Bill Ryan's Other Blog

One more week to go before Christmas holiday break.  Next weekend is going to be a busy one, especially since we’re probably going to head down to see one of my best friends and his family.  3 days in Florida is hardly enough, but that just means we’ll have an excuse to go back down.

I’m feeling a little anxious tonight and b/c we were busy all day, I didn’t get to take my Sunday run.  That’s where I’m heading now.  I’m a long way from being the marathon runner I was 10 years ago, but I”m on track to get back to my former greatness.  Breaking my leg sucked.  But I used it an an excuse to be a bum and let myself get really out of shape (fat).  Since I’ve been running again, I’m slowly gaining my life back and I’m loving every second of it.

Two things were absolutely essential to my comeback.  Prior to breaking my leg, my weight stayed in the 160-185 range, and although I had a few bouts of breaking 200lbs, they didn’t last long.  After the break though I got better at making excuses and rationalizations than I did at getting results.  I’d get on track for a little while, take off 20 lbs or so, then put it back on.  My weight was a freaking yoyo for the last 9 years and I got as heavy as 280 (saying it publicly is probably the best way I know of to make sure I don’t go back there).  This time though, things were different.  The first thing was the Warrior Diet.  I’ve been reading Doug’s blog for a couple of years now, and he’s a health fanatic.  (He was also born in 1971, which brought home that my weight problem was self-induced 100%).  I came across his blog a while ago b/c he had some posts about being in Greenville and I immediately became addicted.  He’s a former cop and former Army member and while he was doing quite well for himself, decided to go back and volunteer to serve his country.  His blog focuses on philosophy/books, military strategy, health and politics.  I ignored the fitness stuff at first, but he was adamant about the Warrior Diet and the more I read about it, the more I wanted to try it.  All I can say is, it works.  If you have any interest in health/fitness I highly encourage you to read Doug’s blog.  Even if you don’t care about fitness, you should read it anyway, b/c he’s very smart, very well read and just all around cool (I’ll stop now lest it look like I have a man-crush    )

The Warrior Diet helped me lose enough weight that I could safely start running again.  The Couch to 5k program was a decent enough starting point.  I’ve been able to make pretty quick progress though so my increases aren’t typical [I’ll explain why I mention this in a second].  The biggest problem I was facing is that I was tempted to overdo things and that is the best way to injure yourself, or at least get you so sore you miss days.  The Couch to 5k program reminds you of this reality and emphasizes that you shouldn’t try to beat the program – just stick with it at first until your body is acclimated. 

Everyone motivates themselves differently and the main thing is that you find what entices you and use it to get you to take action.  I’ve read repeatedly that it takes about 3 weeks for you to take on a habit (that works both ways for good and bad habits alike).  The longer you engage in something the stronger the habituation.  One thing though that you should be cognizant of is homeostasis.  Basically, it’s a notion that you body likes to keep things steady.  Any big change makes your body ambivalent and there will be a strong tendency to go back to where things started.  I’ve read this various places and not sure how scientifically sound either of them are, but personally, I believe both numbers are pretty accurate (and yes, I ‘m fully aware that placebo effect may be in effect (pardon the terrible pun) here.  If I believe the numbers are real, I’ll convince myself they are.  Who knows).  Anyway, whether you believe those numbers or not, there is some point at which doing something becomes a habit.  There is also a point at which new things will face some resistance.  So keep both numbers in mind – the latter one is particularly pernicious if you’re not careful.

The second item that I used to help me with motivation was a Garmin 305.

It’s a GPS watch with a heart monitor.  So as you start to run, you turn it on.  It tracks your heart rate as you run and at the end, it lets you update your data to a computer where you can plot it.  The results can be plotted, tracked or whatever the hell you want:

This is very useful for me personally b/c seeing the short line at first was a big motivation for me.  I’m rather competitive (too much so many times) so seeing a small little blip at the beginning was a huge motivator.  Running was my big passion in life and I’ve been much happier since I started running again.  Although I tried doing elliptical machines and stair masters, I’m too easily distracted.  I’m disciplined enough to force myself on the machine, but it was boring and it wasn’t hard to talk myself out of getting on the thing in the first place.  After all, I could always rationalize things by convincing myself I had work to do.  In my line of work, there’s always more work to do, more books to read or brand new technologies to learn.  Running is perfect for people like me b/c you can convince yourself of anything, once you’ve run somewhere, the only way to get back and attend to those pressing issues is to hurry up and run back.  You can walk, but you’ll never get home.  It’s perfect.

So the Garming 305 is a great partner. It’s techy.  It’s effective. And b/c you have data to work with and analyze, it caters to math geeks and tech geeks alike (God knows I’m neither of those right   ).  So now, having a Wifi Hotspot in my car and a permanent netbook in it, I’ve got the perfect setup. I head over to the YMCA to begin my run. I run, I run and I run. Depending on my mood and time of day, I’ll hit the gym afterward for some quick weight lifting.  And then I sync my watch to my netbook, and stare the the chart.  The main things I look for are the red lines getting longer, my heart rate doing down, or my time getting shorter for the same distance.  Right now though, I’m obsessed with making the lines longer.

The only problem is that the charting software doesn’t have a web interface.  It’d be nice to automatically post the data to one’s web site.  It’s an ego thing, but more than that, it’s cool to have data to track.  Other people write frequently asking me how I got started again and most runners that blog have the same experience.  So being able to post the data helps out (besides, the uber tech aspect of it makes it cool).  I already wrote a program for my Andriod that lets me upload GPS records to the web, but all it gives you is distance.  The Garmin data is much more detailed.  Now that I’m back to the Windows Mobile World (I can’t thank Andrea enough for the hook up.  The HTC Tilt 2 she sent me rules), I can use the GPS in it to write a program that’ll automatically upload it via a Bot (tentatively named the RUNBot).

None of it compares to the Garmin data though. The Tilt 2 can give you an approximate speed, but it’s not as granular as the Garmin.  Thanks to Bing Maps, I think I’m pretty close to being able to plot correctly.  I’m guessing that there are enough other runners out there with Garmins who would like to post there runs to the web, so I think a WCF service and a Bing Map Control is in the works over the holidays.

You’ll know I finished writing it when my runs are listed up here.  In the meantime, I’ve got to use the standard interface.  I’m running again, and doing much better than I ever expected.  It’ll still be a while before I’m biting off marathons again, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Andy L and anyone else using a Garmin – if you are interested in a web interface, drop me a line.  I’ve got most of the Bing stuff done and working – I just need to finish up the WCF Service.  I’d love to chat though to see what features you’d want – looks like it might make a great CodePlex project (or something I’ll give away for anyone that sends me their first 50 miles – or something that’ll be a motivator).

Enough typing – time to run.

[tags] Garmin GPS, Garmin Forerunner, Garmin 305, Bing Maps, Warrior Diet, Running[/tags]

Earlier today, I lamented the fact that keyboards are such collectors of all things undesirable.  Someone had to use my computer for a few minutes and they had the sniffles pretty bad.  They weren’t using a handkerchief and frequently rubbing their nose/eyes with their hands.  In spite of the gallons of hand sanitizer on my desk, they had their mind on bigger things.

When they were done, I wanted to make sure I killed all the germs (not saying this person is nasty or anything – they were just sick and I didn’t want to get sick myself).  After I wiped my keyboard with disinfectant, I turned it over and figured I’d knock out the dust.  All sorts of dust and what looked like sand came out of it.  WTF I thought – I’ve been pretty hard core about keeping it clean.  As I thought about it, I realized that I’ve never turned the keyboard upside down and NOT had a bunch of dust, paper, hair etc come out of it. As I thought about it, I remembered time after time of seeing other people do the same thing and no matter how hard they worked to keep the keyboard clean – it didn’t end up so good.  I posted a few snarky quips on Facebook and Twitter  about keyboards and I guess I’m late to the party b/c keyboard grossness is widely known.

My homie and former Magenicon Kevin Kriner sent me a link he thought I’d appreciate. And I did.  I’d note however, that a few things really disturbed me. (Continue reading at your own peril.  I would much rather be blissfully ignorant on this issue b/c now, I’ll never be able to get this stuff out of my mind).  “An Example Bill, now!” you say?

It’s often advisable to clean the keyboard every week, as sometimes a keyboard may have more germs than a toilet seat [Emphasis Added]. Now the average geek isn’t really that keen on keeping his surrounding up to date, but if this next device from Vioguard will surely be of his liking then there may be little less to worry about. Vioguard is marketing its new line of self cleaning keyboards, targeted at hospitals and other super clean environments. The keyboard sanitizes itself by sliding into its UV bed when not in use and slides out at the wave of a hand for contactless operation.

