So we haven’t received mail for about a week and I stopped at the post office, a 1 month temporary vacation hold was placed on our mail. The hold was placed at the USPS website, anyone can do this, there is no security. They had my name and address correct tho they supplied a NYC cell phone number as a contact number. Or maybe it was just a random number.

So I am trying to figure out if this is some sort of scam, was someone intending to pick up my mail (because no valid ID was demanded to pick it up), or were they planning on having it redelivered somewhere (tho the hold order had it being delivered at the end of the month to my address)?

Or was this just a db error at the post office?

I don’t seem to find anything on the internet about vacation mail hold scams but very curious.

We had a very nice visit at Firwood Farms today, this place is an unassuming little gem. Way off the beaten path, and not very commercial, but a hugely nice and good couple who own the place and make a home for rescue alpacas (as well as some of their own). And the alpacas are so engaging, very interested in meeting us (we did have food in our hands), and not shy a bit, tho a little cautious. Their eyes are stunning. This place is about 1000x more meaningful and touching than any zoo. Worth a side trip.

I’m a backer of the Poppy – I went for the microfiber bag level. Great to see a Seattle team doing well.

And what the heck, while I was at it, I backed the Openbeam Kossel Pro 3d printer – another Seattle team. I saw this printer at the mini Maker Faire here, it looks totally awesome.

However you feel about Snowden’s actions, whether he is a patriot or traitor, brilliant or naive, you have to give him credit for having the balls to take a stand. He has put his life and liberty at risk for something he believes in. He has thrown away his career, his relationships, his home, everything. I’m not completely sure how I feel about all his actions, though I have a strong bias towards more openness and more government accountability and more transparent oversight. But I certainly admire his courage.

Contrast with members of Congress who apparently were afraid to break a subcommittee rule. Gosh, what happens if you break a subcommittee rule, do you have to sit at the wrong table at lunch, or do you lose your parking pass, or do you have to wear a funny hat on Thursdays? It must be horrific.

To address my ADSL woes, I am considering getting Dish Satellite Internet Access. I’m already a Dish TV customer so this seemed like it would be the easiest path.

My physical dish location is 40 feet from my house though, and I need to make sure I have the right cable in the ground before the Dish installer shows up.

After 4 phone calls with Dish, I finally found someone that purportedly knew the cable requirements. They told me that I would keep my existing dish with its RG6 coax cable for tv, and that I would have a 2nd dish with cat5 cable for the Internet. The 2nd dish part sounds fine, but cat5? I would have expected to run another rg6 cable to a modem in the house.

Anyone a dish Internet user?

UPDATE: Finally found a knowledgeable dish technician, solid copper RG6 is the correct requirement. this is what hughes requires as well, so it makes sense to me. I just couldn’t believe that dish would run cat5 (not even cat6) outdoors, and put the modem outdoors at the dish.

Playing around with Hadoop a little and I am completely confused about where to start:

• Apache Hadoop.
• Hortonworks.
• Cloudera.
• Pivotal. Not yet available publicly but early access program available
• Intel. Probably the standard licensing restrictions on Intel software, probably not viable.
• AWS. Except I want to host locally.
• And yet more distributions.

More confusing than choosing a linux distro.

ios7 first impressions:

• the mail app i think i will like, seems a little easier to dispose of messages, and viewing messages is a lot cleaner
• i never used game center, mostly because i don’t care about the feature, but a little bit because it was so horribly ugly. nice to see that fixed
• sometimes you can be too subdued and too flat. the weather app doesn’t work for me, the difference between a sunny and rainy forecast is now so muted.
• all the new swipe from the bottom, side, etc behavior will take a while to get used to. tho quick access to airplane mode is nice.
• i’m interested in the new photo library features and sharing, tho at first glance, the whole collection thing doesn’t really work for me. collections are too small or too big.
• i hope i can airdrop easily between my mac and my phone. haven’t tried that yet.

osx first impressions:

• laggy. wish i hadn’t installed. i am sure it will get better.
• maps app is cool i guess tho i will have to see how much i use it versus the browser alternatives. the “send to iOS” feature will be great, obviously not a new idea, but still i will be happy with.
• i suspect i will like finder tabs a lot. tags? i just don’t know. evidence from other domains suggests i won’t use them.
• books, keychain – yawn. hard to get excited about when there are great 3rd party solutions that work everywhere.

What’s disgusting you? Personally, I’m not upset with

• The tech companies who may have delivered data to the government. When someone from the government shows up with a warrant, regardless of your feelings about the nature of the warrant, you pretty much have to comply. You assume the legal process is working correctly, and you comply. And if you see any reasonable flow of warrants, you do engineering work to make sure you can comply with warrants in the future, without compromising all your other users.
• The NSA and other entities who went thru whatever legal processes exist to get various court orders. They are doing their job. And as one observer notes:

Christian Finnegan ‏@ChristFinnegan
I’m furious the gov’t is collecting my personal data! That stuff is only for Facebook! And Google! And any marketer willing to pay for it!

