Sheer magnitude

Let's assume there are 15 million people with California licenses. It feels like a lowball, and I only want to do an order of magnitude approximation.
Let's assume the DMV prints licenses every business day in a year - about 250 days. Let's assume that IDs last for 4 years.

That means, once every 1000 DMV-days, you need a new license. 15 million people * (1 license per person per 1000 dmv days) = 15,000 licenses per DMV day.

That is just plain amazing throughput on new licensing.

I've also been spending a lot of time thinking about the sorting procedures for the US Post Office. I can see roughly how FedEx works by online tracking. But the USPS' magnitude is just staggering. I know lots is handled without human interaction. Still stunning.

In sha Allah

There's a phrase in Arabic that I want to repeat lots of times in real life. "In sha Allah" - "if God wills" (ان شاء الله). It's said all the time in the middle east:

Example 1:
Person 1: "Great: so I'll see you Thursday!"
Person 2: "In sha Allah"

Example 2:
Person 1: "I'm going to Europe next summer, in sha Allah"

I'm not religious, it's just a great phrase to emphasize how sometimes things are out of control, though we'd like to do something. In America, if you say "hopefully", it really means that it's not firm, not that things might prevent it. Hopefully really sounds negative. Hopefully and in sha Allah really don't have the same connotation, and I don't think there is anything that means in sha Allah the same way culturally in English.

Closed for easter

The following were closed for Easter:

• Frye's
• Wal-Mart
• Target
• Costco
• In-n-Out
• Toys'R'Us

I guess when I was in grade school I spent Easter with family, and in college I spent it doing buggy.

Mind power

Wikipedia is an amazing exercise in distributed intelligence.
Points:

• People have written bots to try to automatically detect vandalism
• There's chat rooms where people watch edits and try to see vandalism
• Vandalism is often cleaned up within 5 minutes
• Articles that have 'stub' status (need more detail) get recategorized into more specific groups
• Articles get cleaned up when someone adds something that isn't wikified (an internal link) or if they have extra newlines.

Wikipedia is just a great example of lots of minds helping out a little, and a few helping out a lot, and getting something done. It, to me, is one of the most amazing clusters on earth - all human, all unpaid.

Intolerence

Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians from harassment.

If Carnegie Mellon ever overturns their "we shall not discriminate against race, religion, sexual orientation, etc..." in any way, they're not getting a dime in donations from me, and I'll rail against them. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about Carnegie Mellon. It's the schools that are just starting to make the right steps we have to worry about. Doesn't everyone deserve the right to be themselves at work, even if it's not in a trait that's a protected status?

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled intolerant.

Your workplace has decided the company's morals include not discriminating against people based on sexual preference. I believe one should choose to work elsewhere before choosing to speak out at work against being gay.

Your religion gives you the right to believe views outside the social norm, but it doesn't give you the right to start convincing others of your view.

[Gregory S. Baylor] says he supports policies that protect people from discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual orientation is different — a lifestyle choice, not an inborn trait.

I don't think people choose a life of feeling different, of being called 'fag', of being abused in high school. Even if it's a lifestyle choice, does that make it right to enforce your religious views on the world when you can't find a natural law argument against it?

In the public schools, an Ohio middle school student last year won the right to wear a T-shirt that proclaimed: "Homosexuality is a sin! Islam is a lie! Abortion is murder!" But a teen-ager in Kentucky lost in federal court when he tried to exempt himself from a school program on gay tolerance on the grounds that it violated his religious beliefs.

In Middle school a child is so hateful to wear a shirt like that? Even the word 'murder' should keep a shirt like that out of the classroom.

The whole article infuriates me. I know many relgious people who think homosexuality is immoral, but they don't speak against it. They don't wear anti-homosexuality shirts. Believe what you believe, but keep it to yourself. But I wish you didn't believe homosexuality was wrong.

Software patents

Last summer at IBM, we filed a few internal IBM patent disclosures.

Finally, yesterday, I received the materials to actually sign for one.

Say what you will about software patents and how stupid/evil/whatever they are, it's pretty cool to apply for my first one.

If commercial buyers were smart...

TiVo's cool - you can fast forward, and once you see what you want to watch, you press play. It rewinds a bit to account for reaction time, so you press play and see maybe 5 seconds of the last commercial in the break.

