This morning I discovered the reason: the cord for the base unit runs under the crib and plugs into an outlet in the wall the crib sits against. The plug had been pulled out just enough to shut off the base unit.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intentionally unplugged, but it reminded me of all the questions I would see in security forums about how to limit kids’ internet access. The conventional wisdom was that when the kids were smart enough to get around your filter, you should just shut it down rather than escalate. Now I’m wondering if it’s time to turn off the baby monitors now that at least one of the girls is capable of shutting hers off on her own, or if I should just plug it in to a socket she can’t reach from the crib.
]]>As I suggested two years ago, found money has been way down since we moved. So much so that last year I didn’t bother to count the bin. This year’s tally represents two years and is still the lowest since I started: $17.47.
I’m still collecting, but I must admit the numbers here are discouraging.
]]>My favorite example in recent years has been the fake word “performant”. This word is used as an adjective applied to something which performs well, i.e. runs quickly or efficiently. But it’s not a word; it’s just jargon, most often used either by people who want to sound knowledgeable or people who simply don’t know any better. In fact, because it usually forces the sentence into a less active form (“The framework is performant” rather than “The framework performs well”) it actually makes the point weaker.
If you want to say something performs well, say it, don’t obscure it with silly jargon.
]]>Here are two clues:
I’m not going to mention their name because their site looks like the site of a small, struggling start-up. But future marketers, you’re on notice.
]]>sed wizardry the migration guide uses for generating git branches from the Subversion branches, and I got this error:
sed: illegal option — r
The initial web search told me that the issue was that the BSD-style sed that comes standard in Mac OS X (Snow Leopard, in my case) doesn’t provide the same options as Gnu sed. One suggestion was using ports or Homebrew to install gsed instead, but for complicated reasons neither is a valid option for me. (Thumbnail: I uninstalled port to try Homebrew, but my Homebrew installation is broken.)
Then I found this offhand SuperUser comment which solved my problem:
Use -E instead of -r on OS X.
Now you know, aren’t you glad?
]]>ETA: Looks good so far.
]]>We received a Baby Brezza baby food maker for Christmas. Basically it’s a small combination steamer and food processor, since the goal of most baby food is to be cooked until soft and then chopped small.
Unfortunately the blending part didn’t work on the first run. The motor was clearly spinning, but the blades were not. This review on Amazon—which is the “most helpful negative review” only four days after posting—observes that apparently many of the units are shipping with a misaligned belt which doesn’t carry power from the motor to the blade axle. I suspected we had such a dud.
If you have such a dud unit and found this page via web search, you have two options. You can start taking the unit apart until you can realign that belt, or you can take the unit back wherever it came from and get one which works.
If you should happen to follow the first course (as we did, having pears already diced and steamed and not wanting to throw them out), here’s what to do:
I know these instructions aren’t perfect, but if you’re brave enough to open the unit in the first place, they should keep you from following any false trails.
]]>For reasons too complex to explain here, even some systems, like Gmail’s, that don’t allow intruders to make millions of random guesses at a password can still be vulnerable to brute-force attacks.
Let me guess: this margin is too small to explain how this works. But I would love to know; in my world, the definition of a brute-force attack requires millions of guesses at a password.
]]>Halfway through November’s stack of catalogs, which I promise was huge (six inches high at least, maybe eight), I got a response (from Patagonia, thank you) saying, “We use Catalog Choice, maybe you should submit a request through them.”
Sure enough, Catalog Choice was exactly what I needed. I could fill out an initial form with name and address (and specify “name variants” at the same address, so I can cancel catalogs being sent to A, H and A too) and then find each catalog in their system, fill in a customer number and key code from the mailing label (if they’re there) and click a button. They then take care of formatting and sending the appropriate email message or submitting the correct form. In some cases they forward you to a form on the company’s site, which is fine; basically what they’ve done is automate as much of the process as possible.
These are the companies I was able to submit requests for through Catalog Choice:
Then these companies I requested removal the long way:
All this represents a stack of glossy paper that weighs almost as much as one of the babies. That’s paper that has to be harvested from trees, processed, bleached, etc. etc. and then shipped across the country so I can dump it in our recycling bin. I hope Catalog Choice lives up to its promise so I can stem that flow a bit.
]]>Why bother? Ecology. We’re sufficiently busy that most of our catalogs go directly in the recycling bin, unopened. They’re not going to landfills, fine, but why waste the energy needed to make the paper, print it, and mail it long distances when we’re just going to drop it in a bin to be pulped? Better to reduce the stream.
(This is related to the philosophy Noah quoted a few months ago: “I used to put out fires all of the time. I finally figured out that it was better to get rid of the arsonists.”)
The spam legislation I’ve long derided has done one thing for us; email from legitimate companies tends to have a link somewhere at the bottom which makes it easy to remove yourself from the list, and it tends to work. Paper catalogs lack this convenience. I thought it might be worthwhile to document the hoops I’ve had to jump through in reducing the paper load to our mailbox.
Here’s the first batch of catalogs, and what I had to do. N.B. When I say, “requested removal,” that means I politely asked to have our address taken off the list, and provided the full mailing address on the catalog they’d mailed us, along with any codes which looked like they might help some hourly-wage service employee find our address and delete it. Everything was phrased as though I was asking them a favor, i.e. intended to make them feel good about helping me.
