To the Nth Degree

I got someone really angry the other day.

It reminded me of when I once got my mom so angry she said, "And everyone around here is leaving stuff around to the Nth degree!" She used to say "to the Nth degree" a lot, mostly when she was angry. For a long time I wondered what the heck to the Nth degree meant - I was too young to understand exponents and when you're being yelled at you're not likely to come to higher maths on your own. When I was a teenager I realized that crimes often are in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree, so she was probably referencing those. People were criminally leaving their stuff out. I think she went with "Nth" because when you're angry, the last thing you want is for someone to correct you on "Well in this case it would really be the 2nd degree, because... ." So she hedged with "Nth." But to me it always just sounded very weird, and had the opposite of the intended effect. I would stop to consider what it might mean each time - does she mean it's hot out? Is this a college related problem? Then I'd realize she was still yelling at me, and I had probably missed several important points.

Later on in life I gave it more thought and came to the conclusions I've just told you here, and realized that one crime that can be to the Nth degree is murder. Perhaps this was her way of signaling she was considering murder. I took her more seriously after that.

I had this thought while the person I mentioned at the beginning of this story was yelling at me. I probably missed several important points.

Schwab Paperless

me: I'd like to signup for paperless statements
Schwab: We actually can't yet, we're working on it
me: Can I just opt-out of statements?
Schwab: No
me: Can I send statements to a PO Box?
Schwab: Yes
me: So if I can find someone who runs a PO Box/shredder service
I can finally be done with your statements?
Schwab: Hm. I guess so.

Android Apps

New phone - moving the apps I care about over to it. Here's my list - what's yours?

Installed
Pocket (Read It Later) - lets you add any webpage or link to a queue to be read later, even if you aren't connected. Great for a subway or plane ride, and the equivalent of letting you open infinite tabs in the browser.

NewsRob - offline RSS reader tied to Google Reader. I'm open to recommendations for something better, the management features for this are so-so and the reading is meh.

Yelp

Draw Some - I love Pictionary.

Dropbox - free 2gb of synced files.

Google Drive - Google Docs, Office documents, and free 5gb of synced files.

My Tracks - I track my biking with it.

Play Music - streams music you've uploaded to Google Music for free over the web. Good for really long podcasts that would eat up too much SD Card space. Useless in bad connectivity areas.

Pandora - try creating a station with the Gladiator Soundtrack as the seed.

Weather Underground - better weather app

Wifi Analyzer - lets you see all the wifi points in your building, what channels they're on. I once used this to find a friend's apartment when I was lost in their building, using their wifi name like a homing beacon.



Not Installed
I specifically don't install several apps:

Google+ - no one uses this, and it's over 30mb.

Facebook - the official Android Facebook app is terrible. It's slow, it has very few features, it breaks all the time, it doesn't support basic things like tagging friends - why would I use it? I know why it's terrible and the short version is the developers at Facebook are very proud of it, but no one should endure it.

QuickOffice/other Office apps - Google Docs (renamed Google Drive) can now edit Office style files, so there's no need for another app for this

Skype - this app sounds useful but in my experience it's just the thing I wish I hadn't accidentally opened.

A Productive Morning

Since arriving home 2 hours ago my dad and I have discussed:

• The speed at which Earth is moving relative to various objects in the universe
• The merits of dark matter
• The Marjoran Fermion
• Mitt Romney
• Eyelash mites

A productive morning.