Okay, so the Eastern Conference Finals are looking pretty grim for my Chicago Bulls. They’re down three games to one against a Miami Heat with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and a host of sequentially resusscitated role players ala Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller. What next? Eric Dampier goes for 20?

I had been telling people around Christmas that this might be the year LeBron embraces his inner villain and gets mean enough to grab a ring. They were playing that sick D that led to the Lakers getting hammered on Christmas day.

Somewhere along the season, that level of defense started to brown-out against the other elite teams in the league at the worst possible time. But, as The Sports Grid noticed, the D is back with a vengeance:

Obviously the Heat are more than one guy on defense. They are more than two guys. They’re a whole team of guys with long arms who are committed to shutting down the other team, plus Mike Bibby. However, having LeBron James at their disposal certainly makes things easier.

Got a pretty good laugh out of that Mike Bibby dig.

So Da Young Bulls will probably exit stage left after a great season. Even as currently configured, they’re challenging the Heat. If D Rose drains one of those last minute shots, we’re talking a three game series with home court advantage. This could be the beginning of a great rivalry. I figure one more top notch (not elite) scorer for Chicago could make the difference. Then again, the Heat will have some cap flexibility next year and can upgrade too.

Link parkin’: The Most Human Human

Based upon Peter Merholz’s recommendation this book looks really interesting. To wit:

It’s a delightful and discursive book, wending its way through cognitive science, philosophy, poetry, artificial intelligence, embodied experience, and more. The author, Brian Christian, writes with a deft touch, in an episodic and occasionally meandering style that feels like you’re taking part in a good conversation.

Which makes sense, considering the book’s supposed raison d’etre is the author’s preparation for being a confederate (a human participant) for the Loebner Prize, in which judges of a Turing test have conversations with computers and humans, to determine both The Most Human Computer and The Most Human Human.

Available on The Kindle to boot.

As a proud graduate (1989 6-3) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Institute is winding down the celebration of its 150th year. And that was a pretty productive 150 years for one institution.

There’s plenty of stuff kicking around on the Interwebs about what a great place it can be, but I really liked Ed Pilkington’s take on MIT in the UK Guardian. Over and above the outstanding engineering performance, Pilkington gets into the openness to excellence simultaneously nurturing the wackiness of the Media Lab and the seriousness of Noam Chomsky.

And as a true blue 6-3, who UROPed at the LCS, it pains me to say something nice about the Media Lab. Ha, ha. Only serious.

IHTFP!

I’m not sure that data science isn’t just the tech world buzzword du jour, but I’ve got a gut that there’s something important going on. David Smith’s summary of the 2011 Data Science Summit would seem to support my hunch. Looked like an interesting mix of tech, biz, and art.

Also, Joe Hellerstein seems to be working this circuit and he has good taste.

With Dick Ebersol leaving NBC and the network begin sold to Comcast, it feels like there’s an opening for the rights on a couple of major sporting events. NBC clearly has overpaid for the Olympics in the past. Can Comcast afford to do so? Does it make sense to re-up on a big contract with Notre Dame football? What’s the commitment to Wimbledon, the French Open, and PGA Golf?

The only untouchable I could see is Sunday Night Football.

With any of these opportunities ESPN is an obvious candidate to swoop in and expand their hegemony. Attributed to Ebersol is the following:

“ESPN basically has to have one of their talent talk about Hitler or put a picture of their dick on a phone — which is what that Salisbury guy did — before they’ll do anything about any of these various crazies because they don’t have to. Nobody can touch them.”

And as a disciple of Roon Arledge, along with being a legend in his own right, Ebersol should know what he’s talking about.

Which got me to thinking, what would it take for ESPN’s dominance to unravel? You might say the Internet, or mobile, but they’ve been pretty savvy on both fronts. The talent going Animal House? Who cares, they’re just a bunch of replaceable talking heads. Overpaying for rights? They can always jack up the cable operators.

Obviously this is mostly a thought exercise, but a fun one. Have to say ESPN’s management is on top of it’s game at this point. Here’s a few that feel plausible:

• Anti-trust regulation due to some underhanded collusion.
• Overreaching by attempting to expand into foreign markets. I have an intuition that ESPN might like to take on Fox in soccer. There’s a lot of money and a lot of programming in that sport.
• Some wacky legal or technology loophole, similar to how satellites enabled ESPN, that allows a disruptor to sneak in.
• I dismissed overpaying for some rights, but the Olympics could be expensive enough to put a dent in profitability if not capitalized on correctly.
• Actually, if Comcast went all-in they have a bunch of regional networks that could provide a foundation. But that doesn’t seem likely with Ebersol leaving.
• And speaking of Ebersol, maybe he winds up at Fox and architects something.

