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Qualifications for a U.S. Representative

Yesterday I received a campaign flyer from Duncan D. Hunter for Congress and started looking at it, not to think that I’d vote for him, but to see why on this earth anyone would elect him. Our local newspaper had an article about our congressional district and how Hunter had a good chance of winning it. What makes him qualified for this position? His father is the current representative for our district and he served in the Marines (he is still in the reserves). Did I list anything else? Nope.

In the campaign flyer, he opposed the bailout on Wall Street. While I’m not a huge fan of it, economists understand that something must be done in order to keep the economy from going into more of a recession (without credit, people can’t buy houses, cars, and businesses can’t expand). He, of course, didn’t offer any other suggestion (at least in the flyer) for how to improve the economy (other than to keep military bases open in San Diego).

I don’t see the other candidates for this race being any better than him, but he has no credentials to become a U.S. Representative. He surely isn’t going to represent my interests if he gets elected.

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Doing your job

With the recent events about the economy and how John McCain hurried back to Washington to help out in the deal, I started think about politicians doing the job they were elected to do. The presidential candidates and vice-presidential candidates are campaigning when they are supposed to be in Washington doing their jobs. We, the taxpayers, are paying for their new “job search” and paying them for not doing their current job. McCain and Obama should have resigned their positions in order to campaign for president as they are both doing a disservice to their states. Campaigning appears to be a full time job; how can the presidential candidates listen to the discussions in senate and participate if they aren’t there? Yes, McCain and Obama came back to throw in their two cents on the bailout, but where have they been for all the other discussions? I can watch the discussions on C-SPAN, but does that mean I’m participating? No.

Speaking of politicians doing their jobs, if you look at the official house calendar, congressmen (and congresswomen) only work 9 months out of the year. I suspect they are supposed to be talking to their constituents the rest of the time, but does that really happen? Why do we pay these people so much to do so little? Oh, it’s because they make the laws.

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Longer commute

This summer was one of the slowest times I’ve had in the 5.5 years that I’ve been self employed. While there have been ups and downs, I actually considered taking a job in an office. I went through the whole interview process and was offered a position, but ultimately realized that I couldn’t give up the flexibility I have being self-employed and working from home. While it is possible to be employed by someone else and have flexibility, this job didn’t afford it.

Seeing how hard things were on me and that working from home was getting tough for me with my son around a lot, my wife offered up our guest room for my office. This room is about 315 square feet and in the very back of the house. For the most part, we have been using it for storage over the last 4 years. I gladly took her up on the offer, had a little work done to remove some cabinets and a sink, had some tile put in where the cabinets were (to match the rest of the floor), painted it, ran some Cat6 to 2 walls for Ethernet, moved in my furniture and presto, a new office!

I’ve been in here about 1.5 weeks and really enjoy it. It’s pretty quiet and easier for me to work. The main downside to it is that there is no insulation in the ceiling, so it is a bit toasty now and will be cold in the winter. However, I positioned my desk right under the fan and there is a room A/C unit that I can use. Another downside (and hence the title for this article) is that my commute is now a bit longer; I think it takes me about 45 seconds to get to work.

Pictures for your viewing pleasure:

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Health insurance solution

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have ideas on how to handle universal health care. Both plans are pretty weak in my opinion. McCain’s plan talks about giving each person a $2,500 tax credit to pay for insurance. That doesn’t pay for squat and requires that individuals actually qualify for insurance. As someone with a pre-existing condition (ulcerative colitis), I’m not sure that I could quality for an individual plan which would put me up a creek or leave me stuck with the plan for those that can’t afford insurance even after the tax credit. While I pay a significant amount for health insurance now, I get decent care.

Obama’s plan may sound a little better, but where on this earth is the money going to come from to pay for it? The government has already taken on a significant amount of debt with this financial bailout.

So my solution is quite simple; now that the federal government is going to own a very large insurance company (AIG) that sells insurance, use that to provide universal health insurance for everyone. Since we’ve already bitten the bullet to waste taxpayer money bailing out private companies, why not use that to their advantage?

That wasn’t so hard, was it? Maybe I should run for political office. Nah, no party would support me as my views are all over the board and I manage to offend everyone. I guess that’s what happens when I’m a free thinker and actually think about issues on an issue by issue basis instead of doing what my “party” tells me to do.

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Final word on phone GPS

After one success with the Sanyo Pro-200, I began to feel confident that a phone based GPS would work. However, the following day, we used it again and I didn’t quite follow its directions, so it had to recalculate the route. Unfortunately it was far too slow at recalculating the route to be useful. It had to upload the GPS information to the server, recalculate the route and then send it back to the phone. By the time the phone got the information, I was in a different place and it had to recalculate again. Stopping the car and letting it figure out where we were got things going again.

