Don't Back Down

At least, mostly so.

What I mean is that I'm going to try and just post things as they come - let the entry flow, and not go back and correct it a thousand times to make it just right before it flows off the main screen and into oblivion, where no one will ever know just how perfect it was, making the whole effort something of a waste.

That is to say, while I'll make corrections while typing - I don't know that I could prevent that even if I wanted to do so - I'm likely to leave some spelling or grammar errors in the entries, and I'm here to say that I don't care. That was mostly for my benefit, as I know you probably could care very little for those things.

You may or may not know that I don't use spell checking features or software. I have just never been able to get into the hang of using them. I guess I always could spell - and generally speak - reasonably well, so I had no need. Now I'm going to put that to the test.

If there are problems with rendering a page (those pesky ampersands, for instance) or if I screw up a link, or something along those lines, of course I will correct it. But if I miss a letter here or misuse a word there, I think I'm just going to try and let it slide. Will it work? I have absolutely no idea. But I'm hoping it will let me spend a whole lot less time worrying about it.

In reality, it will probably do the exact opposite. We'll find out together.

This week has been really busy. I feel like I have accomplished exactly nothing all week. But I have been insanely busy just doing things. There are people all over talking about Getting Things Done, and while I suspect that the system is a good one, I know that I'll never do it, no matter how much time or money I spend on getting things in place to make it happen. I just don't use things that way. I would really just rather, well, get things done.

So I've been trying to tackle my huge pile of tasks, and in the process, a lot of questions have come up about the way I work. Not questions that people ask me - seeing as how I work from home and am alone for many of those hours each day, having someone ask would be odd to say the least. But questions that I ask myself - is this a good way to do it, does this action make sense or can I do it better? Well, I have no clue. I'm just trying to answer those questions.

Read "To Click or not to Click" »

Yesterday, I tried to order Vonage service. Mainly because I think Bellsouth stinks. I might get into that more later, but suffice it to say that I've about had my fill of local toll call nonsense. I want back on the unmetered bliss of my cell phone. To be fair, I don't think it's just Bellsouth. I think it's most local land-line telephone companies.

So I spent at least 40 minutes on the phone with them because they are offering a $9.95 special, but you have to talk to someone. That makes no sense. It costs more to talk to someone. Why not provide the special online, to pass along the savings and encourage online sign-ups?

Anyway, I did it and no go - I didn't receive diddly. So I called back today and spent another 30 minutes on the phone to actually order service. I'm beginning to think that the $50 or so I saved just wasn't worth it for this hassle. Of course, there may not have been any better experience with the online process, but still.

Then today, I tried to order a trip through Yahoo! Travel. They actually have some really sweet deals on flight/hotel combinations, and I've used the service before and had nothing but good luck with them. Yet when I submitted my request, credit card and all, I received a 500 error.

I get an email a few minutes later saying that everything checked out and to check the details of the email I just received for reservation info. Hmm. That's odd. No such email. Luckily, there was a link in the email to check the "My Travel" section for reservations. So I did. And lo and behold, there it was, under "Purchased Reservations". Yet I couldn't select it. I tried again because it told me I should. Nada.

So finally I resorted to calling the 800 number. Just about sixty-three minutes later, I managed to (hopefully) cancel the trip so that we don't get billed and can spend our money elsewhere. This is insane! Don't these people realize that they are supposed to be making it easier to do business online, not to spend such ridiculous amounts of time on the phone?

Update: Today I bought airline tickets on the USAirways web site, and that went smooth as it usually does. My faith is (somewhat) restored. Incidentally, for this trip at least, the same exact flight on Yahoo! cost $10 more. That would indicate to me that that amount is their markup. But what do I know?

I needed to remove some services the other day and could not recall the name of the tool that allows you to easily add and remove services from Windows. I think it's srvany.exe, but I have no idea how recently it has been updated, and I couldn't find it anyway.

So I needed to remove a service and I couldn't figure it out. Until I stumbled across this piece of sage advice.

Read "Manually Remove a Windows Service" »

I've received only a small taste of the trackback spam that has been floating around, yet it's still enough to be annoying, especially since I didn't really have any good way of addressing it. With comments, I can moderate them. I can make sure they have approval. Not the case with trackbacks.