I may not be in the majority, but I really like The Matrix Reloaded. It’s showing now on AMC (you’re a freaking cable channel! leave the curse words in) and this is the first time I’ve watched it in a while.

Oh I admit the movie’s significantly flawed. Frankly, I think if they’d never gone to Zion at all, and left it as a mystery, the whole saga would have been better off. But then adding in the primal dance club sequence just put it over the top campy for me. And the highway chase scene was completely cliched.

The draw for me is the implications and complications raised by Neo seeing Trinity’s future. Starts with the great in media res opening of the movie. The Morpheus speech sequence (This is a war. And we are soldiers. Death could come for us at any time.) and how it threads the past, present, and future of the mission is brilliant. Not to mention the bit of “random” chance (incoming!) that seemingly triggers Neo’s crisis.

And oh for The Merovingian, a quite worthwhile villain.

Lord knows though, after all the times I’ve seen The Matrix Reloaded, I can’t make any fucking sense of The Architect’s speech. I think I got the bit about choice, but I’m lost after that. May have to go to the Interwebs to solve this one.

Today I Learned (TIL), that there exists an iOS App for managing a WordPress installation. The app was recently updated to provide some new features along with a big stability boost. Will definitely have to check it out along with the JetPack plugin.

Quick posting from the iPhone could become addictive.

Late to the vent since they went to commercials back in December, but I find IFC nearly useless now as a cable channel. Nothing like a chain of 30 second spots right in the middle of Pulp Fiction or Basic Instinct.

Sad, because IFC introduced me to Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake which is similarly brutalized by commercials. Hard enough to get in synch with the British accents, but the cognitive interruptions just spoil the whole thing.

Alright, I’ll admit I still watched most of Basic Instict. Nothing can stop that Sharon Stone freak show.

As Trinity said in The Matrix Reloaded, “That’s a nice trick.”

There’s something sick about being able to run a C compiler in a shell within Emacs on top of Linux executing in an x86 emulator running in JavaScript embedded in my browser. And it’s not dog slow! Feels like a circa 1995 PC or logging into a UNIX box over dial-up.

Fabrice Bellard, we salute you!

The moby Hack and how it works

Repeated viewing leads to some obscure observations. Like the fact that most commercials lose content as time goes on. As an example our fine friends at ESPN have taken their most recent “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” spot (It’s like a Big Papi without the cheese) and shrinrayed the bit for a new online contest at thefanwiches.com.

Which of course leads into the suckage that is Facebook.

This may be a sign that I have too much time on my hands.

I’m looking forward to how the 2011 NBA Eastern Conference Finals plays out between the Bulls and Heat. I normally just root for “good game”, but this time I’m on Derrick Rose and the Bulls’ side.

When I lived in Chicago, I got the tail end (the Last Dance 97-98 season) of the Jordan Bulls, the dark days of the Dickey Simpkins/Kornell David/John Starks era, and the unfulfilled potential of Elton Brand, Jay Williams, Tyson Chandler, Eddie Curry, et. al. I even had a partial season ticket plan during the dark days, when they picked up Jalen Rose. So I feel well within my rights to root for the Bulls, even though I live in DC and go to a lot of Wizards games.

Besides, I have to live with my wife, who’s a born and raised Chicagoan. And I really like Derrick Rose.

Definiely diggin’ TNT’s shots of Chicago in HD.

I’m sort of tempted to buy the Manning Early Access Program edition of Matthew Pearson’s Generative Art. I’ve been looking for that “processing” book that really gets into the craft of generative art. I already know how to program, I’m looking for insight into the artistic process. The following reviewer quote gives me hope:

Matt’s approach is unique in that he focuses on core concepts of genart instead of core concepts of programming. He succeeds in teaching about variables, functions, OOP and recursion without the reader realising what he’s doing.

The artwork thumbnails look beautiful as well.

On the other hand, I’ve already got a few processing books gathering dust on my bookshelf, so why should keep banging my head against this wall.

