My baby’s words
Words that my 15 month, Lily, uses in ‘conversation’, in chronological order:
- Dada (of course)
- Mama
- Baby
- Bye-bye
- Kitty
- Audrey (pronounced adi, her sister)
- Woof-woof
- Night-night
- Cookie
- Bubbles
- Nana (banana)
- Elmo (Sometimes pronounced Elmot)
- Shoes
- Apple
- Moo
- Bobby (Belly)
- Bott (belly button)
- Cow
- Ducky
- No no no
- Doggy
- Poopoo
- Pumpkin
- Fish
- Grandpa
- Nose
- Owl
- Ernie
- Bath
- Blanket
- Yes
- Nice
- Butterfly
- Meat
- Applesauce
- Coffee
- All done, all gone
- Coat
- Toast
- Potty
- Bag
- Airplane
- Oval
- Heart
- Tractor
- Diaper
Mint.com bought by Intuit. Oh no!
I was a happy user of Quicken on the PC years ago, and after moving to Mac was very unhappy with Intuit’s Mac offerings. I briefly used iBank but was pretty unhappy with the limited feature set. The reporting and graphing was very basic, and there was not automated integration with banks and brokerage firms. I think this is changing in newer versions, but I gave up on waiting for this feature. I switched to Quicken on the Mac, but found the product to be absolutely horrible. Most Mac apps have a well thought out user interface, and usability is a primary concern. Not so with Quicken. The Mac version is much harder to use than the PC version, and costs more to boot. I limped along on it for a year, before discovering mint. Mint.com, even in its earlier stages, was a joy to use. It had a simple interface and nice basic reports. It gave you the high level information you needed to track your spending without forcing you through 500 required fields like Quicken does. And the latest update is even better, with more flexible budgeting tools and better reporting.
And now this: I saw the bad news this morning, Mint.com was selling out to Intuit. You have to read the comments, it seems like half of the people are really upset. I really hope this ends well, but it’s hard to say. I think it will be very hard for the Mint team to move over to Intuit and keep innovating. Quicken has their own online version, but obviously it must suck or they wouldn’t spend $170M to buy another company. I imagine this experience will be a little bit like the past 15 bank mergers I have had the privilege of living through.
Some Mint users are deleting their accounts immediately. I think I might want to stick things out for a while and hope for the best.
Book Review: More Information Than You Require
I picked up a copy of John Hodgman’s “More Infromation Than You Require” a few months back when I saw that a signed 1st edition was available from Powell’s (only one left at the time of writing!).
John Hodgman Autograph
I have always enjoyed John’s appearances on “The Daily Show”, and as PC in the Apple commercials. After reading this book, I can say he is quite a strange man with a very good imagination. The book is a rambling continuation of his first book, “The Areas Of My Expertise”, which I haven’t read, but from what I can tell from the many references in “More Information Than You Require” is very similar. This book is quite funny. I read part of it on the train, and more than once cracked up laughing, probably causing my fellow passengers to wonder about me.
The book is broken down into several sections, such as “The Presidents of the United States: Are they the new hoboes?”, and “How to be famous”. He also has a section where he offers advice on a number of issues, including technology and protecting yourself from identity theft that is hilarious.
The book is laid out in a reference book format. Each page, including the title page, contains a little fact from a date in history, starting with October 21 – the date the book is published. The facts have no relation to the rest of the content, so you end up having to switch contexts on every page, which can be quite annoying, but some of them are pretty funny. There are also a number of tables, sidebars, and strange pictures to support the content. Hodgman has managed to do many other creative things with the book. For example, the page numbering starts at 237, a continuation from his previous book.
After a few hundred pages of random “facts” and humor, there is a large section of the book devoted to describing mole-men (some sort of human that lives underground) and their interactions with humans throughout recent history. In this section, Hodgman lists 700 mole-man names (ex. 611. Mr Drew Danglemites, a gem swallower). I think the mole-men chapter was about the time when I just wanted to finish the book.
If you’re a John Hodgman fan, I highly recommend this book. It’s filled with his unique sense of humor, and is a good change of pace for you to add to your reading list.
ESPN360 coming to Comcast
I had blogged a few months back about how I got a survey from ESPN about ESPN360, their online video presence. I checked on their web site a few weeks ago and saw that they have reached an agreement to offer ESPN-U and ESPN360 to Comcast customers. Apparently this is old news, but I’m pretty happy to see this. Maybe that will mean getting a few more NU games when they are on the road. It seems like there are fewer Big 10 games on regular TV now than when I was in high school.
Some interesting theology coming from Barna… but not really
I got this email today, and thought it was pretty funny. I hadn’t yet read the actual article, and it turns out in context it’s not quite as funny, but this cracked me up a bit.