Read "Trying to Block the Bad People" »

I am enjoying my new phone immensely (even though it isn't quite so new at this point). But the case that came with it was just killing me. I couldn't get over the horrible design. I mean it is protective and everything, but it's darn near impossible to get the phone out of the case with both hands, much less one hand when it's at an odd angle on your belt.

Yet I couldn't really find what I wanted - namely a replacement case and a car charger. Rather, it took me a long while to find them in the US, and all the people in the UK who had the products I wanted wouldn't respond to my requests about shipping to the US. It reminds me once again that there is a long ways to go in the world of e-commerce to make things truly useful.

So since this model is the same as the Qtek 8010 and the SPC C500 (and others if I recall correctly), I searched on those terms and dug and dug through the results until I found what I needed. I ended up with the highly-rated Krusell 86160 Leather Case, the Krusell 58124 Slide Swivel Kit and the Audiovox CLC5600 Vehicle Power Adapter. The combination works great.

I had tried a palmOne-branded cigarette lighter adapter with USB cable, but it wouldn't work for me. It's not designed for the SMT 5600, but I had seen reports where it worked. I don't know if mine was broken (I bought it on eBay) or if it just doesn't work for this phone. The new adapter seems to work fine. Life is good again.

The first thing that jumps out at me about any creation account is the sheer size of these numbers. Even if you start with the biblical account, the earth is at least 6000 years old. I don't think anyone will argue that the earth is at least that old. Most will argue that it is much older indeed.

Meanwhile, the science of radiocarbon dating is just 55 years old, being created in 1949 by Willard Libby. Compare that to the age of the planet. If we assume a 6000-year-old earth (remember, the very low end of estimates), you're talking just under 1% of the time elapsed since creation. That's not long. 1% of my life is about 130 days, a period of time which can go by in the blink of an eye.

But also consider in that article that the very process of decay in carbon-14 is not constant. If an element that makes up the very structure of the universe isn't constant, then no measurement based on that element can have much degree of accuracy. In the case of carbon-14, scientists had to use growth rings in trees to match up their dating process, and they say it is accurate to about 11000 BC.

What's more, so far as I know, the oldest "verified" writing goes back perhaps 5500 years, and even that should probably be called into question. What if someone just wrote an older date on their writing tablet? My sons write dates into the future all the time. It doesn't mean that it's actully being written on that future date, and it isn't verifiable proof that can be used for dating anything.

But regardless of all this, let's pretend that the process is spot-on accurate all the way back to 11000 years ago. That's far short of the claimed capability of carbon-14 dating (50000 years), and it could only be achieved with the assistance of dead trees. There's simply no way that anything longer than this period could be deemed accurate. While I personally don't think even dates under 11000 years ago will be accurate, I'll allow that perhaps I may be wrong.

That still results in a bunch of stuff that's less than 11000 years old, and other things that are somewhere between 11001 years old and, well, any date you should like to set. Even with an accurate window of 11000 years, the dates line up much more closely to the 6000-odd years of the bible than they do to the billions of years espoused by many theories. Just makes you wonder.

Disclaimer: This is a blog. These are my thoughts. I am not necessarily aware of any evidence to back up this information other than that linked here. If you have some, please present it, but do it in a conversational - as opposed to confrontational - way, and I'd be happy to discuss it. If you want confrontation, go somewhere else.

I've seen loads of commercials recently for Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper (as well as the regular version). I have to say that I'm intrigued. It looks quite good. I'm even tempted to try the diet version, though I really don't drink diet drinks. I just want to taste it. Yet we can't find it!

We've been to Bi-Lo, Food Lion and Wal-Mart (actually a couple of Wal-Marts, but not just for this product), and there is nothing! That's just wrong. They ought to have a disclaimer saying you can't find it. Now, when I'm actually running out to find this beverage, I can't get it. Pretty soon (perhaps already), I'm going to get tired of it and just stop looking.

It was bugging me that I was lumping entries about my various gadgets in with just a bunch of other links. I know very well that it probably didn't bother anyone else, but I'm anal that way and you'll just need to deal with it. Sorry.

