Lee.org

(see update below)
“24” jumped the shark in season 4 between 4 an 6 pm PST. Up until then, the scale of how things unfolded was large and seemless. The terrorists had comandeered 106 nuclear power plants with a remote override control. I had nightmarish visions, wondering feverishly if America’s nuclear power plant system could be so suseptable to a single directed attack.

And then…. Ta-da. only 6 plants were under attack. And then 1. Yes it’s sad that a nuclear plant had a meltdown but they averted a disaster that literally would have destroyed America and the people involved didn’t get so much as a wayward smile… instead, they instantly became worried about the next great threat… well, there weren’t any next great threats so they worried about other, much more petty things. At that moment, the walls of the set fell down for me. It stopped being real-ish and started resembling (just a little bit) like The A-Team with constant nonsensical action, snide remarks, pat cliches and cardboard acting.

The clincher was Jack’s phone number. In a recent episode, Jack gave somebody his cell phone number. It showed on-screen for a couple seconds, 310-597-3781. So of course I called it. How could I pass up an an Easter Egg like that?!

Hurumph! The message on the voicemail is:

[female vmail voice]The mailbox belonging to [man’s voice] Nextel phone for twenty-four [female vmail voice] is full. It cannot accept any more messages. Please try again later. Goodbye.

TVTome.com says that at one point, stagehands and such on the set of the show picked up the phone. That sounds tremendously cool… but now that the folks on the set have gotten bored of answering the hundreds of calls a day, they’ve just left the phone off with nothing fun for anyone else. At least have Mr. Sutherland or someone could leave a short message there.

update: After a bit of googling, I found several message threads talking about how they called and got through to people on the set. – – – – Ok…. I’ll admit it. That’s cool. There could have been better follow-through, but that was cool.

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I still watch, but now it’s just for the sake of completeness.

Update 5-5-05
Grr. Ok, maybe I spoke too soon. Maybe I’m weak willed, but I just watched 2am-3am and it was terrific, like really terrific.

Ok, so they had a lull, and the pace had a weird hiccup, and there was a slipup and how the plot flowed in one storyline for a moment. But darn it, that’s good TV!

I saw The Matrix Reloaded tonight on HBO. The last time I saw it, in the theater, I was sorely disappointed. I think I blogged that a long while ago but I’m too lazy to look it up.

“Hype” is such a strange animal. You see, this time around, I really liked the movie. The action was eye poppingly realistic (except for the multiple-Agent-Smith parts where it was terribly noticeably computer animated), the storyline worked for me. And the thing I most suprised myself with was that I actually was kind of digging “The Explainer”.

The first time through this movie… wooo-eeee, was I disappointed. But there were so many fairly subtle things I cought this time through. For one, after Neo gained is “The One” powers, I was initially really disappointed that the only super-power he had was flying. An ability he used very well to run away on a number of occasions. I even talked about this with others and they gruffly agreed. But now I noticed that he had supa-fly X-Ray vision, could pass his hands though solid objects (like Trinity), could reanimate someone (Trinity again), could stop a sword being swung at him full-force with the pinky edge of his open hand taking the full force and only bleeding a few drops, fly at about 4,000 miles per hour, fight 100 Agent Smiths at a time without bleeding, fend off an Agent Smith “copy” attack, destroy squids with the power of his mind (and I now kinda understand how that would be possible).

I did slow-motion through a couple fight scenes and they were total poetry. When fighting multiple opponents, each opponent was generally fighting full speed. Neo just fought faster. I say this because in many kung-fu movies, when the hero fights multiple opponents, the opponents are usually fighting poorly and taking a long time between strikes. Not so in The Matrix Reloaded. I’ve got to say that this is a great testament to Keanu Reeves, who was at the center of most of these tightly choreographed scenes.

Trinity riding her bike in the wrong direction on the highway… I did slow-mo through it and couldn’t tell how they did it. I mean, I know there is CGI in there, but it was totally seemless.

So forget your expectations, watch it again and enjoy it!

I went I went to the East Coast Hobby Show in Fort Washington, PA looking to speak with manufacturers and remote control know-it-alls for a project. What a total frigging waste of time. The website and the advertising material blatantly lies about what kind of a show it is. It is billed as a “full line hobby show” but it is, in fact a train show.

Take a look at the photo of the poster I took (the odd vertical line in the photo is me merging two photos to get a good shot of the whole poster) Now don’t get me wrong, trains are well and good. But I came looking for… well, looking for what they said they had. Their sign says, “Over 200 of the largest manufacturers, distributors and publishers will be exhibiting.” Well, after I walked the entire show, I went to the info booth at the front and asked, “I was wondering if there are any manufacturer reps here like the sign says.”
The response, “There was one guy here yesterday.”
“Yeah, but yesterday was a dealers-only day.”
“Yeah, sorry.”

