I’m gonna play with two timer apps the next month or so:

• FlexTime
• Meridian

If any of you have used ‘em, I’d love to hear your inputs.

It geeks me out that Delaware’s 1st Congressional District has always had the same footprint—that is, the entire state. [From 1813-23, Delaware had two seats, but both were elected on the same state-wide ballot, with the top two vote-getters getting the two Congressional seats.

Of course, most folks from Alabama don’t know anyone in Delaware, but … I know Joe Bassett.

Matthew Smith is offering up what he calls a “deluxe pre-order” of his upcoming album, All I Owe.

• Autographed cover
• Individual numbering (first 300 copies only)
• All I Owe T-Shirt
• Digital Songbook (lead sheets for all the songs)
• Stream the entire album early
• Clean water for one African for one year through Blood:Water Mission

Yeah, I think that would be worth paying $25 for.

Maybe my friends and I are late bloomers, but I look at talk about Things Teenagers Should Learn Before Going Out on Their Own and think, “Crap, that’s all stuff we figured out in college and just after then.” Speaking as a former youth counselor, too, I think that it’s unreasonable to expect that teenagers are going to be interested in learning this stuff … and frankly, teaching them how to handle alcohol is probably a bad idea. [Why? Even if done in the context of the home---and I think that can be done safely and legally, although rarely!---you then shove a kid out of the nest with two-to-three years where alcohol consumption is illegal. Do we really want to teach kids to flaunt their abilities to handle their liquor when it'll be illegal to do so? Probably not. And yes, please understand that I favor lowering the legal drinking age to 19.]

Maybe we’re just late bloomers?

[Or maybe I'm being a passive-aggressive ass and not coming out to say that I think expecting teenagers to get this is just horrible wishful thinking. Yep, okay.]

Silly sidenote: this is the first time in years where I wish that geek-chick.net was still alive, ’cause I could point to the lovely discussion there on lowering the drinking age. Of course, it’s likely that only Amy, Brad, and I remember that one.

Earlier today, I noticed that some of the commentary on my links got cut off. I came to find out that it happened between the time I posted the commentary using del.icio.us’s Firefox extension and the commit to the server.

Now, it makes sense for del.icio.us to limit the size of the data stored in the Notes field: data has to be stored, and you’ve got to scale. [That, and I'm sure spammers would fill it full of shit if they were granted the space.] But what I don’t get is why the FF extension doesn’t make that obvious to me: some Javascript to tell me how many characters I have left would be awesome. Knowing the constraints, I’ll omit unnecessary words.

Christopher Allen shot me an email the other day pointing to his work on practical applications of 5-star rating systems. I found it to be an interesting read, which you might expect given my previous commentary on the subject. Highlights:

Thus even when a bimodal distribution is not a problem, on a 5-point scale the upward bias often results in only 2 or 3 meaningful data points. This is problematic because it minimizes differentiation. In many cases, a 5-star rating system where most of the ratings are either 3 or 4 is actually no better then just a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system.

However, given that 5-point scales are probably here to stay, we are forced to make the best use of them we can.

The thing that I really enjoy is that Christopher then makes the jump to what really matters: providing incentives for the user to rate and to do so well:

I only have 11% of my collection rated so far, but using this system I’m finding it a lot easier to manage my ratings. I’m already getting many benefits from it — I’m playing my music more often, my iPods typically have the music I want on them, and various music discovery services can use my ratings to help me identify new music I might enjoy. This provides the incentive to keep me entering meaningful ratings.

I have 100% of my collection rated, and I make sure to do so each and every week when I make new additions to my collection. Now, it’s easy to classify my doing so as simply another manifestation of my obsessive-compulsive nature, and I’ll allow the point … but still, taking time out for music, which is clearly something that I enjoy, is something that is a reasonable use of my time. What benefit do I get out of it? When I dump stuff off to my iPod, I’ve got a good subset of my music collection to listen to at the time.

Allen’s stuff is worth a read if this sort of thing interests you.

