johndporter on blogspot

My Road Warrior Recommendations

2011-12-08T08:52:00.001-08:00

The following recommendations are based on my real-world experience, namely:

In the course of any given day, you will be moving -- often without your car -- among a variety of locations -- often ones where electronics (cell phones, laptops, even thumb drives) cannot be brought in or out, and where network access to your "home base" systems is not available.

From the above, two principles derive:

You need to carry with you all of the essential tools of your job, and you should be able carry it all in a single small case. If you think you need a briefcase, you're carrying too much. (The obvious exception is if you need to carry a computer.)
You need to work on paper. You can have a system on your computer at "home base" (e.g. your company office) to which you can sync your paper articles, if that's helpful; but the paper version will be authoritative.

The following critical items must be immediately accessible at all times:

Wallet, with ID, cash, and credit card.
Cell phone. This is indispensable for all modern business.

Have all frequently called numbers in the Contacts.
Obviously, do not take this with you wherever it may be prohibited.

Wristwatch.
- It must display date as well as time.
- Ensure that it keeps good time.
- Synchronize it at the beginning of the work day.
Loose-leaf binder. This is your principal tool of trade.

Rugged cover (e.g. vinyl)
Zipper closure
Three-ring, for maximal compatibility and low cost
Takes standard letter size (8.5x11" in the US)

Contents of binder:

Organizer pages for Calendar, Tasks (To Do), Contacts, Knowledge.*
Ballpoint Pen
Mechanical pencil - with good working eraser
Sharpie pen, fine-point - for writing on CDs and other non-paper surfaces
Highlighter
Calculator - if useful in your work (optional)
Sticky note pad - small
Sticky colored tabs, for highlight/bookmarking
Business cards
A couple business-size envelopes; a few stamps.

(Note: Do NOT include generic note pages in your Organizer. If it's worth writing down (and pretty much everything is worth writing down), it should go on one of the four types above. Temporary notes can be written on stickies. Be sure to migrate any sticky notes ASAP and discard them by COB.)

Have the following less critical items nearby. They can be carried on your person (e.g. in an inside breast pocket), or in your car if it's nearby. (Women would carry this stuff in their purse.)

Aspirin
Tissues
Hand sanitizer

Have the following in your car:

Water bottle.
Spare pens.
Cell phone charger.
First aid kit.
Tool kit, e.g. one of those all-in-one screwdriver/plier/knife things.

Have the following at your "home base", i.e. company office:

Supplies of the various binder contents (listed above).
Cell phone charger.
Shredder.
Printer/scanner/copier/fax machine(s).
Computer system (obviously) with internet connection (obviously) and necessary business software (obviously).

Many of the above are "consumables". Supply levels of each should be checked frequently -- either at the start or end of each day, or on the weekend, depending on how fast you use them up. Don't forget to wind your watch or check that its batteries are good, as often as necessary. Charge your cell phone as often as necessary -- typically once per day. Do this at night; or, you can do it in your car if you have a long commute.

Recommended Chrome Add-ons for Google+Plus

2011-07-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

So, I've done the hard part for you, and determined a set of good Chrome add-ons for Google+.

Google+ Ultimate

This one is mostly about layout. It also has a lot of configurability. Its icon includes a notification count.

Plus Minus

This one improves screen real estate usage, with several modes of compaction. It also has some powerful stream filtering capabilities which, frankly, should be intrinsic in G+.

+1 Plus One

Lets you +1 any page.

All three add icons to your browser bar — one inside the address bar (next to the bookmark star), and two outside (next to the Chrome "wrench").

How Yelp Does Friends

2011-07-18T11:21:00.001-07:00

My good bud Tony asked how "friends" are done on Yelp. Here's my take on it.

First, it's important to remember that Yelp's raison d'etre is reviews. All else is secondary.