If people who bought commercial time were smart, they'd pay more for the first and last slot to advertise better to the TiVo fastforwarding people (and those doing stuff during breaks). I am guessing they already do. But if they were really smart, they'd have the last commercial before a show have a funny punchline. I've rewound TiVo at least twice to see a whole commercial that had a fun ending.

TiVo is actually really cool. I don't watch live TV anymore. I don't discover new shows, but I enjoy the time I'm watching TV more because it's on my schedule and it's the shows I want to watch, not whatever happens to be on..

The end of an era

The beginning:

And the end:

Today, I retired my old license plates, my Maine plates.

Tomorrow, I request my California license - it takes a week or two to come in the mail.

I know of nothing more on paper that ties me to Maine or Pennsylvania. All mail comes here, I have my own insurance (car/dental/vision/medical), I'm not a dependent, and my car stuff is transferred to Califrnia.

It may have taken 3 months, but I think almost everything is taken care of with moving out here.

[EDIT: I have also registered to vote, and now have a paper California license. In a bit, I'll get my real one - I probably should bring my passport to the airport until I get my new license, since they punched a hole in my old one.]

Using the internet to find cheap car parts

My car needs a new radiator fan motor. Problem is, according to my mechanic, no one sells just the fan motor - they sell the motor + the fan assembly. And it's a spcial order part - to the tune of $480 for just the part.

Just a little searching around today, I found the part for under $200. And by a little searching, I mean 5 minutes with my favorite search engine.

So there's some problem in the car repair industry - car shops look at one or two sources to find a part - they don't hunt around for great prices. Since they mark up a percentage of what they pay, they have an incentive not to look around.

If they did look more, however, I'd create a network of parts buyers & sellers. Buyers get rare parts cheaper, mark them up, but pass on the savings to their customers - who are happier and more loyal to the intelligent mechanics who find cheaper parts and save them money. Sellers don't get quite so much a markup - but they sell their parts more quickly and do more business - if they play ball with prices. And it's easier all around.

Part of the problem, though, when I've searched for parts many aren't really findable without asking "do you have the anti-lock speed sensor for a front passenger brake on a 1990 Ford Thunderbird?" There needs to be a better, more specific part labeling system.

Moral of the story: I'm getting my car back from the shop tomorrow, about $600 poorer on a simple part. The market hasn't become very optimized. It's ripe for the picking.

Coinstar

I think Coinstar would be smart if they could recognize rare coins, like the wheat sheaf penny. I mean, I'd love part of the added value - but analyzing the resale value realtime is probably really difficult. Every time I bring change to the Coinstar, I know I put in a couple wheat sheaf pennies. Multiply that by 5 people using each machine per day times thousands of machines, and they could definitely make a ton more money through a little hard work.

Maybe they do this - I couldn't tell searching around online.

Netflix for books!

I just thought to myself "wouldn't it be awesome if there were a Netflix for books. You could ship books back and forth, you only need 2 books at a time out because it takes longer to read books than watch movies, and shipping could be a bit slower to save money."

Then I realized: yeah, use a library.

But a big part of the Netflix experience is not simply being a place to get movies. It's having a queue of the next movies I want to see, it's getting recommendations about which movies I might like. I would really enjoy a site like that for books.

I use Amazon for that to some extent - Amazon knows what books I own (both through what I've purchased there, and what I've told it I own). But it's not the same as the Netflix experience.

So, for the moment, I still rely on friends for book recommendations. I wonder when that will end.

[Edit: Apparently it exists at booksfree.com. But I'd love some way for my library to do it for me intelligently - some kind of intelligent system tied into borrowing]

Traffic

I wasn't feeling well today so I headed home at about 4:40 pm. I assumed that traffic would be light - I was leaving work early, right?

Uh, no.

Blogger comments

Why the heck can't you use your Google account to leave messages on blogger? Why hasn't Blogger been rolled into Google accounts yet?

Most of the people who read this blog have gmail accounts but don't have blogger accounts. I prefer comments from logged in people instead of anonymous posts with a sig.

Rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooomba

I ordered a Roomba today. For those of you who must know, I ordered the Discovery SE.

This robot has 2 purposes:
1. It will vacuum my bedroom floor, and possibly the floor in the hall, my closet, and the living room.
2. It will force me to keep the bedroom floor, the hall, my closet, and the living room floors clear of cords and junk.

But they're cool, and they really do work.

