Juxtaposition, the Blog

The Blue Angels were recently in town and I couldn't believe the kinds of Facebook rants or other kinds of rants I heard from people complaining about The Blue Angels.  I've heard it every year since I was a kid, but I have noticed some different camps.

Anti-millitary

There seem to be quite a few people who use The Blue Angels to channel their disdain for all things military.  I'm not the biggest fan of the war machine myself, but we do need the military.  And from my perspective, The Blue Angels represent some pretty cool -- even if the planes are old by today's standards -- technology that is really quite amazing to watch.  And the skill that the pilots have is really something to behold.  I don't see how it glorifies war or anything like that.  Although I could see how someone who was prone to think that way beforehand would look at them through the same mental filter.  

Anti-noise

These people complain about how noisy they are.  I feel sorry for them that they don't see how _cool_ those loud engines are.  I love the roar of the engines (sidebar:  having 4 take off in formation just yards above your head is pretty freaking sweet).  But my guess is that these people might complain about any kind of thing and The Blue Angels are just a convenient thing to complain about.  Seriously, the planes are in town for 3 days and only fly for an hour each day and may only be near you for a few minutes at a time.  It's not like they built a naval air station in your neighborhood that will be loud every day forever...  Come on people!

Paranoid / Risk-averse

This camp has the people who claim they think that the planes flying basically anywhere are too dangerous.  The "what if they crashed into someone's house" crowd, if you will.  In the past 20 years, there have only been 4 incidents so they are rare events.  But you're surely free to have your opinion and you can keep yourself safe by being nowhere near them if you want to try absolute safety.  But realize that you are probably going to die in a car crash while trying to escape the highly unlikely plane incident you fear most.  Humans are terrible judges of relative risk.  We just never evolved that as an innate ability yet it is something we need to make good, sound decisions in daily life.  So, save yourself but leave the rest of us to make our risk/reward decision and enjoy the spectacle!

I can't believe this hasn't been fixed yet.  I was not about to reset back to factory defaults and I had been meaning to root my phone anyhow so went this route.  It was difficult to find a solution that did NOT require resetting to factory defaults.  Enjoy.

Issue 3477 - android - HTC Hero - can't sign Gmail account if user skips signing when initially using the phone. - Project Hosting on Google Code

referring to my comment 37 above, and 16 ...
(1) First you need to root the phone. I had to Google how to do this, I found the solution (for 2.0, not 2.01) on some German site (yes, careless, I know).
(2) Then, you need a a terminal app (such as "Better Terminal Emulator"). With the terminal app you can navigate in the file system of the phone. However, you need root access (above) to be able to see the folder "/data/data/[and so on]". Without root access you cannot navigate to this folder. Then you need some Unix-fu to navigate to the correct folder, and remove the correct files. Look up the commands "ls", "cd", "rm", and "rmdir" (my Unix-fu was just sufficient, thank fate). Maybe a file manager app would to for step 2, I don't know. The process is likely slightly different for each phone (mine's a Milestone).

I think it is disingenuous of this article to have "Apple" in the title.  It was an AT&T server with a stupid application that used AJAX calls to obtain email addresses by ICC ID.  And since the ICC IDs are apparently sequential, the group was able to iterate through thousands of them to obtain the information.

Then AT&T decides to claim as well that the researchers who discovered the flaw did not contact them.  It sounds like AT&T is lying.

Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed

FYI, SurveyMonkey is a great site, but they have really crappy security. They actually store your password in the clear, or in reversibly-encrypted format. If you request your forgotten login and/or password, they actually helpfully email you both your login _and_ your cleartext password. What year is it again? That is the kind of kindergarten mistake that there is no excuse for making. How to securely handle logons to systems and applications is fairly standardized and there are lots of simple options for supporting secure one-way hashes that are immune to a variety of attacks. No excuse for security this bad...

Fortunately, they allow you now to sign in with your Google login so that might be a better option -- get them out of the authentication business that it appears they have no business being in.

Sorting through the myriad information and misinformation on these topics is difficult.  And remembering what the actual conclusion is can be even more difficult "Was coffee safe or not?"

