Scott Adcox

Doing More With Less Since 1972

Category: Reading (Page 14 of 35)

Stuff You Should See– April 2nd through May 24th

May 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Lost Finale Heads Into The Light – Newscoma writes some of the best Lost summaries/observations around. I’m going to read this…as soon as I get to watch the finale.

How to Tweet Your Way Out of a Job – Hilarious.

After Housing Bust, Builders Dust Off the Boom Machine – Demand is demand, even when it is manufactured out of thin air.

Build Your Own Backyard Fire Pit – Ain’t nothin’ better than your own backyard

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook – Really only need one. I’m not convinced they are competent enough to protect people’s data even if they wanted to.

18 Week Olympic Distance Training Program – Intermediate –

Can Science Explain the Concept of Heaven? – I was really just looking for a yes or no.

More Picking on Facebook

May 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I’m really not trying to bully up on Facebook. Really, I’m not. Besides, I’m just one guy, and they have millions of users. But, again, the scariest thing about FB to me is that they just don’t seem competent enough to handle the responsibility of possessing your personal data:

“We were recently made aware of one case where if a user takes a specific route on the site, advertisers may see that they clicked on their own profile and then clicked on an ad,” the Facebook spokesman said. “We fixed this case as soon as we heard about it.”

I’m sure Google knows more about me than Facebook ever will, but there’s a (very slight) level of trust in their competence I don’t have with FB. I’m willing to let them slide on that initial Buzz snafu. Plus, the tools they provide are way more useful and powerful than Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Feel free to “Like” this post by the way. 😛

First They Came For The Truck Nutz

May 13, 2010 / / 0 Comments

And I didn’t speak up…because I don’t own a truck.

Senate lawmakers in Florida have voted to ban the fake bull testicles that dangle from the trailer hitches of many trucks and cars throughout the state.

No word on whether or not it will remain legal to dangle real bull testicles from a trailer hitch.

I, for one, will not complain. These are the things lawmakers should concern themselves with, because this doesn’t matter. As long as they aren’t raising taxes or making me buy…err..giving me something, I’m ok with it.

Black Holes Killing Whole Galaxies

May 5, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Let the hand-wringing begin.

For instance, “we expect our own galaxy and Andromeda to merge in about 4 billion years or so,” Bluck explained. “If this ends up providing new gas reserves and channeling this gas to the center of our galaxy — all big ifs — then there is a real chance of triggering our dormant black hole at some point in the distant future.”

A few questions:

  1. What did we do to cause this?
  2. How is Wall Street going to use this to stick it to the little guy?
  3. Why isn’t the government, or at least a former Vice President,  doing anything about it?

My One Sided Relationship With Facebook

April 30, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Facebook has gone from a very private way to communicate with only the people you want to communicate with, to a firehose of information about you and everyone you kinda-sorta know.

@jfloyd pointed out this article earlier today, and it pretty much sums up why I have been changing my relationship with Facebook for a while.

Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it’s slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users’ information, while limiting the users’ options to control their own information.

Sorry Facebook. It’s not me, it’s you.

You can expect to continue getting the occasional booty call from me–I’ll let you know when I need something (every time I post), but don’t expect much more. I look forward to your minions Liking my content. In fact, I encourage them to do so. And you can do with that information what you like.

But I really need our relationship to be one sided. As a great man…errrrr golfer…errr playa once said, “You gotta do this for me. Huge. Quickly. Bye.”

**UPDATE**

One of the developers of the World Wide Web,  Robert Cailliau, explains in a TechCrunch interview why he isn’t on Facebook: “I can get in, but I can’t get out.”

Concealed Carry Permits – One More For The Good Guys

April 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Thankfully no one was hurt, and how fortunate that a stand-up citizen had access to a legal firearm and was able to thwart a bank robbery.

Torres then pulled a 9mm pistol on the robber before he left the branch building.

“That’s when I took him down. The whole thing lasted three to four minutes. The tellers were all nervous,” said Torres, who ordered the robber to get on the ground.

Interesting part of the article is that Mr. Torres had another brush with a more violent criminal a while back. This guy is like the Lumpy Lambert of Palm Bay.

Higher Education, Value, and Marketing

April 29, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I know everybody already reads Seth Godin, but I wanted to link out to today’s post by him anyway. He may be 10 years or so ahead of his time, but I think he’s hit the nail on the head:

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less. The valuable things people take away from college are interactions with great minds (usually professors who actually teach and actually care) and non-class activities that shape them as people.

Boy Scouts Badge For Video Games

April 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

It’s for real.

To go on and earn the pin, Scouts will need to teach adults how to play videogames, participate in a family gaming tournament, and learn how to comparison shop for prices.

My sources tell me that the Scouts plan to announce more new badges later this year, including one for mastery of a deck of Sitcom Character Trading Cards and one for learning to identify 10 different Little Debbie snack cakes in a blind taste test. [/sarcasm]

Happy Earth Day (1970)

April 22, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Don’t get me wrong. I love Earth Day. Earth Day 1990 gave me the opportunity to see The Bellamy Brothers, Roseanne Cash, and Rodney Crowell all at the same venue. For free! Can’t beat that.