All along, I’ve been using Simple Green (the best cleaning substance on Earth rivaled only by Purple Power) on a cloth which is rolled up to form a cylinder.  First I blow it out using compressed air, then spray the rolled up cloth and roll it over the keyboard.  Occasionally, if I’m feeling particularly obsessive compulsive, I’ll use a Q-Tip.  The Q-Tip approach seems way too much like something I did when pledging my old fraternity though so I try to avoid it.

I followed some links to “Problem Keyboards”.  To some extent, I wanted to see how bad the average keyboard was. Worst case I clean my keyboards once a month, but I wanted to know that there isn’t someone out there who has one that never needs cleaning.  Instead, I found this:

I bet this guy lands a lot of chicks 

Ok, this is a little better but I sense booger or booger like particulate matter

What must this smell like?

Ok, this is more like it.  Dust isn’t clean but it’s not completely disgusting (see above, and above that, and next to that)

The UV aspect however is really slick.  I bought a UV Toothbrush cleaner years ago and really liked it. (Toothbrushes are probably the thing that sets my OCD off the worst and I’m sure I’m not alone there).  Prior to that I just replaced my brush every month. When I moved to an overly complex electric toothbrush, that got a bit expensive but I still did it.  Then I found the UV cleaner but was very skeptical about it’s efficacy.  After looking at a bunch of background info though – I was convinced that it did the trick quite well.  I was so pleased that I bought a battery powered portable one so I could bring it with me when I travel. Then one day when I was shopping, I came across a generic UV cleaning wand.  It seemed a little pricey and I was unsure about it b/c I thought I’d have to manually hold the thing over the target area for a few minutes.  That turned out to be an incorrect assumption.  So after looking it up online, I bought one.  Then I bought another one b/c I didn’t want to get caught at the office without one and damn sure didn’t want to get caught without one while travelling (I generally assumed that staying in higher end places meant you didn’t have to worry about corner cutting when it came to cleaning. A local Atlanta TV station proved that wasn’t the case).

While I was really happy knowing I had these, a friend pointed out that I exhibited a similar pattern with Neat Receipts and it dawned on me that I am very prone to going overboard with such things. Outside of the cost, the warehouse of gadgets I travel with is nothing short of ridiculous.  After some self-reflection, I thought it best if I just stopped feeding my UV obsession.  I decided to admit my life had become unmanageable as a result of my germ-phobia so I started with “Hello, I’m bill and I’m a UV Cleaner-aholic”  While I may sound flippant, there’s some degree of seriousness here. B/c being a germ freak can be potentially pernicious.  There’s no stopping point and you can always find something to get grossed out about if you set your mind to it.  So little by little you give yourself more things to worry about and wake up one day realizing how ridiculous things have gotten.  The reality of life is that the world is full of gross stuff and that’s never going to change.

All of this silliness was running through my mind today – so I did what I always do when something is nagging at me – I try to joke about it and laugh about it. So I immediately drove home to grab address my keyboard problem. I had a few extra ones that were unopened. I also had several cans of compressed air, a few bottles of Simple Green/ Purple Power and plenty of cleaning cloths.  I also figured this would be as good a time as ever to use the Wand on it. (My dedicated “Work” wand hasn’t been used in a while and is packed up in the garage).  It dawned on me however that none of my proposed ideas would be feasible until after work. I’ve seen people get really mad if they see you using hand sanitizer after shaking hands with them.  I’ve seen people get similarly mad if you wipe off your mouse with sanitizer after they’ve used it.  My office is in a pretty high profile area and there’s no way to do anything in it on the down low.  So rolling in with a few bottles of highly conspicuous cleaner would attract a lot of attention.  But whipping out a UV Cleaning wand and going over it – that would probably bother just about anyone (“He thinks I’m so disgusting that he drove home and brought back some Star Trek looking sanitization device, WTF?”).

Anyway, I figured I’d take the diplomatic road and just type on my laptop’s keyboard for the rest of the day.  I brought the keyboard home with me and did the whole air/cleaner/UV thing so it’s primed and ready to go. All was good and I withstood the urge to go nuts with a Q-Tip and disinfectant.  Then Kevin had to ruin it all by posting me a link to a self-cleaning UV keyboard .  Kim sweetie, I can haz?

[tags]I can haz, UV Wand, Oral B Triumph Electric Toothbrush, Gross Keyboard, Keyboard Cleaning[/tags]

Going through my blog stats is really starting to give me the heeby jeebies.  Bill Ryan is a very common name, (well, William Ryan to be specific) but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear I have a stalker.  Every time I’ve looked through the search engine referrals on any of my sites, I’ve found strange things to say the least. And so do most people when they look. But this time, i see a LIST of “Bill Ryan” + “_____”.  So I started thinking, who do I know that obsessively makes lists and obsesses over every word I write?  Then it all started making sense – Sadly.  Oh well, thank God for server logs – at least I can clearly demonstrate what’s going on if I need to.

Bruce Schneier covers a Wired story detailing Sprint’s alleged complicity in something that should make your skin crawl.  It’s nothing new, Luna was warning of this stuff since the first draft of How To Be Invisible and several times thereafter.  It may seem that I’m being a tad hypocritical when I say this is a bad thing, after all I find cell phone based snoopware not only cool, but very useful for many folks. Cell phone snoopware is extremely powerful, effective and easily available (and yes, in some cases, legally questionable) so to some extent, it’s silly getting all upset about stuff like this. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about civillians abusing their power to try to settle  a score with me or make my life miserable.  Without breaking the law, there’s nothing a civillian could do with this sort of stuff to really hurt me [and for the record, I'm using 'me' in the abstract sense here].  Depending on how you spend your free time, someone could ostensibly cause you some embarassment, but there’s plenty of remedies for that sort of thing.

Employees of the various government agencies however, could cause all sorts of problems for people.  For me to effectively make use of snoopware, I’d need to access the phone in most cases and owners would be fully in their power to check for and remove any such snoopware added to their phones.  The same isn’t the case in situations such as the one alleged with Sprint.  If someone bugged my phone and I caught it, I’m entitled to pursue several different legal remedies depending on the circumstances.  If the Sprint story is accurate, the targets weren’t aware of being tracked, couldn’t do anything to detect it and couldn’t do anything to prevent or stop it.

The response from law enforcement types of course is that this is all paranoid nonsense.  If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have anything to worry about they’ll typically argue.  And if they never abused their positions and were perfectly honest, that’d be a plausible defense.  Personally, I think most govt agents are decent enough folks and not prone to abusing their positions, but there’s no disputing there are bad apples.  And just one of those bad apples could cause you a bunch of problems.  Whatever you think of the guy otherwise, look at the example of Joe the Plumber. He got on the bad side of some people with access to his personal information and look what happened.  Had those same people been employees of a private corporation, he’d be sitting on quite a lucrative law suit. (And yes, I know Judicial Watch either offered to or actually filed a suit on his behalf – but had it been a private company, he wouldn’t need a high powered advocacy firm to help him out).

Quoting Chris Soghoian, I can’t imagine how this situation will get addressed without government action and well, it’s probably wise to be the under on that one:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

One thing is for sure, if a private citizen was caught pulling this exact same thing on members of law enforcement or Congress, Congress’ attitude would be just a weee bit less apathetic about responding. 

The other argument I typically hear is a reference to Evan Ratliff.  If you’re unfamiliar with him, here’s the rest of the story in a nutshell. He’s a free-lance writer and blogger.  He took a gig for Wired magazine that entailed disapparing for a month.  He was to try to hide out and anyone that found him would simply need to say the magic word, and they’d be privvy to a $5,000.00 prize. Ratliff gave it a great go, but before long he was caught. 

Following the story, there’s little doubt that people used inside connections in an attept to follow him.  The extent of that is hard to know for sure, but there’s little doubt that people used friends and contacts at various companies to locate him. Those friends almost certainly did things that, well, were out of the bounds of the companies’ rules.  Does anyone really think that you magically become some ethical angel just b/c you work for the government?  Private sector folks bend the rules so you can rest assured govt folks do it too.

Law Enforcement claims this sort of stuff is necessary.  Law and Order types will claim it’s necessary to fight terrorism and similar bad guys.  Seems to me then, that the solution would be kind of simple.  An evidence rule that gave people immunity from anything not specifically relevant to the prosecution of terrorism in the form of throwing out the evidence, would go a long way to mitigate the damage that could be done by rule benders.  Providing EASY to retrieve records for anyone not currently the target of a terrorism investigation would be another.  Creating a ‘paper trail’ of anyone that looked at a person’s information is not hard and not difficult. Granted that doing anything with govt software is infinitely more difficult than it needs to be, implementing such tracking wouldn’t be cheap.  But that line of argument is essentially advocating the rewarding of incompetence.  And even considering the additional expense, there’s certainly at least one or two unnecessary govt programs we could cut to pay for it. (Defunding NPR for instance would work for me). 

