Uno Mas Blog

This Is Going To Hurt

2009-02-04T16:34:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many times I have seen someone in a movie say "this is going to hurt" before they do something that most definitely will hurt, as long as it doesn't kill them instantly.

I have never in my life said, or even thought that, before taking action. Sure, I probably thought it once when I was falling out of a tree or something, but I had already completed the initial action. I did not, while sitting on my perch atop the tree, say to myself, "this is going to hurt," and proceed to jump.

When normal people say "this is going to hurt" they almost always follow it with "so there is no way in hell I am going to do it."

Pedestrian Mentality

2008-12-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

I was out shopping this weekend, and a few incidents made me realize that the phrase "pedestrians have the right-of-way" has gotten a little out of hand. It appears that this phrase has started a whole new attitude that trumps our ideals of what it means to be courteous, not to mention careful.

Here are two examples:

I was parked between two very large vehicles at a grocery store. In my little car, there was no way that I could have seen over the cars beside me as I backed out, so I put it in reverse and started backing out slowly, checking both directions as I went. As I glanced left, I saw two small children dart behind my car. I hit the brakes. No harm done.

About fifteen feet behind the children was their mother, glaring at me. Okay, so I almost didn't see your kids, I thought, but didn't she see my reverse lights? Didn't she think that maybe there might be cars moving in the parking lot, and that maybe she shouldn't let her kids go running ahead of her?

When I was young, my mother would have apologized to the driver with a wave and then scolded my sister and I for not watching where we were going. Did that make my mother a bad person? No, it made her courteous, careful, and a good parent. She wanted us to know that we weren't invincible and that knowing what was going on around us was important.

The second event of my shopping trip wasn't nearly as eventful. I was at a store near my house, looking, as was everyone, for a place to park. As I drove up and down the aisles, traffic was at a standstill because of all of the people walking down the middle of each aisle. The worst part was that almost all of them appeared to know exactly what they were doing, looking behind to see how many cars had stacked up behind them,

I know that we have been taught that cars yield to pedestrians every time, but whoever came up with that rule probably never thought that pedestrians would actually want to block cars from going by. It's simply rude, and it shows how self-involved some people have gotten.

Remember, treat others the way you would expect to be treated. If you are the guy who wants to walk down the aisle blocking my way, don't be upset when someone does the same to you.

Happy Holidays!

Pocket Survival Kit

2008-12-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

I get a lot of hell from people about the amount of stuff I carry in my pockets. In fact, a few years ago, when I was in my wilder days, I even had a police officer comment that I "carried more stuff in my pockets than he had in his entire apartment." This, coming from a guy who wears a utility belt every day, seemed especially funny.

So, prompted by a coworkers comments this morning when I was fishing out change for a Coke, I decided to list everything I carry on a regular basis.

Here is a shot of everything in my front pockets today.

A - Non-key keyring - Seems like everything these days is designed to carry on a keyring. So, rather than have all of these devices take up space with my keys, I carry a separate ring with the following items.

2 USB Flash drives
Bottle opener
LED Flashlight
Sharpie marker
SecurID for access to servers at work
Lockpick - because you never know when you might need to open something

B - Car keys - I don't know why I carry this by itself. I just do

C - Key ring - All of the other keys I might ever need. You would think that I use these a lot. I don't.

D - Change - I always carry 3 quarters, 1 dime, 2 nickels and 4 pennies. With that, you can make any amount of change. I usually also carry an additional $1.50 in quarters, because you should be able to buy a drink at any vending machine for that.

E - Pocket knife

F - Digital camera - Because you never know when you might need a picture of something, and I phones with cameras still don't quite cut it.

G - Pill case - Ibuprofen and Immodium. With those, you can solve almost any pressing problems.

H - Cell phone - Right now, I am carrying a smart phone.

I - Lighter - You never know when you need to burn something.

J (not shown) - Black pen - A basic black pen is always useful. I always carry a twist-style because there isn't the risk of it accidentally coming open.