And it was a fine train show. There were hundreds of model train exhibitors, miles of track laid and thousands of 2″ tall trees and people and ity bity locomotives with fake smoke gleefully billowing out of them. There was a huge setup, taking up 100′ x 100′ with this amazing 9″ tall set (9″… is that HO scale? N? PG-13? I forget) with amazingly realistic Maersk and Sealand and double-decker containers just like I’ve seen rolling across the NJ Meadowlands. It was pretty cool…. except that it had NOTHING to do with what I was looking for. I drove a friggin hour and fourty-five minutes each way for nothin.

“R/C planes will be landing at the show” Ummm. where? The show is indoors. There was no space for indoor flight, no calendar of such events (no calendar at all, actually) and none of the 4 airplane exhibitors had anything that could fly.

Phoey.

Through all of this, a few good things still came to pass. While I was driving down there, a Computer Guy client of mine called me in need of help. I was happy to help, it let the time pass quicker. After a while, I told her where I was going and why. She came back with, “Oh really! My sister-in-law works with kids with C.P. They use all kinds of stuff like that. I’ll get you in touch with her!” Cool beans. There might have been a little kismet going on there..

After I realized the hobby show was a bust, I called PPG. She was in an art show called The Big Art Show in Asbury Park. Since I was “in the neighborhood” (a mere 1 1/4 hrs away) I decided to make a run for the coast! Also, my client was encouraging me to enjoy life a bit more :-). Well, the evening was quite a bit more fun than I thought it might be. I got to see PPG and Taco and Joe (who is also moving to the bay area soon) and meet some new nice folks. So there.

I saw the Iron Chef America miniseries a couple months ago and was totally psyched about it. I even wrote a gushing post here on my blog… but then I deleted the gush because… well… something didn’t feel right. I had to watch a few more episodes before I was sure what was up.

I know what’s up now. Iron Chef America isn’t a good program. It wasn’t transposed to the U.S. well. Actually, the only elements that they really brought over were that it’s a cooking competition with a secret ingredient with running commentary. Any other similarity to any show, current or canned is purely coincidental.

I’ll get it out the way and say that I enjoy Alton Brown’s commentary quite a bit.

Here’s what they’re missing:

A host with charisma… cult of personality style. Everyone knows that nearly a decade ago, a man’s fantasy became reality in a form never seen before, Kitchen Stadium, a giant cooking arena. The motivation for spending his fortune to create kitchen stadium was to encounter new, original cuisine, which could be called true, artistic creations. On the flip side, the backstory behind Kaga’s nephew is that “he came to America”. Feh. (BTW, just to break everyone’s heart: Kaga’s backstory isn’t real and his nephew… isn’t)

The Challenger doesn’t get to pick who he’ll fight. Why not? Everyone is standing there… why did the other Iron Chefs show up if they already knew who was fighting?

The American Kitchen Stadium isn’t as well supplied. I’ve noticed a couple times how chefs were having trouble finding ingredients or appropriate utensils.

5 dishes in 1 hour? Come on! I know that Americans appreciate busyness, but this is crazy. It changes the show from a culinary competition to a track and field meet, literally. I suppose that it forces the chefs to make better use of their sous chefs, making their management style important. Also, it is a different (and not necessarily bad) thing to see chefs barking orders and discussing things. But it seems a bit impersonal that some components of each dish aren’t even touched by the chef.

It’s obvious that the chefs know what the secret ingredient is before it’s revealed. That breaks my heart.

Alton has to do the final countdown himself instead of the cool voiced, Star Trek computer-like timer lady. That, and a lack of, say a big clock on the wall gives me the subtle impression that the timer might not actually be exactly 60 minutes.

The Iron Chefs specialities aren’t named. I realize that specialities are more of a moving target with the American chefs, but you’ve got to say SOMETHING else besides their name!

The Challenger’s introduction is too short. You could conceivably shorten it from what the original Iron Chef did… a full Olympic-hopeful style 3 minute biography, but to say, “And here is our challenger, Chef Blahblah. He owns a really nice restaurant!” Is…. distasteful.

The interstitial graphics look way too much like Robot Wars.

Why, oh why, oh WHY does our NC (Nephew Chairman) keep saying, “This is your first appearance in Kitchen Stadium.” They’ve put like 5 episodes in the can. Of COURSE this is their first appearance!