I’m remiss. Loleatta Holloway passed away back in March. While clearly a disco icon, through the modern miracle of sampling and the 80’s to early 90’s wild west of rights clearance, she was also a huge influence on House music. At a certain point, it felt like every new Strictly Rhythm single had to have a Holloway sample.

The greatness and contribution really hit me, when I bought the Mastercuts Classic Salsoul volume 2, and first encountered the 11 minute version of Hit and Run. The track starts off with about 3-4 minutes of classic disco. Then it launches into another 7 minutes of soulful beats, jazzy riffs, and Loleatta bringin’ the pipes. But she also scatted for bits and played it low and husky for spells. Just a tour de force of soul diva vocals.

After all that, which I’m assuming was one take, the closing words of the producer just kills it, “Okay, now let’s do the album version.”

Godspeed kind lady.

N.b. If you get the Classic Salsoul volume 2, you get First Choice’s Dr. Love, another disco/house classic.

I’ve been enjoying Philip Greenspun’s oeuvre since way back when he was writing about AOLServer, Tcl, and database backed websites. I even bought the book!

Plus, he’s got a rapier wit on the order of Olin Shivers. So herewith the conclusion to his entertaining review of the BlackBerry Playbook:

Not useful as a computer; too light to serve as a doorstop.

My friend has not asked for the tablet back (he got it for free at a conference).

Touche!

I used to complain about slow posting times on my old Movable Type installation. Didn’t know if it was Movable Type, MarsEdit, or my RimuHosting virtual server. I’ve noticed the switch to WordPress and Linode has fixed that problem. In a big way. Posting is will night instantaneous. I suspect it’s the increased memory, for the same dollars, that Linode makes available for my MySQL server.

Whatever, I’m lovin’ it.

Link parkin’: Kristóf Kovács put together a little collection of UNIX tools that are either command line or console based. Complete with screenshots. Some of them I’ve known about and used for a long time (I love you curl!), but there were a few new ones to me.

Great job Chelsea, taking all the excitement of perhaps the biggest game in this Barclay’s Premier League season. When you give up a goal in the first minute, and are down two at the end of the first half, you’re not really championship material.

Meanwhile, ManU only has to claim a point against either of the two bottom feeders, Blackburn or Blackpool, to clinch the title.

What a waste of DVR space. At least there’s still the Champions League final: FC Barcelona vs Manchester United at Wembley. Can’t wait.

I’m really enjoying Marco Arment’s posts on various trends and tradeoffs between Apple’s laptops and desktops. Seeing as how my current laptop will be three years old in August (and it was bottom of the line then), I was nominally starting to consider my purchasing options for much later this year or early 2012.

First, Arment frames the tradeoffs between iMacs and MacBook Pros. I was considering an iMac to provide horsepower for personal hacking projects but he may have convinced me that the MBP is the right way to go. Then he drills down into evaluating what you want vs “need” in a laptop. Most recently he opines about the potential of a future 15” MacBook Air combined with a Thunderbolt interface. While 15 inches of display is great, Thunderbolt would let the laptop drive multiple monitors on the scale of the 27 inch iMac. At least that’s what I remember from recent blog post, although I’m having trouble digging it up at the moment.

Looking forward to more from Arment.

I’d like to think I’m immune to heavy doses of advertising, but every now and then there’s a TV commercial that really captures my fancy. Recently Heineken has been carpet bombing the NBA playoffs with one advertisement, The Entrance. For whatever reason, it’s really stuck with me.

Part of it is of course the music, The Golden Age, by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. Like the lead singer, and the lyrics are actually interesting.

Another bit of fascination for me is the number of different versions. On TV I got hooked on the “extended” version of The Entrance, that’s about 1:32 in length. Currently on TV it’s running in a shortened 30 second version, which I find irritating since it leaves out a lot of nuance. Wait! I thought he had a flute at the end?! But digging around on the interwebs, I found the really extended 3:00 minute version, embedded above, which provides a lot of back story. If you believe a commercial can have back story. Oddly enough, at the end of the 3 minute version, he’s got the flute, but not the Heineken.

Like I said, it’s a guilty pleasure.

Neat. The venerable Lollapalooza concert festival has an API for festival data. They’re sponsoring a contest for best applications built on the API.