Luckily, there will always be some sort of environmental scare going on, so even if they change over 40 years or so, we’ll still have the opportunity to listen to some good music while surrounded by chicks who marinate in paciulli.

Here’s my favorite part from Reason’s article:

Kenneth Watt was less equivocal in his Swarthmore speech about Earth’s temperature. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

I guess the lesson here is that we did too good a job heeding this warning and should avoid overshooting the mark going forward?

Five Android Apps to Add After the Hero 2.1 Update

April 13, 2010 / / 2 Comments

I’ve been waiting patiently for Sprint to update the HTC Hero to Android v2.1. First it was going to happen in March. Then April 9 was the date. The latest date I’ve heard is April 16…we’ll see? Anyway, there are several apps I’ve wanted to grab for a while, but couldn’t get because I’m stuck on version 1.5. Yeah, I know I could root my phone and do it all now, but I have too many other things to do to waste time trying to fix my phone after I screw it up.


New Google Maps

Turn by turn navigation is the big selling point. Sprint’s turn by turn navigation is atrocious. Ok, maybe that’s not fair. Once you have it running, it’s not too bad, but I’ve found it’s much more convenient to just use Google Maps without the turn by turn feature. Another reason it will be great to have Google Maps work with another little gem I want to grab as soon as I get the upgrade…

Google Buzz

I haven’t given up on it yet. In fact, I think it still has the most potential. As soon as it will let me post Buzz->Twitter it will probably be my go-to social app. But right now I can’t even use the Buzz Widget. It’s sort of ironic that it’s already out there for the iPhone, but I have to blame Sprint/HTC for using such an old version of Android (hurry up with the update!)

Google Earth Mobile

It’s just a toy. But it’s one of my favorite toys to use on a computer. On second thought, maybe I don’t want this on my phone. The ability to multitouch and fly to your current location are very cool. I’ve been in a situation recently where I was trying to use landmarks to navigate (Maps and GPS fail), and this would have been very helpful. Again, the ability to apply layers is very cool, and I’m interested to see how well the multitouch navigation works with it.

FlyScreen

FlyScreen will actually run on Android 1.6, so until the Sprint Hero is upgraded to 2.1  you can’t use it yet. But this is a really cool little app that replaces your stock lockscreen with stuff you use the most. That means fewer clicks/touches to do the things you do the most. Not a good app for people who always lock their phones, but for those of us who seldom leave the house, it’s perfect!

Thick Buttons

If you have fat fingers (literally) like I do, this app will make typing emails and texts on your touch screen a heckuva lot easier. It predicts which letters you are going to want to type next based on the letters you’ve already typed and enlarges them, making useless letters smaller. As someone who types reasonably fast on a standard QWERTY keyboard, I’m constantly frustrated by typing on that tiny screen.

Stuff You Should See– March 8th through April 2nd

April 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Can Science Explain the Concept of Heaven? – I was really just looking for a yes or no.

Only a Few Can Multi-Task – Bits Blog – I got sidetracked when I saw this post. I only read about half of it when something shiny popped up on my other screen.

40+ Awesome Grunge Style Photoshop Brush Packs – Hope to one day find my artistic side.

Knoxville over Huntsville 28-19 | Knoxville Rugby Football Club – Eye of the Possum! Eye of the Possum! Eye of the Possum! Go Possum!!! http://bit.ly/ctwnDt

Twitpic – Share photos on Twitter – Thanks @svandyke for the RedBud mug! I was going to drink this afternoon's coffee from my hands, but now… http://twitpic.com/17e5ap

Colombian Chicken Stew: Sancocho Recipe : Sara Moulton : Food Network – Lunch is leftover sancocho. Wish I could eat this for every meal. http://bit.ly/aWQ9oc

Obama’s NASA Talk Here in April

March 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Prediction — a pretty short speech that’s very abstract on the details (hardly an outline) that is moving and uplifting…until you realize there aren’t any details. I’m guessing this is pretty much a political effort to attempt to keep folks in these parts positive on his plan until after the November elections.

After that, NASA gets poleaxed.

You have to know it’s the secret dream every freshman studying aerospace engineering to one day have the opportunity to fudge climate data. Now they may get their chance.

Agile Software and Agile Legislation

March 4, 2010 / / 2 Comments

Neville’s latest, What if Congress Adopted the Agile Manifesto, is truly great.

You can read the whole post at the jump, but here’s my favorite part:

10) Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
…I think Congress skipped this step. Oh well, it was the only “essential” step.

I’ve long been an advocate of Congress getting as little “work done” as possible. Congress working means us either paying higher taxes or losing liberties–often times both. If you ever hear your Congressman bragging about how many pieces of legislation he’s had passed, vote that guy out as quickly as possible.

Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the Agile Manifesto principles for software development, well…why are you still reading this? Click the link.

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