Yelp's friend-like features, of which there are two, are both oriented toward the discovery of new reviews. In some sense, posting a review on Yelp is analogous to posting a status update on other services.
You have a "stream" or "feed" of reviews recently posted by persons you follow. This is a good way of winnowing down the main feed of all reviews.

There are two ways to get someone's reviews in your feed: you can follow them, or you can be their friend. I'll explain the differences.

When you follow someone's reviews (the Yelp term for "follower" is "fan"), the relationship is private, known only to you. No one, including that other person, knows that you are following him/her. This is an asymmetric, Twitter-like relationship, except it's anonymous as well. Each Yelper knows the total number of his/her fans, but cannot know who those people are. Consequently, no approval is required to follow someone. Just go to their profile and click the "follow" button. He/she will get a notification that they got one new follower, but that's it.

Yelp's "friends" are, as with other services, mutual, symmetric, and public. You request to be friends with the other person and he/she has to accept (or decline). Your profile lists links to your friends; these connections are public.
But being friends with someone has no effect, other than to add that person's reviews to your feed. It does not confer any additional visibility into their profile, or anything like that; and you can't restrict the visibility of parts of your profile to just your friends. It does not enable any more intimate connection, such as private messaging, over and above what you already have.

On G+ I had said:

In my own view, I've come to disregard the number of friends someone has on Facebook, but I'm still quite aware of the friends number on Yelp. It's almost a class thing. Someone with 500 "friends" on Yelp is qualitatively different from someone with 5.

And Tony asked, "Why? What is it about Yelp friends that means you are more impressed by a large number of them?"

I'm really not sure how to explain it. I'm tempted to say it's simply a gestalt thing, but I feel that would be a cop-out. I guess one point that should be made is that anything I'm about to say is a generalization and that there are certainly plenty of exceptions. But the overall patterns are more or less true.

First, Yelp is primarily a local phenomenon, whereas Facebook has no locality biases built in. Sure, most people's circle of real-life friends tend to be rather local, but that's a sociological phenomenon, toward which Facebook is agnostic. Yelp, on the other hand, is specifically local to the cities where it operates. Of course, people do travel or move to other cities, accumulating connections in each; but by and large, people select their friends -- which, remember, are only interesting for their reviews -- based on their reviews of local businesses. The locality factor is important because it necessarily constrains the number of people available to be your "friends". (And we must also not forget that Facebook has orders of magnitude more users than Yelp does.)

Second...

Heck, there is no good reason. It's just a feeling I have.

Actually, I think I figured it out:

On Yelp, you don't have a "wall". The only thing you can do is write reviews and talk in the public forum (Talk threads). Whenever you post in either place, your post is "signed" with your "avatar" (an iconified version of your current profile pic) and your friends and reviews numbers. Every time you see someone's face, you also see their friends and reviews numbers! In the Talk threads in particular, this is interesting because the threads are completely public; any yelper from any city can (potentially) post in any thread. So you tend to see a pretty wide range of people. Contrast that with Facebook, where (a) wall threads are limited to circles (to use G+ term) defined by the owner of the wall, and (b) each post is "signed" with the author's name and face, but not their friends count.

So, ultimately, I think it's just about becoming sensitized to the oft-repeated stimulus.

2011-05-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

Someone recently pointed me at this video. Here was my initial reaction:

I have no reason to doubt the statistics he's quoting. (Someone should probably check them, however, just to be on the safe side. ;-)

And certainly it's true that the government -- Congress specifically -- "will do anything in its power to protect itself." Over the years, Congress has legislated to itself unimaginable perqs, favors, and special privileges. It's sickening, and I don't think there are any easy answers. This is not a matter of one party having done bad things over the objections of the other. They've all been in it, colluding and conspiring and generally exploiting their positions of power for self-enrichment since about 1789. "Throwing out the bums" and electing an entire new slate of representatives and senators will not fix it. The harm is entrenched in US law. Any new class of congressmen would inherit all those benefits and would -- despite any campaign promises to the contrary -- find their appeal irresistible.

