Q: What do Danielson and How I Met Your Mother have in common?

A: Blinders!
The character on the super bowl theme episode of How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) gave them a fancy name, but their intent and design was very similar to the Good Eye Blinders that Danielson used to make.

It was surprising to see overlap between the two. I wonder if some of the writers of HIMYM are Danielson fans.

Wells Fargo ATMs: Now 10% less useful than before

Wells Fargo ATMs no longer have an option to display balances. Why is that?
The ATMs used to have this option. It seemed to disappear fairly recently. Is it going to come back?

Printing an account statement is still an option, but that's often overkill.

Update (2/8/07): The display balances option is back.

Gates (foundation) in a rush? Oh no!

The Gates' foundation is rushing to spend the money that Warren Buffett is giving it. This is a scary prospect.

Bill Gates has been pretty mediocre about predicting the future. In fact, his most well-known prediction is the hugely wrong '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' [1]
He failed to signal the importance of the Internet in his book The Road Ahead despite it coming out a little bit before the popularization of the Internet.

Microsoft's success is due more to relentless tactical warfare, but the downside of that is the company's shady monopolistic behavior and technically unsound decisions. For example, Microsoft pushed ActiveX controls in order to maintain the supremacy of the Windows desktop even for Internet applications. However, it did not do a thorough job of implementing ActiveX in a secure manner. That's why we still see bugs for Internet Explorer due to ActiveX.

The world does not need to see Bill Gates in a rush to vanquish enemies again. Even if the enemies are malaria and AIDS instead of Sun and Netscape, Gates should move deliberately and carefully. There have been mistakes by philanthropists in the past, and we do not want to look back in 20 years and rue the decisions made by the Gates foundation.

[1] A Wired News article indicates that he didn't make this statement, but it does agree that he's not much of a visionary.

The DP DP

Motley Fool published an article called "Openwave: A Closed Book" expressing disappointment in the behavior of Openwave's management.

There are other troubling issues to deal with. During the quarter, CEO David Peterschmidt exercised a significant chunk of his options in company stock, then immediately sold the shares. It happened to take place on the same day that Openwave was accused of options backdating, halfway into the quarter. Again, this makes me wonder whether Peterschmidt knew something the rest of us didn't.

This should not have been a surprise. Dave P. has historically had really good luck with his options. That's why he could make gobs of money from Inktomi despite giving away the search market to Google and falling for the hype in the network infrastructure market.

The unbearable crumminess of NBA refs

Why isn't there (more) controversy over the Lakers-Suns game on Sunday?

I guess people are so excited by Kobe's game winning drive that they will overlook the sketchy circumstances that led to it.

Why didn't the refs give the Suns a timeout when the Suns' players were calling for one?
Why didn't the refs call a foul on the Lakers' defenders who seemed to be fouling Steve Nash while trying to trap him?

I saw the replay several times, and it very strongly looked like that Nash was fouled and that his team called for a timeout. Somehow, in the feeble world of NBA officiating, that led to a jump ball pitting Nash against a taller player.

Kobe's basket was a dazzling display of skill, but that doesn't excuse the fact that Nash should've been shooting free throws instead of losing a jump ball.

As to the "refs shouldn't call fouls late in the game because the players should decide the game" argument. That's a weak argument at best, but somehow the refs were willing to call fouls on Shawn Marion until he fouled out. His fouls didn't look worse than the uncalled fouls against Nash.

Until then, the Lakers-Suns game was fun to watch, and I was excited for the next game in the series (as well as the rest of the playoffs). Now if I don't watch another NBA game, I won't feel bad.

Thanks Flaming Lips for the great music and film you gave us

If Wayne Coyne started a cult, I'd consider joining. Based on Fearless Freaks and the Q&A after the Noise Pop screening of Fearless Freaks, he's charming, articulate, clever, and inspiring. Listening to some of his answers, I thought he was a motivational speaker. "Everyone can be creative ... do what you love ... work hard ... I live in a van down by the river".

Why no secure Blogger login?

How come Blogger doesn't have a secure (https) login page?

Update: It does, but there's no visible link to it from the main or sign-in page. To make signing in use https, manually convert the protocol to https in the url of the sign-in page.

"badness" indicator more important than phishing alerts

There's been interest in having browsers display a phishing warning. What would be more useful is if browsers displayed a badness warning, especially before the user followed a link.

"Be careful where you browse". That's popular advice, but how does someone know what the bad parts of the web are? It would be useful if the browser itself gave some clue, e.g. a "bad" link could be in a different color, or the browser prompted the user before displaying/processing the contents of the risky link.

The browser could consult a database of "bad" links, preferably a database that is updated frequently to catch problems like "good" sites being hijacked or newly created "bad" sites.
Browsers could also preprocess the content of the link to gauge it's safety. Of course that means browsers would have to have a mechanism of checking safety that doesn't cause them to do "bad" things.

bi-wite?

bi-rite is a good little market in the gourmet and guerrero area of the Mission.
Have you been there? Have you been to the rest of the Mission?
Doesn't something seem unusual about the customer-facing workers?
The same thing goes for tartine too.

style wars: what happened?

Style Wars is a really cool documentary about early hip hop. The focus is on graffiti artists in New York City in the early 80's. It was re-released on DVD in 2003. However, it seems to have already gone out of print. Plexifilm, which released the DVD, no longer lists it on their web site. Amazon doesn't have any new copies for sale. The Style Wars website takes orders, but payment is via Paypal!

Does anyone know what happened?

Update: Netflix lists it now. There are also new copies available on Amazon. The studio is Music Video Dist. and the release date is August 23, 2005. I wonder if it was re-re-released.

Update: The wayback machine indicates that Plexifilm stopped distributing the DVD sometime between April and June 2004: April and then June, look for "PLEASE NOTE: THE STYLE WARS DVD IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE."

Red vs Blue, Jeopardy's view

Being red on Jeopardy is bad because it means you have negative money and won't make it to final Jeopardy.
Being blue is good because you have positive money and will make it to final jeopardy.