Moving to electronic books

I love reading and I love books.
This is a picture of some of the books Michele and I have accumulated. This is after we have donated yearly to the local library.


Even though we both have Kindles, I still prefer to buy paper books. Can’t really put my finger on why, but I still prefer a paper book in most circumstances. I do read a lot on my Kindle and am impressed by how quickly it’s come to change what I expect out of a book.
Recently, I decided to learn how to program Ruby on Rails. My friend Yoshi, recommended a book to use. Obviously, I could have bought it electronically and had it in seconds, but instead I made a point to go to a store and buy the book. I was sure to check that it was the latest edition.

I’ve been humming along with learning for a bit and hit a stumbling block. Something didn’t match what the book said. I got frustrated and chatted with Yoshi. After looking a bit, he said, “Aw crap, you ran into the rails 3.1 change. They fundamentally
changed the way css and javascript files are stored and generated.” I was able to find some of the book errata online and move past.
This week I was continuing to work and bumped into another problem. Once again I couldn’t get an example exercise to work. After two hours I finally found someone else with the same problem and learned that .rjs no longer worked and I needed to use jQuery instead. I had wasted two hours again, because my paper book was out of date.

On the left is the printed version and on the right, the electronic version.
This is where printed books clearly fail. Technical and instructive books simply get out of date too fast these day.
The book I’m reading is from Pragmatic Programmers and they offer a great program for people with the paper versions to get electronic versions. If you go to their coupon page and prove you have a paper version, you get a huge discount on the electronic version. I now have DRM-free version in PDF, Kindle, and iPad formats.
Textbooks, I’m liked reading you over the years, but your day is done. I’m an electronic convert.

How much time America wastes in line at Starbucks

Recently, my friend Kirill asked, “Wonder how much time America wastes in line at Starbucks“. Interesting question, I thought. Let’s do the math.
According the Starbucks 10K filing in 2010, there were 11,131 stores in the US.
According to this analysis by Trefis, there are an average of 449 visits per store daily.
Doing the math: 11,131 stores * 449 visits per store = 4,997,819 visits per day by Americans.
If we estimate that the process averages 5 minutes per visit to go from entering the store to have the coffee in hand is five minutes, we get these numbers.
The time wasted in line at Starbucks by Americans, per day is:
24,989,095 minutes = 416,485 hours = 17,354 days = 48 years
Obviously these are just rough estimates, but the time is significant. Also, some might argue that time at Starbucks is not wasted, as you do get your drink or food. Everyone’s views on the value of Starbucks will vary.
Personally, I don’t mind going to Starbucks, but prefer a lighter roast coffee made from better beans.

NFL Widower

It’s September. That means that once again I am a NFL Widower.
The Superbowl is Feb. 5, 2012, so there are 5+ months of football ahead. My wife is thrilled.
I like sports. I watch football, baseball, cycling, hockey, and pretty much anything else. Sports are always better than police procedurals, medical dramas, music/dance competitions, and reality voyeur shows.
But my wife, she LOVES football.


Her favorite hat to wear out running, working in the yard, or doing anything outside is her beloved NFL cap. We’ve been through so many, you can see the amount of use she puts them through. She rejects the individual team hats. It’s the whole NFL she loves.
We have the full DirecTV Sunday Ticket so we can watch every game without fail. Now that the kids are older, she’s even more into football. I wrote about this in 2005, but now she’s taken it to new levels.
This year, she’s in a fantasy league, so we’ve expanded from beyond her favorite group of teams to in-depth analysis of every team.

On Sundays, I pretty much plan that I need to make sure that the kids get fed and all the errands get run. There are slight breaks when between the morning games and the afternoon games, and sometimes before the Sunday night game. Monday nights are football. Later in the season we get football on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday. In the playoffs we get football on Saturday and Sunday.
I’m not really complaining, it’s just that I can’t consume as much football as her.
Many guys would love their wife/girlfriend to like football, but I say, be careful what you wish for. You could end up being the one to make the snacks rather than the one sitting in the recliner with your feet up.

