Sl “apps” Happy iPhone Users

Posted on by chappyshi

In the Washington Post article, “iPhone Apps for the Traveler,” dated May 16, 2010, Ross Arbes, endorses 15 apps for the iPhone using traveler.  I will comment on a few of them.

  • Maps – Buy a hard copy or print something out from Google or Mapquest or just access the sites on your iPhone.  Do we really need an app to replace competent services that are available to us on our web enabled device?  Familiarize yourself with where you are going before you get there.  It is generally very beneficial.
  • Cheap Gas (free) – First of all, cheap gas may be cheap but is is not free.  No driving directions to the gas station so what is the point.  What is that $1.50 savings per fill up in the wider scheme of things anyhow?  Especially if you are out of town.
  • ATM Hunter – ATM’s are everywhere…banks, fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations, bars, etc.  Now an app for “Money (free)” would be cool.
  • Sit or Squat, public toilet finder – Public toilets are everywhere…banks (just kidding), fast food restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations, bars, etc.
  • EveryTrail, records route, speed and elevation using iPhone GPS and incorporates photos taken into the route – This presumably requires that you use the camera on your iPhone.  God forbid!  Give my my Nikon D60 any day.  Besides if you can’t remember where you took your pictures then they probably weren’t very good.
  • HearPlanet Lite, locates nearby sites and reads articles aloud from Wikipedia and Wikitravel – Get the relevant real Lonely Planet guide and read about it beforehand.  Bring the book with you to refine the experience on site.  Avoid noise pollution be it by headphone or speaker, especially by speaker.
  • Am I Safe (costs $.99), provides crime states for your area and classifies it as safe or not safe – Bam your mugged or dead. If you can’t figure that out by yourself or haven’t researched it in advance then you are effed.  Sorry.
  • iTranslate, can translate more than 50 languages  and voice translations out loud – Sounds pretty good but how do you input the foreign language?  Do you have to type it in?  Can someone speak the foreign language in and have it output in the desired other foreign language?

The GOP Wants to Penalize Me for Being Single?

Posted on by chappyshi

In the Washington Post article dated May 16, 2010, “Conservative thinkers tout three innovative and controversial proposals,” Robert  Stein, who served as deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomic analysis in George W. Bush‘s administration, suggests that the tax code benefits retirees who didn’t have children.  His theory is that those individuals who marry and have children contribute more to the Social Security and Medicare systems because their children contribute to the system also.  More “buck for the bang” as it were…

Personally, I thought that what each individual pays into the Social Security benefits them as to the return.  Just because you as a parent have one or more kids paying into the system does not make you any more worthy.  While it might look good now to have more people paying into the system, those individuals are just as likely to avail themselves of the retirement benefits in the future as anyone else.

As a parent with children, one already gets significantly more Federal tax breaks than does a single filer.  It was always a quasi bone of contention with one of my military coworkers, who had four children, that he paid next to no Federal taxes after all his deductions while I, with no kids, have paid taxes for 32 years…allowed to take only the standard deduction.  To take it one step further,  non-parents have no children burdening the public school system which makes me wonder even more why there should be so many tax allowances for having children.  I am not really complaining but saying that childless taxpayers  who put less of a strain on and contribute more to the public well should pay more into Social Security and Medicare is a bit of a stretch.

I am am no tax specialist but to simplify what Mr. Stein suggests which is to up the child tax credit from approximately $1500 per year to $4000, here is how I would have made out on my Federal tax return in 2008 if I had had four children.  Could I really have had the government pay me $8000?  Just think, if I had ten kids, I could get paid $80,000 a year by the government.  What a concept, eh?  Right…the tax burden is just reduced to nothing.

File Status Deduction for Children Tax Burden
No Children $0.00 $8,000.00
4 Children (Current System) $1,500.00 $2,000.00
4 Children (Proposed System) $16,000.00 -$8,000.00

Trash On My Door Knob

Posted on by chappyshi

Who is responsible for cleaning up all the trash that local businesses hang on my door knob?  I live in an apartment complex with open walkways so any maggot can come through and hang restaurant menus or solicitations on my door.

I hate those things.  They go right into my recycling bin though many other people might just trash them.  Lately, as a form of protest, I just leave them on the hall floor.  It speaks to the cleanliness of the complex in that the trash stays in the hallway for weeks without anyone cleaning up.

Can I, can anyone be they a renter or an owner, be responsible for cleaning up the trash that vendors and solicitors leave at their doorstep?  Can I save all the crap up for a year and send it back to the deliverer COD?

It Just Isn’t Natural

Posted on by chappyshi

I hate Tuesdays in the summer at my apartment complex because that is normally when the landscaping company comes in.  The lawn mowers and blowers are so loud it is ridiculous.  To make things worse, the company milks the situation often by mowing and blowing the same plot twice.  There is no apartment management representative around to observe what is going on.  Of course, were I working, I wouldn’t be present to observe the shenanigans myself…

Last Tuesday, I watched three guys, two with man portable gas powered blowers on their backs and another guy with a wheeled gas powered blower clearing the debris out of the parking lot, onto the dog walking/pooping area below my balcony, and then into the tree line.  The blowers are so powerful that they flatten out the grass for about a 1 x 2 foot area.

