Reverend Ted's Blog

Pure Awesome

Ted Haeger — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:41:59 +0000

So, I clicked it.

Wow, that was ugly.

Ted Haeger — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:59:55 +0000

Did these guys just totally take each other off the board? How will people react to their behavior tonight?

Photo from unrelated LA Times article.

CareerBuilder.com Inhumanity

Ted Haeger — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:57:30 +0000

A few years back, I wrote a letter to CareerBuilder about their Superbowl adverts for their exploitative use of chimpanzees. I shared the letter on my alter-ego blog. A few people left comments telling me that I totally missed the funny.

Before doing it again this year, I hope CareerBuilder.com will take into account two articles. The first is “Cute TV Chimps May Harm Their Wild Brethren” from Science Magazine. The second is an article from The Christian Science Monitor called “Super Bowl commercials: What happens to those CareerBuilder chimps?“

Wild chimpanzees…gone within our own lifetimes. But golly, they’re entertaining!

My Republican Debate Rundown

Ted Haeger — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:17:20 +0000

Romney – Oh, snore!
Bachman – Crazy.
Paul – What’s this “Constitution” thing he keeps harping on about, and why does he think it’s relevant?
Cain – If was running under “Herman”…
Gingrich – 1994…only now his head seems bigger.
Parry – See Bachman, subtract scientific literacy. (Yes, he’s in deficit…and I’d like to buy a vowel.)
Huntsman – Inviable. As he steadily earns my respect, his chances diminish.
Santorum – Ew! Why, Google? Why?!

2010 in review

Ted Haeger — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:39:00 +0000

After this paragraph, the rest of the post is completely penned by WordPress.com. They give me seemingly high marks for my blog, while noting that I only posted 16 times in 2010. Remiss? Maybe. My top posts date back to early 2007 and before, when I was blogging actively for my role at Novell. But from the silver lining department, one of my top 5 referrers was bobjamieson.net, a paleo-geek’s blog. Perhaps a sign of things to come in 2011?

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 40,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 16 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 384 posts. There were 8 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 198kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 206 views. The most popular post that day was Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, roseindia.net, linuxcompatible.org, bobjamieson.net, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for linux, wallpaper, mac, suse wallpaper, and opensuse wallpaper.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit? March 2007
204 comments

Can Linux Desktops Live in an Active Directory World? September 2006
65 comments

OpenOffice.org and Excel VBA Macros July 2006
25 comments

SUSE Wallpaper #2 August 2006
1 comment

Show Me That New GNOME Main Menu June 2006
34 comments

Is Steve Jobs Killing Housecats?

Ted Haeger — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:27:38 +0000

Magsafe: Dealer of Feline Death?

Droves of house cats may be dying, and Apple’s Steve Jobs may be to blame. Apple’s latest revision of the Magsafe power adapter has a new cable coating that seems to be purposely tailored to lure innocent kittens to a convulsive, incendiary death.

The as-yet unconfirmed but increasingly popular rumor is that specifications sourcing from One Infinite Loop in Cupertino are directing sweatshop laborers in Jiangsu to mix concentrated cat nip extract into the formula used for the latest Magsafe cable coating.

I only recently became aware of this when a friend reported to me that his cat had chewed through the cables of both of his brand new power adapters. Some short research revealed that my friend and his furry, fried feline not alone:

“This just in- Magsafe plugs are not compatible with Cats” cites numerous accounts of cat-damage, noting that despite apparently intentional design, Apple’s warrantee explicitly exempts cat-chew damage
“MacSam” reports numerous incidents of cats chewing through his MacBook power cords
“eccentricglow” experienced the similar
“Auroraboy” and “Jayo83“ both report similar on Apple’s own forums
Larry Gilbert further traces the problem back to earlier, less effective models

Certainly, these are merely a few examples, and none actually lethal. But as with all things reported via the Internet Tubes, each incident must be multiplied by one million (at least) to devine an estimate for how many incidents have gone unreported. Who knows how many of these have ended in tragedy?

OS X names aside (“Snow Leopard” indeed!), it’s a well known factoid that Steve Jobs hates cats. We should have seen this coming.

With INTERPOL occupied by ongoing WikiLeaks investigations and the record for US police agencies turning a blind eye to cat crimes (those K-9 units? we know whose side you’re on), a wave of vigilante tabbies may be emerging:

Note No cats were actually harmed in the creation of this blog entry.

Hey, Sealy: You Suck!

Ted Haeger — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:43:49 +0000

You know that old line of jokes about The Mattress Police, the people who check whether a mattress still has its law tags attached? If you live in the U.S., then you probably do. After all, it was a joke in the 1985 movie Fletch, an author uses it for his registered domain name, and there are t-shirts, a punk band, and countless other links riffing on the concept. The whole joke is based on the absurd notion that someone checks such an obscure thing. Of course, the tags also state that the tags can be removed by the consumer, so it’s just a joke. Right?