Ten Years

Ten years ago I was awaken by a call from my mother-in-law asking “Did you see? Did you see?”.
Ten years ago I was driving to work, to send everyone home, when I heard on the radio that the Twin Towers had fallen.
In those ten years, I have seen the best and worst of America.
I have seen honest debate about the future of our country, and I have seen citizens call each other traitors simply because they don’t share the same politics.
I have seen America unite in joy and in grief together regardless of race, gender, or politics, and yet at other times question the foundational concept of America that “All men are created equal.”
America, we are a better country than this.
Our forefathers deserve a better legacy that an era of personal name calling and character assassination.
Our descendants deserve a better future than an era focused on fear.

That which unites us is stronger than that which divides us.

The cost of comic books over time

Recently, DC Comics rebooted their entire line of stories. I hadn’t read comics in a year or two, but I was intrigued. I stopped by the local comic store and picked up the new books. The price of the new issues was $3.99 a copy.


I thought to myself that the price is really rising. When I got home, I read a great article on comparing the price of comics to the minimum wage by Von Allen.
Soon I was wondering what the relative cost of comics was in the past. I mean, I know they were 10¢ in the 50s, but what does 10¢ in 1950s dollars compare to in 2011?
So I did a little research. I looked up the cover price of comics over the years on Wikipedia and I used a site called Measuring Worth to covert prices in the past to prices today based on the Consumer Price Index.
I threw all the values into a spreadsheet.

YearCover CostCost Adjusted To
2011 $ (CPI)
1950$0.10$0.91
1962$0.12$0.87
1969$0.15$0.89
1971$0.20$1.08
1974$0.25$1.11
1976$0.30$1.15
1977$0.35$1.26
1979$0.40$1.20
1980$0.50$1.32
1981$0.60$1.44
1985$0.65$1.32
1986$0.75$1.49
1988$1.00$1.84
1992$1.25$1.94
1995$1.50$2.15
1996$1.95$2.71
1997$1.99$2.70
2000$2.25$2.85
2005$2.50$2.79
2006$2.99$3.23
2011$3.99$3.99


Graphed it looks like this:

Looking at the graph we can see that the relative price of a comic book stayed around a buck until 1970 or so, slowly ramping up to a buck fifty over the next 15 years. That’s a 50% increase. From 1985 to 2000 the price almost doubles (100%) getting neat three dollars. From 2000 to 2011, it’s around a 33% increase.
It’s a fact that costs increase over time, so I’m not saying prices could remain at a buck forever. But it is hard to see how young kids and teenagers can get into comic books, it’s simply too expensive. For $20 you get 5-7 books. Serious comic readers will pick up 10-20 books a week. A few years ago, when I was a more regular reader, I would the totals of other people routinely $30-50 a week. That’s $120-200 per MONTH. There can’t be many parents helping pay that much for a kid’s comic habit.
Perhaps comics are now becoming a purely adult pastime. That would be sad. The joy of reading, sorting, and collecting comics was a wonderful part of my youth.

TF2 Video


Recently, I’ve been playing the the Replay editor in Team Fortress 2. It allows you to edit a video together from a round in a game of TF2. Not only can you see the round from your perspective, you can switch between the views of any player or go with a free view camera. once you’ve edited the video, you can render it out several different ways. The editor even allows you to upload the video directly to Youtube from within the game.
The most interesting part is the transition of gaming from simply playing to playing and then taking the gameplay and then remixing it into new content.
Valve, makers of TF2, held a contest called the Saxxy Awards, for the top videos in 20 different categories. Winners of the Saxxy received an actual golden statue in game for use. This blending of gameplay and community is exemplary.

Cupcake Inception

We’ve played around with making Cookie Inceptions a bit, but I never really wrote it up.
Today, Mira and I made Cupcake Inceptions. And they turned out great.


The idea was to bake an Oreo cookie inside a cupcake. The first thing to ensure is that the Oreo would fit inside the cupcake wrapper/tin. They fit perfect.
We decided to use Oreo Heads or Tails, which have a chocolate side and a vanilla side.

Mira mixed up the cake mix. We went with chocolate cake for the cupcakes. A vanilla mix would have shown off the Oreo better, but we thought the chocolate would taste better.

We poured a little cake mix into the cupcake wrapper to give it a good cake base.

Then the Oreo were Incepted!

Cake mix then covered the Oreos to a little over 2/3 full. We like using a measuring cup to pour our cupcakes into wrappers.

A little over 20 minutes in the oven and out come the Cupcake Inceptions!