Lollapalooza is offering over $5,000 worth of prizes and tons of promotional exposure for the best mobile, web and desktop apps created using their API. Developers can access data on artists, events, stages/venues and updates for Lollapalooza 2011. Prizes will be awarded for apps that help fans get the most from their Lollapalooza experience before, during and after the Festival. Winners will be promoted on the official Lollapalooza website and to fans via email, Facebook, Twitter, and the jumbotron screens at the Festival.

Lollapalooza is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with a line-up of 130 of the most notable and buzzworthy bands from across the globe, including Eminem, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Muse, and many others. The Festival is August 5-7 in Grant Park, Chicago.

About six and a half months ago, I recalibrated my feed reading. It worked out pretty well, but I was still winding up with piles of unread items on my iPhone. And I was getting overwhelmed on the desktop side.

So recently I bit the bullet and coalesced all my non-work feeds into one Google Reader account. I used NetNewsWire to merge my desktop feedroll into the Google Reader feeds. In addition, I did some gardening and weeding, eliminating some firehose/light read sources (e.g. io9, Gizmodo, Engadet) and adding in some infrequently posting must reads (e.g. Greg Linden’s shared items . NetNewsWire tells me I’m “down” to 150 feeds.

This scheme feels like it’s working a lot better though, since I usually hit at least one short window during the day when I can spend some time info grazing. When I get home, processing the remaining new items is short work.

Lastly, flagging items in NetNewsWire integrates really nicely with Google Reader, where the marked content winds up in the starred items feed. Works just like I’d expect it to. Now I have to revisit the unofficial Google Reader API Python module to slurp down my starred items for local searching.

Well that sucked! The hometown Caps looked pretty good after brushing aside the Rangers in five games. Bad enough they got eliminated last night, but they got swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning. Frankly, I thought they mailed it in for game 4, which could be indicative of team character flaws.

And the Red Wings are in deep doo as well, down 3-0 to the Sharks. If you’re in the NHL playoffs and your team color incorporates a heave dose of red, this doesn’t look like your year.

At work, I was finally privileged to receive a MacBook Pro back in November. Man do I love it!

One of the nice things about using the same OS at work and at home is that I exploit some of the hidden power features more consistently. One such feature on OS X is Apple’s Spotlight, the built-in desktop search service. Even better, Spotlight is easily accessible through LaunchBar, so I don’t even have to remember another key combination for search. Command-Space plus a few keystrokes gets me to web search or desktop search.

Once upon a time at work, they allowed us to have Google Desktop on Windows, which is the best desktop search I’ve ever experienced. Spotlight isn’t nearly as nice, but it works sufficiently, especially on indexing my Thunderbird e-mail. That’s where every other desktop search tool I tried, Mac or Windows, failed miserably. Indexing and searching my e-mail is pretty important, since I like to use mail for information trapping.

When migrating this blog, I decided to go casting about for a new favicon. While I probably haven’t been officially anointed a hacker, I definitely advocate the old time hacker ethic, and appreciate Eric Raymond’s use of The Glider cellular automata as “the” hacker emblem. So I’ve adopted for Mass Programming Resistance.

Besides I figure I have enough hacker cred from providing a patch for g++ 1.9, using Linux since 0.94 (a.out vs ELF binaries, fun!), and living in Emacs for 30+ years.

Recently got a chance to purchase some new music through the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3s.

• Evol Intent Us Against the World
• Counterstrike Back From the Grave
• Derrick Carter Fabric 56

The first two are straight up Drum ‘N Bass DJ mix efforts. 70+ minutes of hardcore riddims and tweakin acid. There’s no point looking at the track list. You just get on the train and ride the beat.

Derrick Carter’s Fabric effort is straight up Chicago House, featuring tracks from venerable names such as DJ Sneak, Cajmere/Green Velvet, and Roger Sanchez. I was surprised how well Sanchez’s My Organ held up, although I’ll always remember it as part of Little Louie Vega’s United DJ’s of America mix from way back in ‘94.

At $10 a pop for the electronic download version of each, I can recommend them all, if you’re into this style of music.

I’ve got to give a lot of credit to Discogs.com for now clearly highlighting DJ mixes. Makes my music hunting life a bit easier.

Way back in August, I proclaimed my excitement for the 2010-11 Barclay’s Premier League. While I couldn’t follow as closely as I would have liked over the winter, I’ve gotten back into it over the last few weeks. And the race has certainly become compelling!