Not according to Sealy. They use those tags as a way to weasel out of their warranty. Wow. Sealy just screwed me out of $1000+.

In Spring of 2007, I bought a California King Sealy mattress. The mattress has turned out to be an epic fail. Within 3 years it began to cave in, and now it has sunken in deep enough to cause me a lot of back pain. However, Sealy will not honor their 10 year warranty because I removed the “law tags.”

Although the warranty states that you must have these, the tags merely state that they may only be removed by the consumer. They don’t mention that removing the tags can void your warranty. Talk about your fine-print technicality.

Sealy uses cheap technicalities to get out of serving customers. That really sucks, Sealy. You suck, Sealy.

I post this rant because I hope that some small number of people will see this and avoid Sealy when purchasing a Sealy sleep set.

I’ll take it down should Sealy ever decide that their brand matters enough to honor the warranty that helped their authorized retailer sell me their shoddy Shy Blossom mattress.

Other Suckful Rants on Sealy

Launching code.mozy.com

Ted Haeger — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 20:28:32 +0000

Since my start at Mozy in September, 2009, one of the internal programs in which I quickly took interest was Mozy Labs. Labs’ main champion was a former Google intern named JT Olds, who had witnessed directly the power of allowing engineers free time for innovation and wanted that for Mozy. After several months, Labs had spawned numerous projects, some of which are now on their way to becoming features for Mozy customers. But a few of the projects addressed lower-level needs in the Mozy service–such as helping Mozy handle massive storage (currently 50 petabytes) scale and data transfer demands. The Labs’ projects in this domain end up help us to serve our customers better, but are entirely the domain of deep-think developers. Nevertheless, the developers driving such projects want to share with others who would appreciate their innovations.

After several months of quiet preparations and effort, we now have a way for those developers to do exactly that. Today, Mozy launched code.mozy.com, a site on which we can host free and open source software projects.

Related Resources

[updated 10/26]

code.mozy.com
Mozy blog: “Open Source and Mozy: The Debut of Mozy Code“
Storagezilla: “Dive into Mozy Code“

Pleistocene Park

Ted Haeger — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 02:51:12 +0000

I’m listening to Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America
right now, and it has me thinking about my disappointment from a recent visit to rewilding.org. Something ain’t quite right.

I first became familiar with the rewilding concept from Scientific American, some time ago, and blogged on Mammoth Cloning. The idea was compelling. But my takeaway was that the backers behind the article had a vision for a “Pleistocene Park.” What a great idea!

Essentially, they assert that North America is missing significant members of its mammalian megafauna. Giant ground sloths with prehensile tongues as large as elephants, mammoths and mastodons roaming in matriarchal herds, short-faced bears who stood on all fours with shoulders taller than I, native camels and horses, lions and cheetahs. These and other creatures disappeared from the landscape suddenly, just some 13,000 years ago. Right about the time that the first reliable evidence of humans appears. If you accept that overkill played a key part in their demise, the assertion that today’s North America may likely have had them still, if it were not for us humans.

That’s not a reason to rue our very existence. The Pleistocene Park idea is inspirational. The world still hosts rough analogy species, many endangered on their native continents. Patriating them to a new preserve in North America could roughly reconstruct some of the lost world. It’s far out, and would certainly be challenging to win. But the success of African game reserves show that the challenge would not be containment or management. It would more be getting the public behind the idea.

My disillusionment started when I found out that an EarthFirst! founder was involved. That made me skeptical that I might find an overly radical agenda. Their blog featured a couple stories about Greenpeace, using the same brand of sensational and righteously indignant style that lead me away from Greanpeace. Yet the site also features interesting, easy-to-understand principles of conservation science, such as diagrams for good-better-best geometry for wildlife habitat preserves (some courtesy of Michael Soulé, a UC Santa Cruz professor from who lectured for a class I once took). But the real disappointment was that the site no longer lead me to see anything achievable.

Instead of a Pleistocene Park (bold and visionary, albeit really hard to achieve), they now seem to advocate the rewilding of North America more in more general terms. That is, I don’t see an inspiring vision for species conservation coupled with a contextual justification based on analogous predecessors. I see a nebulous vision that feels a bit idyllic and nostalgic. What am I supposed to get behind? This blog post is really just to try to get one of them to comment on why they seem to have moved away from their most concrete idea.

A Different View of Iran. Thanks, NPR

Ted Haeger — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:44:09 +0000

I have never considered blogging about something I heard on National Public Radio. However, it affected me today in a way that warrants comment.

Just before arriving to work, NPR aired a story about Iranian singer Mohammad Reza Shajarian. My respect to the journalists and editors who assembled the piece. In a very short piece, they shared not only Shajarian’s wonderful voice but insight into the heart of the Iranian people. It broadened my perspective.

Is this the liberal media that Fox News warns us as destroying our country?