There’s a lot more I could say about this… a lot more. I thought about doing a careful analysis of what was wrong with the show and how it might be fixed, but that wouldn’t be seen as a QA effort but a crazy fandom streak in me. I’ll settle with this nice little rant.

Concerning Understandable Statistics, Seventh Edition by Brase, Charles Henry Brase

I took this course last year at Warren County Community College. I found myself very interested in the subject. There were problems though. Several times I had to bite my tongue in class or while speaking one-on-one with the teacher else I show her up… and that is an uncomfortable proposition! Also, the book SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED

So, I often found myself sitting in class, not listening to the teacher and correcting the mistakes in the textbook with my pencil. And this is from someone who hasn’t ever taken Statistics before! One sunny day in the back of the classroom, I went ahead and wrote an “Authors Note to Students” on one of those pages that was intentionally left blank.

Authors Note to Students

Although this book is in its 7th edition, no care has been put into making this extremely interesting topic easy or accessible. To this end, Brase and I have made sure to not explain the variables in our equations, not describe our reasonings in “English” and not show each of the steps in the examples that we give. In addition, we have placed several exciting “Easter Eggs” in the form of incorrect or poorly reasoned answers in the Answer Key. This is designed to enhance your classroom experience by giving you all something to talk about in class.

We hope that you enjoy this text as much as we have enjoyed the boat that you have collectively bought us. Don’t forget to buy our 8th Edition, the exciting page renumbering of the popular 7th Edition!

Brace & Brace

For the last couple months I’ve been using a teeth whitener to shine up my pearly whites. I’m quite happy with the results.

My teeth aren’t black or horribly discolored. I don’t smoke and rarely drink red wine, those are two things that can really darken a smile. But my teeth are just a bit yellow. And darn it, I want a nice smile.

I bought a “boil-n-bite” tray set and 15 ml of 22% carbamide peroxide from Dentist.net for a total of about $40.

The boil-n-bite set came with 4 trays… good thing because my first attempt at making a form fitting tray failed. But the next two attempts (top and bottom arch) went just fine. It was a matter of warming up the tray quickly (5 seconds instead of the suggested 15 seconds) and using all my fingers to squish the trays into place. I looked a bit odd with all 10 fingers in my mouth while hovering over the stove.. but hey.

I got 22% because… well, because I’m cheap. 10% is only a few pennies cheaper but is supposedly recommended for “beginners”. Bah. I’ll admit that the first couple times I did it, I had to take the trays out after about 30 minutes because of a burning sensation in my gums, but I’m good now.

I brush my teeth, squeeze about 0.5 ml into the tray along the tooth-line in the tray, and plunk it in my mouth. I usually do both the uppers and lowers at the same time. Though I’ve done my uppers more often because that’s what people see the most. I leave them in for 45 min to 1 1/2 hrs depending on how I’m feeling and how fed up I get with having bulky trays in my mouth.

After about 5 sessions, my teeth were noticeably whiter. Importantly, they still look natural. They’re not monochromatically WHITE but an imperfect and naturally looking white-er.

The last couple sessions haven’t gotten them much whiter, but that was expected. I’ve read that the first couple sessions give the most benefit.

I could have gone to a dentist or Brite Smile but I seriously wasn’t interested in paying $600 for WHITE teeth… $40 was more my style, even if I have to stick trays in my mouth for months instead of a single 2 hr dentist visit.

Last but not least, it very much appears to be “safe and effective”. I couldn’t find anyone online that had problems with the stuff.

update 12-30-05:It’s been 8 months since I used the teeth whitening stuff and I’m still happy with the results. I went to a dentist a few weeks ago and I asked about teeth whitening products. They compared my tooth color to some tooth color swatches they had; my teeth compared to the second whitest in their swatches and they said I definitely didn’t need whitening… though they’d oblige me if I still wanted to give them money. I thought that was a bit strange because before I went in, I was thinking I might need some more whitening. I guess I’ve got a little tooth-color-anorexia. Suffice to say, I’m still happy with the results.

Health insurance for an individual is, as we all know, quite expensive. About 6 months ago, I did some hunting around to try and find health insurance for my self. Here’s what I found. I live in NJ so some of this advice might not be appropriate for you.

I’d get a great break on insurance if I had a company with just other employee (must work at least 25 hrs a week or so)

NJ Blue Cross Blue Shield (the “official” provider for NJ..) is freaking expensive. They wanted to charge me $650/month for moderately good insurance.

The IEEE has a good insurance program. You’ve got to be a member for 2 years before being eligible… Since membership is $100/year and it would save me $150/month in insurance, I immediately joined. I’m still waiting for my membership to mature though.

