Techcrunch is reporting that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks. Abe was actually around before the world wide web when it was a tool for used book stores to find used and rare books at stores across the country. It’s current website let’s end users do the exact same search.
What’s very interesting, and not mentioned by techcrunch, is that the company is Canadian and will be keeping their Canadian presence. This is interesting because Amazon doesn’t currently have a Canadian presence because of some legal issues. If they did, then they’d be subject to Canadian content laws regarding the percentage of Canadian book titles they sell on Amazon.ca. I don’t know how they could have structured the deal that the two entities are separate yet not (though I’m not as crafty as corporate lawyers).
I just wanted to make a quick comment about CBC Radio. The comment is that it is awesome. I drove from Toronto to Ottawa today and decided to see what makes the Sunday morning program. First up was Sunday Edition which had this amazing piece about Canada’s new “Guest Worker” visa program which basically brings people into Canada to do unskilled labour that no one in Canada will do (like work at Wendy’s or work on farms). Next up was The Late Show which profiled a late author named Martha Blum who resided in Saskatoon and was a Holocaust survivor. The piece on her was phenomenal. Next, Vinyl Cafe did a show about covers which included crazy stuff like William Shatner’s Mister Tambourine Man, some standards like Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, but the one that really surprised me was a cover of the BeeGee’s Islands in the Stream by The Constantines & Feist. The Debaters was pretty good and then Wiretap was fantastic (I especially loved the bit about Josh trying to “rid himself of his material possessions and hit the road, wandering-hobo style”).
I really wanted to point this out because radio in Toronto is genuinely atrocious and it’s so nice to see that the CBC has such diverse, entertaining, and quality programming.
Can someone please explain to me why git-checkout is overloaded so that you can get a branch (git checkout master) and also restore a file from the current branch HEAD (git checkout hello.c)? It seems like a misplaced overload. Wouldn’t git-revert be a better overload?
Anways, this confused the hell out of me this morning for some reason.
I’m back from Spain. It was awesome. Barcelona is my new favorite city. Also, the Citroen C2 is amazingly roomy for a tiny car and has an insane turning radius. Hopefully I’ll steal Auriol’s photos soon and you can all see them.
I landed at 9pm on Friday and headed immediately to the opening night event of RubyFringe, Unspace’s punk-rock tech conference. The whole thing was an unmitigated success (in my humble opinion) and I was very glad that everyone I asked seemed to agree. All of the presentations ranged from “awesome” to “best I’ve ever seen”. The food and parties set a new bar for tech conferences (in my humble opinion). Though lots of people helped out, my fellow unspacer Meghann deserves an insane amount of applause for doing such an amazing job organizing and planning the event. Checkout what people are saying about RubyFringe on Twitter here and tons of photos on flickr here.
And now that I’m back, I went out and bought a 16GB iPhone. $90 a month to the man (Ted Rogers). Maybe I should buy like $1000 worth of Rogers stock just so I feel like I’m not getting completely screwed by this GSM monopoly.
I’m back in Toronto now. I’ll be posting some photos of the road trip as soon as Sean sends them to me. I still have my Seattle cell phone number and might just keep it until Rogers releases the iPhone. Also, I shall be at the Toronto Rails Project Night tonight with fellow unspace people who will be telling people why RubyFringe is a must-attend conference.
Ram mentioned on his blog that he’s looking for a “mouse that doesn’t suck“. I started writing a comment in response, realized it was getting really long, and decided I’d just post it here.
I also spent a lot of time looking for a good keyboard and mouse. The keyboard part got easy when Apple launched their latest keyboard but their mouse, the mighty mouse, was just not for me. It’s horrible small, which cramps my hand, and I’m not big on the tiny scroll wheel.
So my requirements was a mouse with bluetooth (i didn’t want a stupid dongle taking up a usb port), rechargeable (i didn’t want to deal with batteries), and preferably as large as possible to fit my hand. This left few options. I went with the Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000 and I’ve been very happy with it. Though oddly expensive at the time ($80 I believe) I managed to get it from the Microsoft Store (thank you Boris) for $50.
Configuring it on OSX Tiger was a real pain in the ass (you had to install it manually as a random bluetooth device) but when I upgraded to OSX Leopard it worked perfectly. The 4th and 5th buttons on it are off to the sides are rest perfectly under your thumb and ring finger. I use those buttons for OSX’s Expose and Spaces, respectively. The one annoying button on the mouse is the scroll wheel. It’s one of those scroll wheels that also has left-right scrolling (which i never use) so using it to click is near impossible (so I never use it).
I use the mouse at home (so not 8 hours a day like at the office) and since November I’ve probably only recharged it a half-dozen times. It comes with a recharging base so I don’t have to deal with batteries which is quite nice. The mouse is also a decent size. I’d still want it bigger but I didn’t any that were.