If this sort of stuff is really needed for a specific case to prevent some huge atrocity, fair enough. But some fed using this stuff to hassle some guy banging his ex-girlfriend should never be allowed to happen.  I don’t see how anyone can say such a scenario is unlikely.  So if it did happen, the victim should be able to know about it and sue the hell (and have the person fired, not put on some BS administrative leave) out of the person.  

Another possible remedy would be to allow cell phone proivders to offer “opt out” service. (One might argue that this would be extortion, but I don’t see it any different than paying extra for an unlisted telephone #). I missed the official memo when all cell phones became tracking beacons, but it’s something that could be done without.  So say, for $10.00.00 extra a month, T-Mobile (the best cell phone company on Earth) could offer “Secure” service that meant you couldn’t be tracked.  I know all sorts of people, concerned for my safety should I ever find myself stranded a ditch , would have a fit over such a service, but I’m an adult and I’m willing to live with that risk.  After all, I’ve yet to lose a family member or friend (or even know of someone who has) b/c they weren’t able to be tracked by their cell phone.  But I have come across people who’ve gotten on the bad side of a cop (for matters completely unrelated to the law) and been seriously harassed as a result of it.

We’re not able to stop technology from eroding our privacy and even if we were, we wouldn’t want to.  Moreover, this trend isn’t going anywhere but up.  So the solution seems to be minimizing the incentives for abuses.    To Quote Mr Luna – “Governments hide secrets from their citizens, why shouldn’t citizens be able to hide secrets from governments?”

[tags]Digital Privacy, Sprint, Invasion of Privacy, Snooping[/tags]

My posting has been a bit schizophrenic due to moving in between different blogs.  My original plan was to use this one for personal stuff and non-Microsoft related items.  The thought was that I’d use the Microsoft MVPS blog for things specific to Microsoft.  Then I thought, well, I’ll keep is specific to MVP issues and/or device application development.  Then I couldn’t make up my mind.  So I wasn’t sure where to post this but I’ll just cross-post it b/c I think it’s cool.

Like most families, we do most of our activities as a group, after all, we all share many interests in common.  We also have hobbies/interests that not everyone in the family enjoys. So Kim and Sarah have their mother/daughter activities, just like Sarah (aka “Cuckoette”) and I have father/daughter activities. (Well, actually she’s my step-daughter, but I certainly love her like a daughter, hence the term.)

We all think our kids are special and I’m sure I’m no different, but IMHO, Sarah is particularly smart (dare I say brilliant) and very curious.   She is also quite mature for her age and has always been ahead of her time with many of her interests.  I predict that by this time next year, Sarah will have mastered HTML/CSS (and I don’t mean mastering a GUI HTML editor), WordPress, PGP/GPG, basic SQL Querying and Office.  And she’ll have a solid command of Windows, Mac and Linux.  And she’ll be able to perform many tasks that are typically reserved for the geekier among us (set up a secure Wireless network, run Tor and Firefox from a SD Card, sniff network traffic and read unencrypted email that is sent on our network).  Yes, that’s pretty impressive stuff for someone to accomplish by the time they’re 11, but she’s well on her way and it’s not parental bias talking when I say she’s amazingly smart.

Our first planned Father/Daughter project was to get WordPress up and running on one of her domains and have it fully customized with every plugin that strikes her fancy.  While we were at it, phpBB, Joomla and MediaWiki were also going to be up there.  Such a project is a great way to get introduced to many of the topics mentioned earlier, without having to go commando to learn it.  We have a slight delay there so the plan is to build a family site using the same stuff and let Sarah work with us to build it. This will give her a practice run before attempting to to her own. (Kim is infinitely more qualified to teach HTML/CSS and front end design in general than I’ll ever be). With this project on in it’s infancy, we needed a new project of our own.

The Cuckooette shares my love of cars, particularly fast ones.  She was a wonderful ally in the battles with Kim and my mom over my next vehicle.  She was quick to point out how impressed all the boys at her school are with sports cars and how lame minivans and old/slow people cars are.  She was also a vocal advocate for the replacement vehicle to be a 2 seater.  While that battle was lost in the technical sense (no Cayman, no Elise, no 370 and no RX-8), it was won in the every other sense.  She spent last night at a sleepover at her friend’s house and was there most of today, so she didn’t get to see the new car until this evening and her mother was with us then.

So as soon as dinner was over, we made up an excuse to leave the house for a bit, so just the two of us could go setting speed records around Duncan while shooting cool videos of our excursions to the grocery store and run errands her mother needed done.  She won’t be driving for a few years so this choice of vehicle was important – after all it’s very likely going to be her first car when she turns 16.

The current project is the Geek My Ride project.  There are some great lessons to be learned about network setup, network configuration and network security. We’re ultimately going to have much of our wish list voice enabled so she’s going to get introduced to basic TTS and Speech Recognition (after all, how can one seriously be expected to exist in the modern era without an instance of Microsoft Speech Server and some web services running in their car). This of course will be facilitated via the S.A.B.U.R.bot (Sarah and Bill Ubercool Recognition Bot).  I’ll obviously have to handle the coding, but Sarah can learn to build Grammars with me, and she can serve as the voice talent for [tags]S.A.B.U.R.bot [/tags](my voice is such that it only qualifies me to do things where I don’t talk   )

This is a decent sized project for sure, so it’s going to be done in phases.  The first one is the most critical and that’s getting all the networking/hotspot issues working/resolved asap.  We need to be able to just hop in the car or stand near it ,and have the computer sign on to a preferred network.  We need internet access to be as constant as possible being down only when there’s no cellular connectivity.  This has to be done as quickly as possible, just in case Cuckooklaus goes hi-tech this year. So here’s planned workload:

• Phase 1 – Install travel router and networking cards.  Install mounting brackets for both the front and back passenger seats.
• Phase 2 – Add TTS and basic Speech rec (So everything from Search Engine Results to Outlook meeting reminders can be read back to the listener)
• Phase 3 – Have a Bot handle all of this instead of using the Windows 7 GUI functionality. Also have WCF Services inside house and in car to handle file sync, media streaming and the like
• Phase 4 – Anything else we find on Geek My Ride that looks like it’d be worth doing and isn’t beyond my limited skillz.

I’ve got about 24 clips for Episode 1, most of which have some good content in them.  I need to edit everything b/c my videography skillz leave a lot to be desired (but I have mad game at Statistics and Linguistics – Funny dat).  Not to mention her mother will break my neck if she sees how fast we were going be upset that we were out longer than we said we would be.

All in all, I guess this is going to be a bit cheezy.  I’m filming each session we work on this stuff and yah, it’ll be done in episodes. So it’s going to be like a reality show, except with a much more smart &  beautiful primary character, a much smarter cast of ‘other’ characters and no cheesy choreographed scripts (and yes, I fully realize that Choreography deals with dancing moves, not scripts. It’s a metaphor, it’s late and if you understood enough to nitpick about it, you understood the metaphor).

Introduction:

Off We Go:

It’s getting late:

As you can tell, there’s a whole lot in between these but like I said, I need to do some editing.  Even small clips like these are huge memory hogs too so this stuff is taking forever to upload.  Anyway, nothing too impressive happened here – we just set up most basic network install we could and proved to ourselves it worked.  We wanted to figure out what the best Passenger side computer would be – a specifically made car computer, a Tablet PC, a regular Notebook or a NetBook.  So far, the NoteBook went over like a ton of bricks (although without the mounting braces, it’s not the fairest test one could think of).  The Tablet went over a lot better but it’s still a bit heavy.  The NetBook went over spectacularly except Sarah complained the typeface was a bit small.  We may  be able to just use a bigger Netbook or we may be able to change the resolution.  When she gets back next week, we’ll need to take a few shopping trips so she can look at them and figure out which one she thinks will serve our purposes the best.  (In the meantime, any and all suggestions, from computers to networking tools to idea suggestions – EVERYTHING – Is welcome).  We’re still kind of stumbling through this focusing more on learning and fun than anything else so I’m sure there’s a lot of cool stuff we hadn’t considered yet.