Firefox

Firefox 1.5.01 is seriously broken on OS X, or at least on my work machine. It hangs temporarily, it ignores keyboard input, etc. It reminds me of a Windows 95 machine that needs a clean version of the OS. Though reinstalling Firefox isn't doing anything for me.

But it's fine on my personal laptop. Sad.

[Update] It might be FaultVault dumbness.

Wednesday musing continued

Maine has highways, routes, and a turnpike.
Maine definitions:
Highway: a divided road with multiple lanes (usually 2 or 3) in each direction, and no stop lights.
Route: 2 lanes, usually one in each direction, may have stoplights or stop signs occasionally, but meant for long, back country trips
Turnpike: A highway with tolls

New York has Highways, Expressways, Throughways,
Expressway: See Maine, Highway, but with more lanes
Highway: Like a Maine route, but with more lanes and more stoplights, and not usually back country
Throughway: See Maine, Highway.

Southern California has The Roads:
The 5, The 101, and The 405. I think they call them Freeways, which are really just Highways. Not sure about The Definite Article on it though...

Northern California has HIghways, Expressways, and Routes:
Route: See Maine, Route, but more curvy sometimes due to mountains
Highway: See Maine, Highway, but with more lanes
Expressway: A road with fewer exits/roads and fewer stop lights, but 2-4 lanes in each direction. The Lawrence Expressway has really long greens if you're going the main way, and they're nicely timed!

Wednesday shorts

What ever happened to changing one lane at a time? I see people shift 2 lanes at once frequently around here.

Clearly Pepsi One and Coke Zero are competing in the same market - but Coke Zero is clearly meant for those who zero index.

Another thing I want to see out of OS X Dashboard

I'm posting this from Google's Blogger widget. I'm posting from my personal 12" PowerBook. 

I love Apple's Dashboard. It creates an excellent mental separation from what I'm doing and what I'm trying to keep track of, and helps me check out what I want to check out. What I hate, however, is that I have such limited real estate on my small monitor, and I always have to shift widgets around and close some if I want to track a couple flights or monitor another ski resort. They need an auto-arrange feature for Dashboard that tries to keep things about how the user had them, but lays things out so everything's visible.

In posting this, I realize that the Blogger posting widget isn't great - it expands every time I type a new line, instead of having a scroll bar. Now that's annoying.

Satellite radio

I flew AirTran Airways this weekend to Pittsburgh to see Helen perform in performed by The Pittsburgh Savoyards. And to go to the Beaux Arts Ball.

AirTran provides XM satellite radio in each armrest. Now some other airline provides DirectTV in each seat-back. But I argue XM is a better choice, especially for red eye flights, because on red eyes the TV selection is limited, they charge for movies, and it's much easier to sleep to music than either TV or cabin noise. Plus I would prefer to read on flights, instead watching TV. Maybe if I had kids I'd choose TV over radio.

Plus, XM is better than the canned 12-channels 80-minutes of music that most flights have, because XM has 50+ channels of music, and then more of sports, talk, etc. And they have 2 electronica stations! So I can listen to a similar selection of what I'd listen to on my iPod, but without using battery. On normal flights with normal in flight music, I can't even find a station I like, and then on a 4 hour flight I hear the whole set 3 times.

Now don't get me wrong, AirTran isn't really convenient out of the bay area - they only have 2 flights from SFO, one to Indianapolis, and the other to Atlanta. But XM satellite radio is a great choice. Plus, XM wins: this weekend I realized how cool satellite radio is, and I just might have to get it in my next car. I still love you, Live 105. But I am not always in range.

Features that should be turned off

I think all school systems should disable auto-correct on their computers, and all students should too.

I think auto-correct is actually the root cause of why we have a lot of poor spellers in the US. People don't realize that they're spelling incorrectly because the only thing that knows they're spelling correctly often auto fixes it.

I used to think I was a good speller, until I started using Adium (an OS X chat client). Adium tells me when I spell something incorrectly by underlining it.

I then decided to disable auto-correct in Word. I now am learning how 'ridiculous' is actually spelt.

That reminds me, why do I have to go to a program with spell checking to write out my blog posts, instead of Firefox having integrated spell checking in all text areas? What about Blogger offering spell checking?

Wikipedia is a prime example of this: most articles I've found have at least a few misspellings. They need interactive spell correction in order to help gain more credibility.