Malcolm Gladwell’s father has installed geothermal heating and cooling at his Ontario residence, to great effect:

For an investment of $25,000, my father saves, conservatively, $2000 a year (remember; he wasn’t running air conditioning in the summer before this, so the financial benefits of his system are substantially understated.

My favorite bit of explanation from his father on how the system works:

A heat exchanger is rather like two clasped hands, with the fingers of one hand interleaved with the fingers of the other. One set of fingers carries the warm water, the other carries the air to be heated.

Eat your heart out, Rich Trethewey!

I now expect that Jonathan just wishes that we’d gotten out the backhoe a few weeks ago when their A/C was out. [Memo to me: reclaim your fans!]

I’m terribly impressed by something that is hidden on National Tire & Battery’s Web site: online appointment scheduling. I mean, look at their front page and tell me where to find that. How did I run across it? I went to their find-a-store page so I could look up the number for the place and also check the store hours, as this is standard data to have on the store-locator part of a clicks-and-bricks enterprise. [Holy bizspeak, Batman!] When I got there, I found the opportunity to schedule an appointment online.

The online appointment schedule left a lot to be desired: each successive drill-down [year, make, model, variation] was simply information added to the URL’s query, which gets unwieldy. Also, the system was slow, but it would respond after 45 second or so. [I was working on an email at the time, so I had time to toggle back and forth.] Eventually, though, I got to a screen where I could tell them what I wanted done [oil change, belts and hoses, and replace my battery] and roughly when. Presumably they’ll call me to follow up.

This is not something that I expected something as low-tech as I perceive a garage to be to do for its customers. Things that I’d suggest as an improvement in the future:

1. Allow me to create an account so I can tell you vital details on my vehicle(s) so I can cut the process down a number of steps.
2. Show an estimate of time and price to me on the site. I understand that both are estimates and subject to variances once they actually get under the hood, but I’d like to know roughly what I’m in for on this job.
3. Repair histories would also be nice as well.

Hey, what they’ve done is a good first step for an industry where I don’t expect this kind of thing to occur. If I have a good experience with the garage, they’ve quite probably won my business.

Wow.

Great Physician Dies: In May, Lee Jong-wook died at the age of 61. He passed away a few hours after suffering a stroke, then undergoing emergency surgery that failed to remove a blood clot from his brain. Who was Lee Jong-wook? One of the world’s leading physicians — an expert on tuberculosis pathology and, on the day of his death, director general of the World Health Organization. Where did he die? At Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, one of top health care institutions of any nation. So the head of the World Health Organization died young after receiving the best possible care. Memento mori: in Latin, “Remember that you too will die.” The knock on your life’s door could come at any hour. If it comes today, will your heart be ready?

A $54,000 Per Night Hotel Room Costs the Same as the U.S. Median Family Income for a Year: Ian O’Connor of USA Today recently praised golfer Phil Mickelson as generous to the poor, writing, “[Mickelson] pulls over to the curb, with no cameras or notebooks in sight, and hands hundred-dollar bills to homeless men.” Hmmm — if no one with a camera or notebook was present, how does USA Today know this happened? For its part the Wall Street Journal recently reported Mickelson paid $3.4 million for a nine-week penthouse timeshare at Saint Andrews Grand in Scotland, an ultra-lux condo overlooking the Old Course at Saint Andrews, frequent site of the British Open. The price works out to $54,000 per night, making this perhaps the most expensive hotel room in human history. Phil Mickelson — do you really believe that in a world where the impoverished of Africa die for want of a dollar a day, you are justified in spending $54,000 per night to make yourself feel important? “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation,” Jesus taught.

It’s refreshing and a little shocking to see Gregg Easterbrook being so open in his first column back on ESPN.com. [I guess a little mis-perceived anti-Semitism is okay when Mike Eisner is gone, eh?]

Looks like Upcoming is really grokking the screencasting. I am making good use of its featureset long after I thought I would … I don’t know if that’s because it wasn’t what I needed then, because I was too dumb to leverage it, because it’s improved, because I’m now more likely to give others my data if we can remix it together, or … well, if it’s all of that.