The cupcake holds together well and you can’t see the Oreo from the outside.

Inside, you can see the Oreo. The cake mix softens the cookie, but not too much. There’s still a little crunch to the Oreo, but not enough to slow us down from wolfing down the cupcake.
The experiment was a success. Give it a try.

Experience running an anonymous site

There has been a bit of recent discussion on comments and anonymity on the web. See Anil, Tim, Caterina, and Anil again. Good stuff for the most part, but I have a bit to add from my perspective.
For several years, I ran a site called Anonyblog. I’ve taken it down now, so there’s not much to see now. You could probably Google it or find it on archive.org if you are really interested.
The premise was simple. I made a weblog and posted the username and password to allow anyone an anonymous way to post on a weblog and “get it off their chests”. I was enthusiastic about blogging at the time, fresh from inspiring SxSW conferences and watching traditional media adapt to the influence of bloggers.
My plan was simple, let people post whatever they wanted, stand back and let the good times roll. I was quite naive.
At first, things went as I intended. Posts on all types of issues from work, relationships, politics, police departments, other bloggers, and even requests for advice. Occasionally there were posted that I found distasteful, but in the name of ‘freedom’ I didn’t censor anything.
At one point someone starting posting NSFW photos. Being that I was checking on the blog from home, I didn’t want my children seeing NSFW photos while I requested that people not post NSFW photos. This was the first rule I made.
Things were OK for a bit more, and then a group of posters appeared that appeared to already know each other. They posted inane stories about stuffed animals and racist stuff, and appeared to encourage each other in this. I really didn’t like it and considered deleting it all, but ended up leaving it alone. “It’s just words.” I said to myself.
Fairly quickly a contingent of readers started pushing back and complaining about the stories. The frustration on both sides escalated and soon I was dealing with users deleting and revising the posts of others. Some users were even posting fake posts from their ‘enemies’ to make them look bad.
Suddenly, I was in moderation overdrive trying to maintain some sense of order. It was a pain for me, but I did it because occasionally someone would post something that I felt worthy or that gave someone that was hurting a way to relive their pain.
I worked on ways to auto-approve posts to prevent editing by others and free me from having to individually approve each post. I spent many hours trying to solve the now communities’ problems.
The group of stuffed animal story people soon invited yet another friend to post. This person was obsessed with coprophagy (Google it yourself, I won’t link it). Multiple posts, images, and all sorts of disgusting stuff way over my personal limits for freedom. I pushed back hard, deleting stuff and banning IP addresses.
Soon I was in a war with the shit poster. He would use scripts to auto-post hundreds of posts via proxies. I would script deletions, use anti-spam software to filter words he used frequently, and even started tracking down the person via IP in an attempt to dox him.
I posted to the community about the issues so people knew what was going on. A few cheered, but many harangued me over my censorship. WTF? I’m the guy who built the Anonyblog in the beginning and did a bunch of work to keep it running. How dare they question me?
At this point, I knew the end was near. I started to feel anger and hate toward users. At some point, the blog software broke due to either the external attacks or my defense modifications. No new posts were possible at this point.
I could have fixed it, but I didn’t.
Why? Well, people could still post in the comments, so they did. And it just got worse. Terrible stuff, fighting, and everything bad that occurs in online communities when the brakes are removed.
For a couple years, I agonized over what to do. I talked to a few people I respected as having wisdom in blogging community expectations. More than once I was ready to relaunch the site, but just couldn’t since I knew it would bring ever more drama and frustration into my life. I felt bad, since I knew there were many people out there suffering that could use an outlet for their pain.
In the end, I wiped the site clean. The web is a better place without it.
What did I learn? Two things really.
First, people do need anonymity. There is pain, secrets, desires, worries, successes, failures, and prayers that people have and need to share in a way that they feel safe. Going to an all ‘Real Name’ internet does not help many people.
Second, complete anonymity and anarchy leads to the worst in people. Even a tiny group can poison a community, creating divisiveness and bad feelings all the way round. Without fail, this is what I saw on Anonyblog and in other communities on the web when anonymity reigned.
To make Anonyblog work would require many of the things Anil mentions in his post. I just don’t have the time, energy, of desire to build all that to support what would be needed to prevent a site like Anonyblog from becoming a sewer once again. But the need for it remains.