud

There’s a lot of awesomeness about Google Calendar. I’ve been using it, synced to my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, for pretty much everything but my work calendar (stupid Exchange). I used it so much that I even built a Greasemonkey script to automatically create Google Calendar entries from Evites. That’s not necessary any more (Evite finally added it natively), but it’s safe to say I used Google Calendar pretty exhaustively.

Over time, working with Google Calendar across all those devices became a bit tougher. It’s not really Google’s fault–I just wanted to do some stuff that wasn’t as easy to do. Syncing across multiple devices with all of them being able to read/write/update entries became a crapshoot as to whether or not an update would work. Weirdness with iCal (on the Mac) where all of a sudden it couldn’t authenticate to Google’s servers. I’m not sure where the fault lies (probably both on Google and Apple: Google tends to do some stuff non-standard; Apple seems to sometimes not handle non-standard stuff very well), but it would go flaky every now and then.

That being said, it still worked very, very nicely. Mostly. iOS 4 made it even easier when they added native Google Calendar syncing.

But, in iOS 5, Apple released iCloud, and with it, the chance to simplify a bit. I could drop some of the workarounds to go native Apple. So, as risky as that sounds (remember MobileMe … or hell, remember the trouble just downloading and activating iOS 5?), I decided to bite the bullet and move my calendar out of GCal to iCloud. Just one less thing that could go wrong…for better or for worse.

Google makes it very easy to get your data out. Within a minute, I had downloaded my .ics file with all of my historical events. Over to iCal, import, and boom.

It would fail every time.

After a bit of digging (using Console.app), I could see this error:

iCal: Component boundaries mismatch (VALARM VEVENT)

That lead me to think that maybe Google’s ics file had some sections that didn’t match right (I’m pretty smart, eh?). Thanks to Google’s search engine, I was able to figure out why Google’s Calendar wouldn’t give me my data.

I uploaded my ics to this iCalendar validator. I helpfully told me places where the file didn’t parse properly. Using my favorite text editor (hosted on Google’s code repository–is there anything these guys don’t do?), I fixed the problems.

Voila. Everything imported nicely. Moments later, I had my calendar on iCloud.com, on my phone, and on my iPad. Working exactly the same as it was before, but now I get to more easily take advantage of some of Mac OS’ and iOS’ niceties (data detectors, applications creating calendar events), and I can to take one “sync” out of my chain.[1]

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1. Unless of iCloud craters and I go rushing back to Google.  ↩

These People Are Losing Their Mind

Closer game than it should have been, but this video gives me chills every time I watch it. Need to find myself a way to get back to Blacksburg.

Steve Jobs

(from http://jmak.tumblr.com/)

Over the past 10 years or so, like many folks, I’ve become (or re-become) an Apple fan. The first computer I ever used was probably an Apple IIe or IIgs, at a friends or at school. Loads of Oregon Trail, other text-based games, and a bunch of Carmen San Diego.

Then, as I got older (and here we’re talking ten or twelve), I moved into the PC world. I liked building machines, replacing parts, screwing around with trying to move memory around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys so I could run the latest game. And that’s a huge reason I ended up with computers being my vocation. Apple got me in the game, the late 80s/early 90s PC world made me a tech geek.

But then something changed. Well, a couple.

I graduated college.

I got a job.

I no longer had time (nor the desire) to upgrade to the latest drivers, or deal with the incompatibility between my new graphics card and my sound card. I didn’t want to deal with poorly developed software that caused my machine to blow up just because I wanted to use a scanner or play a game.

It started slow. I got a second-gen iPod in, I think, 2002. It cost $500 for 10GB. I had to buy a FireWire card for my PC to even use it.

But Steve Jobs had gotten his foot in the door. The iPod did one thing, and it did it well: it played music. The interface required no instructions, no learning curve, no explanation. It. Just. Worked. (It also lasted me 3 or 4 years. And I’m pretty that if I turned it on right now, it would work.)

One iPod lead to another iPod (a Shuffle, then a 5th Gen iPod). Then, I got sick of dealing with a crappy PC at work and bought myself a MacBook Pro. My re-entry (after 20 years or so) into real Mac computing.

I’m not going to tell you that Macs are better because of superior hardware or software. I’m not going to tell you that everything about a Mac is better than a PC. I won’t tell you that Steve Jobs was some sort of deity of software design.

What Steve Jobs got, and what he eventually made me realize, is that my time and my experience are worthwhile. It’s worth paying a little bit extra to get a computer that just sort of does what it is supposed to. That has an interface that makes sense. That doesn’t make me worry about configuration or setup. That does the little things right. Whether it’s a computer, or a music player, or a video player for the TV, what’s valuable isn’t the technology, it’s the technology’s ability to get out of the way and make my life better, easier, faster.

As a kid (and even now, a little bit), futzing around with a computer is an enjoyable pastime. Your time, as a kid, just isn’t quite as valuable. When you have a job, and maybe a hobby or two, or a family, your time is your most valuable asset. Your time allows you to do what you dream–build a company, a family, play a sport, start a charity, whatever it is. Steve Jobs sold time.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.[1]

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1. 2005 Stanford Commencement Address  ↩

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