Our new mayor, Jerry Sanders, seems to be a good guy with the right intentions to get the city back on track after the pension scandal and fiscal disaster. However, last week, he came out saying that he will do all that he can to keep the Mount Soledad cross which is on city owned property. This is after 15 years of it being debated in court, voted on by the votes, etc. The judge has said that the city has 90 days to move it or face a $5000 a day fine. Can’t people leave well enough alone? It is a cross on city property basically saying that the city endorses it. While I’m personally against having religious symbols associated with the government, this is no longer about that; this is about what the justice system and the votes have said needs to move. I’d be more than happy to pitch in $50 to move it if I never have to hear about it again.
Trash, trash, trash
Normally when I go for my run, it is late morning, early afternoon, way after the beach has been cleaned up. Yesterday was quite interesting as I saw the trash truck and city crews cleaning up the tons of trash on the beach. It was truly a disgusting site. Granted some people did put stuff in the trash cans, but the park at Crown Point had trash all over it. Can’t people clean up after themselves? It’s a shame our tax dollars have to be used to clean up after slobs.
What part of "no dogs" don’t people understand?
Yesterday I did a 15 mile run on my usual course and started about 8 am (amazing I got out of bed that early). I saw a number of dogs when I started the run and I thought they were violating the no dogs regulation; I later found the sign and it said that after 9 am they were violating the regulation. Even after 9 am, there were a number of dogs there. To top it off, some dogs were off leash which is never permitted. Dogs on the path are just another obstacle I have to avoid. If the regulations were enforced, maybe people would stop bringing their dogs.
I love dogs, but there is a time and a place for them.
Being handy is a double edged sword
I grew up learning how to fix things around the house, from the simple changing a light bulb to the complex installing a ceiling fan (which almost took out my head when my dad hadn’t quite secured it and yanked me out of the way just in time). Then when I owned my own house, I taught myself about network wiring, replacing a garbage disposal, and then stereo installation. Being handy, does however, come at a price. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I want to, but I can’t justify paying someone else to do something I can do myself. There are exceptions to this, but things like fixing a toilet don’t justify calling a plumber for $65 an hour to replace the flush handle or something like that. I don’t enjoy many aspects of do-it-yourself work, but since I have the knowledge, I do it anyway. My next little project is to figure out why the toilets occasionally run (it has something to do with the stupid chain from the lever to that plastic flap); I dread it, but I’d feel like an idiot calling out a plumber to do a simple task like that.
Did another class action suit against Microsoft really hurt?
Today’s newspaper is reporting that Microsoft has settled a lawsuit with city and county governments in California. It has the same premise as all the other anti-trust suits against Microsoft in that Microsoft is a monopoly and used it to overcharge for software. I had to almost laugh with the settlement agreement…Microsoft will pay $70 million for qualifying computer hardware and software. Let’s see, I bet most of that software will be Microsoft software. Now who is the big loser in this suit? I think that would be the taxpayers, as usual.
$25 to control my air conditioning?
My local electric company, SDGE wants to pay me $25 per year to put a control on my central air conditioning unit that would allow them to turn it off in case of extreme demand. I haven’t used the A/C in the almost 2 years I’ve lived in my house, so this would sound like a great deal. However, what happens if this year I really, really want to spend the insane amount of money to cool my house and it happens to be on the same day there is an extreme energy shortage? I won’t be able to do it. Some of you may be thinking that it would be selfish for me to want to turn on my A/C when there is an energy problem, but I’m entitled to use it once in awhile as I conserve as much as I can all the time. When we first moved in, we have ceiling fans placed throughout the house so we wouldn’t have to turn on the A/C and we have a programmable thermostat so that we only heat the house for a few hours a day when it is cold. While I don’t want to use my air conditioning, I don’t want anyone else to be able to say when I can’t use it. If that makes me a bad person, so be it.
Standing on my head debugging code
This weekend I was looking at optimizing a program I’m working on and tracked down high CPU using to NSProgressIndicator which shows progress, obviously. The CPU usage has to do with animating it. After hours tracking it down, it turns out I was calling [NSUserDefaults resetStandardUserDefaults] at the beginning of my app. I have no idea what one has to do with another, but I wasn’t 100% convinced of this until this morning when I reproduced the issue with a bare bones test application. I submitted a bug to Apple; this really explains some slow downs with OS X. Amazing that the pretty pulsating progress indicator can slow down a machine so much. Uggh.
Stupid me, I upgraded the kernel
I try to tell myself, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Unfortunately I don’t always listen. Periodically I update my Linux server to get the latest updates. Unfortunately lately I’ve been bitten by bugs in the kernel when I upgrade. The problem arises from the fact that I’m running software RAID-1 and those that work on the kernel don’t seem to use it and therefore put out updates that break using RAID. I think it is great that people spend their own time putting out updates, but it is a little frustrating to keep having the kernel break. This is the 3rd kernel update I’ve done that has broken. It doesn’t appear that I’m the only one with this issue as evidenced by some posts I’ve read. I’d really like to get the security fixes in the kernel, but I need to think harder the next time a kernel comes out before updating. (Wasted 2 hours on this, good thing I had nothing else to do.)
Where’s the D drive?
I’ve been listening to Black by Christpher Whitcomb and as I was listening today, my ears perked up when I heard that one of the characters had an iMac. It was described as being chrome and ivory, so I was trying to figure out if it was an iMac G4 or G5. Yeah, I realize I’m a geek for even thinking about that. A little bit later, the author describes how the character put a CD into the D drive on the computer. Hmmm…I’ve been using Macs for 18 years and I still haven’t seen a D except when using Virtual PC, but I’m sure the author wasn’t talking about that.
Free email addresses used for business
For years, I’ve had my own domain (next week makes 8 years), so I’ve always had a personalized email address. I fully understand that not everyone is as lucky as me and can’t handle their own email. When I first setup the domain, only Network Solutions existed and you had to get someone to host your website and domain. Since the introduction of different registrars for domain names, domain names are not only cheaper, but in order to win your business companies provide services such as email forwarding. The company I use, GoDaddy charges less than $9 per year for a domain and includes email forwarding. What is email forwarding? Well, it allows people to send email to joe@example.com and have it goto a yahoo.com, gmail.com or whatever email address to make it look more professional. Furthermore, many of the free email providers let you set your return address to be joe@example.com instead of joe123@yahoo.com. So what am I getting at? I’ve dealt with lots of people that use free email addresses (I have no problem with them and even have a few of my own that I rarely use), but to me, it seems that if for $9 a year you can get an email address that doesn’t look free, wouldn’t you do it? Of course this is my opinion and I’m sure some people have valid reasons for using free email addresses for business.