So, I figured that I would blog about two very recent posts that summarize the data about these topics.

Summary:

Caffeine bad ("Pregnant women should avoid caffeine because of potential effects on
fetal growth and spontaneous abortion."), Alcohol seems okay in moderation (i.e. no known conclusive data exists that shows a problem with low intake during pregnancy)

Science-Based Medicine » Alcohol and Pregnancy

"The scientific evidence has not identified a threshold below which
alcohol consumption during pregnancy is definitely safe, but neither has
it shown any convincing evidence of harm at low levels of intake, and
it has not ruled out the possibility that low levels might provide a
small benefit."

This one loaded drive-by-malware, a popular tactic.

Malicious iFrame on US Treasury and other sites?

http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/2010/05/04/treasury-websites-compromised.aspx

Ridiculous but glad they changed their policy.

A retraction from the American Academy of Pediatrics : Pharyngula

"We retracted the policy because it is important that the world health community understands the AAP is totally opposed to all forms of female genital cutting, both here in the U.S. and anywhere else in the world," said AAP President Judith S. Palfrey.

Then, if you're a baby in Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, or related states you get reprogrammed to fear and doubt science and believe horsepucky. Glad me and my baby live in Seattle.

I may have to order this print. Lots of other goodies for geeky parents like me there too.

I'm always forgetting how to do this but here's how to delete matching lines:

:g/.*foo.*/d

:g!/.*foo.*/d

We were given a big "FU" by SPU (Seattle Public Utilities) last week and told that alley trash service would stop tomorrow and we would have to somehow haul our cans up to the street level every week.  This is complete bullshit, of course, as I point out in a letter to SPU I just submitted.  All of my neighbors affected are protesting by continuing to put the cans in the alley tomorrow.  We'll see what happens.  We've all been calling to complain the past week but so far there seems to be no recourse at all.  I plan to keep escalating this until we get a reasonable response.

"All houses on my alley were given only a week's notice that alley garbage and recycling and yard waste service were to be discontinued starting 5/11/2010 and that we would have to put our bins on the street level.  We have all brought this to the attention of SPU that this is a ridiculous request for our block due to the nature of the terrain.  That is the reason that we have had alley garbage service for the over 5 years that I have lived here and beyond that.

Alley service is the only option that makes any pragmatic sense due to the terrain that our houses are built on.  The houses main floors are on a grade level _below_ the street.  The lower floors of the houses are on yet another grade lower than that but on par with the grade of the alley.

There are at least 9 houses on my block that all have alley garbage service for this reason:  [redacted 9 specific addresses] are all addresses on this street receiving alley service. 

My house alone has 8 steps to reach the street level that make it simply impractical to haul one, let alone three or four cans up and down the stairs each week.  Other houses have more stairs and many even have twisting staircases that would make it treacherous to lug the garbage up and down.

Waste Management needs to have SPU tell them "no" and to resume alley service and ensure that we continue to receive this service from now into the future.

We have been told that Waste Management's contract has the option to arbitrarily change the collection location at their decision, however I have read the contract posted online and do not see that they have that authority at all.  It says in section 135 that "collections from Residential Structures shall be made at the curbside or alley, as
determined by the City", meaning that the discretion is entirely the city's.   It goes on to say that, "Subject to special arrangements made by mutual agreement between the Contractor and the City on a case-by-case basis to accommodate extraordinary situations, Residential Structures on the same side of the street on the same block shall place all Containers on the curbside or all on the alley.  However, if a particular property does not abut the alley or have alley
access, Container placement shall be at the curb."  So, our case is already covered in this language since all of the houses who do not abut our dead-end alley do not have alley access.  Even if they did, our case would fall under the 'extraordinary situations' case anyhow due to the uneven, steep terrain that our houses have been built upon.  See http://www.seattle.gov/util/stellent/groups/public/@spu/@csb/documents/webcontent/spu01_005943.pdf

None of us are going to be putting our cans at the street level and will expect that our waste service will continue in the alley as it has been or else we will continue to report missed collections every week that goes by and will continue escalating this issue higher in the governmental chain until we get a reasonable resolution."