You want to be in a group. 1 person obviously gets more sick, more often than that same person as long as he’s paired up with someone. Hurumph.

NJ law makes it so that I can’t get cheap but crappy insurance. Instead, I must get good, expensive insurance… well, expensive at the least. This differs from many states. I noted that you can get things like $10,000 deductible insurance in California for $90/month

Don’t be afraid to get phone numbers and call on the phone. I sometimes got more done in a 20 minute phone call than an hour browsing confusing medical insurance websites.

I eventually ended up going with a trusted client’s recommendation. I get my Health insurance from Medical Insurance Claims Inc. of Kinnelon NJ. I pay about $370/month for a good Oxford plan… $30 copays, RX paid 1/2.

Here’s some links I collected. They may or may not be useful or still valid:

http://www.workingtoday.org/resources/insurancebenefits.php
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http://www.workingtoday.org/productsservices/products.php
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http://www.asmeinsurance.com/
I have to be a member for 2 years first.
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ACM.org Association for Computing Machinery. $99/year
– Professional Liability Insurance – about $1800/year
– Major Medical – blue shield of NJ 212-476-1111
– Catastrophe Major Medical Insurance – no
– Disability Income – yes
– Auto – 1-800-524-9400 www.libertymutual.com/lm/acm
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Marsh Affinity Group Services 1-800-503-9230 http://www.seaburychicago.com/cwp.asp?assn=ACM
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IEEE computer society – http://www.computer.org/
$95/year to join IEEE and Computer Society as a professional (partial year)
– Comprehensive HealthCare Insurance – must be in IEEE for 2 years. 1-877-886-0110
– Disability Income – 20 units of $130/month, 90 day waiting period: $216/year
– Professional Liability – through Marsh Affinity Group
– Discount Prescription Plan
– msa plan
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Blue Cross of NJ (crappy insurance)
http://www.horizon-bcbsnj.com/members_rates.asp?urlsection=members
Plan: Plan A/50
Effective Date: 4/2004
Deductible: $10,000.00
50% coinsurance
$5,000 coinsurance cap
Monthly Rate: $242.52
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http://www.nationalbusiness.org/
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Small business something or another http://www.nfib.com (but not in NJ)
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insurance quotes at: http://www.ehealthinsurance.com
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http://www.keystonetosuccess.com/
What the frig is is? Just a discount plan? I was referred to this by http://www.nationalbusiness.org/NBAWEB/Premium3600/NBAcontact.htm
Ah… It’s a pharmacy discount
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Nationwide Health Plans–NFIB Ohio
1-800-551-4312, option 4 < --- Call --------------------------------------------------- update 8-1-05 Good to know: When you get your insurance, use a company that provides a real live human being at your service. When something goes awry and you are battling the insurance provider, it will be good to have an agent that knows all of the loopholes and such. I am right now in the process of getting health insurance in California. It is amazing, I can get very similar insurance in California for $170 that I would've paid $370 for in New Jersey. I am going to opt for a less inclusive $100 per month plan. A 70% discount!

I just saw the “Oona Wentworth” episode of Nip/Tuck.

I knew I was done being sick (from my cold) when I realized that I was feeing the full creepiness and disgustingtude of this show. Bravo to everyone who made this masterpiece of …. of…. whatever the heck it is. It’s really on it’s own out there. Nip/Tuck is a great show but I can’t tivo through two episodes…. I need to recover and digest and finally remind myself,”Well, at least I’m not as bad off as that!”

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3-14-05 update: I woke up this morning with alternating and repeating visions of Dr. Bobolit cutting his face off and Adrian pleading for his mother to make love to him. I’m feeling pretty unclean on this fine sunny morning. Yup, pretty darn unclean.

Peercast sits out there quitely. Some day in the not too distant future, people are going to start going crazy for it and products like it. It’s a good idea.

What is PeerCast?
PeerCast is a new, free way to listen to radio and watch video on the Internet. It uses P2P technology to let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of traditional streaming. This means you get to hear and watch stations not normally found on commercially funded sites.
…
PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast a radio station to the entire network.

(I have anarchistic visions of there being a few relay points in tropical desert privacy-haven countries really messing things up for the RIAA)

In a fit of wanting to type faster, I looked into the latest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. After 30 mintues of googling, I’ve decided that speech recognition is still not ready for prime time. :-( (dear reader. Do not dispair. Read my update below!)

