The Occasional Blog

I forget how it came up, but I was talking to Becky and she remembered the Tootsie Pop commercial. I quickly thought that it may, in fact, be the oldest running commercial on television. Some Googling indicated that that particular honor goes to Discount Tire which has been running since 1975. Since that particular one is only 15 seconds, I may still be right for 30 second commercials.

Here they both are for your entertainment and edification:

Tootsie Pop Commerical

Discount Tire ‘Little Old Lady’

Source: thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com

(Sorry for the false post earlier. I accidentally hit publish.)

I’ve mentioned before that we have decided to homeschool our oldest daughter. While in her particular case, the primary problem was the general disregard of her level since she wasn’t jeopardizing the results of the standardized tests that public schools are obsessed about.

I recently ran across two presentations of Sir Ken Robinson at the TED conference. The first is from 2006 and was an observation of children’s innovation and creativity and how that is trained out of them as they work through the system:

He again presented just earlier this year with additional thoughts the subject:

He recommends revolution of education system and not evolution. I couldn’t agree more. While I hope that those involved in the system (at all levels) take these thoughts to heart, but until things change significantly, I don’t think we’ll be alone in finding our home as the best place to learn.

While I believe that someone’s intelligence should be measured by the amount of useful information they possess, insight to their character can be determined by the amount and type of useless information they can recall. I’m not sure where I rank on the first measure, though to be well-rounded, I do occasionally need to work on the useless part. Fortunately, one of my podcasts, The Podcast About Nothing by Jimmy Jett, highlighted a source of Unnecessary Knowledge. I’ll be all set for the next lull in a conversation.

Here are some examples from a few minutes of studying:

• More than 10 percent of all the salt produced annually in the world is used to de-ice American roads. (#2588)
• Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. (#114)
• The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they can be easily confused at a crime scene. (#557)
• The verb “cleave” is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate. (#51)

I’ve mentioned before how I use OmniFocus to manage everything in my life. It has been an essential tool for me for several years. So much so, I can’t say how excited I am about the pending iPad version which I believe will become very critical for keeping me sane. I check the App Store a couple times a day but so far, nuthin’.

If you’re not familiar with OmniFocus or David Allen‘s Getting Things Done methodology, please take the time to read ‘The Psychology of OmniFocus’ which is a better write-up than I would be able to put together on how GTD works and specifically

The last thought is that with this post (and the associated task ‘Write a blog post’), I will for the first time in longer than I can remember, be caught up with all of my overdue tasks. I’ve written about having challenges keeping up with tasks before and I have improved, but I seem forever behind. That’ll change when I wake up tomorrow and when I get to work on Monday, but if I can continue to keep due dates to a minimum, I may actually start getting to those things I’ve haven’t been able to get to. One can hope.

In January, I was fortunate enough to be able to move from DSL to FiOS at home and the extra bandwidth sure has been nice. Unfortunately, I just received word from my ISP, DSL Extreme, that the lovely Verizon has changed their mind and will not be allowing their circuits to be used by third parties. As a result, DSL Extreme, will no longer be able to resell FiOS. Worse than that is the fact they will have to discontinue the service for their customers by March of next year. While they promise to make it as seamless as possible, the problem is I don’t want to be a customer of Verizon.

I don’t have anything against them, personally. You see, their terms of service is the problem. I like the flexibility and control of hosting my own domain and host it on a computer in my living room over the home’s Internet connection. Any typical consumer provider doesn’t allow you to host servers and want to require you to pay more for a commercial account (if they even offer one). DSL Extreme had very reasonable terms of service and generally allow their customers to do whatever they want as long as you don’t make trouble for them (e.g., hosting a spamming service).

So, between now and March, I need to decide if I should go back to plain ol’ DSL or switch to Verizon and move my services off my home server onto a hosted one somewhere. Fortunately, Verizon left the copper pair for our phone when they pulled the fibre so switching back to DSL is an option that shouldn’t normally be possible. I’m not looking forward dropping the bandwidth to a third of what I’ve gotten accustomed to, but I’m also not liking the idea of moving my services to someplace else.

Thanks, Verizon, for causing me this trouble. Please reconsider your decision as there are others that are being inconvenienced by it.

I was contacted tonight by someone who had suffered a drive failure and was hoping for some insight on how to resurrect the drive or rescue the data that has potentially been lost.

For the sake of those that may have not thought about backups, please take a moment to back up your data right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

While you wait for your first copy to complete, don’t think you’re done. Make sure you follow the 3-2-1 rule of backup:

• 3 backup copies of any data you don’t want to lose
• 2 different media types
• 1 copy at a different location (off-site)

Personally, I recommend CrashPlan for backups. It’s free software for basic use that lets you backup to any other user of CrashPlan (if they agree) over the Internet. Currently, I back up from my main server (the one you’re reading this on), to the upstairs computer, a machine at work, and to my mother-in-law’s computer. In the spirit of encouraging safe data, if you have a reasonable amount of data, let me know and I can be a backup destination for you (don’t worry, I’d be unable to read the data as it’s encrypted by the software).

Protect your data, folks.

A week ago today, I landed at Heathrow airport in London, U.K. for a series of meetings with our European and Japanese counterparts. The meetings went quite well and I was looking forward to going back home on Friday. Unfortunately, events conspired against me. On Thursday, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted and sent plumes of ash into the air which drifted SE over UK airspace (and beyond). As the ash poses a safety issues for the airliners, they have been grounded.

My original Friday flight was canceled and while I was able to extend my hotel and move my flight to Monday (tomorrow) that has just been canceled. Currently, I’m on hold with my company’s travel agent to determine what options exist. One possibility may be to take a train to mainland Europe (Chunnel to Paris, probably) and then a train to Spain or elsewhere that still have operating airports.

I had fun yesterday visiting the Science Museum, Natural History Museum, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. I enjoyed it as I was just going to be here for a few days more. With no significant change in the conditions of the volcano or the airflow, there’s a chance airports could remain closed for an additional week or more. What was a inconvenience is now becoming a real problem.

I’ll try to keep my Twitter feed (public WiFi access permitting) updated with major developments.

This Saturday, Apple will be releasing the ‘magical’ iPad to the world. I’ll be getting one, but you already knew that, didn’t you? I’ve been a user and fan of the iPhone since its release in 2007 and it has been a device I use extensively every day. Many act like a “large iPhone” is bad thing, but I’m really looking forward to using a device that has the functionality of the iPhone without the limited screen size of a phone.

Does it equal a laptop, no. That’s not the point. The iPad shouldn’t replace all the functions of a laptop. Yes, the iPad is made by Apple, and while it technically running OS X, it is the same variant that has been found on the iPhone for years. A desktop OS is the wrong metaphor for a tablet with finger input. As with any platform, quality applications (or lack of them), will ultimately determine the fate, but by judging the buzz and the early reviews, I think Apple has changed the game again.

Time will tell. Speaking of time, I only have about 36 hours to wait.

I’ve been a fan of bookmarklets which are javascript tools you can add to your browser’s bookmark menu (or bar) to extend the functionality of your browser without having to resort to a browser-specific plug-ins. One I ran across recently is called Readability and I find myself using it more and more often. It reformats the current page you are on to a single-column display with all of the extra advertising and layout ‘noise’ to make reading much more comfortable and enjoyable.

Here’s a quick demonstration of how it works. It’s free, easy, and quite nice.

Readability – Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

Source: Online Education