Paphiopedilum
Well, my paphiopedilum is in bloom. Pretty exciting, this is the second orchid that has bloomed since I took custody of a nice collection from a friend.
paphiopedilum in bloom
OmniFocus syncing with Apache 2.2 WebDAV
In my quest to get back on the GTD wagon, I decided to spring for a copy of OmniFocus for both the Mac and the iPhone. One neat feature is the ability of the app to use WebDAV to store the database on a web server and then sync between the two versions remotely. I will probably always have my phone with me when I am using my laptop, so I don’t know how critical this feature will be for me. However it does provide for a remote backup of the data, plus allows me to pull the data down when I want it instead of having to remember to sync “one more thing” on the phone before heading out the door. You can use a MobileMe account to do this, but since I’m a cheapskate I had to figure out how to do this with the servers I already pay for. A quick google search showed some nice blog posts on getting this setup using Mac OS X Leopard, but I wanted to run this on my Ubuntu server. So here’s basically what’s needed. First, make sure you have apache2 installed. I won’t cover that here. You need to enable mod_dav and mod_dav_fs.
sudo /usr/sbin/a2enmod dav
sudo /usr/sbin/a2enmod dav_fs
I also wanted ssl enabled so I wasn’t sending credentials in the clear. Turns out that the ssl certificate script (apache2-ssl-certificate) that most tutorials mention is not included with apache anymore. But you can do basically the same with the ssl-cert package, so install that as well as openssl if it’s not installed already. One problem is the cert is only good for one month, so if ignoring the warning you get from OmniFocus bothers you, you can fix that later by generating a cert with a longer expiration, or getting a real one.
sudo aptitude install openssl
sudo aptitude install ssl-cert
This should create a certificate and put it in /etc/ssl/private/localhost.pem. Then enable the ssl module and the ssl configuration on apache.
sudo a2ensite ssl
sudo a2enmod ssl
Then, create an htpasswd file that will be used to authenticate for your directory. I put mine in /etc/apache2.
sudo htpasswd -cs webdav.passwd username
Then follow the prompts.
You need to setup your config for the ssl part of your server, it will be in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. You need to pick a location on your server to host the data. Whereever you put it, make sure it’s owned by the user that apache runs as:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data data/
Here’s a sample config:
<VirtualHost *:443>
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/private/localhost.pem
Alias /data "/opt/data/"
<Directory "/opt/data">
Dav On
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
AuthType Basic
AuthName WebDAV-Realm
AuthUserFile "/etc/apache2/webdav.passwd"
require valid-user
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Just restart your server and hopefully everything is setup.
sudo apache2ctl graceful
You can check it from a browser by navigating to https://yourdomain.com/data, assuming no other apache strangeness has been configured.
Ads you can’t escape
I received a new credit card and ATM card in the last few weeks as my old ones had expired. In the past, when I needed to activate them I was able to just do this via an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system in about 15 seconds. Done and done! This time, for the credit card I was connected with a live person who proceeded to tell me all about a credit monitoring service that I should use. I managed to talk my way out of that one, but for the ATM card I was forced to listen to an automated message for the same service. It must have droned on for about a full minute, and then when I didn’t press “1″ to buy the service, it said something to the effect of “while you are waiting for us to activate your card, don’t miss this great opportunity, blah, blah”. Do they really think we don’t know how long it takes to activate a card? I guess they have to make up their billions of losses somewhere…
Is ESPN rethinking ESPN360?
I got an interesting survey this week from ESPN. The survey asked about ESPN360, ESPN’s online video site. I first used it during the last world cup (2006? it’s been that long?) to watch a few games at work. ESPN has decided that instead of using a pure ad supported model, they would go to the ISPs just like they go to the cable companies and demand payment for carrying their ‘network’. Since I use Comcast I am currently out of luck since Comcast and ESPN have not been able to agree on whatever this payment is, so ESPN360 is not available for me. There have been hacks in the past that have worked, such as signing up for a free Verizon business account, but that doesn’t appear to work anymore. ESPN wants you to do what all those new cable network ads say – “To get the new Knitting channel, call your cable provider right away and ask for us by name”. That seems a little ridiculous to me, they need to provide a better mechanism for this, maybe some kind of voting site or petition process.
This really stinks the few times a year when there is a game I really want to watch that is not available elsewhere. Also, since I have the $9 cable from Comcast, I don’t even get ESPN. ESPN360 would be perfect for the few games a year that I really want to watch. I’d even pay per game if it was available. I think if ESPN would jump on board with an ad supported model, they could do very well. Just look at Hulu as an example, people will pay much more attention to ads in smaller doses online in exchange for good content. I think ESPN360 could deliver the demographic that advertisers would pay premium dollars for. Should be interesting to see what happens over the next year or two.
Ready, set… consume!
This article from the New York Times was interesting. Turns out that by being very frugal, the Japanese have possibly made their economy worse.
However, I’m not sure if “underconsuming” is really that bad of a thing, even if it causes some economic pain. I love the quote from a 20 year old Japanese woman, ““I’m not interested in big spending, I just want a humble life.”
Maybe this is where we are headed, and it might do us some good. If we had all lived more simply sooner, the current financial crisis would probably have been avoided from the beginning.