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.

Killing Goats

One of the funnier Aussies I've met out here walks in. We're not talking so he starts a new conversation:

"I killed a lot of goats once."

He then looks at us all with a worried look wondering what we'll think of him now.

"I was working for this company in Oman, filing papers to make a little money, and they kept saying hey you seem to know what you're doing and having me do things I didn't know how to do. That was how it was back then - no resume, just you seem to know what you're doing - why don't you do this task. So one day they tell me I'm going to manage the water purification system for this town nearby. I don't know any chemistry or crazy things, but they think I can do that, and there's this giant water pump, and these 2 giant tanks of chlorine they use on the water. They fill the tanks with these giant trucks all the time.

One day the tank starts leaking, and as it turns out chlorine will kill you. So I write a letter asking what to do about it. A week later someone writes back saying build a swimming pool, fill that pool with water, and then submerge the tank in it. The chlorine will safely leak into the pool for about a month and that will be that.

So I do that, and it really chlorinated the pool."

So we ask him what that has to do with goats.

"Oh, the goats were downwind from the pool."

Australian TV Ads

So the ads here are a bit funny, because they use a lot of colloquialisms like, "Sure we all buy mince..." - yes, we ALL buy mince, what kind of 2-bit bogan wouldn't buy mince? C'mon. But by far the strangest ad is one for an underwear maker here named Bonds. They'll run 12 short commercials over the span of just one half hour show, so it starts to get really strange if the TV's on in the background. A guy kinda singing like Robert Goulet half asleep just sings a part of "Twelve Days of Christmas" with a couple guitar plucks and fades out.

Imagine this coming on repeatedly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5sgx0Yjnlw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79visS2GafE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqXG28ffG48
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQt1zrDPDKk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rumgnCjAhrI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUdNfmebeMg

So weird.

High-Level Media That Can't Be Bothered To Fact Check

Duty calls. http://xkcd.com/386/

Having worked at Google, people frequently ask me about some of Google's shadier dealings. There's a recurring one that comes up frequently, and here are 2 articles of many that have come up over the past 4 years:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/11/googles-3-top-executives-have-8-private-jets/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/a-new-fighter-jet-for-googles-founders/

It's important to notice that the first was written very recently (2011) and the second in 2008.

First of all, I'm not Google's biggest fan. They do stupid and evil things sometimes. But this is not one of them - in fact it's the opposite.

NASA and Google have a close relationship. First, they literally are close:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=google+headquarters+to+moffett+field

I recall driving over Moffett Field - where NASA launches many experiments from, and even houses a dorm for budding scientists - on my commute to Google each day.

Second, they are intellectually close - they both run buildings worldwide filled with nerds dreaming of crazy things they can do with technology, that may or may not be useful or a good idea, but from time to time may turn out to be very important to humanity.

They differ in two important ways: NASA is allowed to do crazy things almost no one else can, like launch satellites, fly fighter jets, and drop astronauts out of the sky. Google has a gigantic pile of cash - $42.6 billion. NASA is short on funding as people find it and the space race less and less relevant. And this is where the insane articles people keep asking me about begin.

With NASA's lacking funds, Google loaned a private 747 - with a giant Google logo on the side - to NASA. Knee-jerk reporters took a photo and reported Google was using federal airbases to fly in style. Since then Google lent several more planes to NASA, and even helped them pay for a fighter jet that NASA used to help monitor their European equivalent's mission.

So, Google is making up for the US's lack of funding to NASA by handing some of their giant pile of cash to NASA, with no business win on Google's end unless you believe mankind's gradual progress into space is somehow in Google's business interest. To really hammer this home, these reporters for the New York Times and TechCrunch are slamming Google for doing something philanthropic.

And here's the part that makes me go XKCD on these guys: These aren't some 2-bit bloggers trying to make their name. These are established arms of the media, supposedly the 4th branch of government, meant to monitor government and industry and warn the population when they get out of line. The New York Times article was written in 2008, and updated after the fact with the same knee-jerk headline and a brief, uninvestigated note about NASA maybe owning the fighter jet.

The TechCrunch article had 3 years to figure out the facts, and regurgitated them all over again. They then go on to say that 8 jets are divided amongst 3 Google Execs: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders, and Eric Schmidt, the CEO. Except Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO, replaced by Larry Page, so he could go work for the Obama Administration. So even in their attempt to exaggerate with a "2.6 jets per executive," they failed to do basic research to maximize their claims to 4 jets per "executive" (Google has hundreds of executives that may at any time have need for a flight to a national or international office or business partner, so it's a weak number anyway).

The point being that if a company, individual, or politician can't even do something nice and get away with it - let alone be applauded for it - how is the US supposed to ever pull itself out of the hole it's in? The fourth branch is broken, and the idiots writing the linked articles are part of the problem. Shame on you, douchebags.