What do you carry in your pockets? Post a comment and let me know.

Help Google (and the US Governement) Track Everyone

2008-09-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

I guess I should start this post by saying that I have no real facts to back up anything said below. I also know that I am not the only one that thinks that Google and the US Government have been in bed for many years, and that everything I type, search, or upload on a Google-owned site is probably readily available to any number of government agencies. In fact, maybe it's ironic that I am typing this on Blogger. Hi G-Men!

For those who don't follow the tech news, Google, along with the US Military just launched the highest resolution commercial satellite that has ever orbited the planet. Before we get into details, you might want to check out the story here: http://gizmodo.com/5046406/google-military+controlled-satellite-reaches-orbit-we-dont-feel-lucky

So what does this mean to all of us? Well, probably nothing at first, but Google has been given exclusive rights to the commercial applications of this new super-camera, and I'd say it's a fair bet that you'll start seeing some new Google Earth images in the near future.

But this post isn't about Google taking over the world. I've already decided that they will eventually, so I am just riding the wave. No, instead this post is about how Google is trying to get all of us to help them, and the government, keep track of everyone they might ever want to peer down at.

If you don't currently use Google's Picasa web service or desktop app to keep track of your pictures, you may not realize the sheer power they have put into that system. First, they started by allowing users to "geotag" their pictures. I fell right into it and thought it was a great idea. I was able to open any picture that I had uploaded to the Google servers and actually place that picture on a map, showing where it was taken. It gave me a way to organize my photos in addition to keeping track of where I had been and what I had done when I was there.

About a week ago, Google introduced a "face tagging" system for Picasa. Another great idea. Now, I can have Picasa scan all of my pictures looking for faces. It then tries to recognize people in the photos so I can assign names to them.

The first time I ran it, it found 372 faces in my collection. By my guess, those pictures contained about 20 different people, and Picasa did a better-than-average job of recognizing what faces were the same. Of course, I have a lot of grainy pictures, and picture of people staring up at the sky or making very unusual faces, so it asked me to tag the ones that it couldn't decipher. Now that I am done, I can go into Picasa and search for pictures by what people appear in them. Yep, still pretty darned handy for someone as unorganized as me.

But as I was sitting there assigning names to all of these faces, I started to realize that Picasa was getting smarter. Faces that, at first, were unknown, were now coming up with suggestions, and the suggestion were right a lot more than they weren't. I was basically "teaching" Picasa how to recognize my friends, from any angle, in any light, in any condition.

My mind flashed to the GeoEye (that's the name of the fancy new satellite, if you didn't read the attached post). Was I just teaching Picasa how to recognize my friends, or I was I actually teaching Google how to do it? And if I am teaching Google how recognize those people, was I actually teaching the government?

Okay, so now I've managed to teach the government, who owns the most powerful "spy satellites" in space, how to recognize almost anyone I have a photo of. And, thanks to all of the geo-tagging I had done in the past couple of months, not only do they know what my friends look like, they now have an idea of where to point their cameras to find them.

As I started to think about it, I started to really worry about the repercussions. Sure, I don't care if Google can find me. I don't even care if the government can track my every move. But do I have the right to do that to everyone I know?

Needless to say, I have gone back and removed every "face tag" I had created that wasn't of me. I'm going to have to trust that Google didn't hang on to all of those, but I'll probably never know. As the system gets more popular, I am sure that plenty of faces will be tagged, but I just can't help thinking of that ol' Trojan Horse; Just because it's free, and looks pretty cool, doesn't mean the army isn't hiding inside.

Will IPv6 Make My Life Easier?

2008-07-29T10:07:00.000-07:00

No one that isn't heavily involved in computers and network probably pays much attention to the discussion of IPv6, or Internet Protocol Version 6. For those of you that don't know what it is, it is basically (very basically) a new addressing scheme for computers on networks.