For artists doing calendaring on their site, I think this is the best setup for you to use to put your stuff out there, given its input and output characteristics. If I were building a band’s Web site from scratch, I’d make strong use of this. [Bryan, are you listening?]

I love that there’s a quite-detailed Wikipedia entry on Egyptian Rat Screw. I was definitely reminded of this after reading about the Granades teaching Eli to play Slapjack. I learned ERS at Space Camp years ago, and I love to play it at lock-ins to while away three hours without really noticing.

If you had “Geof is posting this generally useless entry because he’s in a soul-sucking teleconference regarding a duty that takes up 3% of his time because he’s trying to do most anything to stay awake” in the “Why is this IJSM entry being posted?” pool, you win a cookie! I shall now implore you to shove the cookie down my windpipe so that I can end my suffering. [Goodness, I'd rather Blogathon again today than be doing this right now.]

As noted, I’m posting some things in other places and linking to them. First up: a list of things I’ve agreed to do at my church in the last few weeks. I also led a hymn last Sunday when our choir director had a weak spell associated with the onset of a migraine; no one jumped in to do it, so, true to my form of hardly ever being afraid of making a fool of myself in public, I hopped up there and announced the hymn as I strode to the pulpit.

It may take a good 15-20 minutes for you to listen to all of this, but Opie & Anthony—whom I don’t listen to on XM—got Joel Siegel on their show to take him to task for walking out of his screening of Clerks II … Kevin Smith was along for the ride, and it’s just … hilarious. Siegel’s arrogance is just a sight to behold.

Now, Clerks II may be a flaming sack of whale dung. I’ve read about what offended Siegel—repeated bestiality jokes—but Siegel is a paid professional who loved Clerks, so … what’s with leaving out of this movie? There was a bunch of really … wrong … humor in the first one. He praises the crap out of Smith both before and after figuring out that Smith was actually in the studio.

Thing is, Siegel’s dumbassedry has made me want to watch this even more. I’ll go and see it tomorrow night, and I haven’t seen a movie in a theater for at least a year, and more like two.

Looks like Upcoming has made lots of process improvements:

New Add Event Form

As the number of events on Upcoming grew, several parts of the original design have become harder and harder to use over time. A perfect example was the “Add Event” form, which used a pulldown menu for choosing a venue. That worked fine in the beginning, but some metros have thousands of venues! Not fun.

That was the inspiration for the new Add Event form, which addresses some of our long-standing complaints. Among the changes:

• Venue autocompletion. Pick a venue by typing a couple characters in the venue’s name, and it will do a real-time search across all metros. No more huge dropdowns.
• Inline venue adding. If the venue you’re looking for doesn’t exist, click the “Add a new venue” link to open a window to add it without leaving the page.
• Better calendar. The calendar picker is much improved or you can still type right into the date fields, if you like.
• Better duplicate checking. We’re doing a number of tests to find events and venues similar to the ones you’re adding, which helps everyone.
• Add an event from anywhere! In the past, if you wanted to add an event, you needed to find the metro first. This was a big frustration for new users, in particular, so we’ve lifted the restriction and put the “Add Event” link right in the header.

Man, yeah. That’s badly needed. I use Upcoming [or, well, I'm working on it ... the initial data entry is a cast-iron bitch, and I haven't managed the workflow properly ... grrrr] for managing the collaborative calendar over on squarepegalliance.net; I dump SPA shows to the Square Peg Alliance group, which tumps it over with one of Upcoming’s badges. Saves me time.

NASA has published video (4.5MB, QuickTime) of the right-side Solid Rocket Booster separating during the launch of STS-121. The camera is one mounted to the SRB; given the quality of the imagery, I’m betting that this is video captured and recovered from the SRB rather than telemetered down to Mission Control (as the External Tank-mounted cameras are; the ET burns up after being jettisoned).

This kind of stuff is great for three reasons:

1. It’ll catch the public (and the blogosphere’s) eye.
2. This imagery helps watch for foam shedding and foam strikes. You’ll note that you see a lot of the right side of the Discovery Orbiter here. This imagery has understandable value.
3. We’re going to need this imagery on CLV ARES.