From what little I’ve seen so far, it looks indeed scrumptious. It’s still not for me, though – I’m holding out hope for a Delicious client that actually downloads and cached the web pages referenced, so I can search locally. Since most of my links are research-y in some way, that would be a tremendous improvement.

When I first started blogging, I got my start – the Home Of The Rant – on livejournal. First on the free edition, and then, when I needed more features, on the paid edition. And writing is indeed rather addictive, so I staid with it.

Well, I staid with blogging. Somehow, livejournal was not quite what I was looking for. So I floundered about, tried out quite a few blogging systems, and even wrote my own. The latter one? Total suckers’ bet. Yes, you learn about web development – but for me, it takes time away from what I really want to do, write.

So I moved on to WordPress, and my own webhost, hosting ‘Groby Unplugged’ – this site.

More shopping. I tried both Virtual Private Servers and shared hosting and in the end stuck with shared. Not because it’s technologically better, but because it’s less headache. That might change if I ever get popular enough that performance matters – but for now, it’s doing fine. (In case you’re interested, I’m with Dreamhost. If you sign with and use my affiliate link or mention the code GROBY you get $50 of your bill. And I get $47 – which I much appreciate!)

You’d think now I’d be settled and could just get blogging, right? Well, sort-of. The more time you spend on this, the more you realize what you could do if you just spent some time – or money. There are tons of plugins to explore (free). There’s certainly the lure of professionally made themes. (Not free. Not by a long shot. Bring money!). And you do spend a lot of time on just keeping your blog software up-to-date. I love wordpress – but if they could have a few less security holes so I don’t need to update every 30 seconds, that’d be fine by me.

And of course, sooner or later you’ll discover that your writing spans to many fields of interest, or at least I did. So, at some point, I took my programming topics off to a new blog – codingadventures.com. And all was good – for a while.

Then I transitioned, and started rachelblum.com. And I felt programming for the web and game programming were different enough that they justified two blogs – so there’s Rachel’s Lab Notes for the game programming topics now.

And there were, of course, several – aborted – home-written blog projects in between. Drupal, Django, you name it. I probably tried it. And always realized that I’d rather write than re-invent blogs.

But now that all that is done, I finally can write, right?

Well, sort-of. Turns out writing isn’t always easy, either. You need topics – and I refuse to just bang out another top-10 list if I can’t think of anything good. Often, the editor gets just closed again.

But when it doesn’t, it has been worth the whole journey for me.

And since health care reform in general is something I deeply care about, I joined the Facebook boycott group, and shared it on my FB page – despite the rather juvenile, foaming-at-the-mouth activist ramblings on said group.

I did get disagreement, of course, and was about to write a long reply explaining my reasoning when I realized that it was too long to make a good “status” message. So here we go.

First, just so we are clear, I’m not trying to stifle speech or imply that the CEO did anything legally wrong. I simply chose to deny him my money and encourage others to do so, since he’s using wealth built on that money to insulate himself from the reality of health care in the United States today. A large majority of his customers are progressives. His position is 180 degrees opposed to the progressive position – that’s enough for me to stop giving him money.

I did however, during my research into this, found quite a few examples that this guys moral and ethical compass could use some readjustment. (See his shenanigans on Yahoo message boards to drive down competitor pricing for a good chuckle). That just added one more reason to boycott Whole Foods.

But, let’s take a step back and look at the article, and the underlying ideas.

Overall, it’s a sales piece. His closing point: “If you just bought healthy food – and I just happen to know the store to do it – you wouldn’t need health care”. Looking at the individual points, there are some decent suggestions hidden amongst a bunch of misinformation and bad ideas.

First, let’s talk about “deregulation is good” – the gist of his suggestions. This one is so laughable that I’m surprised anybody can still bring that up with a straight face. Let’s just take a look at recent history what deregulation has gotten us…

The current economic crisis? Check! The S&L banking scandal? Check! Californias power disaster? Check! The wonderful situation with our current cable/cell phone companies? Check! And the list continues.