[tags] Geek my Ride, Geek my Infiniti G35, T-Mobile, Data Plan, Infiniti G35, Speech Server, 3G[/tags]

The new Cuckoo 1 was delivered last night and Kim and I headed over to pick it up.  The Cuckooette was very enthused by this particular model but didn’t accompany us b/c she was at a sleep over with one of her very cool friends.  (So tonight, she and I will be driving around minus Kim, doing what people do in cars that like to go really fast).  The process was quick and painless and within an hour – we were off:

I wanted a sports car and so did the Cuckooette. Kim wanted anything but a sports car.  My mother seldom inserts herself into family decisions but when she saw the 370z I was originally looking at, she said the following:

Do me a favor would you?  On your way to pick it up, can you stop by the store and buy a really big butcher knife, then stop by and plunge it into my heart.  B/c that’s what buying that stupid car will do to me anyway, but at least it’ll be quick and painless

Mom isn’t above throwing out a bitchin guilt trip here and there when it comes to something she views as life-death. And she was pretty convinced that the 370z would be a continuation of the last Cuckoo 1, and that I’d inevitably get myself killed. Kim’s sentiment was pretty much the same, although she was a little more clever about hiding it

You’re a few years away from being 40, you’re married, with a wife and daughter that need you.  2 Seat cars are for non-married men, or inconsiderate men, and you’re neither.  So you can get whatever car you want, as long as it’s not a 2 seater and as long as it’s not some ridiculous sports car. And yes, a RX-8 is off the list of acceptable vehicles

Then one day, my wife called and said she found the perfect car for me, it was an Infinit G something or other.  I thought, God not only answers prayers, he’s quick to hook a brotha like me up.  My swagga already included:

• Da Dough
• Da Paypah
• Da Hoes (Kim, dear, if you’re reading this and I hope you’re not, I only pluralized Hoes for grammatical consistency, and don’t believe what all those people tell you, Ho is an abbreviated form of ‘Honey’, honest)
• Da Gats (Da feds ain’t the only ones that can Pimp Sigs and Glocks, I pimp a Sig P250 and a Glock 23 and trying to figure out how the hell I can mack around a H&K MP5 like evil movie villains do)
• Da threads (who other than OJ has more Bruno Magli’s then me. Who other than has more Ferragamo’s then me? If Imelda Marcos was a silly fuzzy teddy bear with a touch of gangsta swagga, her name would be Bill)

So now I can add

• Da Whips – as of November 24.  You simply can’t pimp in a Malibu. Period.

You see, for all of her objecting, Kim called one day and had the ‘Perfect’ car for me.  She was pulling up next to it and would let me know what it was.  ‘Oh, it’s a Porsche Cayman, never mind’.  What a bummer that was. So I was bumming, thinking I was about to head straight into dorkville for a while (at least they weren’t demanding a Minivan. So no matter how lame it was, I could at least still have my manhood.  Yes, there’s no such thing as a man that drives a minivan – that’s right.  In fact, if you’ve ever even thought about driving a minivan, then you get kicked out of the club)

A few days later I got the same call, but this time she said “It’s an Infiniti something or other”

Me:  “You mean, the G35 or G37? “

Kim:  “I think so but I’m not sure, its really cool though, I know you’d like it”

Me:  “2 doors?”

Kim:  “Yes, its sporty but looked mature and professional not like something some teenaged hotrodder would drive around. HINT HINT HINT”

Me: “So I can get one?”

Kim: “If you like it and want one, yes, I think that’d be ok.”

Me: “Will you tell my mom that you approve so I can get her off my back?”
Kim: “Well, yes.  Like I said, it looks refined, it’s not a hotrod but it’s still sport”

Me: [Thinking to myself – Will I burn in hell for not pointing out to her that this is the same damned car she and my mom hate, but with 4 seats?  Maybe I should tell her. No, that would be patronizing. She’s a big girl and a hell of a lot smarter than me. She knows what she approves of or not. I don’t need to say a damned word about it mwuahahahahahahahahaha. Behold my Patrick Duffy Leg dammit!”

Me: “Can we go look at them tonight”

Kim: “Well I look for some online but yes, we need to get this taken care of”

--------

Three days later I was driving home in it.  I wanted to hurry up and buy the thing before she realized it was just a  4 seated version of the 370 because I was renting a car and the period that the insurance company covered it had just run out. So I didn’t check it out very much.  I knew I’d like it so if she was cool with it, I’d be cool with it too.  Upon getting it though – I realized how unbelievably high tech it is.  And I was fully intent on adding to the list.  There’s a little more cabin space and a ton more dashboard space than the previous Cuckoo1 so my dreams could be realized. The following is being as we speak or tonight:

1. Kyocera KR1 – Mobile Travel Router
2. T-Mobile webConnect ™ usb 3G Travel Router
3. Vehicular AC Power Supply
4. Gateway Netbook (and yes little Cuckooette, unless you change your mind and want to go on another super trip to Hollister, I’m sure CuckooClaus will have one of these for you)
5. U2500 Vehicle Laptop Stand

So when Kim and I drive to Fripp Island tomorrow to see Mom and the family, Kim will be able to surf the net in 3G, on a Netbook instead of her Android. Since the Netbook has Windows 7 instead of Vista, it’ll actually be a good experience for her).

But the picture is bigger than this.  We’ve got a few extra notebooks at the house and some tablets too.  The back seats are really small and fitted specifically for function as opposed to space.  The router and webConnect™ enables the car to be a Wi-Fi hotspot and if I understood correctly a full T-Mobile hotspot as well.  Between now and Christmas, the Cuckooette and Kim along with anyone else we may be taking with us can surf the net in relative comfort while driving around town or on trips.  Sure, longer trips may have some down spots but on the whole, the trips we usually take have solid connectivity for most of it.  The Cuckooette's finally coming of age and I’m sure would jump on an opportunity to shed her DS in favor of browsing YouTube with her cumpys.

Two more Zune HD’s have been requested for the remaining members of the household (in the interim, they’ll have to suffer through using their current Zune’s, or borrowing my Zune HD) which can be used to surf the net while driving as well.

At the end of the day, watching YouTube clips is no more value added than watching Hannah Montana or whatever else but I feel  a lot cooler/better about having computer access for the wife and daughter than DVD or movie access. Maybe that’s just my mind trying to rationalize buying more computers and more gadgets but since I’m not the one who’ll be using the stuff primarily (not the computers anyway), I think I can still try to pass off the altruism routine, right?

-------------------------------

If you’re interested in vehicle computer systems, the best place to start is probably Geek My Ride. The book provides several links to a companion site and enthusiast sites as well as vendors who sell the various components.  There is also a lot of other coolness you’ll find in the book (I mean, what’s cooler than a computer geek who drives a RX-8, and a black one no less. Not sure but I know that a computer geek that drives a techhed out G35 has to be right up there). And if you want to check the book out before buying it, It’s available on Google Books.

There are several computers specifically made for cars, most of which are just the case and stuff inside.  Depending on your car and what you’re trying to accomplish, this may or may not be desirable.  Netbooks are so cheap now though – that I highly recommend them for such projects(just make sure you install Windows 7 instead of Vista). You can get Netbooks in all shapes and sizes so from small to large, you’re covered.  What’s more, you don’t have to deal with having a monitor and a computer (although you’ll probably have to work out some sort of fastener for the Netbook including a seatbelt equivalent – unless of course you don’t mind leaving heavy projectiles sitting around your car).  There’s a lot of simplicity here and consider this – I’m about as unskilled when it comes to drilling and installing stuff as a man can be yet I pulled it off without a glitch – I promise you, you can too. Think about this too – what are Netbooks targeted to do?  Browse the web, check email and light editing of office documents (You don’t want to write multiple best selling computer books on a Netbook unless you get yourself a much better keyboard).  That’s exactly the sorts of things you’d primarily due as a passenger in a car – or need in a pinch when you’re driving.  So b/c of price, weight, battery life etc, a Netbook is probably a great choice.

If you’re on a low budget, you can do away with some of this stuff too.

You can do away with the Notebook mount for one thing.  You could build your own or get a small lap based laptop desk. You can also do away with the router. If you don’t have two lovely ladies driving around with you that you want to keep entertained, then you can just Roll Fo Dolo and skip the router.  Save roughly $150.00 on the project

If you don’t need/want to power multiple machines you can do away with the power supply (although you still want a surge protector) as well.  I always have devices that need powered (and now that my wife turned into an Android junkie, she does too) so I got a power supply that could charge multiple items at once. My thinking is that with multiple people actively surfing, I was pretty sure battery life would die more quickly. Save roughly $100.00 on the project

Or you could be completely lame and just skip the internet connection, but I can’t think of much fun in that case. Save roughly $50.00 on the project up front, and then monthly costs of the plan

I’m going to ask Kim to post a review of the experience after we get home this weekend.  The Cuckooette will likely want to provide a review of her experience as well – with a little luck I may be able to provide that this evening. Sure, I’m going to write about how cool the stuff is, b/c I’m a gadget geek and I went through all the trouble of setting it up (which honestly, wasn’t much trouble at all – I was shocked at how easy it was). However the end users (Kim and the Cuckooette and maybe some of her friends once they’ve had a chance to see it in action) are going to be less tolerant of things that don’t go well and will have a different perspective altogether.  I think their reviews will be particularly insightful.