In truth, I bet the three guys manning these gas powered tools could have raked all the debris to the tree line sans noise and petroleum burnt pollution in the same time it took them to blow the debris away.  Meanwhile they stirred up a dust and pollen storm that forced me to close my balcony door and apartment windows.

Is it time to get back to the basics of yard work and employ some college kids for the summer?  I don’t want to put any “immigrants”  out of work but WTF?

Passwords In the Clear

Posted on by chappyshi

I was recently reminded of a work incident that occurred a few years ago whenn I needed to retrieve a forgotten password.  The coworker/system, instead of generating a new password and emailing it to me and forcing me to immediately change it, brought the password up in the clear.  I use, shall we say, racy, embarrassing passwords.  They haven’t been compromised and I remember them but I don’t want others to know what they are for the obvious reason that they are passwords but for the less obvious reason that the might be construed as very weird.

So it is weird and bad enough if one of your coworkers pulls up a password which embarrasses you.  The other day I was at the library and…yep…you got it.  I ask to see if I can view a history of books that I have checked out and the female librarian asks for my card number.  I give it to her and as she is saying “the default password is “111111” which I had changed at first logon, she is somehow pulling up my account with my “not for public consumption  password” and telling me that I have such and such checked out.

Well  I know what I had currently checked out.  I wanted to see a history of all of the books I had checked out.  I think that they can’t keep that info for privacy reasons though I may be wrong about that.  NTL, the librarian said that they might not be able to store all that info due to storage limitations.  I kind of doubt that because all you need are a few fields like a card number linked to a user name, and every book that had been checked out on that card number.  That database would not require that many fields and take up that much disk space in my estimation.

The bottom line is why do we still have major databases systems out there that store passwords in the clear?  If you are a system administrator and can reset passwords, whether or not the password is in the clear is no matter.  But if you are a hacker, it is a different story.  No serious computer system should store passwords in the clear!

Waste Not Want Not

Posted on by chappyshi

In the process of buying food, I wind up with more reusable bags and containers than I can possibly use.  I am admittedly not a regular dishwasher which is not to say that I leave a mess of dishes in my sink or all over the counters.  I carefully rinse everything and set things aside  to wait for a good washing.

As such,  I often find myself washing a combination of more than 30 reusable (in my estimation) containers and plastic bags.  It is a pain in the ass drying out the bags and ensuring that they are sanitary.  Is it worth it in the big scheme of things?  Is it a waste of water?  I don’t  know but it is worth it to me.

I am also terrible about the use of tissues, paper napkins and paper towels…and when I say terrible I mean I keep and use them until they are totally useless.  I go through lots of tissues due to allergies and such but not nearly as many as most people might.  I think that in the 4.5 years I have lived in this apartment  I haven’t had to buy any napkins and might have bought one additional roll of paper towels due to that which I had already on hand.

Ultrasound Chicanery

Posted on by chappyshi

Is a fetus any more viable, and accordingly less likely to be aborted, just because the expectant mother sees it on an ultrasound?  This is what regular Washington Post Op-Ed contributor Kathleen Parker would lead us to believe.  I have much respect for Ms. Parker…her opinions are well thought out and moderate.  However, I don’t follow her logic on this one.

In the Washington Post opinion piece, Images of Choice, dated May 2, 2010, she describes herself has “both pro-life and pro-choice” noting that “Once a pregnancy is viewed as a human life in formation, rather than a ‘blob of cells,’ it is less easy to terminate the contents of one’s vessel.  I ponder the description of a woman’s uterus as a “vessel” but that is really not the issue for me.

According to the article, “Oklahoma passed a law….that would require women to have an ultrasound, though,…they are not required to view the images.”  Apparently they have to “…hear the doctor’s description of the images.”  Murder of humans and killing of animals goes on daily.  Surely in the majority of those murders and killings the murders and killers are looking at what they are killing realizing that they are sentient beings not “blobs of cells.”  You are either taking a life or you are not taking a life.

I honestly can’t think any women, or pregnant teens, who are so stupid that they don’t realize they are taking or preventing a life, even in the first trimester.  I believe that most women will have an abortion based on financial, emotional, and mental factors rather than the picture of a fetus or “blob of cells.”  The option seems too traumatic to think that forcing one to have an ultrasound really makes a difference in the decision making process.

I’ll never know though…  However, a woman should have the right to make the choice without the interference of the state or federal governments.

Coppermine Photo Album Bug 2, Not!

Posted on by chappyshi

I thought I had another bug in my Coppermine Photo Album but after much research, a backup of my web site and database, and an upgrade of my photo album software  I found that I had just screwed up.

When batch uploading files to my site I got the error “no new file was found.”  Finally, and embarrassingly enough, I realized that I had created the server folder containing my new photos using spaces and symbols in the name which is a definite no no as far as I am concerned.  I have used filenames sans symbols and spaces for years considering that they were an unnecessary complication in the world of 0’s and 1’s.

After removing the  offending spaces and symbols, I was easily able to publish my photos.  The PHP software that I use for my photo album just couldn’t handle the offending characters.

Coppermine Photo Album Bug 1

Posted on by chappyshi

I am not convinced of this yet but it appears that I cannot post photos that have no “EXIF” data to my Coppermine photo album.  I have not found confirmation that that is a problem yet on the Web but it is a problem for me.

Photos batch processed using Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 lose their “EXIF” info and can’t seem to be published to my Coppermine photo album.