(It's almost funny how some people run on a platform of "integrity" and "changing how Washington works" and so on, promising to create jobs and "get America back on its fee", and then, when they haven't even been in office a year, forget those promises and focus on tax cuts for the super-rich, cutting funding to social services, killing unions, and so on. Funny, except that we see it in almost every election cycle. Why does the electorate keep buying that BS year after year?)

Even aside from the benefits and protections which Congress has allocated to itself, through its authority to legislate, there are the legitimate interests of their constituents and states whom they are there to represent. Every congressman wants their state or district to get a nice big piece of the pie -- whether it's highway funding, or getting a military base put there, or even just contracts being awarded to companies in that jurisdiction. Then there are the less legitimate interests of various groups -- big oil companies, casino owners, AARP, and so on -- which our congressmen end up championing because those organizations "were good to them" during the campaign. All these interests end up getting money in the federal budget, and no amount of citizen squawking is going to change that. Again, it is not a partisan problem. They all do it, and they have from the beginning of the republic. It is the status quo. This is what candidates are usually talking about when they run on a platform of "cleaning up Washington". But cleaning up Washington is impossible, at least for a single candidate -- even a president -- as the ones who win their elections quickly find out when they get here. I think the recent attempts by the Tea Party representatives to reduce the budget by cutting Medicare is a sterling example. You can't just eliminate billions in funding to a certain program; there are far too many people who benefit from it. Those congressmen were extremely delusional to think that the beneficiaries of Medicare would not rise up in resistance. The same would be true of just about any other program, too. Imagine if the House of Representatives floated a bill to cut all funding to, say, Wisconsin. Do you think the people of Wisconsin would just sit there and say, "Yeah, ok, whatever it takes to get the federal budget down. Slash away!" Of course not. That's why they ended up cutting a bunch of nickel-and-dime programs. The people affected were too few, and too powerless, to put up any meaningful protest.

Now, one of things that irritates me about rants like this one from the "Government Gone Wild" guy is that he talks about "Government" as if it was one big unified department, wielding all the powers of legislation, regulation, budget allocation, etc., with a small cadre of politically unified persons in control of it all. But this could not be further from the truth. The fact is that Congress has the power to make laws and approve budgets, and the executive (the president and his departments) have the power to expend funds in accordance with the budget, and to make some kinds of regulations; and it's a cold day in hell when the policies and priorities of the two branches coalign perfectly.

Another thing that bothers me is the implication that most government workers -- civil servants, as we often call them here -- are lazy freeloaders who return no good to society for the wages they're paid. I've worked with a lot of government employees in my 25+ years in this sector and I attest that they are extraordinarily dedicated and committed to the jobs they've been called upon to execute for the common good.

Another thing that bothers me is the implication that the Gov't employs "too many people" -- that the public sector is not a legitimate place for The Common Man to have a job. Are the lessons of the Great Depression so easily forgotten?

Now... Who is "Government Gone Wild"? Do you even know what their true agenda is? Or who the people are behind the monicker?

The man you see in the video is Blaise Ingoglia - a charismatic and aggressively self-promoting Tea Partier -- i.e. extremely right-wing. So much so that he has no qualms about lumping Congressional Republicans in with Democrats. (Even so, he was happy to accede to the position of Republic Party chair in his home county, and then as an apparatchik in the Party at the state level.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, his background as a two-bit local real estate huckster reeks of sleaze and dishonesty. Here's some commentary on Mr. Ingoglia by a local who, it is interesting to note, represents the other extreme of the political spectrum, the Green Party. Here's another short commentary which is probably a bit more sound, politically. In any case, I invite you to do your own research. Follow the money.

Another contributor to the site is Donald J. Myers (Colonel, USMC, Ret). You can find more of his writings out there on the internet; from these, you can see that he is extremely right-wing in viewpoint as well.