[tags] Geek my ride, Car Computing, Mobile Computing, Android, T-Mobile Hot Spot, Netbook, Kyocera KR1, Mobile Router, Gateway Netbook, Netbook, Bill Ryan, Kim Ryan, Cuckooette, Windows 7, Windows 7 vs Vista, Infiniti G37 [/tags]

My wife never tires of putting a smile on my face.  Indeed, I often start to feel guilty for being married to such a wonderful woman – but hey, God hooked me up and who am I to argue with the big guy.  She sent me the following link today in an email with the text “this is soooo our house”

It also spreads doom all over the carpet for thee. And hogs the bed for thee (how one small sausage dog and occupy so much room on a king sized bed still amazes me).  And lifts his leg to pee (my rhymin skillz are off the chain, no?)

[tags] humane society of America [/tags]

So I just came across Norbt ( which is an acronym for NoRobot).  So basically, you create a Norbt page which allows you to post a link (here’s a sample).  On the link there’s a question. The user answers the question and they get to see what your hidden text is (the answer is the encryption key).

Give it a try!

The answer is RyanOmniscientUbiquitous

I’m not sure how this offers anything password protection doesn’t, but it’s a darn cool idea.  Encrypting stuff is always cooler than just password protecting it.  I think I have a couple of ideas that this would be cool for, especially for communicating with dissidents who aren’t allowed to talk to you (think Yoanni Sanchez)

[tags]Norbt[/tags]

Apparently Google has recently indexed some of my Phil Hendrie Show posts and I”m getting a lot of traffic on them.  Phil has a lot of content available on  his website, and I don’t want to do anything that would stop you from buying a Backstage pass. In fact, the best way to convince me to let you access my archive is to send me copy of your backstage pass receipt (with any information you consider private redacted).  With that said, a lot of the stuff I’ve gotten isn’t available for sale anywhere so I’m not cutting into his sales by making it available.

If you have a backstage pass, you’ll notice that several years are only available in streaming format.  That sucks.  So, I wrote a program to go out, grab the streams and make a big mp3 out of them.   For each year that there’s only streaming content in the Phil Hendrie Show archive – I can help you one of two ways.

Way 1 is to give you access to an archive I have.  However there’s years of content here.  Each show is roughly 50 MB although some are larger.  There’s 3 years worth of content here so as you can imagine, Way 1 might not be of tremendous help to you (and yes, my generosity only goes so far – i’m not really willing to dump a few terabytes of content up on a site to give away for free while paying megabucks in bandwidth charges).  I’m also willing to burn some DVD’s for you.  But since I”m not in the DVD business – I can only do so many. If you have any vintage stuff of his that I don’t have, I’d definitely be glad to trade. And I’m willing to hand out freebies up until the point it gets too expensive or takes up too much time. I’m good like that.

Way 2 is to give you the program I wrote. You’ll need a current backstage pass to use it.  But it’ll go out and crawl his site.  From there it’ll take the streams and make shows out of them.  I made this for myself so I don’t have a lot of documentation on it – but it’s extremely easy to use (Select a Date, Select a clip or “Entire Show”, select an output file location, hit “Create”)

In addition, I’ve been getting more and more stuff from the Miami days.  If you’ve never heard him back then, you really want to hear this stuff. The show was much more Raw back then and much more funny/rude.  This was way before Janet’s wardrobe malfunction brought hellfire from the FCC so yah, it was a much different show.  Most of the stuff i have is 94-96 although I have bits of pieces of earlier stuff.  And I’ve got several vintage bits like:

• Bobby Dooley – Cat Sex, Merry Gone With the Wind Kwanzaa, Bobby Visits Dachau
• Mavis Leonard – All you can eat Negro
• Pastor William Rennick – Christmas Pageant, You Islam, Werewolves
• Chris Norton – Chandra Levy, Teach your man to dance, Banging the boss’ wife, Purple Vein Productions
• Dave Oliva/Brass Vulenueva – Credit cards, clean your plate, I’m gonna be LAPD, Mamba #5, Blue El Camino

Make sure you’re following Phil on twitter if you aren’t already.  And you may want to follow me too as I frequently tweet about stuff I’m giving away.

[tags]Bobby Dooley, Phil Hendrie, Phil Hendrie Show, Mavis Leonard, Pastor William Rennick, Chris Norton, Dave Oliva, Neil Rogers, All you can eat Negro, You Islam, Merry Gone with the Wind Kwanzaa[/tags]

In my The Kids are Alright post, I used the example of Jackie Seal to illustrate a perfect example of how smart today’s kids are (and you gotta love her choice of wall paper which I’m sure she did herself), all the while getting  a really unfair rap.  In fact, for every clueless apathetic teenager I run into, I usually run into several more that are sharp, savvy and motivated.  Even looking at my 10 year old daughter… I love to goof on her about how terrible the cartoons she watches are compared to my day, I love to goof on Hannah Montana and I love to goof on her about Webkins… but I bet she reads more in any given week than me and my friends read in 3 months (and yes, I was a book worm at 10.  I didn’t become a partying degenerate until I was 14).  At that age, I was pestering my mom to take me to Dadeland Mall so I could get some new video games (at 10, I had just graduated from using an Atari 2600 to playing grown up games on my Atari 800 – with a bitchin tape drive).  She has strong political opinions, has a good command of current events and is always interested in learning about what’s ever on the news.  She’s a very smart and motivated girl and so are her friends. 

But everyone thinks their own kids are smart and motivated (mine really is though   ). There are times, particularly when I’m being cynical, that I look at the comments on YouTube (especially ones revolving Hip-Hop Beefs) and think the end of the world is around the corner.  I think back to when I read the Bell Curve and ignoring the racial aspects, think, Yikes, the whole Cognitive Elite scenario is coming true.  But the truth is, I know quite a few very well educated people (with post-graduate degrees in real subject matters) who would be hard pressed to hop on a computer, let alone register for YouTube and start casting snarky insults. 

My /b/eloved 4Chan is often cited as a horrific place where young gremlins and malcontented idiots hang out.  The average /b/tard is typically portrayed to be little more than Beavis or Butthead, but with a computer.  Every loudmouth that get schooled on the net loves to throw out the whole “fat loser who lives in his mom’s basement and plays video games all day” cliche’ – which is often resulting from a bad case of projection)  Yet these same young ‘morons’ have pulled off countless internet hoaxes, have pulled off some impressive hacks, are the creators of tons of famous web sites and are responsible for just about every well-known meme on the net. [If you want to talk about idiotic douchebags on the Internet – I present Exhibit E).  Most people have no idea who M00t is, but he’s ostensibly one of the most accomplished internet entrepreneurs the internet has known.  Ask Sarah Palin if she thinks the average /b/ tard is stupid. I’m sure some phony like O’Reilly has a lot to say about them too (when he’s not out trying to score some a55 while his pregnant wife sits at home alone, insists he’s innocent and then settles with a demand that nothing is discussed).  Ask the victims of owners of db.singles.org (and don’t dismiss them just b/c only losers resort to online dating sites) how stupid OldFags, NewFags and every other form of /b/tard behind Operation Jesus was (Ooops, i forgot, 4chan was definitely not /b/hind Operation Jesus, it was Ebaum’s world).  And honestly, could stupid people have spawned something as utterly awesome as this:

I’m sure some that fancy themselves mature and moral will take issue with my accolades for /b/ denizens or M00t and I’m sure English language Pedants (few things are lamer than trying to defend an idiotic argument by nitpicking typos on a web forum.  A Ph.D dissertation – ok, I’m with you.  An affidavit?  Sure.  But a freaking newsgroup or web forum? Pulleeeezzz) will take issue with my characterization of YouTube beef comments as a sign of intelligence.  If 4Chan was full of idiots, no one would care about it.  If 4Chan was full of morons, the same people wouldn’t be able to take issue with the morality of people all about the LULZ.  And I bet most of the kids who post comments on YouTube are headed for college and can write and spell properly if need be.  At the same time, I doubt many of their critics didn’t even know what Lolspeak was until they heard about it on the news.  And the same folks couldn’t write in Lolspeak even with a freaking Urban Dictionary Translation bot  helping them out.

