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| Paying for internet | May 29, 2006 |
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Building off my previous post, I have to agree with Jason Kottke's post on paying for hotel internet access (link to New York Times article). I think this is another case of self-perpetuation. Money is needed in order to pay for the money-collecting mechanism. Why do hotels charge money for internet access? Considering the fact that something like 97% of the people that stay in hotels on any given night are business travelers, shouldn't hotels offer business tools? And even if they're not business travelers, should normal people be paying the extra $9.95 per day to be able to access the internet when they're already paying $100-$150 to sleep in a bed and use a bathroom? It wouldn't be that bad if the cost was included in the price of the room. I'm already paying $100 to sleep in a mediocre bed; go ahead and charge me $110 but include the internet connection in the price. My company won't reimburse me for an internet connection fee. They won't care about a more expensive room. #technology |
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| Self-perpetuation (5) | May 28, 2006 |
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I've come across a few jobs lately that serve no identifiable purpose other than self-perpetuation. I went to the dirty Jersey Shore today. There was a girl at the entrance to the beach that wouldn't let me enter unless I paid. Despite my livid objection, I paid. But when I thought about it, I noticed it was a little strange that I paid $7 in order to gain access to a public beach. With this $7, I got a fancy little wrist band, and I was later told that I could now use the public bathrooms (other than the ocean ... ha ... everybody does it). I figure this girl made about $6-7 per hour, and there were probably about 20 of these people working at any given time. There are probably a few levels of managers above this girl that coordinate who's working what day and where. And there are probably a few other people who decide how much to charge and the legal ramifications of charging money to use God's green earth. And let's not forget the cost of those bracelets! So basically, my money went to furthering the collection of my money. My money ensured that this girl would be there the next day in order to take somebody else's money. My money was being taken because without it, the whole system would fail, and it would be a shame to use a natural resource without the exchange of currency. (I know there's some Jersey Shore jerk out there who wants to say, "That money goes to paying the lifeguards and buying new pieces of beach combing equipment". To that I say, "Shut up jerks. Nobody likes the Jersey Shore. The only reason we keep going back is because we remember having a good time there once when we were 7. We're continually hoping to relive that experience, and we're also continually let down by your overcrowded beaches and your archaic toll roads.") #business |
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| Hosting issues | May 26, 2006 |
 And that's why I'm moving to a paid host. I started thinking about it a while ago, but decided against it because I felt I could handle a little downtime in exchange for a free service. But several times recently, my site has been down, and it's been down for hours at a time. And if it's down when I check it (during the day, middle of the week), it could be down at night or over the weekend and I would have no idea. And ironically, as I submitted a payment for hosting this morning, I tried to access my site and it was down. So while I like free stuff, I feel the need to move on. And like all things, this will be another experiment to see how things go. If I don't like it or if I don't like paying, I'll probably change things around again. So as I move everything to a new server, you really shouldn't notice anything different, except that there won't be much (if any) downtime. That's the plan anyway. And for my future reference, check out MySiteSpace or TotalChoice if Dreamhost isn't good. #technology |
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| The Da Vinci Debacle | May 26, 2006 |
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In January of 2005, I read a book that presented a bunch of arguments against the Da Vinci Code. A year and 4 months later, I actually read the Da Vinci Code. I'm completely backward. I think the book was great: A great story, a page-turner, easy to read, had short chapters, presented interesting ideas. And I never read books, let alone fiction. I'd like to see the movie too, though I've heard it got bad reviews. Without getting into the nitty gritty, I have two main objections to the book as a whole: 1. Primary effect. I think that a certain percentage of people that read the book or see the movie (maybe 20%) will believe everything in the book as if it were pure fact. They won't question where the facts came from. They won't investigate on their own. They'll accept what it says and use it to develop their own continually changing worldview. These people probably didn't believe in Christianity to begin with, so the book was just icing on the cake. It presented a few good ideas that could easily prove the absolute fallibility of Christianity. 2. Secondary effect. I think the other 80% of people will understand that the book is fiction, so they'll read it as a work of fiction. They might be unsure of the existence of Jesus' ancestors, but they don't see it as a bad thing if his ancestors actually did exist. And while all the right-wing sword-toting Christians (I'm one of them, minus the sword) systematically disprove every argument against Christianity in the book, the book will serve a much less obvious purpose: Raising doubt. Whether or not Jesus was married isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not the church might have possibly withheld information over the course of 19 centuries to make us believe something that wasn't completely true. The issue is the idea that a secret society knows some things that would knock religion on its butt, and if these things were made known publicly, the entire world would be changed. So I think it has less to do with the actual content of the book and more to do with the general idea. If Christianity was disproved (some think it already has been, even without the Da Vinci Code), it would open the door for other religions to be disproved. And I think this would make certain people happy. #religion |
