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It’s hard for me to express how much I enjoy getting e-mail messages that are two or three megabytes in size because the sender decided to take a screenshot and send it to me via Outlook. I suspect there’s some goofball setting in Windows that lets you snap a screenshot and mail it to someone, but the default format (thank you Microsoft!) is a bitmap image… which is huge because it’s 24-bit uncompressed. The exact same image, without appreciable loss of quality, might take up two percent of that size– a mere sixty kilobytes.

Ahh, clients… without them my life would be so much simpler.

My old pal Chancellor is now the proud owner of a fancy web administration system, built by yours truly, so he can share his ramblings and musings with the world… just like me.

Anyone else? C’mon, I do this for a living– I can build you a web administration system in, like, an hour!

There was a hilarious thread on Slashdot today, discussing what computer desktops various famous people might use. Along with the typical jabs about what Bill Gates uses was a great series of comments:

molafson: “I would like to see Jesus’ desktop; I bet he uses OS X.”
madpierre: “Come on he’s the son of God. He uses the command line.”
rmarll: “We’ll never know. I’m sure he’s logged in as root though.”

Alex just came down to my office, tears on his face, and said he was having problems.

“What kind of problems?”

“The computer isn’t working.”

“And that’s something to cry about?”

“Well, it hurts my feelings when the computer does that.”

Apparently he thinks the computer misbehaves just to spite him. I suppose if I believed that, I’d be in tears most of the day…

“A happy person is one who enjoys the scenery on a detour.”

— Seen on a sign outside a gas station in Berthoud.

Today, as I was driving to a meeting in Denver, I was thinking those random thoughts one thinks while one is driving to a meeting in Denver… namely, I was wondering whose portrait was on the ten-dollar bill.

Everyone knows Washington is on the one, and Lincoln is on the five. I was thinking perhaps it was Andrew Jackson, but remembered he was on the twenty. You get fifty clams for Grant, and Franklin comes in on the c-note.

The more I thought about it, the more annoyed I became. This is obviously an example of senility setting in, because I’ve seen plenty of ten-spots in my day and should certainly know who grins at me from them.

When I hooked up with my friend Steve for lunch, I posed the same question to him. Of course he’d spent his last ten earlier, and I didn’t have any in my pocket either. Aha, we thought, the pizza place would have some in the cash register. We ordered our lunch and asked the clerk whose picture was on the ten.

They didn’t have any tens. Not one.

Obviously this situation had moved beyond senility into the realm of conspiracy. What sinister forces were working to prevent me from learning who was on the ten? More determined than ever, I finally went to the Fount of All Knowledge… Google.

Sure enough, after a few random links to people writing poetry about ten-dollar bills (no kidding!) I found a U.S. Treasury page showing the bill.

The answer to my conundrum? Alexander Hamilton.

Yeah, like he was even a real President. He’s like Taft or Garfield… a name you heard, but have no idea when they were in charge or what the heck they did.

“Even when you’re not working, you’re working!”

This was Laralee’s (frighteningly accurate) assessment of my effort yesterday to revamp the CyberSchroeder web site. I spent a couple of hours redesigning everything and rebuilding all the pages. In my opinion it needed it– the old design dated back almost two years, which is bloody forever in the web world. The new look is much cleaner and “twenty-first century” or something.

But she’s right: even if it’s a Saturday night and I’m sitting in bed clacking away on the laptop, I’m doing web stuff. I suppose since it wasn’t for a client, and didn’t have a deadline, and didn’t involve payment, it counted as “personal time”. It is a bit scary, though, to realize that even my personal time is occasionally spent developing web applications.

And in two more years I’ll have to do it again…

There’s been an interesting development in how you pay for things. Mobil and Exxon have been using their so-called “Speedpass” system to allow people to pay for gas at the pump without having to swipe a credit card. It’s a little keychain fob that contains a radio-frequency identifier (RFID) chip; when you wave it near the pump the system deducts the cost of your gas from your credit card automatically.

Now they’ve teamed up with McDonald’s (in the Chicago area) to offer a way to pay for your meals. Plus, rather than using a keychain you can use a watch. Here’s the text from their ad:

“Are you the type of person who likes sneak previews and private screenings? Are you the first on your block to have the latest gadget? Well, we have just the product for you — the NEW SPEEDPASS-ENABLED TIMEX WATCH. Order yours today!

Your Speedpass-enabled Timex Watch is the fastest and easiest way to pay. No reaching for your wallet, or fumbling with change. The new watch looks and functions just like a regular watch. However, inside the watchband is a miniature Speedpass radio frequency transponder that allows customers to instantly pay for purchases at over 7,500 Exxon and Mobil stations nationwide and at over 440 participating McDonalds’ restaurants in Chicago and Northwest Indiana.”

I wonder if this is going to catch on and cause other merchants to accept Speedpass purchases? Moreover, will we start to see other devices (jewelry, etc.) containing the RFID chips? With recent news about Wal-Mart considering various implementations of RFID in their merchandise, it’s definitely an up-and-coming technology.

Of course the paranoid (who, me?) see that down the road it’s inevitable that you’d have an RFID chip implanted directly in, say, the back of your hand. That way it can’t be stolen (at least not easily) and it’s always with you.

Does convenience outweigh the risks/concerns with this sort of thing?

Laralee went to a presentation at school about “Gang Activity in Longmont”. Who knew that a cow town like this has a lot of gang activity (apparently it does), and more to the point, who knew that some of it is focused on the middle school (!) next door to the elementary school where Alex and Kyra go.

She came home with a bunch of handouts and information about how to determine if your child has joined a gang (he acts tough, swears, and gets tattoos). It even had a brief dictionary of gang terms, for those of us who don’t know what “kickin’ it” means. Pretty weird stuff.

What’s scary is thinking about how there are gang problems at a middle school… in My Day, I think the worst violence you could ever see at school was when two guys decided to have a fight after school (“psst, Jim Haney is going to fight Dave Hobold in the parking lot at 3:15”) and you could see them shove each other a few times before the vice-principal showed up. Today schools worry about knives, guns, drugs, and the like. Yikes.

Others see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I see things that never were and ask, “Wow, where did you get this stuff?”

— Seen in an e-mail joke