Far from dumb, far from clueless, today’s kids are quite cool in my opinion.  They’re sharp, talented and ambitious too.  People my age and older will trash their taste in music (Yes, I myself am guilty at times, but at least I admit that I’m wrong for it). But their elders did the same thing about that ‘awful’ Rock-N-Roll.  Pretentious Phony Douchebags Some people got offended by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction (according to Dave Oliva – aspiring L.A.P.D. officer and frequent guest on the Phil Hendrie Show, Janet Jackson is actually a man. And we know that Steve Bosell of Corona, California was definitely hurt by it) and went on and on about how society has lost all sense of morality.  But the same stuff was being said 50 years ago.   Many in my age group love to criticize how bad cartoons of today are (yep, I’m guilty there too) and talk about how much better they were 30 years ago.  But I remember hearing the same exact complaints all the time when I was a kid watching cartoons.  Same thing with TV (admittedly TV hasn’t been around long enough to have several generations comment on it). When I was a kid, I always heard how MASH was truly funny and intelligent (except that it pretty much blew)  Shows of today just aren’t as funny – in fact many need laugh tracks.  There were plenty of laugh tracks back when I was a kid.  Sanford and Son, WKRP,  Soap, The Jeffersons etc were very funny.  But Seinfeld, The Office, Friends etc are equally funny in their own right.  And I’d love to hear some GenXer or older try to say that we didn’t have as sucky, if not worse sucky shows back in our day.

To sum things up, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the kids of today aren’t just alright. They are darned cool.  Each generation, kids tend to get cooler and cooler and parents get dorkier and dorkier (I mean, making kids wear freaking helmets for bicycles with training wheels only rivaled in lameness by the fetish most parents have with child seats).  Each generation bitches about laments the same stuff – music sucks, kids are lazy, have no morals, don’t appreciate anything, don’t respect their elders etc.  If that was true, then the unbiased, objective consummate professional Norah O’Donnell would have schooled Jackie Seal instead of Jackie Seal schooling her.  If kids were 1/2 as rude as they are made out to be –Jackie would have told current a**hole of the week Ms. O’Donnell to blow it out her ass to go pound sand.  Instead, she politely responded to the ambush (what does it say about your argument when you have to ambush a kid to try to make your point… and then star in EPIC FAIL Part 1 in the process). I can tell you this much – even though I think it’s a sign of good manners to respect one’s elders, I wouldn’t have looked down on Jackie a bit if she would have told Norah O’Donnell off – even if that included getting all sorts of gangsta on her.  If she pointed out what a freaking dork this a-hole is – I wouldn’t fault her for it either (Let’s attack a kid and pretend to be setting the Record straight b/c of Glenn Beck’s distortions)  The fact she handled O’Donnell with such composure and grace is testimony to her upbringing and class.

Who really cares if you like the kid’s politics or not?  I mean, when a kid gets a lot of press, one side of partisans talks about how great the kid is while the other side trashes them. If parents put the kids out there as a poster-child, then go after the parents, but attacking the kids is just whack.  Both sides do it (although from my POV, seems the left is a little quicker to get ugly and always gets nastier) and both sides acted shocked and amazed when the other side does it.  Then again, hypocrisy has never been, and will never be, in short supply in Washington D.C. Roubaxl  Bill Ryan is the worst piece of garbage in the world, next to my ex-wife Kim Ryan, formerly Kim  Finleyson. Those two pieces of garbage are made for each other

The point here though is that it’s great to see a high schooler at a political gathering of her own free will (and it’s true, I don’t know for a fact that she’s there on her own will, but it looks like she was and I’ve seen nothing to make me believe otherwise – if such evidence presents itself, I’ll certainly correct myself).  We constantly talk about how apathetic the electorate is.  Pejorative references to Joe Sixpack abound.  Both sides criticize the other side’s voters as stupid and uneducated.  But when we see shining examples of behavior both sides claim they want to see, the opposing side rips the person to shreds (and let’s be honest – both sides constantly blabber about ‘it doesn’t matter which side you vote for, just make sure you get involved and vote’.  And as long as you agree with them, they practice what they preach).  I for one am quite glad to see younger folks getting involved in the electoral process (not just b/c the trend seems to be that younger folks tend to be more Libertarian these days – as opposed to Socialist in my days and previous generations – come to think of it, what more proof is there that today’s kids are SMARTER than previous generations?) Andrexa Roubaxl

[tags]Jackie Seal, Norah O’Donnell, Bill O’Reilly, 4Chan, Pedobear, Lulz, Operation Jesus, db.singles.org, singles.org, Phil Hendrie, Dave Oliva, Steve Bosell of Corona California, Bill Ryan, William Ryan,  Janet Jackson, Wardrobe Malfunction, WKRP, Seinfeld, Sanford and Son, moot, m00t, FAIL, The Bell Curve, Cognitive Elite[/tags]

One of my favorite sites is on fire today… While WoW is probably the douchiest thing to ever hit Earth since the Popped Collar, Second Life is a very close second.  Makes this evil stop!

I was going through my new logs and boy, what a gold mine.  If I was a little more paranoid, I’d think someone was out to get me.  All along I figured, if someone would be out to get me, it’d be some unstable nutcase like Charles.  As lovable as I am, i have managed to make 3 enemies in my life – well, so I thought. Little did I know that I would have some serious people who were out to get me.  Although maybe I’m not who they think I am. See below:

Get it?  Ever see the X-Files? remember the cigarette smoking man?  Remember the people out to get him?  Remember what happened to him in the movie?  Remember why Art Bell quit CoastToCoastam ?  Well, now I know what it feels like – you see, ‘they’ are after me now too.  So to all of the New World Order, Trilateralist, CFR one world govt types – all I can say is this… Ryan is a really common Irish surname. In fact it’s one of the most common.  William is very common too. I mean, in college there were 4 different William Ryan’s.  I’m the 4th William G in my family.  So guys, you don’t have to suffer through reading my blog – I’m not the one trying to out you – I’m not anyone to worry about.  Whew!  Now that I have that resolved…

I’m thinking it might be really funny to start posting stuff from the Stats mod. You know, like Search engine terms people searched on to get to my blog.  Anyone familiar with blogging knows quite well how interesting such stuff is – and all I can say is there are some very sick puppies out there.  When I get home tonight, I’ll try to clean some of the results up and post them – they’re great for a laugh.

When I was a high schooler, I remember the constant drumbeat of the GenXers are (fill in negative) meme.  Lazy, apathetic, substance abusing, promiscuous blah blah blah.  I vividly remember many vehemently criticizing modern music and Gangsta Rap in particular.  This new music wasn’t music at all – it was cacophonous at best and no real music had been produced since the Beatles (which speaks volumes about the people making the criticisms). 

The funny thing about it was that my mom had always told me about her teenage years and it sounded like the exact same stuff they said to her.  And pretty much the same stuff was said to my grandparents (Considering they came straight off a boat from Czechoslovakia it would appear that such criticisms transcended both time and geographic borders).

So today when I hear people talking about what bad shape the kids are in, I just roll my eyes. Same sh** different generation.  Well, there are some things I am not  thrilled about  with SubXers, GenYers, Millenials and the like but on the whole, I think the kids are not just OK but doing quite well.  About 6 months ago, my wife and I were heading out for our weekly trip to P.F. Changs and could barely find a parking spot b/c Barnes and Noble customers had taken them all.  The new Harry Potter book had just come out and Barnes and Noble, along with all the other book chains in town were slammed.  Harry Potter books are hardly high brow literature but they aren’t small easy reads either. From what I’ve seen, they are typically about 1/2 the size of War and Peace.  Sorry, but when i see bookstore after bookstore jammed pack with kids competing to be the first to get a new 500+ page book – it’s hard for me to think anything but “Wow – Good for them”. Sure, the news loves telling us bad news and they love portraying every generation in America as self-absorbed idiots, but the news these days is one area that’s truly deserving of criticism.

I challenge anyone (unless your so blinded by political bias that you can’t be objective) to look at someone like Jackie Seal  and say she’s a disappointment. I know, I know, there’s a lot of Palin Haters who are saying just that – but she clearly has a sense of humor , has a brain, has a lot of courage and handled herself quite well against Norah O’Donnell and her Blackberry.

To top things off, Jackie has a blog and a twitter account .  Imagine that

[tags] Jackie Seals, Norah O’Donnell [/tags]

I just upgraded this version of WordPress to 2.8 like I had been planning to do for a while.  I also added several plugins to the install including Stats – just so I can keep easier track of who’s coming to my site.  Parsing web server logs isn’t all that hard, but it gets old after a while. Then again, knowing EVERY SINGLE visitor to my site is kinda cool.  I mean, you have a pretty good idea of who your readers are and who hits your site, but until you start looking at your logs, you don’t really know EVERYONE.  Once you do, small unexplained things start to make a lot more sense.  You can detect patterns.  You can see how frequently the same visitors come and when they come back to the same pages, you really get to understand their behavior.  The only downside to all of this is that it’s creepy. When you have visitors that come to look at the same pages over and over again, more than the Google and Bing spiders do – you think , someone must really have a crush on me.  Or be some crazy stalker.  Or, well, you know, Or.

So have fun watching me, watching you, watching me. I think I”m going to start a new page (which is like a post but a little more permanent ) with my visitor list – you can see who’s coming here – their IP addresses, machine/browser info and domain registration information.  WordPress is definitely da bomb.