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| Food record | May 25, 2006 |
| Some people think I'm a geek for doing this, but I recently starting keeping a record of the meals I eat at different restaurants. The reason is simple: I have absolutely no memory, so I often order the same bad meal several times and hate it each time. So to break this vicious cycle, I make a note of what I had and how it was. Since I've been doing it, I've already ordered 2 or 3 meals that I had previously and didn't like (and weren't in my records), so my little record keeping system would've helped a lot more if I started doing it a while ago. My food record will make sure these bad meals don't happen again, and this helps make my little world a better place. #food | |
| Last minute | May 24, 2006 |
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I'm taking a project management grad class, and as expected, it's the biggest waste of time anyone could have possibly fathomed. One of the things that project management losers talk about is how more time leads to better stuff. When you have more time to do a project, you'll get better results. I wrote about this a while ago, saying something along the lines of how it would be nice if work and school were spaced out so that I could keep a steady pace and get a good amount of work done, instead of rushing through stuff and then sitting idly for weeks at a time. The idea makes sense in principle. More time means less stress, which means better quality work, which means better results. But in practice, I think the exact opposite is true: The more time you have, the worse work you'll do. And this is mainly because of laziness. Many people have a tendency to push things off until the last minute, even when they're given ample time to do something. So they try to cram a huge amount of work into a small amount of time, they end up cutting corners and doing sub-par work, and the final product is rushed and filled with errors. It's true in work as well as in school. But all throughout school (which has taken up about 70% of my life at this point), I found that last-minute work was often very successful. As my brother-in-law Nick says, "When you wait till the last minute to do something, it only takes a minute to do." How true. I've completed huge amounts of work and studying when there was almost no time left. I've done amazing work in small amounts of time because I didn't sit around putting it off and thinking about it. And even at work, I've come up with ideas and implemented them in record (small) amounts of time simply because I waited till the last minute to start working. The lesson I learn from this is that last minute work is often better and more productive than work that's done over a larger period of time. So I say put things off, do nothing, and just give up. That's the moral of the story. #education |
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| Toilet seat (1) | May 23, 2006 |
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I was gonna post a response to Wendy's comment, but this issue deserves a post of its own. A constant battle has raged since the dawn of time: Should the toilet seat be left up, or should it be put back down after use? I grew up in a house with two sisters, so that answer was already decided: The seat must be put down after using the toilet. I caught on quick. But even in the course of learning, I discovered a few important truths: 1. Don't eat while standing over the toilet. Food can and will fall in.The first lesson was learned when I was about 10. I felt like an army captain that lost a soldier in battle. "I dropped my apple in the toilet! Life will never be the same! I just can't go on!" The second lesson was learned when I was about 20. I never felt comfortable wearing that hemp necklace again (though I still wore it). But there's even a point of contention amongst toilet-seat-putter-downers: Should one or both pieces be put down? Many women argue that only the first part of the seat needs to be down. That way, everybody's happy. Girls can use it without lifting the lid. Guys can still use it, and they don't have to do anything when they're done. When I hear this argument, I pretty much explode. If you're gonna put anything down at all, put both parts down. When you only put the first part down, there's still a huge opening that's just asking for stuff to be dropped in it. Plus, there's the whole thing with animals drinking water out of the toilet. We all know it's gross, but they do it anyway, and they'll continue doing it no matter how much fresh water you put all around the house. Animals like dirty water. But if you use any type of harsh toilet cleanser or toilet cake, you definitely don't want your pet drinking out of the toilet. Pets are stupid. They'd eat rat poison and dynamite if you pretended to drop it off the kitchen counter while you were cutting up meat. So the bottom line is this: Both parts of the toilet seat must be down at all times when not in use. That's the final answer. There's no need for more discussion. I've settled the argument once and for all. But if you're one of those people that only puts the first part down, I hope you simultaneously drop your toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, toilet paper roll, apple, glasses, gold necklace, and diamond ring right in there. You deserve it. #entertainment |
