A Helpful Guide to Your Position on Healthcare Reform

1) Check your investments.
2) Do you have investments? (Yes – goto 3, No – goto 10)
3) Do you have health care investments? (Yes – goto 4, No – goto 10)
4) Store your annual rate of return in field A
5) Check your health care plan.
6) Do you have a health care plan? (Yes – goto 7, No – goto 10)
7) Store your annual rate increase in field B
8) Is field B less than field A (Yes – goto 9, No – goto 10)
9) You have made a good investment and should be against health care reform.
10) You are for health care reform.

It’s interesting to me that the anti-tax group seems to be the anti-health care reform group. So they’re unwilling to pay anything for government services, but if it is a private service they expect, nay demand, to pay through the nose for it!

2009 Sunstroke 5k – #10

28:42 – I’m getting slower. I think I need to run with my iPod to speed things up. That was a really nice comfortable run. It was 87 and raining gently. I guess I need the 100+ degree heat to push myself.

I had an awesome run at Mabel Davis yesterday in the heat. I really felt like I pushed myself. Go figure.

Headbands rock!


I don’t care what Julie says. Headbands rock. I bought some on a whim at Target a few weeks back. Sure they’re designed to emulate the late seventies for kids who weren’t born then, but whatever.

Up until recently I was reticent to wear sunscreen cause that stuff stings when it rolls down your face into your eyes. And yes, I do wear waterproof. See waterproof sunscreen means it will stay on you after you get wet. It doesn’t mean that any that hasn’t bonded with your skin won’t roll down your face and get in your eyes.

Running with the headband was a revelation. My forehead stayed cool and dry and sweat was channeled down the sides of my head.

I can’t explain that visor on Stella’s head though. Kids these days.

The News Doesn’t Like Plot Twists

So there was a double-homicide in west campus a few days back. A guy and his girlfriend. Apparently they were really cool. The media seized upon it as this random horrific act… THAT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!

Well it could happen to you if you deal large amounts of pot and you start leaning on a person who owes you thousands of dollars. So that came out today, but the Statesman’s still going along with their “poor kids, random act of violence story”.

Remember. Stay in school. Don’t do drugs.

Some Facebook Quibbles

Image via CrunchBase

So I’m going to try to keep this non-technical. But I do want to explain why Facebook will be eclipsed by something else fairly soon. Their programming interface is keeping Facebook from being used for anything but MafiaWars style games.

I’m currently writing a theater ticketing and management website called BuyPlayTix. It has a lot of cool features, and so I decided to start working on Facebook integration. I tried to do a Facebook widget about a year ago (remember back when they had those?), and got frustrated and gave up. I’m glad I did since they basically removed that feature entirely.

I went ahead this time since I knew there was at least one feature that I could add that would be useful.

So now you can create an Facebook event automatically based on your event in BuyPlayTix. Which is nice. It saves you a little bit of duplicate effort. You set up your ticketing website, click a button and your event is on Facebook. Except you still have to go to their website to actually invite anyone to the event. Because their API doesn’t support that feature.

I have a page for my theater company – Loaded Gun Theory. I have hundreds of fans who want to be updated about Loaded Gun Theory’s new productions. They have manually clicked a button to make this happen. Yet I cannot automatically invite those fans to Loaded Gun Theory events via Facebook.

Which was ok, I guess. I still added a feature that saves about 5 minutes of typing.

Next up, our mailing lists. Email is becoming increasingly outdated, we lose about 5% of our contact list every time we send out an update. I figured it would be nice to be able to email updates to people who have opted in to our mailing list, or update them via Facebook. So I wrote a widget that would let you lookup a person on Facebook. Only downside there is you can only look them up by full name. The API has a first_name field. And a last_name field. But you can only search by full name. Which stinks if you happen to be looking up one of the many women who have their maiden and married name as their full facebook name. Or you’re looking up anyone who has a nickname, but uses their full name on facebook.

Then I figured it would be nice to have an automatic import feature. Where it would take only those exact matches and update them with their corresponding facebook id. Thanks to the previous problems this wouldn’t be a great solution, but it would save some time. Guess what? Can’t do that. Even though I have a list of fans subscribed to my facebook page, there is no way to get them out via the API. That’s right. I can’t get a list of all the people who are fans of Loaded Gun Theory. Which is pretty stinking useless.

So I’m already irritated at this point. I decide to go setup the mailing list capability where it will send an email if that’s configured, or a message via Facebook if you’ve (manually) entered the users facebook ID.

I go to look at what sort of messages you can send. Turns out:

a) You can’t send a message FROM your page. I can’t send a message from Loaded Gun Theory. It’s always going to look like it’s coming from Tim Thomas. Which is great if you know me, but we actually do have fans who don’t.

b) You can’t send a message that shows up in the Inbox. At all. Period.

c) You can’t send a private message to a user.

What can you send? You send send a status update (again as Tim Thomas, not Loaded Gun Theory). You can send a notification (which shows up in that tiny little box in the right hand corner that you don’t pay attention to). Or you can respond to a status update. Which doesn’t seem to be the best way to notify a fan about a new production.

So what do I have? I’m still sending out email and I’m sending those little notifications in the bottom right. I guess it’s better than nothing. But barely.

I understand they’re trying to prevent spam, but they’re also preventing every legitimate use. And I can still go into the application and spam people. It just takes longer for their page to load than mine.