I’m used to the GPS unit in my wife’s Honda CR-V and it’s extremely fast at recalculating its route. I’ve also used Garmin and TomTom units and been pleased. Before my next trip that I have to rent a car, I’m definitely buying a Garmin nüvi (the new ones look pretty cool) to save me a lot of frustration.

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Smartphone GPS Followup

After our disaster with a smartphone based GPS yesterday, I was given another phone to try, this time not a smartphone, but a Sanyo Pro-200. We used the Sprint Navigation service and we were quite pleased with it. It gave us directions and spoke the turns. I took another look at the Treo 800w and found the issue; I was using Google Maps’s navigation instead of the Sprint Navigation (which was available on the 800w). However, Sprint Navigation has a monthly fee and still won’t work when you don’t have data coverage. So while my initial review was a bit harsh, I still think I want to get a Garmin nüvi as it doesn’t require a data connection, has a larger screen, and just works.

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Lovely HP Scanner

My dad has some random HP Photosmart scanner and keeps running into problems with it and ReceiptWallet. His messages imply that it is an issue with ReceiptWallet and that very well may be the case. I looked at his ReceiptWallet log today and saw:

               XResolution: 200.0000
               YResolution: 200.0000
        imageInfo:
                ImageWidth: 616
               ImageLength: 1528
           SamplesPerPixel: 3
             BitsPerSample: 5605
              BitsPerPixel: 16815
                    Planar: 0
                 PixelType: 2
               Compression: 0
got the image info 0...
setupMemXfer.MaxBufSize: 16777216
setupMemXfer.Preferred: 1048576
bytesPerRow: 0
Getting image via memory based transfer...
totalMaxDestBytes : 0
rc: 1
Got image via memory based transfer: 1

This means that the scanner says that it has 16815 bits per pixel! Most scanners do 24 bits per pixel. His scanner must be so advanced that it can capture color 800 times better than the average scanner! OK, so the scanner reported an error and somehow ReceiptWallet didn’t properly handle this (I think I fixed this). The better question is why oh why do HP scanners report bogus information? It seems like the HP scanners are the ones that randomly screw up scans the most. I worked on an issue last week with a different HP scanner doing something similar. Did I mention that the scanner logs debug message to the Console? This is very bad form in a shipping app. ReceiptWallet’s debugging information is turned on via a hidden switch and logs it to its own file to make it easier to troubleshoot. I’m hoping that someday the drivers get better.

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Smartphone Based GPS

This week I’m in Minneapolis for a client and I had requested a GPS unit for the rental car as I have no idea where I am and don’t like being lost. Unfortunately Enterprise didn’t have any units, so we were stuck with paper (I say we because my wife and son came along for the trip). My client loaned me a Treo 800w as a GPS unit as it has real GPS in it. I’m not sure if Windows Mobile was what I don’t like about it or that its GPS routing seemed to really suck. Since it doesn’t have all the maps loaded, it had to make a network connection to get the maps; for some reason, it seems to fail to connect despite having a full EVDO signal. Then when it did load the data, it didn’t reroute or announce the turns basically making it useless. My wife was operating the unit while I was driving and I have threatened to run over the unit because of how useless it is. It’s possible we were doing something wrong (I played with it and wasn’t impressed; I don’t think familiarity with Windows Mobile would have helped).

Will the iPhone 3G GPS be any better for navigation? Well, it won’t have all the maps pre-loaded and who knows if it will announce turns. We’ll have to wait and see. I might be spoiled as the GPS in my wife’s CRV is great, but I expect a lot from these devices.

Next time I travel and have to rent a car, I’m definitely buying a GPS unit. I hesitated earlier this year and buying a unit, but I might just get one next week. I can’t even put a price tag on being lost in a strange place!

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Jack of all trades, master of …

In my line of work of being a contracting software engineer, I have to take on many different types of projects, some in fields that are foreign to me or touching parts of the operating system that I have never used before. I’ve had to learn a lot to get things going. For example, I learned how to setup and maintain Linux machines (thanks to Phil Karn for helping me first learn Linux for a work project) and learned how to administer a Mac OS X server.

So with my ability to adopt to lots of different projects, I sometimes ask myself, what am I good at? Turns out, I’m pretty good at tackling whatever is thrown at me. I don’t like doing anything half way and do my absolute best to become an expert at something because in many cases, my clients wouldn’t come to me if someone else was already an expert!

Doing a quick search on Wikipedia gives the full quote to the title of this blog entry.

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No more mowing

One of the things that has bugged me about our backyard was that the grass was always dead. Now that Aiden, our son, is walking, I wanted him to people able to play on the grass. My parents had EasyTurf installed, and I was pretty impressed with it. So, we had it installed on our backyard. Today was the day it got installed. I’m pleased so far as it is green and I don’t have to deal with it anymore! While this wasn’t cheap, it doesn’t need to be watered (I’m doing my part to conserve water) and has a pretty long life. Hopefully in a few years I’ll still be as pleased with my purchase as I am today.