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| Site dynamic | May 23, 2006 |
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It's been about a year since this site has been located at ddhr.org. And I only really started "blogging" (as the young kids call it) in March of 2005. Looking back on my site, it's kind of interesting to see how things changed. This site used to be located at daveinc.net and used to consist solely of plain text. Eventually I started hard-coding "blog posts" and turning my site into a trendy little blog. Shortly after that, I started using Blogger to power my blog because hard-coding was a little tedious, especially with frequent style changes. I discovered WordPress at an excellent free host, though I initially didn't believe it could be legitimate. I struggled through the downtimes and template rebuilding with Blogger for only a few short months before I moved to WordPress. Eventually, I got rid of the "blog" section of my site and moved all the posts to the main page, while also converting all the former static files into WordPress pages. Some of my earlier posts were truly written with the idea that no one would ever read them. That's really the way they should all be (like I recently decided). But people keep finding my site accidentally, so I sometimes try to keep other people's feelings in mind (a little, though obviously not very much). But even the structure of my earlier posts was different. They had long and/or nondescript titles. The content was sort of unfocused and didn't really have a beginning or end. The topics were edgier and I didn't hold much back. As time went on, posts became a little bit more organized, [I think] they were better written, and spell-check was used profusely (though Google doesn't have a grammar checker ... yet). It's true that a website is never officially complete, but I think that idea applies to more than just the formatting. Some interesting trends came and went. When I first started in March and April of 2005, I only posted about once per day. I was afraid I'd run out of things to write, so I wanted to space everything out. May was a slow month, but the summer followed a pretty steady pattern. In September, I had more than twice as many posts as August because I introduced a couple new categories: links and pictures. The fall of 2005 continued with this pattern as I read more and more websites and came up with "interesting" things to write about. I continued to post more and more things each day as I got over my fear of running out of things to write. My biggest month of posting was in January of 2006. Why? Because my employer blocked access to my website. It's like that whole thing with voting: If people don't have the right to vote, they want it. I didn't have the ability to blog, so I wanted it. In January I also upgraded to WordPress 2.0 (which started a string of posts, problems, corrections, etc.) and I started the updates category to announce new plugins and major (or minor) site changes. In February, I quietly moved past the 500 mark in total number of posts, and in April, I reached 600. All in all, this little experiment in technology/writing/thinking/tinkering is proving to be bigger and more rewarding than I had expected. Like my current sidebar says, "When I'm not talking, I'm thinking. These are the results. It turns out that I have something to say about everything. When all else fails and you're out of other options, continue reading." And when I'm done coming up with things to write, I'll just stop. Until then, happy trails. #technology |
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| Little preacher | May 23, 2006 |
| Terry Durham is an 8-year-old "minister" of a church in Florida. He's the grandson of the previous minister, and he's been preaching since he was 4. He wears "an oversized suit and alligator shoes" and "kicks his right leg up in the air as he sings and shouts". I'd like to see this kid. (via News of the Weird) #religion | |
| 2000 Flushes (6) | May 23, 2006 |
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I've been using 2000 Flushes Bleach for about 3 or 4 weeks now, and I'm so unbelievably impressed that I need to tell the whole world about it. It's just a simple little "cake" that you put in the back of the toilet (the tank) that adds a few nice little chemicals into your toilet water to make it cleaner (and by "cleaner" I mean "deadly"). The website says it uses chlorine to bleach away stains and to deodorize. All I know is that I was told to call poison control if the thing touched my skin. I was a little concerned about the potential effect on my plumbing system, but the product packaging says it's safe for septics and sewers. Sounds good to me. Besides the lethal nature of these harsh chemicals, the product is amazing. My house has really hard water, which means it contains a bunch of minerals and salts that easily stain porcelain and consistently rust metal. This meant that the toilet needed to be cleaned at least once a week, though the stains would start building up after about 4 or 5 days. I decided to try these toilet cakes to see if they did anything. It turns out that they do something quite different: They prevent the toilet from getting dirty at all. And they actually work. I haven't cleaned the toilet since I started using these things, which means that this product is awesome. One bad thing is that the toilet water smells like chlorine. But since I don't drink out of the toilet [too much], it doesn't really affect me. The cats might be a little mad, but they get their fill from the shower. On an interesting side note, 2000 Flushes is owned by the WD-40 Company, which is obviously the company that makes WD-40, arguably one of the most useful substances known to man. #entertainment |
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