Also, every company makes the point that their mailings are often prepared months in advance, so getting our names off the lists might not mean an immediate cessation of paper. They are very apologetic about this so I have to assume it’s true.
If I used a web form to request removal, 99% of the time that means there was no indication on their site of how to get off the mailing list (although 100% of the time there is a link to request catalogs!)
Maybe I’ll post another one of these when the next batch of catalogs comes in… maybe.
ETA 11/1/11:
The value of Stack Overflow as a Q&A site is the huge number of people using it. For any given Ruby on Rails question, for example, there’s a pretty good bet someone among the thousands of users scanning those questions will have an answer. Things get a little thinner when you get to very new technologies like SproutCore (for a while I was among the top 20 answerers for SproutCore, which says more about the traffic in that tag than it does about me).
However, as Stack Overflow grows, the number of questions seems to be overwhelming the number of answers. I’ve posted two questions in the last two days, and as of this writing neither has been “viewed” by as many as ten Stack Overflow users. This isn’t because the questions are unanswerable, I think; it’s that there are so many other questions to answer, mine have been buried almost immediately.
We always say the value of a network grows with the size of the network. But Stack Overflow is suggesting to me that there might be a limit to that rule. If the network becomes big enough that messages get lost, the value of the network may begin to fall as it gets larger.
The Area 51 site where new Stack Exchange sites are suggested, debated, and spawned seems to aim at building a critical mass of users to make each new site valuable and useful. There isn’t an internal control for sites which get too big and therefore lose value; I wonder how that could be created? Is this a big enough problem to bother?
]]>At some point when I was in college, I learned on the Dead Runners’ Society listserv about SEXY-LU points. I don’t remember now what the abbreviation stands for, other than that the S stood for the last name of the person explaining this scoring game to the list. (He shall remain googlenonymous here, but Ed, I do remember.)
A runner would accumulate points for a given span of time, generally a calendar year, although I imagine one could accumulate lifetime points as well. Each state and/or foreign country in which one ran in that time counted for at least one point. The actual score for each depended on how much one ran in those states, basically boiling down to the exponent needed when expressing the number of miles in scientific notation:
A serious runner would generally pick up four points for their home state (I doubt anyone has scored five) and one or two for most places they visited. A good year for me when I was doing a lot of track traveling would be in the mid-20s. In 2010 I think I hit 16 or 17, and I may have done as well in 2009. (I don’t recall if different Canadian provinces counted for extra points, but that hasn’t mattered for me since 2001, the only year I visited more than one.) I haven’t tried to calculate my lifetime score, but I started thinking about it when I read this post by Scott Douglas.
The drawback to this program is that a weekend in Japan counts for the same number of points as ten miles in Connecticut, but on the other hand, a quick run in the Denver airport can pick up extra points as well.
]]>
I’ve driven the same vehicle for a bit less than fourteen years. I took out a loan to buy it in March of 1997, a very lightly used ‘96 with about six thousand miles on the odometer.
I paid the loan off in about three years, and just kept driving. (Quicken might be able to tell me the lifetime TCO of the car and help me suss out a cost per mile, sometime.) It got pretty good mileage. It got hit once or twice, by objects ranging from softballs to Lincoln Continentals (and including one pop-up canvas “garage” at one of our apartments).
I replaced the trunk lid to get rid of the spoiler. I didn’t replace the stereo, even though for the last few years if you turn the knob right or left it’s anyone’s guess whether the volume went up or down. I fixed some things and not others.
I think it would be stretching things to say I loved the car. I think it would be fair to say we were pretty used to each other. I did not relish the idea of shopping for a new car, and the annoyances of the old one did not add up to wanting to get rid of it.
The tipping point turned out to be car seats. You can’t get car seats into the back of a two-door car—at least not this one.
So Sunday morning I put it on Craigslist. I fielded a lot of emails and made a few phone calls. Tonight I had a family come by. They looked it over, looked under the hood, kicked the tires, took it for a drive. Then they counted out some hundred-dollar bills and I signed the title over.
They’ll come back in a few days with new license plates, and it will be someone else’s commuter car for the next few years. He sounds like he knows how to keep a car running. I suggested that he’d get it to 200,000, and he responded, “I’m going to get it to 300,000.”
]]>I have two doors hung now on one of the closets. The problem now is that the doors fit the frame a little too perfectly; if one is closed and the other is not, the closed one needs to be opened a bit to allow the open one to close. With both doors shut, there is practically no space between them; in our bedroom, there’s about a quarter-inch gap between the two doors.
The universal solution to doors which are too snug is to plane some material off the edge of the door—in this case, about an eighth of an inch, to make that cumulative quarter-inch gap. That’s proving challenging; my block plane, a replaceable-blade Stanley affair, is maddeningly difficult to use, either not biting into the door at all or trying to take slices too thick to effectively peel away. I’m not going to rule out the possibility that this is because the door is cheap wood, but it’s also likely that my plane is lousy. I’m not quite sure if I should be renting (or buying) a better plane, maybe a power tool, or if I’m just so unskilled with the one I have that I just need to learn how to do it better.
Bonus door-hanging tip: it turns out that getting the hinges lined up accurately is a lot simple when you drill the pilot holes for the hinge screws before you chisel away the space for the hinge. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that in the instructions earlier.
]]>