As of a month or so ago, Chelsea, the previous champion, looked dead. Despite starting off the campaign on fire, the Blues had fallen well behind Manchester United. Apparently they had a serious mid-season swoon. Similarly, my rooting choice, Arsenal’s Gunners, sort of flamed out, showing a little too much youth. Plus they got jobbed in the Liverpool match.

Meanwhile, Chelsea had awoken and closed to within 6 points of ManU to start this weekend. The Blues got a bunch of breaks (a.k.a dubious calls) in their match against Tottenham Hotspur and eked out a win. On the other hand, Arsenal rose up and knocked off Man U at home. Chelsea closes to 3 points and plays at Man U next Sunday. Good stuff!!

Not to mention the UEFA Champions League semi-finals conclude this week. One thing I didn’t realize about top flight football in Europe is that the major powers are all playing multiple competitions simultaneously. Makes for more big matches.

So I’m liking WordPress as a blogging content management system. Some of the upsides:

• Upgrading from the Dashboard. Earlier this week I upgraded my installation with one click. This WordPress release was a security update so ease of keeping up to date is commendable.

• Theme support is great. Easy to install and easy to switch between. Having a hard time finding free, nice looking, blog oriented themes but there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

• Works well with MarsEdit. My standard workflow hasn’t been interrupted at all. In fact it’s been supplemented since MarsEdit understands WordPress pages. Wish Markdown support wasn’t a plugin but a part of the WordpPress core.

• Looking forward to using shortcodes to embed syntax highlighted code snippets.

The switch seems not to have seriously busted anything. About the only 404’s I’m seeing on the new site are for images. Images that shouldn’t even be linked to from an external site. And occasionally there’s an old permalink that didn’t get translated correctly. Those are easy to fix though.

The various search bots are visiting the new site, being bounced through old urls into the new site using HTTP redirects. I used the fairly brute force method of leaving the old static MovableType HTML files in place, but putting Php code in them to generate the HTTP redirect. Some Python fu was needed to automatically rewrite the statics pages and generate the right destination URL. That was fun hacking though. I’m gonna pat myself on the back for ingeniously avoiding linkrot.

Best of all I ran essentially the same process for New Media Hack. Now my old writings have a fresh coat of paint and are searchable.

Update: Spoke a little too soon, as I had some incorrect permalinks in the imported posts. Did a quick search and replace, bulk delete the old posts, and then reimported. Probably need to do a post by post examination.

Okay so I bit the bullet and investigated what it would take to port Mass Programming Resistance from Movable Type to WordPress. Turns out it was less painful than I thought it would be, although it took a few tries. That’s what occupied my March and early April.

Also decided my tenure at RimuHosting was getting a little stale. Thanks to the recommendations on Hacker News I’m giving Linode a twirl.

There’s still some nits and splinters I have to be careful of, but I’m feeling confident enough to pull the switch. So there probably will be some breakage around here. People subscribed in a feed reader may suffer the most.

You have been warned.

If I knew what this was all about, I’d tell you.

I’m making it up as I go along. If you enjoy any of it, and want to hang around, be my guest. No commitment though.

In a former life, I used to be a new media hack in much revered academia. I traded that in for a comfy, if somewhat Dilbertish, spot in the military-intelligence-industrial complex. My company employs 100K+ people, and nothing I say here could possibly represent that organization’s position. At least not without our PR people present. And maybe a lawyer… or two.

Increasingly our lives are controlled by the numbers. Massive data sets, statistical learning, data mining, comprehensive genome sequencing, trend analysis, polling, prediction markets, social network analysis, personalization, targeted advertising, mass customization, FICO scores, carbon numbers, financial derivatives, etc. etc.

In many ways, I’m a primary contributor. Mass Programming Resistance is one man’s journey to find the spirits beyond the numbers.

Transcend the data!

Yours in resistance C. Ross Jam.

E-mail gratefully received at b m d at crossjam dot net.

Currently MPR doesn’t accept comments. I’m not interested in even monitoring a comment stream, much less managing or moderating one. E-mail still works (b m d at c r o s s j a m dot n e t) and if you say something fairly cogent I might even repost it. With your permission of course.

Well over two years ago, I blogged about kicking the tires on various Lisp implementations. At the time, I observed how modern machine performance had blown past the “inefficiencies” we saw back in the 80s to mid 90s.

