Month: February 2014

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dropbox cancellation

I only took a dropbox storage account because it was a nice deal in conjunction with a phone I bought.  Then comes an e-mail explaining the new arbitration “agreement” in a rather ridiculous fashion.  What goofball corporate spin.  Cancel!

We’re adding an arbitration section to our updated Terms of Service. Arbitration is a quick and efficient way to resolve disputes, and it provides an alternative to things like state or federal courts where the process could take months or even years.  

The Consumerist has a good rundown of it here.

It’s almost as good as saying that a Comcast Time-Warner merger will benefit customers.

 

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target’s deprived consumer

For two consecutive Sundays I have been unable to pull the Target weekly ad between about 11AM and 1PM EST (UTC -5).  Sunday afternoon is my favorite time to shop the local Target store, but only after seeing the online ad first.  Usually Target has the weekly ad available on the server very early on Sunday mornings.  The Target retail empire will surely crumble because I have been deprived.  omg!  OMG!  lol.

I guess the webserver and I will eventually be OK.

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reading list for my sick days

While I’m down for the count for a few days trying to recover from something affecting the upper third of my body, I’ve been enjoying some light reading.  I often read fairly weighty tomes of a socio-political nature, but sometimes I like to dip into things that are lighter.

Here is my “therapeutic, get well soon” reading list for these recovery days:

  • some pulp science fiction by Homer Eon Flint.  From the 1920’s, it’s light, easy, and fun.  Most are free at manybooks.net.  Free, fun, soothing.  Each one can be read in a few hours.
  • “Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker” which is about Kevin Mitnick.  I enjoy stories from the 70’s and 80’s about the big-iron mainframes and phone phreaking.
  • anything by Cory Doctorow.

I hoping to be well enough by tomorrow to sit up properly and maybe even drive a car!

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total sick day

I’m missing work Thursday and Friday.  Fortunately, a job for those two days got cancelled, so I don’t even have to notify the office that I can’t come to work.  I can sit (un)comfortably at home and not get docked personal time.

It’s head, throat, and chest, a whole lotta phlegm and snot.  I feel so bad that I can’t sleep, so I took a generic Zyrtec to hopefully knock myself out and get some rest.

Meanwhile, some comfort activities:

  • a Sunbutter (like peanut butter but is sunflower-seed based) and jelly sammitch.
  • a couple of episodes of the 1970’s TV series The Rockford Files.  The show was often corny, but I always find James Garner to be charming.
  • a tablet balanced on my stomach, so I don’t even have to get off the sofa to read or make posts, do e-mail, etc.

Meanwhile back to the sandwich.

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80’s dance fave – viola wills

I loved to dance to her cover of “Stormy Weather” in the early 80’s.  The clubbin’ was good then.  I thought of Viola Wills, and she was an easy find on Google.

Now I’m so lazy.  Well, the computer room does have a sound system, but there’s not much dancing in here.  There’s even a subwoofer in the bedroom.

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i wash my hands – myopera

MyOpera:

Don’t let me stop, Your great self-destruction
DIE if you want to, You misguided martyr
I wash my hands of Your demolition
DIE if You want to, You innocent puppet

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mozilla location service

A couple of us in town are doing an activity that we are enjoying:  The Mozilla Location Service.  If you have an Android, you can install the MozStumbler app, and just run it while you walk, bike, or drive around.  It records wifi access points, cell towers, and GPS satellite signals.  Google has already done such a thing.  The goal of this project is to have the data open and public.

The stated goal is:

The Mozilla Location Service is a research project to investigate crowdsourced mapping of wireless networks (WiFi access points, cell towers, etc.) around the world. Mobile devices and desktop computers commonly use this information to figure out their location when GPS satellites are not accessible.

There are few high-quality sources for this kind of geolocation data currently open to the public. The Mozilla Location Service aims to address this issue by aiming to provide an open service to provide location data.

The fun part for us is that there are few people doing it in this area, so the locations we map are very striking on the map.  If you want to assign a nickname to yourself, you can track your ranking on the Leaderboard.

We are getting Greensboro, North Carolina, nailed down quite well.  Not all data on this part of the map is ours, but most of it is.  This project works anywhere in the world (see the map).  The requirements to upload are Android and access to data.