KPAO by Dave Cortright

FiveThirtyEight.com: Presidential Election Projections

I stumbled across this site in my wanderings across the InterWebs yesterday, and it looks pretty amazing. It's has great data visualizations of the most recent political polls on the presidential election. Unfortunately, it looks like Obama was ahead, until McCain's announcement of Palin on his ticket, which pushed him into the lead.

Check it out. And do what you can to help Obama win the critical swing states: Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, New Hampshire, Virginia, Ohio, and Michigan.

Best digital TV converter box: Channel Master CM-7000

On February 17, 2009, all over-the-air TV broadcasts will cease transmission in the analog format and switch exclusively to digital. While this doesn't affect those who have cable or satellite TV, it does for everyone else. And as someone who is looking for a way to drop the $60+ monthly bill from DirecTV, it seems like a perfect opportunity to do so.

The US government is helping people out with the switch by providing $40 coupons towards the purchase of a converter box. Granted, these are pretty bare-bones options in this program, but you can't beat the final price of $10-$40. So your first order of business is to request those coupons on their site: https://www.dtv2009.gov

After you wait the 4-6 weeks for the coupon to show up, you're ready to buy your converter box. I consider an S-video output to be an essential feature; Most modern TVs have an S-video input, and it gives a much sharper and richer picture than a coax RF or RCA connection. So that leaves us with just two options: The Apex D250 and the ChannelMaster CM-7000.

From the customer reviews tab on BestBuy.com, it looks like there are serious quality issues with the Apex. The CM-7000 reviews while fewer in number have a more reassuring tenor than Apex. So for me the choice is clear. The cheapest I could find it online is from SolidSignal.com.

Get a CM-7000 from Solid Signal

The HyperEnvironment vision of Sportscope, 13 years later

For my Masters project in 1995, I worked on a project called Sportscope. The goal was to work on the vision for something that was technologically about 5 years out.

The basic concept was a device that could be rented at the ballpark and used to get additional data on the players, see highlights, and even order food to be brought to your seat. The core ID revolved around what we called a "hyper-environment". At the time we envisioned electronic tags (like a longer-range RFID) on items in the environment that could be "clicked" on which would them provide more information. While our implementation was in the ballpark, we envisioned other uses, such as providing tourists with information on sites, or as real estate shoppers driving around and looking at properties for sale.

Fast forward to this week. TonchiDot appears to be doing the same thing. But it's not clear they actually have viable technology, as all of the hard questions asked by panelists at the conference were answered with flip sound bites. With all the technologies available today (GPS, cell tower triangulation, bluetooth, WiFi, smartphones...) it seems inevitable that this will happen soon.

Eat local

There's a movement afoot to eat more locally grown food (for example, EatLocal.net). At my work, we always get a big catered lunch on Mondays, and there are nearly always a bunch of leftovers in the fridge. I was joking yesterday that the leftovers were about as local as you can get. Only 20 steps from where you sit.

Perhaps you had to be there...

Best people management book: First Break All the Rules

A colleague is off to his first official job managing people, and this is the one book I recommended. Really all of the books that Marcus Buckinham has written are good. But this is his first and best.

The thing that makes it so great is the underlying methodology. They studied countless people in a variety of companies, organizations, and workgroups. From that they distilled out the  themes that were common among great managers.

At the highest level, it comes down to the people. Spare no expense in finding the right person from the job (or conversely, getting the wrong person out of the job). Once you have them, focus on their talents and strengths, spending as little time as possible mitigating weaknesses. Spend the most time and effort on your best employees. And finally, clearly define the desired outcomes and appropriately reward for achievement. Don't dictate the means by which results are achieved. 

If you read only one book about people management in your life, make it this one.

Get First Break All the Rules from Amazon

Trebuchet font fixed (finally!)

I finally got fed up with the lowercase g and ampersand in Trebuchet. So I bought a font editor (TypeTool), and fixed these characters. The g now looks a lot like the one in Meta, and the ampersand... well it's not great, but it's OK and was easy to create by modifying the existing one.

In order to avoid any licensing issues, I've retraced all the letters into my own version of the font that I call Catapult. I'm using these versions on my computer now. I've not done the italic faces yet, though. It took me long enough to figure out how to use the tool. As soon as I get around to doing the italics versions, I'll post them all in a package for download.