Basically, if you want a quality rechargable, bluetooth mouse I’d recommend the Microsoft Laser Mouse 8000 (what a terrible product name).
So I posted 10 tracks up at awardtour.muxtape.com. Like any proper mixtape, it has a theme, a beginning, a ramp up, a lull, and a finale. This is pretty much what I would listen to today if I needed a quick jolt. Some of it is quite new, some of it is from the last year or so.
Also, the new Tokyo Police Club is awesome. They play Seattle on Sunday May 18th.
Looking at feedburner trends over the last few months it looks like there’s about 30 people who read awardtour five days a week. I highly suspect that I personally know every single one of these people. I also suspect that this won’t be news to any of them as it’s been in the works for a very long time…
I’m leaving Amazon in May and Seattle in June. I’ll be driving my 2000 VW Golf across the USofA and should be arriving at my final destination, Toronto, sometime during the second week of June. Soon after that, you’ll be able to find me at the offices of Unspace near Queen & Spadina. I met the guys from Unspace at Railsconf last year and I’m quite honored that they asked me to join their ranks. I suspect this is when I start asking everyone I meet “Hey, do you need a kickass Ruby on Rails consultant for your cool project?” or exclaim “What do you mean you’re not going to RubyFringe? Are you out of your mind?”
“But Tyler, don’t you love Seattle and enjoy working at Amazon? Have you lost your mind?”
‘Tis true. I am quite fond of Seattle and Amazon, excluding my brutal first year, has been great. But as you might also know, I’ve been dating my lovely girlfriend (who’s still in Toronto) for the last 3 years. Three years of phone calls and flights is more than enough for me. That said, I’m so excited to be moving back to Toronto (more so than Jessie Spano on caffeine pills).
Seattle people, I have no idea when the going away party will be. Toronto people, would asking for a parade upon my return be out of line?
That’s all for now.
Oh, I also suspect this is when Ram comments “Fuck ya! Toronto rules! What took you so long?”
I first got on “the internet” back in 1993 when I was 13. I say “the internet” cause all I was doing was dialing into local BBSs with my high-tech 14.4kbs US Robotics Sportster modem. The BBS basically gave you access to newsgroups, play terrible command line games (which I never did), and use email. The main reason I would log on to the BBS was to get cheat codes and guides for video games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II off alt.videogames.
Back then I didn’t know a single other person who was using BBSs and I can distinctly remember thinking at the time “who the hell needs an email account? who would they ever email?” It seems I was short-sighted as a teenage boy as twelve years later the internet had 1 billion people on it and I personally check 4 different email accounts.
For some reason I’ve been thinking about that idea a lot this weekend. The 37signals post which made this comment pointed out Wufoo, a site that let’s you create nice looking html forms for collecting all sorts of user information. The site is also a testament to usability and just looks damn nice (see some screenshots here). None the less, it’s still not what I, as a programmer, needs as it’s a hosted solution for non-tech people. I could really use a Wufoo that spits out some rails templates (preferably in haml) which I can just slap into my project. I find myself making html forms far too often, repeating way too much work, and spending too much time on css details. I need something clean, cross browser compliant, and preferably with some client side validation.
Wuhoo actually provides a good start with this. Their templates page (which has some great color palettes) actually gives you a static form with some standard items (like radio items, date boxes, address boxes, etc) along with css and javascript to make it look quite nice. There’s still work to be done if to hook it into your project, but it’s a start. I also came across this post which shows how to use css to do all sorts of horizontal and vertical layouts from a plain html form. I feel like mixing these two things together and adding some jquery form validators (and convert it to haml) could be pretty handy.
Seems the kind of thing I’d do if I was consulting full time (or maybe the kind of thing I’d do starting around June).
I came across this fantastic lecture by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren from UC Berkley entitled The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. Warren seems to be the media’s go-to lately when talking about bankruptcy and credit card debt. I’ve seen her in several New York Times articles, on Frontline, and in the documentary Maxed Out.
The lecture talks about the change in the middle class from the mid-70s to today and presents some really interesting data. Warren spends the majority of the lecture talking about the decline in savings rates and asks the question “where is all the money going”. Around the 15-minute mark she starts going into different items and shows how basically all consumer goods (like clothes, food, home appliances, etc) are 20-50% cheaper today (inflation adjusted) than back in the mid-70s. Where the money is going is in mortgage payments (up 75% excluding upkeep costs), owning a second car (50% increase), and health care costs (up 75%). She then spends quite a bit of time talking about why the increase in housing and health care costs create a “living on the edge” situation for dual income families.