Fast forward to last week, mid-February 2011. I’m stuck in a not-particularly captivating conference, with a relatively new Macbook Pro, dual core Intel i7 and 8 MB of memory. What’s a Lisp nerd to do, but check out how the new ride rolls. So I grab and install every Lisp and Scheme implementation under the sun, since I’ve got so much idle time, and quickly whip out a recursive fact function in all of them.

Wow! All I can say is that I was blown away by the performance observed running a few micro-benchmarks. When a Common Lisp compiles to native code and can do (fact 1000) in about a millisecond, you’re cooking with gas.

That prompted me to revisit the Lisps on my measly old, circa 2008, bottom of the line, white Macbook. Even if it’s an order of magnitude slower, we’re still looking at hundredth of a second performance. In doing so, I discovered the fabulous Quicklisp project, which makes installing Common Lisp packages butt easy across a number of implementations. Turns out there’s the nice LISPBUILDER-SDL package, which makes the cross-platform multimedia SDL library available within Common Lisp.

The above screen capture is an example from LISPBUILDER running in SBCL. If you squint close enough at the lower right, you can see the frames per second, FPS, reading. That’s a 30.29.

A compiled Common Lisp on a pokey old Macbook can easily do 30 FPS of graphics rendering. And here I am struggling to get Python up to the pace of processing.

I’ll have to get substrate implemented in SBCL just for comparison and we’ll go from there.

Given my disappointment in the current state of MovableType, I gave WordPress a little more consideration. I can overlook the Php implementation, but I was a little worried about preserving my old URLs. Some rudimentary investigation indicates that WordPress’ pretty URLs option, some creative metadata extraction from MovableType, and a little scripting could get the job done.

So I’m ready to bite the bullet and give the migration a shot. This is going to be a long term project though, so don’t expect any major changes around here soon. In fact, I’ll be working a test run on a virtual machine just to be safe.

Bonus. This also might be a way to get the New Media Hack content into a modern blogging system as well.

Six Apart has pretty much swirled down the drain. While I managed to successfully shift from MovableType 4.x to 5.x, it wasn’t a whole lot of fun. Development seems to be stagnating a bit. Might be time to switch to a new blogging platform.

The only problem is that the options are pretty limited. WordPress would be the obvious frontrunner, but I’m really not into maintaining anything based upon Php. Plus, I’d need to figure out how to import all my old content. Could switch to Posterous, but I really like hosting my own site and using MarsEdit.

After WordPress, everything else seems marginalized, although maybe I need open my aperture.

Sigh.

You might be asking, why the big celebration for getting some goofy Rube Goldbergian mail filtering process working. Basically my information trapping routine had fallen down and keeping tabs open in browsers was my version of bookmarking. At one point, I had about 4 standing Chrome windows open with double digit tabs in each window. Not to mention a few squirreled away in Safari tabs.

After I got my mail based link stashing working yesterday, I ripped through those browser tabs. 40+ links parked, with a little excerpt for each one, remotely accessible and searchable in GMail, yet indexed locally thanks to Thunderbird and Apple Mail. Took maybe about an hour, including time to select, cut, and paste the excerpt text.

Now my webtop feels much less cluttered.

I finally, Finally, FINALLY, solved a long standing conundrum that had been vexing me. The nut of the issue involved mailing links from myself to my own GMail account, using a + address, e.g. bmd+notes@example.com. I have a GMail rule to automatically file such messages into a folder. This worked great until I would mail a link from my MacBook, through MailHop. Then the message wouldn’t get autofiled, and would sort of disappear.

Initially I blamed MailHop for not forwarding a message with the same to and from addresses. Not true. Messages were getting through to GMail. In fact, once I poked around in the “All Mail” folder, there were my little self-notes.

So why wasn’t GMail running my dang filter?

Turns out I had Thunderbird set up to add a copy of the message to the “Sent” folder. So when my message was delivered through SMTP, GMail was smart enough to reconcile the incoming as already existing in my message store. Ergo, this wasn’t a new message.

And GMail only runs filters on new messages.

The quick solution was to simply turn off Thunderbird’s filing of outgoing messages. Then my links messages got autofiled. GMail was even smart enough to recognize that I sent the mail and stash it in the “Sent Mail” folder. Only problem is that if I actually sent mail to someone else, e.g. crossjam@example.com, I wouldn’t have a record of the sent mail. Through a combination of Thunderbird Bccing myself and another GMail filter I juryrigged a solution. I think.