I found several blogs and sites that talked about how excited they were at the prospect of how the software could help them, but I never found any followups. That says to me that everyone who tried it got dis-interested quickly. When I first tried speech recognition several years ago, I had a similar experience. After a few days with it, I thought that if I only put more dedication into teaching the computer how I spoke, I could get some use out of it. But I just wasn’t interested in putting that much effort into it. Hence, the waning interest. Well, here we are, 10 years of research, my computer is 200 times faster (!!! 3 Ghz vs 14 Mhz!!!) and the reviews still say pretty much the same thing.

The most useful review was from John Udell’s Weblog. He included a video of him dictating a letter. His was virutally the same experience I had 10 years ago. The recognition had about a 2% error rate. That sounds good until you realize that this posting so far is 203 words… That means there would have been 4 errors in the preceeding text… errors that were spelled correctly and were likely gramatically correct, just not what I intended to say.

So then you have to correct the errors… That can be terribly slow, and error-prone in itself in an audio interface. Listening to John Udell patiently talk to his computer in a carefully moderated voice, and having the machine still make dumb mistakes drove me crazy, and I’m a patient guy.

Grr. I don’t know… Maybe I will give it one try. I tried to type as fast as John was dictating and I very quickly realized that, when it worked well, he was going at like 100 to 120 words per minute. I type at something like 25-40 WPM. I would love to be able to integrate this kind of performance in my typing life! Maybe I could dictate and then edit by hand? I don’t know…

update 4-29-05: I’ve been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 now for two days and I’ve got to say that I’m extremely impressed with it. My previous reservations were unfounded. I’m typing this right now with my voice. It’s pretty darn cool, and yes, I’m going a lot faster than I could type after only one day of training. it takes a little bit of getting used to, speaking to the computer, but really not that much. More importantly, I feel that I’m using a different part of my brain in order to write things. It’s a speaking thing, not a writing thing. That was one thing that I was hoping that I would get out of this.

Woot!

I’ll keep my intrepid readers abreast of how I’m doing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Oh, and as for the microphone, I’m surprised to say that I’m very happy with a cheap lapel mic that came with my web cam.

Gosh darn it, it’s even becoming easier to say things like “Send that” instead of clicking on the Send button in Outlook.

You know, I have to admit that it’s kind of nice to hear my voice in an otherwise quiet room. It’s better than listening to the mindless, brain sucking television in the background.

Update 5-3-05 I’m convinced.

I am now able to type and about 80 wpm. That’s twice as fast as I have ever been able to type in my life. With more practice and the new headset that will be arriving in a few days, I am fairly confident that I will be able to tie at 100 wpm very reliably. This gosh darned thing is good! There are still a few small issues but they all seem conquerable. For example, right now the integration with Firefox is less than perfect. But there are tools to get past that. I’m really pretty impressed.

Of course, instead of me doing just necessary things faster, I am now becoming more verbose. I think I like that in my Internet life.

Case in point: this is getting to be a pretty long blog entry, isn’t it? It’s not that I’m spending more time writing this entry, it’s just that I’m “typing” a lot faster. Woot!

(and it is a bit of a novelty teaching the computer to understand the word “woot”)

update 5-5-05: That’s it, I’m hooked. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is amazing. I really can type/speak at about 80 wpm. It’s still taking a bit of getting used to but darn it, this thing works. I went out and bought a good dictation headset (an Andrea ANC-750) from Knowbrainer.com and that has improved the accuracy quite a bit (of course, it’s also an excellent gamer headset ;-). I’m thinking less and less about how I speak to dictate after just one week.

Update 5-20-05: I continue to be happy with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 (DNS8). My biggest gripe with it right now is its memory and performance footprint. When it’s running it takes longer than normal to switch between windows, even if DNS8 isn’t engaged. That makes it so that it’s a bother to leave it running on the odd chance I’ll want to issue a “close window” or a “send that” command. Though I admit that I’m a huge short-attention-span-theater window switcher. I have 2 monitors and at the very moment I have 12 windows open. On any day when I’m spending more time writing than not, DNS8 stays running.

Update 9-14-05: FYI I continue to be an avid Dragon NaturallySpeaking user. I got a DMCA takedown notice from copyright-compliance.com last week representing Scansoft saying about this very page (where I gush happily about DNS)…

It has come to the attention of Scansoft that you are distributing unlicensed and unauthorized Scansoft Products.

If anyone can find the unlicensed Scansoft product on this page, I’ll give them a prize.

Update 10-7-05: Sweetness. I just installed another gigabyte (bringing me to 1.5 GB) and all of the lag that I’ve been seeing when moving between programs has gone away. I can now leave Dragon NaturallySpeaking running much more of the time without a strain on my PC.