But yes, deregulation works – for business profits, and in the short term. As the end user, you will be screwed, inevitably. (No? OK, so how much of the bailout money did you see? And how many of you get million-dollar-bonuses after having screwed up your job to an unbelievable magnitude? That’s what I thought. But you sure get to pay off the debt we incurred in the process.)

Furthermore, it doesn’t address the issue of pre-existing condition. Insurance companies will still be able to easily weed out anybody who’s a threat to the bottom line. Only a mandate to insure every applicant guarantees fairness. Insurance is about pooling risk. If you weed out high-risk groups to increase profits, you break the idea of pooling risk, ultimately creating a class of uninsurable people, and a class of people who overpay for medical services. Wait, we already have that…

On the flip side, we need a mandate that every citizen be insured simply to avoid the “smart” people who will go uninsured until they desperately need insurance – a lop-sided mandate would encourage that behavior.

And then of course, there’s the “The Constitution contains no Right To Healtcare” strawman. Of course it doesn’t – it’s a compass, not a map. You’ll notice that it also doesn’t talk about police an fire departments, public utilities, the FDA, USDA, and a host of other regulatory agencies that help ensure we’re not living in frontier land any more. And don’t have the corresponding low life expectancy.

And that is why the government needs to be involved in health care.

The fact that a search actually brings up relevant other entries from the blog is something that I like very much. If I’m searching, I appreciate any extra help I can get.

And since I want it for my blog, I spent some time trying to figure out how they did it. Since they are using WordPress, I am fairly certain that they are using the Landing Sites Plugin. That’s both good news, and bad.

The good news – not much extra work is required. The bad news – the guy who wrote landing sites seems to have withdrawn a bit from blogging, and the latest version has some issues with later WordPress versions. Circle Six has some info on work-arounds, and the WordPress plugin registry has some more.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about the status, since I plan on using this fairly soon…

And just as a reminder to myself, there are also a few things I’d like to avoid in my version of this. The font size seems completely oversized – I’m on the article page, and all I see are related articles.

I also don’t think it’s a good idea to link back to the search engine you came from twice.

Still – props for inspiring me to tune up my response to Google searchers a bit.

And while searching, here’s a list of other plug-ins I found that might well be worth evaluating:

• C6 Old Post Alert – display if a post is old

• In-Series – allows managing series of posts

• Related Entries for your 404 page – show entries related to the term that got your visitor on the 404 page

Besides the fact that it has a name that sound like it’s right from the brains of Robert Scoble and Dave Winer, it’s a wonderful solution for this problem – it backs up data from all your various web sources to one central location. (OK, right now it backs up twitter, photobucket and flickr – but more is promised).

The only downside: That one location is on the web too. You can back up to your own S3 account, if you choose so, but “le web” it is. Which means that the data is still technically out of my control, and if I pick my own account, I get to pay the (not insignificant, for a non-business purpose) S3 fees.

As soon as somebody offers this with the option to go to a local disc, my problems are solved. (Yes, I could route to S3, back up from there, delete S3 data. I’d rather pay somebody to do that for me)

I just came back from cruise to Mexico with my in-laws, all relaxed. Petra’s Dad wanted to know about the news in Germany – and this is the picture that greets me. Hail? In July? With hail balls almost several inches in diameter?

And while it’s rare, it’s not an unheard-of occurrence. German summers do occasionally come with hail & rain. I think I’ll stick with sunshine…

I’ve been dreaming of adding them since I started iCalFix, but in the harsh light of day, I don’t have enough time to follow through on them. So I’ve finally decided to “get over it” and open-source iCalFix. The sources are now available on github.

I hope this helps out all of you guys who really wanted new versions, additional features, etc. I’ll still be involved with it – I think – but now others can modify it whatever way they like it.

Hope you enjoy it!

As with many forwarded links, it’s ready for the trash can. (Really. It’s so bad I refuse to link to it. If you have to know, here’s a Google link).

It was pretty much clear it was bogus when I read the title: “2nd Great Depression can make you rich as BANK COLLAPSE is just weeks away, says expert”.

The “journalist” posting this garbage goes by the name of Derek Clontz, and he claims he has “News those other journalists don’t DARE print”. Yeah. That has a reason – they fact-check. Here’s how that would work.

