Get This Man a Doctor

I have a new article up on developerWorks about CakePHP. It’s part four of a five part series, and I have nothing to do with the other parts. I have to admit that it’s not the finest article I’ve written for them—it wasn’t a great experience writing one fifth of someone else’s article. I’ve already gotten some corrections sent to me by CakePHP developers.

A while back someone alerted me to a nice little collection of free (a.i.B.) icons at Famfamfam. The set is called Silk and release under an CC attribution license. I’ve used it in projects and personally like it because it’s massive (700 icons commonly used in modern web applications) and also includes a few meta-icons that can be superimposed on other icons (plus, minus, edit, play, stop, etc.).

Anywho, I was recently startled when everyone’s favorite Firefox plugin, the web developer toolbar, started using the icon set. I swear I keep seeing it around the Web and it’s starting to give me spooky déjà vu feelings. So someone needs to come out with a few more icon sets that break the mold—I’m thinking something with fewer pastels. Maybe black and white or Technicolor.

Two days before the keynote heard round the world, a little known billionaire named Bill Gates made a similar announcement at the now outdated trade expo CES. The purpose of Bill’s keynote was to stir (scrounge) up excitement and buzz for Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista.

Okay, so let’s review. Nearly six years after the release of Mac OS X, Microsoft is dragging out its latest operating system on January 30th. It’s so massively ahead of its time, it’s going to be released in no fewer than six (6) editions, ranging in price from $200 to $400. The top edition, called Windows Ultimate and priced $100 higher than the next cheapest version, will offer a number of awesome upgrades. What exactly these will be is unknown. Instead, Microsoft announced three awesome upgrades at CES that will be part of the so-called “WaveZero” round of updates (further attack waves will occur after the January 30 release). They are:

1. A program that allows you to set your background to be a video,
2. A program which makes it easier to use an existing encryption feature of Vista, and,
3. A Texas Hold-em game.

Gnarly, right? Even more awesome than that is Microsoft’s rather tasteless attempt at a community-based/viral marketing campaign called Show us your “Wow.”

The only thing good about that site is how it makes me feel slightly less bitter about my job.

Today I mailed in the last of my ten applications. It is a happy day but I am too worn out to care. A calculation of the total amount of money spent for ten application will follow.

After going to the front door of my delinquent advisor during Thanksgiving, I have sent three mailings, snail and other, to her. I still have no responses. So it looks like I’m back to being totally screwed.

Since I did end up paying huge bunches of money to my school, I kind of feel like they owe me one. So I’m writing a letter to the President asking him to do something, like round up all his other President buddies and get them to admit me anyways. It contains such gems as,

[…] I do know that my Reed education is intended to prepare me for further academic study. I also know it is in Reed’s best interest that its students have all the resources they need to get into any graduate program. Despite my commitment to resolve this issue, my inability to obtain a letter from my thesis advisor will be a serious detriment to my applications.

Will it work? Stay tuned to see.

The Official Google Webmaster Blog recently release an entry on Google’s fight against artificial manipulation of PageRank, namely comment spamming and link selling. Apparently, they have new algorithms to discount tampering with your search results by making yourself seem more popular than you are. From TFA:

To sum up, even though improved algorithms have promoted a transition away from paid or exchanged links towards earned organic links, there still seems to be some confusion within the market about what the most effective link strategy is. So when taking advice from your SEO consultant, keep in mind that nowadays search engines reward sweat-of-the-brow work on content that bait natural links given by choice.

Way to stick it to ‘em, Google. Will this stop certain marketing companies from violently abusing Google’s name? I highly doubt it.

Dear Amazon.com,

In April of 2006, I was on your site and you offered me a free trial of your Prime membership account. You told me that I could get free two day shipping on anything I bought. And boy were you right. I was buying things like crazy—when I can get stuff in two days at no extra cost, why should I ever leave home?

But then the trial ended, and you wanted me to pay $79 a year for the membership. You thought you could trick me by automatically signing me up for the membership when the trial ended, but I found the secret setting to turn that off.

What you don’t seem to realize, Amazon, is that I don’t have to shop at your store. I’m not willing to pay premium prices for the luxury of shopping at home. Didn’t we learn that when the dotcoms crashed?

I’m including a graph of all of my purchases with Amazon.com for this year. I hope you take a moment to look at it and reconsider how much you are selling your Prime membership for. Something in the less-than-eighty-dollar range would be better for me.

Sincerely,

Sean

On Sunday when I drove up, it started snowing in Seattle. When I got there, it looked to be about one inch. I don’t think that any of the roads I drove on had any snow left.

The next day it snowed another inch.  The entire city of Seattle shut down.  No one went to work.

I don’t know why the northwest gets so freaked out about snow. It’s not like Seattle or Portland are boring, but if it snows even one inch, it’s likely to surpass every other news story that evening. People stay home. Schools close.

Of course, as weird as Seattle and Portland are about snow, it’s nothing compared to how neurotic Los Angeles is about rain. For the first rain of the season in Los Angeles, you turn on the evening news and I guarantee you will hear about at least five accidents caused by commuters “skidding” into head-on collisions.

I love to hate tourists. Yesterday I was taking the AirTrain to JFK to get on a flight to Portland, which by the way is biggest crock of mass transit ever. It costs ten dollars round trip to take a robotic tram half a mile, and there’s no other way to get to JFK. That’s almost as bad as the Seattle monorail.

Anywho, I was getting off the subway when I saw a tourist going in the opposite direction. She had piece of rolling luggage and needed to get on the subway. Instead of using the four foot wide service entry (which I’ll admit took me three tries to figure out how to use it, and I’ll still not really sure how it works), she rolled her suitcase right through the turnstile. Just as she got through, her luggage got stuck in the narrow gate and thudded to the ground.

The best part was her reaction as she turned around and saw her bag wedged tightly behind her. She shouted at the turnstile, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen!” Five minutes into her trip, and she’s getting pissed at an inanimate object.

This is a person who is not going to have a good time in New York.