I realize, of course, that these rabid, reactionary viewpoints will resonate with some of you. That's fine. But I think we are all served by greater awareness and greater transparency.

Hocus Pocus, Abra Cadabra

2011-04-26T10:17:00.001-07:00

By now it's generally accepted that the magical phrase "Hocus pocus" is a corruption of the Latin liturgical phrase "Hoc est corpus meum" ("This is my body...") spoken by Catholic priests at the critical moment in the Mass.

Unfortunately, the magical phrase "Abracadabra" does not have a similarly well-established origin. Here is my hypothesis.

Through a mechanism of corruption like that which produced "Hocus pocus", "Abracadabra" has its origin in the Latin liturgical phrase "Ave verum cadaver" -- "Hail, the true cadaver", i.e. of the slain Christ.
(However, it is interesting to note that "Abracadabra" sounds more similar to the plural form, "Ave vera cadavera". What bodies this could have been referring to, I don't know...)

Jar-Jar, you're a genius!

2010-11-08T06:02:00.000-08:00

If you're a nerd, in that you have more than a little experience with D&D or other RPG, particularly as a DM/GM, and you've seen all the Star Wars movies, then you need to read Darths & Droids.

Seriously.

dirtgirl - "best worst bug" lyrics

2010-09-15T08:46:00.000-07:00


A slug!  A slug!  My best worst bug!

Now guess what ... garden pest
That I like less than all the rest
It leaves a slimy track each place it goes

It slides around and has no feet
And eats the things I like to eat 
My garden's getting smaller as it grows 

Come on now, shoo, go away 
Don't come back another day 
Take your slimy track back when you go
You'd do best to disappear
Molluscs just aren't welcome here
A slug is my best worst bug, don't you know

Of all the pests that I have seen
Hiding in my garden green
A slug is quite the worst that I have met

Weevils, worms, and butterflies
And even little grubs with eyes 
All eat less and make a better pet 

Come on now, shoo away 
Don't come back another day 
Take your slimy track back when you go
You'd do best to disappear
The sign says "slugs not welcome here"
A slug is my best worst bug, don't you know

View the video on youtube. It's awesome!

The -aught words

2010-07-30T08:36:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about the words which rhyme with "caught".
I noticed that with very few exceptions, they all derive from words which do not rhyme. Bizarre. But that's English. Gotta love it.

word	derived from
haughty	high
flaught	fly
bought	buy

claught	cleek
sought	seek
wrought	wreak

brought	bring
caught	catch
distraught	distract
draught	draw (though it's generally pronounced "draft")
fought	fight
fraught	freight
onslaught slaughter	slay
ought	owe
taught	teach
thought	think

What will kill you if there is a nuclear detonation

2010-05-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

What will kill you if there is a nuclear detonation?

More than you might think.

Broadly, effects of a nuclear blast fall into two categories: electromagnetic radiation, and kinetic blast.

In the first category, we have:

1. Nuclear radiation.

This is the gamma rays, neutrons, and other ionizing radiation resulting directly from the nuclear fission and fusion going on at the heart of the bomb. Some of this stuff travels at the speed of light, so it will be the first thing that hits you. If you are at a great enough distance, it will merely give you cancer, from which you may die some months or years down the road. At distances closer than that, it will disrupt your body's electrochemical systems (i.e. your brain) and kill you instantly. Nice.

2. Infrared radiation.

Otherwise known as radiant heat. Also being electromagnetic in nature, this reaches you with the visible flash. At great enough distances, you may simply feel the warmth; as distances decrease, you will experience first, second, or third degree burns. (A third degree burn is defined as "charring".) As more of this radiation continues to pump into you, you will be incinerated. At very close distances, you will simply be vaporized -- more or less instantly.

The other category includes effects which are propagated by the atmosphere, as opposed to radiation, which needs no medium and can travel quite easy through empty space.