Buying more time in the day

Time is our most valuable commodity simply because it is finite resource. But while you can't technically buy more time, you can optimize the things you do in your day to make more discretionary time available to you.

The number one thing to do is shorten your commute. I suppose this is one of those things ingrained in me from childhood. We lived literally 300 yards from where he worked. He walked to work every day. Now I haven't achieved that level of optimization, but for 11 years I've lived less than 10 miles from work. I currently live 3 miles away: a 6 minute drive or 12 minute bike ride. I've also been biking to work regularly since 2001: another optimization I've previously written about.

Now I understand the appeal of living in SF or the East Bay (or even Marin or Auburn). But I assert the total costs outweigh the benefits. Spending 2 hours in the car 5 days a week is not worth the coolness of living in the city, or the cost savings of living on the rural fringe. Really that cost savings is negligible when you now factor in the high price of commuting today.

I probably could have saved $300k buying a comparable house in Alameda county. But my commute would have been 1.5 hours/day longer. At 180 commute-days/year over the course of a 30-year career, that works out to $37/hour.

So the question is, would you pay $37 for an extra hour in your day?

Get Element By ID cross-browser

I needed this function recently, and might need it again in the future. I'm posting it here so it will be easily findable when I do need it again. FWIW, the Prototype Javascript Library handles this really well with its $ function, but the page I'm putting together doesn't need that kind of overhead.

function elementById(x) {
  if (document.getElementById) return document.getElementById(x);
    else if (document.all) return document.all[x];
    else if (document.layers) return document.layers[x];
    else return null;
}

Legal does not mean safe

Although it is not illegal to share lanes with motorcycles, it is unsafe.

California Driver Handbook

Cars and motorcycles each need a full lane to operate safely. Lane sharing is not safe. Riding between rows of stopped or moving cars in the same lane can leave you vulnerable. A car could turn suddenly or change lanes, a door could open, or a hand could come out of a window. Discourage lane sharing by others.

California Motorcycle Handbook

I got my motorcycle permit before I learned to drive a car. I recently gave it up, simply because it's too dangerous. I suppose if there's any part of your body you wouldn't mind losing, then you can get away with not protecting it. But I want to keep all of mine, which is why suiting up for a ride takes over 10 minutes.

That's why it baffles me that on top of the already dangerous activity of simply driving a motorcycle on the road, many riders feel the need to crank up the risk factor and speed along between lanes of traffic mere inches from impact. I don't care if it is legal. So is smoking. So is eating meat. So is riding without a helmet in one of the 30 states that don't require it. Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it is safe.

Nor does it mean you necessarily have the right to do it. Drivers are under no obligation to make room for motorcycles splitting lanes. In fact as the California Motorcycle Handbook states, drivers should "discourage lane sharing by others." I do just that, and I encourage other drivers to do the same.

An easy fix to a common problem

I was out on a houseboat with a group of friends over the long Labor Day weekend. You'd think the control panels on a rental houseboat would be designed so someone unfamiliar with them could figure them out without training or a manual. And you'd be wrong. Just to get power to operate the electrical system, you needed to go to the back of the boat where the generator control panel is, turn on the blower for a minute, turn it off, hold down the on switch while pressing the start button, wait for it to warm up for a minute, then switch a dial over to "boat power".

But the real UI travesty was the engine blower. The blower is there to air out the engine compartment of any built up gas fumes, which could otherwise ignite in a massive conflagration. The problem is, the blower runs continuously when the switch is on, pulling power from not the boat's generator, but from the starter battery. There's no indication that the blower is on other than the position of the switch: no light, no warning beep, and not even a mechanical hum. So it's far too easy to accidentally leave the blower on and drain the starter battery. Which we did. 9 miles from the marina.

Luckily the rental company had the policy of sending a mechanic out to deal with any boat problems. The guy was fast, and for good reason; he's had a ton of practice. We were the 3rd boat that day that needed a jump start. All because of that poorly-designed blower switch.

Problem solver that I am, I decided the best way to solve this problem would be to install timer switches on the blower circuit. You've probably seen these on hot tubs or saunas, where they want to limit the amount of time the heater is on for safety reasons. It wouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars to outfit the whole fleet with these, and they would save a ton of hassle for their mechanics, not to mention the gas to drive a boat out the stranded renters.