I ended up creating a new category, Gadgeteria, into which I will be posting all the information about any gadgets I may acquire for personal use. If it's just gadgetry in general, it will probably end up instead in Linkedelica. This is more to keep up with my own personal devices, and I can then look back over time and see how that selection has changed.

There are already a couple of entries, but I suspect that this will grow a bit in the very near future. Need to get caught up on a few different gadgets that I've been using and which I'd like to share with you.

Over the next few days (weeks, months, years), I'll be moving much of the technical stuff off of my blog and onto the company site. Nothing will change about the data (well, it might actually look decent), but it will be available at a different set of URLs. The blog will then become more personal and less technical, while the company's site will use the data as a basis for its own blog, which will naturally be much more technical (and, in turn, much less personal).

In the meantime, the only thing that's changing is the location of the download files. Don't be alarmed if you see that you are being redirected from cxliv.org to everitz.com. This is perfectly normal, and should be expected. Unless I broke something. Which perhaps should be expected too. If you notice any problems, please let me know. I'll try to keep you updated along the way and let you know what to expect.

There is only one comic strip that regulary makes me laugh. Not just chuckle-laugh, but just about blow-liquid-out-of-my-nose-laugh. I admit, that's not every day, but it does happen. Or rather, it would happen if I had some liquid in my mouth around the computer - but I generally don't, for whatever reason.

 Bucky: You literally could not be a bigger geek if you had a dungeon master's guide in your hand.
 Rob: Well... which edition?  The new ones are su-weet.
 Bucky: I do not stand corrected.
 Rob: I mean, my charisma is, like, eighteen double-zero!

Appeared in Get Fuzzy published 2005-02-04.

While I was reading Jeff Sandquist, I came across this piece that talks about the new MSN Search. Perhaps it was the mention of the football that made me look, since we're so close to the Super Bowl. I'm really not sure.

Nonetheless, I did look. And Jeff's arguments for the new MSN Search were compelling. Specifically because I've also noticed that there are times when I look for things - oftentimes hotel phone numbers and addresses and the like - that I can't find that information (easily) through Google. Instead, like Jeff, I get all sorts of results offering to sell something to me, but more and more often I can't find the simple information that I want.

So I tried it. I have to say that I'm impressed. Notably, the page is really, really small for a Microsoft-branded site. It loads quickly without a bunch of extra junk. I could even do without the football (or other graphic), but I could live with it because it is very unobtrusive. After all, Google has its doodles. No reason Microsoft shouldn't be allowed the same courtesy.

I have thus far found only one serious disadvantage to MSN Search.

I first thought that the cache isn't as fresh as Google's. I looked at my page through Google's cache and it is from February 4th. In MSN Search, it's from January 21. Two weeks is quite a bit of lag time. Surely Microsoft could do better. I see from my stats that MSNBot visited less than five hours after the last time that the Googlebot stopped by to check on things. If that's the case, their cache shouldn't be so badly out-of-date.

Interestingly, I then noticed that if I search on Chad Everett instead of Chad, I get a fresher cached page in the results (fresher, in fact, than Google's). That's a little strange, don't you think? Both show a URL of jayseae.cxliv.org, yet the cached view is different. This isn't a show-stopper, but it's just a little odd that accessing the same page from two separate result sets will give me a different cached result.

Incidentally, I also see two advantages to MSN Search.

The first is that, right at the bottom of the page, is a nice orange RSS button. Click it and you have a feed of the search results. That's sweet. It would be nice if it were featured more prominently - perhaps higher on the page - but it's nice that it's there nonetheless.

And the final advantage to MSN Search? Their search returns me as the first or second result for Chad. I'm at the bottom of the third page on Google. Interestingly, the results for Chad Everett are indentical on both sites (at least for the first couple entries) - the actor's profile is listed first and I'm second. This flip-flops over time at Google, so I'd assume the same will happen at MSN Search.

In the meantime, I've added an "MSN" search keyword to my address bar so that I can keep using it. Not sure if I'm ready to switch my default search enging just yet, but it's actually tempting.