Tonight started out like any other night.  My car is being delivered to Greenville so I am sharing Kim’s car until it arrives.  I had a lot of work to catch up on so I was home most of the day and suffering from a little cabin fever.  The daughter and wife came home and decided to give All American Pie Factory a try since we’ve never been there before. (For the record, we went to Sahara Mediterranean Grille last night having noticed it finally opened.  I lack to words to describe how awesome Sahara Mediterranean Grille was).

Anyway, we were doing the typical weekend family night thing… dinner, a trips to Books-A-Million and then we headed home.  That’s when I learned my oldest son is homosexual – sort of.  I have to say, the circumstances around me finding out weren’t exactly the most comfortable ones – but I did not get all butthurt over it.  I guess you could say I found out the really hard way, but that might sound like an inappropriate pun at this time especially after the butthurt comment in the last sentence.

So after finding out (literally, i caught him and his lover in the act in the back yard, in plain view of the rest of the family and neighbors), I wanted to make sure I handled things right.  Caught off guard, my first reaction was to think that he was being raped (for what it’s worth, it appears he’s a bottom).  I realized how distasteful such a sentiment was. I mean, how many bigotted white fathers start claiming rape just b/c they find out their daughters are involved with a Black man?  Such behavior is patently wrong and without realizing it, I was inadvertently acting the same way. 

I told him that this changed nothing as far as I was concerned.   I love him and always will and as long as he’s happy – I’m happy for him.  In fact, i feel guilty even saying this b/c it sounds way too much like ‘some of my best friends are Black’ type arguments.

Kim heard me talking to him and walked outside.  As it were, they were still in the heat of the moment so she learned about it the same way and roughly the same time I did.  She didn’t talk to him about it yet but our kids know we love them unconditionally and equally importantly – something like this isn’t a wrong or right issue. There’s nothing to be ashamed of (I mean, going at it in the back yard in plain view of everyone is a little shame worthy – but the gay aspect certainly isn’t) and I’m sure all of the kids understand that.

Like I said, he’s my son and this changes nothing.  I’m as proud of him as ever.  I may not be particularly fond of the specific person he’s chosen to get involved with but that’s due to the person’s character, not his sexuality.  This caught me a little off guard so I’m sure I sound a little awkward – fortunately, we’ve filmed the whole incident and I’m sure that it explains things much better than I ever could.

To my son’s new boyfriend I say this:

Having to serve a parent to a gay child is already difficult enough, but how do you as a parent with a gay child deal with pressures that are unnecessarily created by a zoophiliac rabbit, that wants to destroy your available garden vegetables, and will continue to do so until one way or another they break you? 

And Mr Rabbit (not sure if you prefer Mr. or Mrs in this case so I went with my best guess being that you’re the Top), please quit mocking my writing skillz – there’s nothing funny about the tone of my writing or my sentence structures.  Silly Rabbit, trix are for kids, and Pimps, but not rabbits, so remember that!

Did a quick inventory trying to plan out some networking issues – I decided to lock down the network. To do that, I needed to first do an accurate inventory of everything in the house that connects to the internet.

• Notebooks | Netbooks – 7 total
•      Windows XP Pro – 2
•      Windows XP Media Center – 2
•      Windows Vista – 2
•      Windows 7 – 1
• Desktops – 3 Total
•      Windows XP Pro – 3
• Servers – 1
•      Windows Home Server – 1
• Routers | Switches – 3
•      Wireless N – 1
•      Wireless G – 1
•      Gigabyte Switch – 1
• Video Game Systems – 2
•      XBox 360 – 1
•      Wii – 1
• VOIP Adapter – 1
• Misc Devices – 3
•      Wireless Printer – 1
•      Zune HD – 1
•      Tablet PC – 1

Doing a nice clean inventory (Mrs. Ryan dear, I can make LISTS TOO – W00T!!!!!!) sure puts things in perspective.  B/c when I look at the networking area – All I see is some glowing neon and a bunch of cables that look like they’re trying to strangle the dogs or anything that comes near them.

(Great, I just heard the Router complaining about me again Having to serve a secondary router is already difficult enough, but how do you as a primary router deal with pressures that are unnecessarily created by secondary devices, obnoxious humans and doom spreading canines who don’t understand that Cisco/Linksys/Netgear != Dog Toy, that wants to destroy your available bandwidth, and will continue to do so until one way or another they break you? (When we just had the Netgear Router everything was fine – but once the Linksys moved in – it’s been nothing but headaches, whining and a whole lotta butthurt)

I’ve been having a  ton of problems recently with dropped connections. There’s a wall separating the kitchen and living room (where the routers are located) so using the microwave usually causes some problems.  But things are much bigger than just this.  The Netbook drops the connection constantly  and is the one usually located closest to the routers.  If I am on it for an hour – it will drop at least once.  Kim’s Mrs. Ryan’s media center and work notebook seem to be the most robust and seldom drop irrespective of where they are.  There’s a desktop that connected over BPL and whenever that was used, we’d have immediate problems with other computers.  The problem was in part that the assigned IP Address would often be one already in use – so that was easy to correct.

Frustrated (b/c I can’t download anything new like Office 10 without a trillion attempts), I decided to fix it this evening.   Brilliant idea on my part.

No matter how hard I try, no matter what I buy to help alleviate the problem, my network cables gain self-awareness and decide that all carbon based life forms inhabiting our house need destroyed.  I’d like to be a man about it and blame my wife but no one would believe that.  But we use velcro wraps, plastic ties, a special octopus power strip and UPS that has fasteners to hold each incoming power chord.  Even with all of this, it looks like I hosted a beer funnel and Graphix Bong contest at my house before attempting to install everything. Then I realized something really disturbing – I have this complete mayhem of a situation and every one of our computers (as well as the video game systems) are wireless. I can only imagine what kind of clusterf*** would be in place if we were wired.

Anyway, I changed things around a bit though and basically had the configuration go from the modem to the switch where I plugged in each of the routers and BPL Adapter.  I plugged the Tablet directly into the N Router and did the same for the VOIP Adapter.  Since the Home Server is sitting next to the routers and I couldn’t possibly make things any more convoluted, I decided to plug the Windows Home Server box directly into the switch.

I turned on several of the computers and hit the internet on each of the ones I turned on.  I’ve been sitting here for about 2 hours and all is good.  Sure, it’s not *really* long enough to say for sure that I fixed the problem, but I fixed the problem. If I get 45 minutes of net time on the Netbook without dropping a connection I’m shocked. It’s been two hours.  And each time I used the power line networking – I always had problems with the other computers.  I fixed it temporarily by assigning an IP address but I undid that for the test – just to see if things were really fixed.  So far, so good.

Then I thought about it and maybe I shouldn’t be so happy yet.  You see, earlier tonight I upgraded the Netbook to Windows 7.  It’s like I stuck another 2GBs of RAM in it and fixed everything else that was wrong with it (it’s a high end Netbook so should have decent performance but froze all the time, had driver problems constantly and just overall worked like crap – all of that went Bye Bye 1 second after Windows 7 Showed up.

Either way – I should know soon what’s driving what but first thing tomorrow – all the Vista machines are going to be Windows 7 machines and unless my wife and daughter say otherwise, the XP machines are going to Windows 7 as well.  The wife and daughter both want Santa to bring them new laptops and Santa  couldn’t possibly say “No” to such charming gals.  Hopefully Santa has gotten with the program and is ensuring Windows 7 is running on any laptops he’s delivering

[tags] Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Bill Ryan, William Ryan  [/tags]

I had an interesting conversation with a friend that made me realize that email privacy isn’t nearly as well understood as I would have thought.  The person was sending emails to a girl he was dating. In the email was a bunch of stuff that I thought he was crazy for including.  He of course asked me why I responded how I did.  And I replied simply – If it’s not something you’d be ok having put on the front page of your local newspaper, you shouldn’t be sending it via email.  He was amazed and asked why.  And I told him that in general, email is analagous to a post card.  The operative notion here is that a Post Card is readable by anyone that touches it.

Well, unless precautions are taken that’s exactly the case with email.  So let’s examine my friend’s situation.  He sent it from a va.gov email address to her corporate email.  So essentially, just about anyone on the I.T. Staff at his company could read the information, anyone on her company’s IT staff could read the stuff, and pretty much every member of every IT staff along the way could read the info (if you want to get all pedantic and point out that all members of the IT staff probably don’t have Admin level access I’ll agree with you.  But it’s impossible to know who has what access so from a privacy perspective, I’d assume the worst case scneario.  At a minimum, there’s at least one person at each place that could read the stuff).