When a nuclear bomb detonates, it creates a fireball of rapidly expanding plasma and gas. The pressure within the volume of the fireball is enormous -- almost not worth contemplating. But outside the fireball, a pressure wave expands outward very rapidly, well in excess of the speed of sound. At any given instant, the atmosphere outside this radius is "normal", and the atmosphere inside this radius -- the zone of the blast's effect -- is very high pressure and very hot.

If you survived the radiation emanating from the bomb, then you have to contend with the following effects:

1. High pressure.

The "over-pressure" within the radius of the wavefront can be enormous, depending on the distance. Once the fireball has stopped expanding, the pressure within the radius diminishes with the volume -- that is, as the cube of the radius. But consider that humans cannot survive overpressures of more than a few pounds per square inch. You will be "crushed" by the pressure. At the very least, you will not have the strength to take a breath against that pressure.

2. High wind.

The wavefront travels outward from the center of the blast faster than the speed of sound. Behind that wavefront, the atmosphere is following at a very high speed (again, depending on the radius and the time since detonation). Wind speeds of over 200 mph are typical. A wind speed of 50 mph is sufficient to knock you down and slam you into whatever obstacles are nearby. A wind speed of 80 mph is more than enough to drive loose debris through your body. Winds over 100 mph are very hard to survive. Assume that a wind speed of 200 mph is going to be fatal, in some way or other.

3. Heat.

The atmosphere behind the wavefront has been heated by the nuclear blast. Temperatures well over 120 degrees are typical (again, depending on the distance and the time since detonation). If you do manage to suck in one breath, your lungs will be cooked. Otherwise, you are baked.

Given the above considerations, arranging your survival through a nuclear detonation is a difficult endeavor.

And then, if you succeed at that, you'll have to contend with the longer-term effects of the blast. Besides the obvious destruction of habitat, these effects have to do with lingering radiation, which are of two main forms:

1. Nuclear fallout.

The fireball rises very rapidly into the atmosphere, and typically evolves into a vortex, i.e. a "smoke ring". The convective action of this process is strong enough to draw quite a bit of soil and other surface material into the air. This material is vaporized and, through intense bombardment of nuclear radiation, made radioactive. Eventually this material condenses again into dust particles of the elements or simple compounds: iron, silicon dioxide (sand), and so on. These particles precipitate onto the ground at some distance downwind of the detonation, covering you and your environment in radioactive material. Worst of all, these dust particles get inhaled, subjecting your lungs and internal organs to ionizing radiation at very close distances. This is cancer city.

2. Direct radioactive conversion.

The intense nuclear radiation from the bomb blast directly converts matter, within a certain radius, into radioactive isotopes. Thus, some circular area centered on the blast will be an uninhabitable "hot" zone. But unless you have some kind of radiac, you won't know; these radioactive emissions are completely undetectable to human senses. If you so much as walk through this zone, you will be looking at lethal cancers in the not too distant future. It could even kill you outright.

I have not addressed other potential post-apocalyptic sources of death, such as zombies, day-glo-mohawked gasoline freaks, or trigger-happy survivalist bunker-dwellers.

Have a nice day.

Mary Fahl @ Jammin' Java

2009-12-06T18:48:00.001-08:00

I attended a performance by singer Mary Fahl at a club in Vienna, Virginia, this evening.

She did two October Project songs: "Deep As You Go" and "Bury My Lovely".

She sang some covers -- "Wild Is The Wind", "As Tears Go By", "Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair", and "Nessun Dorma", as well as the medieval Spanish song "Ben Aindi Habibi".

But most of the numbers she did were her own compositions, including a beautiful fado. Also a lovely wedding song; a song she wrote for her boyfriend, possibly called "Defying Gravity"; "The Dawning of the Day", written for the movie The Guys; and (I think) "The Other Side of Time".

First post on blogspot (blogger.com)

2009-12-06T12:01:00.001-08:00

Hi!