I also added twitter support. That took 3 lines of code, and works exactly as you would expect.

Has anyone had success in communicating with Facebook users via the API? What did you do?

Trying Tofu

Mmm…. tofu

Last night was the first time I cooked tofu. It turned out well.

Julie is having to adjust to being a parent. Previously she would occasionally head off to the cupboard to make a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich if what I was making was unappetizing enough. Now she has to sell it. We’re in the food sales business here these days. So she may have wanted to hurt me physically when she saw tofu on the menu. But then we discussed how tofu was in miso soup, and that was good. Everyone was on board.

As I cooked I had to pay tribute to Stella. She’ll try pretty much anything raw. She demands raw potatoes, ginger, and tofu. But once they’re cooked she often won’t eat them. And she detests anything green. I started giving her the curved parts of the red peppers to make my dices nicer, and now she demands them.

The dish last night was Spicy Tofu with Red Pepper stir-fry. Stella thought the tofu was better uncooked. So did I. But then she played one card too many. She said she liked the peanuts better uncooked. We notified her that the peanuts had been put on top of the fully cooked dish and were still raw. This led to perhaps two more bites.

There’s no logic with three year olds. I can’t really complain. Stella eats a lot of foods. And she’ll eat almost anything while I’m preparing dinner. She just doesn’t want it cooked.

Our pediatrician told us recently that we’re going to need to start Etta on solid foods. Probably this weekend. I get to try again with another child.

What is the weirdest thing your kid eats?

I’ve got tools

Not these kinds of tools.

So I’m testing some cool new tools to hopefully get me to blog more often. I’m playing with ScribeFire and Zemanta which will hopefully make things more dynamic.

I got inspired to write more after writing a 3 page monologue for the Vestige Group’s “Muses III” project. It still has some editing to go, but I figure I should write more blog posts. I often think of them while trying to fall asleep at night, then forget in the morning.

We took Etta in to get her fourth month shots yesterday. She handled them well. It’s hard talking to the doctor about her because she’s so agreeable most of the time. Nothing seems to bother her for long periods of time. She’s a very smiley kid, and I’m enjoying the fact that her hair is starting to spike out on top. Now we have to start feeding her solids. Because getting Stella fed every night wasn’t a big enough chore.

Speaking of Stella, things have gotten better. Julie, Etta, and she were sick last week and Stella was in a rebelous/whiney mood. The whole week was an ordeal. Then Julie’s mom came to stay with us for a few days and it was like a cloud had lifted. Stella is still not napping, which means she’s prone to extreme crankiness, but I’m no longer wanting to box her up and send her off to the circus.

So I’m going to put a notepad on my bedside table, and try to knock something out every day. Even if that is a long and boring post about how interesting CouchDB is. Keep me honest Internetz.

Franken is unimportant

There has been a lot of talk about Al Franken giving the Democrats a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. This will not allow Democrats to push through a liberal agenda. The reason is that the Democratic party is no longer even remotely liberal.

What we’ve seen happen over the past decade is the polarization of the Republican party. They keep moving right. They’ve thought they were moving the country right. But what they’ve actually been doing is leaving people behind with no party. I don’t think this is the same thing as the traditional “swing-voter”. These are people who might be anti-union and pro-business, but feel that a reasonable level of taxation is required to keep the government providing the sorts of infrastructure that business needs to run efficiently. They might be very traditionally conservative, but had a falling out with the party because they’ve had an abortion. Or a gay son or daughter.

So in effect the Republican party is made up of people who are either

  1. Batshit-insane
  2. Unable to quit the party. Probably because they are small-‘c’ conservative and change doesn’t come easily to them

So basically the Democrats may have a majority, but it’s just a majority made up of the non batshit-insane. Which means that we’ll continue to see these extremely moderate bills that one might expect to see when there’s a very balanced congress, rather than this one where one party has a clear majority.

I’d still love to see a truly liberal majority in Congress. But this isn’t it. And that’s probably ok. The center needs to get drug back a little closer to center, so we can start talking reasonably again.

The one thing that makes me optimistic is that the Democrats in Congress are doing a really good job of compromising. It’s really a reflection on the American public at large, that once you cut out the crazy right there’s a lot of good discussion and compromise going on about the role of organized labor, business taxes, and healthcare.

So let’s just ignore the crazies and they’ll go away (or get put in prison for blowing things up or shooting people). Eventually the Democrats will probably have to split into two parties, and that’s for the best.

Cooking

Here’s a picture of Stella and I peeling oranges.

I eventually gave her a peeled orange and she was able to seperate the slices from the membranes with a children’s knife.

She probably only got about 2 wedges out of the entire orange, but I was still really proud of her.

You can blame the dealers

There are a lot of car dealerships that are very angry right now. A large number of Chrysler and GM dealerships are being cut loose. The general sentiment is “poor car dealership”, but I don’t buy it.

The dealers did it to themselves. GM didn’t build the cars that the American public wanted. They didn’t build the cars GM wanted. They built the cars GM dealers wanted.

I worked for 5 years, getting information out of dealer’s mainframes and onto websites. Something that a large number of dealers resisted. Mainly because they didn’t want to expose their prices. On the one hand they obviously wanted people to come into their dealership where they could play hardball. But they also didn’t want consumers to be able to compare prices.