The part which I found really interesting was her discussion about education and bankruptcy in the middle class. On education, she mentions how in the mid-70s the majority of Americans believed you could enter “the middle class” with a high school diploma and a strong work ethic. Today, twice as many Americans believe the moon landing was faked than believe you can make it into the middle class on a high school education. She then goes on to discuss how that means, in a generation, getting to the middle class went from 12 years of taxpayer paid education to 2 years of paid pre-school, 12 years of taxpayer paid education, and 4 years of paid post-secondary.
The numbers on bankruptcy filing was genuinely surprising to me. Ninety percent of families file for bankruptcy because of one of three reasons: job loss, medical problem in the family, or family breakup. Nearly half of those who filed had two of those three. “More children live in homes that will file for bankruptcy this year than live in homes that will file for divorce. This has been true since the late 1990s.” Put another way, “you know anyone who got divorced in the last 6 or 7 years? Know any children who come from divorced families in the last 6 or 7 years? Than statistically speaking, assuming you know a random cross sampling of Americans, you know more people whose family has filed for bankruptcy.” She goes on to mention how there is an enormous stigma attached to bankruptcy. Also telling, in some research Warren had done, 85% of people they spoke to who had filed for bankruptcy had kept it a secret from their parents, a best friend, or their children.
Here’s the full video. It’s an hours long so you might want to get in a comfy seat. Also just wanted to give a hat tip to Little Bites of Point for the link. That blog comes across some great youtube content concerning economics.
So I’ve been meaning to write-up some thoughts on hulu.com since I got a beta invite back in December. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and FOX to create a legal online video hub for their content. The main draw of the site is the content. Every show that’s currently on NBC and FOX is regularly updated on hulu. They also have a solid back catalog which including every episode of Arrested Development and a couple seasons of the A-Team. Their also added new content almost every day. The video quality is quite good (fullscreen on my macbook looks fine) and download speeds have been awesome (I’ve only had buffering issues once or twice since december).
The site is nice and clean and has a couple features that I’ve really grown to like. If you close your browser while watching an episode, when you return to that episode it’ll re-queue it 10 seconds before you left last time. I’ve even got into a few shows via hulu which I wouldn’t have watched otherwise (30 Rock and Burn Notice come to mind). It seems the biggest problem with the site is that it’s only available in the US (which will probably drive me nuts soon enough).
Anyways, hulu is no longer in beta and anyone can use it (that is, anyone in the US). I highly recommend checking it out.
I uploaded a bunch of my photos from my trip on flickr. Hopefully Juan will post his photos somewhere soon as they’re much better than mine. I also shot a bunch of videos with the digital camera and will hopefully have a small compilation video ready soon.
I’m heading down to Argentina for the next 3 weeks on vacation. I’ll be visiting Juan who lives in Buenos Aires and we’ll be touring around the country over the 3 weeks. As you can imagine, don’t expect many (or any) posts on awardtour while I’m in Argentina.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a great blog. It usually has some really funny stuff. On the weekend it posted the best commentary on the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal I’ve seen. The article is well worth reading but here’s some of the choice quotes:
It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.
But here’s the really dark part of all this. [Ballmer] knows it won’t work. He has to know this. He’s not stupid. [...] He has a mindset that was formed in Detroit, where he grew up. He’s a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It’s Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can’t think of anything else to do.
Oh, and synergy. Yeah. They’ll talk a lot about synergy. You know, like when you hook together a bunch of data centers that run on completely different technology stacks.
Scariest to me is that in all the articles I’ve seen the one thing Ballmer keeps bringing up is how he’ll be able to save $1 billion a year in costs. Are you kidding me? Is this Microsoft or Dunder Mifflin? I mean, I don’t doubt he could save a billion a year. But it says a lot about the kind of company Microsoft has become that this is what they’re thinking about.
These two videos are of a speech Robert Kennedy Jr during a panel about the republication of Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative. He talks about the meaning of Goldwater’s conservatism and it’s perversion by the modern day conservative movement. There’s some really choice quotes amongst the whole speech. Here’s the youtube links for both part 1 and part 2.
I had never that crazy about the “+” and date links being intermixed for each post on awardtour. It seemed a little confusing. So when I saw this blog yesterday I thought it a good idea to replace my “+” idea with a similar icon-set. I used the two free icon-sets I linked to yesterday to make a set for the site. I’m still not sure what color to make the icon background color. I keep switching between the standard orange, light gray, and a dark gray.
So some of you might have noticed that the other day I added a comment count icon to the side of every post which had comments. I did this so that you could pick out posts which had garnered comments but had fallen out of the “latest comments” list. I changed the comment icon to fit the new icons and it now doesn’t show the comment count in the icon but a mouse-over will tell you via a tooltip.
I also wanted to try keeping the running date on the page as I liked how it conveyed how much posting I was doing over time. I just couldn’t get it to look nice enough beside the icons. I think I might now cook up an icon set for dates and see how that looks.
Anyways, I posted this just to see if anyone had any comments on the change.
Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?
Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.
Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.