And I am pretty happy with

• Snowden. Shining a light on these activities is good. A brave (and perhaps naive, but still brave) man. James Fallows’ article seems sensible.
• The press. Ditto. I am very glad we have a free press that digs and digs and digs.
• The members of the Washington congressional delegation who have voted against FISA.

I am not so happy with the bulk of our elected representatives who have hollowed out the 4th amendment, who think that secret briefings of Congress is sufficient oversight, who think that the 3 branches of government can balance each other without transparency or any citizen oversight, and who now call the actions of Snowden “reprehensible”. The President right on through most of Congress are out of step with me and many Americans.

• I think I will end up loving Vagrant. I shift my work across a lot of machines and being able to bring my entire dev environment with me seems like a great thing. Really this is the way I’d like all my apps to work. In case you are not clear why Vagrant is good, here is a snippet from their site:

If you’re a developer, Vagrant will isolate dependencies and their configuration within a single disposable, consistent environment, without sacrificing any of the tools you’re used to working with (editors, browsers, debuggers, etc.). Once you or someone else creates a single Vagrantfile, you just need to vagrant up and everything is installed and configured for you to work. Other members of your team create their development environments from the same configuration, so whether you’re working on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows, all your team members are running code in the same environment, against the same dependencies, all configured the same way. Say goodbye to “works on my machine” bugs.

• Rich turned me onto all the lens tests at Photozone. Awesome resource for lens data.
• More info on linux perf tools than i know what to do with.
• A bunch of nvidia gpu programming resources. How do I do the same things on Haswell? OpenCL? Some cuda-to-intel tool? llvm? I’m probably seriously confused.
• I’d like to learn more about sparkleshare

Trying to get smarter about image processing and computer vision – kind of a random walk of books:

• Digital Image Processing: An Algorithmic Approach Using Java by Burger and Burge. Mix of theory and implementation on the most basic of image processing techniques. A nice starting point.
• Mastering OpenCV with Practical Computer Vision Projects by Baggio etc. Heavy on samples, light on theory, but still useful.
• Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision by Hartley and Zisserman. Heavier on theory. You’d better enjoy math.

Also for break from tech:

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell. Liked Cloud Atlas (the book, never saw the movie), and so far really liking this. Great characters and does an excellent job of placing me into Japan in the year ~1700.

Gee’s comments about ND were stupid and deserve an apology.

But Bielema? Saying nasty things about a former competitive coach, who bolted Wisconsin abruptly?

And SEC academic quality vs the Big10? Look at the USNews rankings. Northwestern > Vanderbilt. UM, Wisconsin, Illinois, PSU in top 50. OSU, MD in in top 60. Purdue, Rutgers, Minnesota, Iowa, MSU in top 75. Florida is first SEC showing (after Vandy) at 54, Georgia at 63, A&M at 65. It is kind of a rout in favor of the Big10 actually. Gee just said the truth. Might be painful and indiscreet but seems true.

• Traitor to His Class by H. W. Brands. A fine biography of FDR. The title led me to believe that it would be a little more focused on the conflict between his policies and the monied elite, but it was really a general biography of the most influential president of the last century.
• The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. Snooty acclaim but I am giving up. The “oh my gosh they were secretly gay” idea just doesn’t do it for me anymore, you can’t carry a story on this point, it’s like trying to revolve a story around “he was secretly left-handed!”. Maybe 30 years ago this would have been interesting. Not now.
• Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance. Classic 70’s science fiction, some sort of Vance appreciation society is pulling these out of the back catalog and getting them out in e-book form. His characters seem stilted and awkward, age hasn’t treated them well, and yet a compelling tale.
• The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey. Beginning of a YA series about an alien invasion of Earth, appealing due to the shades of gray in the characters. I’d read more.
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Eh. An over-ambitious grasper stumbles his way to success. The character is unappealing and I just don’t get him. Supposed to be funny.
• The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. What a great fun book, a piece of classic science fiction that has aged very well. A blast.
• Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress. A nice concept but the story doesn’t go particularly anywhere.

I recently left my Kindle on a plane, and now I have to get a new one (or migrate to ipad or whatever, the device used is not the point).

I’ve purchased 515 books over the years and read many of them. It is a disaster getting just my unread or currently-reading books over to a new device. The “Manage your Kindle” web page has no indication of read status, I have to go through each title and figure out what to do with it. And I can’t group or organize on the webpage at all. A really terrible experience. And hasn’t improved in years. Amazon has done nothing for the core Kindle market, people that actually read a lot of books.

Annoyed. Wasting my time, Amazon.

Look at the first half of this schedule:

• Aug. 30 - vs. Navy (at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium)
• Sept. 13 - Kent State
• Sept. 20 - Virginia Tech
• Sept. 27 - Cincinnati
• Oct. 4 - at Maryland
• Oct. 18 - Rutgers
• Oct. 25 - at Penn State

You’d not be able to tell this team was in the Big10 based on this. The center of mass of this schedule is somewhere like Hagerstown, Maryland.

This guide to booting ubuntu on uefi hardware leaves me lost. I never thought I would pine for the days of the good old BIOS. Maybe I should go to the UEFI Summerfest, that sounds like a good time. Right up there with the “Root Canal Faire” and “Proctology Midnight Madness”.