Let’s say that  in the email, my friend was bragging about his sexual prowess and was totally fine with all his coworkers seeing it.   (What I mean is, assume that the sender is fine with all the information being seen by their coworkers – whatever that info may be).  Would that be ok?  Of course not.  B/c the recipient didn’t ask for the email to be sent to her and in it, there’s a ton of private stuff that all of *her* coworkers can see.  If she solicited the email and ok’d the content, then yes, everything would be fine.

But think about this for a second.  You could recieve an email from someone completely unsolicited that contained private/embarassing/confidential etc information. And unless it was encrypted, all that information was just disclosed to anyone that wanted to look at it.  After explaining this to my friend he said “I’m soooo sure that I.T. people sit around and read people’s emails or whatever”.  Josh – let me absolutely positively assure you that there are a LOT of I.T. people that love reading other people’s emails.  You think that a horny geek with crush on the Lady Gaga lookalike in accounting would never think of reading what she likes, where she’s going this weekend or what have you?  You really think some screw up on the verge of being fired never reads emails his supervisor sends to HR?  You really think the guy who hasn’t gotten a raise in 5 yhears would never look at an email message containing an offer letter to some new hotshot they’re hiring?  I’m not saying this happens everywhere – but I am saying it can happen anywhere and it does happen at many places.  Many people don’t even see it as wrong b/c the company has a “Your email is my email” policy.  Email monitoring in fact is part of the job – THAT IS – MANDATORY – at many places.

The answer of course, is simple – if you don’t want everyone and their mother to know about something – don’t send a plaintext email and think long and hard about including it in an email at all. If you do  and it’s encrypted, chances are it’ll never be read (unless your sleeping with the lady some former KGB agent is in love with).

Wired has a great introduction on how to start encrypting your emails (Yes, encrypting and decrypting is a slight inconvenience.  Trading keys is a slight inconvenience.  Locking your front door is a slight inconvenience too, as is closing your curtains before you walk around nude while making coffee).  Once an email is sent, you can’t recall it (well, there are some services that have  Undo functionality but currently most are lame at best).  Many companies (especially publicly traded ones compying with Sarbanes-Oxley) are actually compelled to save all of their emails. Everything.  That includes letters to the boss about manipulating the energy market the whole way to emails discussing which Korean girls you’re going to ****)

I highly encourage you to read the last two links (Enron and Peter Chung).  Just pick a few.  Do you think that the writers ever thought those emails would be read?  Do you really think they realized their emails weren’t private?  Do you really think they would have written about crimes, infidelity and all sorts of other vices if they KNEW how many people could read those emails? Do you really think Chung wanted the entire world to hear him say stuff like “Why do I need 3 bedrooms?  Good question,  the main bedroom is for my queen size bed, where CHUNG is going to f**k every hot chick in Korea over the next 2 years (5 down, 1,000,000,000 left to go) the second bedroom is for my harem of chickies, and the third bedroom is for all of you f****s when you come out to visit my ass in Korea.”

As icing on the cake, Chung decided that he’d include this little tidbit in the bottom of his email – look familiar?

Peter Chung
The Carlyle Group
Suite 1009, CCMM Bldg.
12, Yoido-dong, Youngdeungpo-ku
Seoul 150-010, Korea
Tel: (822) 2004-8412
Fax: (822) 2004-8440
email: pchung@thecarlylegroup.co.kr

Yep, a signature complete with address, email and phone numbers.  Sure, the Carlisle Group is well known and they don’t hide their offices. But imagine if Chung was a woman who had someone stalking her. What if Chung was a Green Beret or Special Forces who’d been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.  Something as silly (and useless ) as an autosig could quickly reveal enough information to get him killed (would you want an enemy to know your office address and direct phone line?) Of course a Green Beret or Special Forces member would be way to smart to send unencrypted emails with autosigs, but I’m just trying to illustrate the potential downside here. Can anyone show me an example where an Autosig is really necessary?  Even if you think the person you’re sending the email too needs it – you have no control over who sees it or who it’s forwarded to so it pays to be careful.

 I myself learned the hardway abou the evils of AutoSignatures when I sent out the warnings in the db.singles.org incident. I was in a hurry to warn people to change their passwords.  I wasn’t trying to ruin the Lulz mind you – I’m all about them, but stuff was getting ugly and money was getting stolen.  So I sent out warnings for the people to change their passwords. Problem was, most of the accounts were already breached. So guess what?  People who don’t much like White Knights, let alone /b/rothers that part-time as White Knights, now had my full contact information.  I was in a hurry and used a work account.  I was warned to back down and shut my mouth or face the consequences and call me a coward if you want – but I wasn’t about to go sticking my p3nis in that hornet’s nest.  (While we’re on the subject, reread the Singles.org post and think long and hard about  your own personal use/reuse of passwords – do you really want to put all your online accounts at risk like that?)

No one thinks an email they send is going to be intercepted but the truth is, it’s too easy for it not to happen. If you use email regularly, I can guarantee you that someone has read some of your emails (in all likelihood, you’ve had several of them read).  Not mixing work and business is one way to protect yourself but that’s sometimes easier said than done.  Encryption is one of the easiest ways to get some privacy and offers a big bang for the buck.  PGP and GPG are excellent mechanism to get up and running with encryption quickly, easily and inexpensively.

You may read all of this and decide – who cares, I never write anything I’d be embarassed of.  If that’s true, good for you.  Most regular email users however are in a different situation. A little forethought on things like Password reuse, encryption and auto-sigs can save you a whole lot of embarassment and the little bit of effort can save your career and maybe even life depending on what it was.

[tags] PGP, GPG, Email, Email Privacy, Encryption, Cryptography, Internet Privacy, Bill Ryan, William Ryan  [/tags]

Some days you just want to laugh. Other days you just want to cry. And some days, you just sit there with your jaw agape, amazed at things you just saw/heard. Today is too good of a day for me to fret, but if it wasn’t, well, read the subject line

You’ll find the definition says "Chris Tacke and everyone else at OpenNetCF”.  I consider myself a pretty creative guy and am more than willing to step out of the traditional bounds of doing things when they don’t fit my needs.  If a tool doesn’t work, I’m more than willing to toss it out and either build my own or find something else that does work… Most of the time anyway.

Unit tests are an interesting issue.  People are often complete dumbasses really passionate about it one way or the other.  There are many (typically developers who hate writing code and love the thought of having Manager on their business cards) who completely disavow the utility of unit testing. Advocates on the other hand usually evolve into zealots and can’t imagine coding without unit tests.  Personally, I had a little trouble getting my head around unit testing at first (well, using mocks specifically) but quickly became a true believer (although I don’t get all butthurt get bothered if I see someone else writing code without having written the test for it first).  At first I pretty much stuck to only unit testing stuff I got paid for.  Then little by little, I started doing it in personal projects.  The CuckooBot, StripperBot and the bot who’s name can not be used in public would never have been the successes they were had I not made such liberal use of unit testing.  Actually that’s not totally true – I should say I started doing it for most of my personal projects.  Because when I’m doing Smart Device Programming – I avoid it like the plague.

Why?  I’ll let someone a lot smarter and much more eloquent than myself answer that.

And while your reading up on things, I encourage you to take a look at Project Resistance and the IoC Framework as well. 

Chris links to it in his post but I’d like to draw attention to it as well.  This is the official solution to the problem according to Microsoft.  I realize everyone is very busy with important stuff like Silverlight and Windows Mobile 7, but if you’re going to publish a solution that inadequate, it’s probably better to just publish nothing at all. To me, this would be like a car company finding out Model X had a problem that kept it from starting up when it got below X degrees or above Y degrees and offering the following solution:

1. Wake up 20 minutes earlier than you normally do on work days.
2. Get dressed and eat breakfast 20 minutes earlier as well
3. Put on some comfortable shoes and walk to work

I understand it’s very easy to be a critic and no one on the Windows Mobile team is dumb, lazy, apathetic or uncaring (they are all exactly the opposite), especially when it comes to things that inconvenience end users.  But the proposed solution is so bad you have to wonder if it wasn’t just ‘thrown out there” so someone could check it off of a TODO list or something

Bill's new G37

The charge that I can only drive an RX-8 are bull. I have mad skillz and if it’s hot, I can pimp it.  Yes, the RX-8 was my car of choice. Yes, my RX-8 is totalled.  Yes, I’m not getting another one b/c my wife hates sports cars and really hates ones like my RX-8.  The torque is going to take some getting used to but somehow, I’m thinking I’m going to adjust.  Seriously.

I’ve already got the Alpine components ready to go. I’ve already got the radar detector and laser jammer ready to go.  And in just a short time from now, I’ll have the ride to stick them in.

Money – Check, Cars – Check, Hoes -Check – life is great.

[tags] Infiniti, Infiniti G-37, Passport Radar Detector, Bill Ryan, William Ryan  [/tags]