Of course, if I just used Google’s SMTP for all my outbound mail, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. It’s what I do on my iPhone. But it’s the general principle of not having Google slurp up all of my communications, and besides I like the MailHop guys.

Whew!

One nice thing about Amazon’s Kindle is that it’s not a singular device but a multi-device platform.

This past Saturday, I hopped on the Metro to meet my Dad for the Wizards vs Celtics basketball game (Wiz Win! Wiz Win! Go home Massholes! Clap, clap, clapclapclap). There’s a pretty long ride from Northern VA into downtown DC. Traveling light, I didn’t bring the Kindle, but I was lamenting it’s absence.

The lightbulb finally went off. I realized that I had my iPhone 4, with the Kindle App installed. Synced my farthest location in Rudy Rucker’s Software and finished it up before I reached the Verizon Center.

And Calibre definitely makes it easy to get free books onto the Kindle, not to mention Amazon’s built-in e-mail transfer service.

Although they really need to let users customize the standby images displayed when the device is “off”. Or at least let you set it to blank. I can only take so many literary giants.

Gnu Emacs tastes great.

Python’s virtualenv tastes great.

Aaron Culich’s virtualenv.el takes two great tastes and makes them taste great together.

I know this one is a bit late but I have to get if off my chest.

The collegiate bowl football system is completely corrupt and the bowl season completely sucks. If it wasn’t for the pageantry and rivalries of the regular season, I probably wouldn’t tune in. My overriding thought during the BCS Championship game, which I constantly channel surfed out of, was “Get this over with, so I can go to bed!”

What makes me say this? To wit the evidence:

• Who’s dumbass idea was it to hold the BCS championship game 9 days after New Years? Used to be when New Years Day was done college football was done. I could see an exclusive evening showcase on New Year’s Day. I could see the following Monday as a fill in for Monday Night Football. A week later? That’s bull!

• 37 days of non-game action for the “student athletes”. Don’t ever buy that BS when a university president says they’re worried about a playoff “unnecessarily extending the season.”

• Other than the Rose Bowl, all the other bowls are exposed as dubious exhibitions. Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl? C’mon! And The Grandaddy of Them All is putting its tradition on thin ice with its routine disruption of the Pac-10/Big-10 matchup. The BCS has managed to uniquely ruin the other bowls in the way a playoff couldn’t.

• Not apples to apples, but Rich Rodriguez violates NCAA rules and keeps his multimillion $$ paycheck, gets fired, and keeps his multimillion $$ buyout. Bruce Pearl lies to the NCAA, keeps his job, keeps his multimillion $$ paycheck, and only has to sit out a few games. Terrelle Pryor, while working for no pay, unloads a bunch of excess gift crap, gets a 5 game suspension, and his head coach strongarms him into not considering a lucrative compensation year and competing in a future earnings deflating season. Guessing Tressel didn’t get a fine.

• Cam Newton’s dad attempts to pimp him out and somehow it’s not a violation.

• Bowl directors making high six figure salaries.

• “This is for all the Tostitos”. I’ve noticed Brent slipping as well, but really, that sentence was the punctuation on the crappiness of the whole system.

Not that it actually matters, with ESPN rolling in the ratings.

Ahhhh, that feels better. When’s The Big Game next year?

So Verizon announced today that they’ll be carrying Apple’s iPhone, starting in early February. No biggie, looks like almost exactly the same product. Even though DC is the home of Verizon, I feel no urge to switch carriers. Hopefully it’ll relieve some pressure on the AT&T network.

But I’m slightly chapped that the Verizon iPhone is enabled to act as a mobile WI-FI hotspot. Our fine friends overseas have always had this capability, but it’s sort of lame AT&T can’t turn this on. Point Verizon.

Well at least until they announce their gouging 3G data plans. Still, this might put a little heat on AT&T. As I said, that would make the dang thing pretty close to perfect for me.

Update: I was in error about iPhone mobile hotspotting in Europe. Verizon’s iPhone is the first appearance of the capability in the Apple product. I was thinking of tethering, which AT&T eventually made available in the US. According to the Boy Genius Report though, perfection may well be nigh.