First off, anything on the Internet that promises to make you rich is bogus or an outright scam. But assuming the title would’ve actually been decent, there are a couple more things you can do to verify claims.

• Check the date

  A lot of info is time critical. It’s really embarrassing if you find a prediction that “the economy will collapse in 6 weeks”, you repost it blindly, and it turns out it’s actually an article that’s almost a year old. Granted, in this case it applies only to the re-poster, but please, always look for the expiration date on the can, so to speak.

• Check the source

  If the article you’re reposting claims to be from an eminent source in the field, you might want to double check if it’s indeed a well-known authority. Google is your friend. The “expert” cited in this article doesn’t show up in either Google or Wikipedia. At least not credibly. That doesn’t automatically discourage information – “unknowns” can have great insights, too – but it’s a warning sign.

• Check the Numbers

  Really. Do check them, if just as a ballpark.

  If somebody predicts that 140 million Americans will be out of work, you might want to engage your critical thinking skills for the slightest moment to figure out that that’s 50% of the entire population. Account for “too young” and “too old”, and suddenly pretty much every adult American is out of work. If you want to get more detailed, dig deeper. In this particular case, the bureau of labor statistics has detailed employment stats. As it turns out, there are only 145 million employed Americans in the civilian labor force.

And if that’s too much work for you – JUST DON’T FORWARD LINKS!

The Pledge: The fact that many things adults told us when we were kids actually contain kernels of truth – even though it sure sounded like they were just corny proverbs. Which of course brings up “I wish I had known then what I know now”.

The Turn: With the Internet and Google available, we actually often can know now what in the normal course of events we’d have to learn via experiences later on. We can glimpse into millions of people’s lives and learn from their experiences.

The Prestige: “I wish I had known then…” talks about of knowledge in the sense of experiences. While it certainly would be nice to know stock prices or lottery numbers in advance, this is not the kind of knowledge it talks about. So I started wondering if there are two words to express the different kinds of knowledge. And how you classify knowledge.

And it turns out that it’s a topic that many great minds have spent a large deal of time on. It starts with Aristotle and the concept of “scientia”, gets mulled around for a couple of centuries, and then Francis Bacon starts looking at this. And turns out a whole book¹ – “Of the Advancment of Science And Learning”, in which he develops a catalog of knowledge.

This idea then bounces around in lots of other brilliant minds for another 250 years or so, when it leads to the Dewey classification.

And then it gets weird. In the 19th and 20th century, we start classifications based on principles. We get classifications based on logical positivism, Marxism, sociology – you name it. (To be fair, previous classifications were also based on assumptions – it’s just that we’re starting to explain our bias at that point). We also get Scientometrics, which discusses how to measure science.

I still don’t have my word, though. According to the Library of Congress Classification System, this knowledge probably falls under AY – General Works/Yearbooks, Almanacs and directories. But that’s about as good as it gets. “Raw Data” is probably the best description for this kind of knowledge.

The irony? Raw data – lists of words matched to websites, without any deeper meaning – makes Google work, which gives us access to all kinds of knowledge. The one thing that no classification really covers enables us to create and think about classifications. There’s a moral somewhere in this…

Now, there are quite a few things wrong with that:

• Is there really any computing professional who needs yet another mug?
• Do we as a society really think it’s a good idea to spend money on useless gifts? How does that jive with the “social responsibilities” in the ACM’s ethics code?
• If it has to be a mug, could we please not have it made in China? I’d rather not get lead poisoning, if possible.
• And really, if you do anything that has a visual element, try at least asking a designer. That mug definitely screamed “programmer graphics”

Either way, I voiced my opinions to my “customer service representative”. (There’s a depressing job title.) The reply?

Thank you for your comments.  
They will be forwarded to manangement for consideration.

Uh, yeah. Not only does this tell me that you’ll round-file them as soon as possible, it also tells me that my “customer service representative” is nothing more than an e-mail aggregator. I’m seriously not certain if I really want to be a member in a society that so obviously just doesn’t care.