I am sure if I gave you an IP address like 192.168.2.1, you'd probably have some idea that it is an address of a computer. But what if I gave you something like 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334? Still look familiar, or would you be more likely to guess that it was the serial number on my new Jedi Light Saber? Well, get used to it, because that just might be your computers IP address in the near future.

See, back when the designed the numbering format we are used today, IPv4, was designed, they didn't really expect the Internet to get as big as it has. IPv4 supports 4,294,967,296 different addresses. Sure, that sounds like a lot but think about how many computers are really out there. The computer industry has done many things to try and extend the life of IPv4 but the inevitable conclusion is that we are going to run out of these addresses.

Anyway, back to the original topic. Based on that IPv6 address you saw two paragraphs ago you are probably thinking, "How can an address that compliucated make my life easier?"

Well, if all I had to remember in life was IP addresses, it wouldn't. If 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334 and 2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7335 were two different computers, I am sure things would start to get confusing quickly.

So, what's the answer? The answer already exists and you use it every day...DNS. DNS provides us with the friendly names, known as host names, that we all remember: google.com, yahoo.com, sourceforge.net. All of these domain names map to IP addresses so we don't have to remember all of those numbers. It's been around since the beginning of the net, and we all take DNS for granted.

But never in the history of the Internet has DNS been as important as it will be in an IPv6 world. In my industry, as in many others, there have always been a few computers that just didn't have host names. Since everything that communicated with them already knew the IP, there wasn't a real need to waste space on a DNS server assigning a unique name.

This practice, or maybe lack or practice, has led to a lot of confusion, especially on private networks where hot names are even less common. Not a day has passed where I haven't asked a coworker what IP 172.16.125.12 was for, and I know that almost everyone in any computer field has a spreadsheet they keep all of their IP addresses on. In a network that uses IPv6, that means that every host has an address of up to 32 digits. Not only is that a pain to remember, it's a nightmare to type.

Enter our old friend DNS.

DNS is going to be the savior of IPv6 and it's going to bring all of the same old benefits it has with IPv4 along with it. It's just going to be used more, and that makes all the difference in the world. So no longer will I be saying "What computer is this IP?" In fact, I am willing to bet that almost everyone will completely forget about IP addresses eventually. They'll be like MAC addresses today. Sure, they do something, but I bet you don't know what yours is...

Why Linux Can't Win in the Enterprise

2008-07-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

I love Linux. I love Linux probably more than most Linux developers out there. I use it every day at home, and even at work on the servers I manage, but I still don't use it on my primary work computer.

Why?

One word: Exchange

Linux still doesn't have a way to naively support Exchange servers, which are still the leading do-everything servers in the world. Sure, there are some options out there. Most companies worth their salt have started using Outlook Web Access (OWA) on their Exchange servers, so you can still get your work done if you don't mind using your browser for all of your dealings with Exchange.

The problem with OWA is still that it takes people our of their comfort zone. Sure, Microsoft has done everything they can to try and make the OWA client look and feel like Outlook, but it just doesn't have the speed and familiar look that we are used to.

I can only hope that the future brings us an alternative to Exchange that companies will actually be willing to adopt. I thought about hoping for Microsoft to release a Linux client, but I won't hold my breath. Until then, KEEP USING OWA on your Linux machines. The more it gets used, the better it will get.

Free Chicken

2008-05-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I told myself I wasn't going to include national chains in this blog, but this one is worth mentioning.

Today and tomorrow, if you go to McDonalds and buy a medium drink, you can try one of their new Southern Chicken Sandwiches for FREE.

Medium drink, free sandwich, large fries = $3.20 (in my tax area) so it's a heck of a deal, and, in my opinion, it's a better chicken sandwich than Chick-Fil-A...

Fritz's Meats

2008-05-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I stumble onto good deals that I should have known about all along. If you have never heard of Fritz's Meats, I'm not surprised. If you have heard of it, but had no idea they served food, then you're probably in the majority.

For most of my life, Fritz's was just a fancy place to buy better-than-average meat. To me, I would have told you it was the place that you went when you wanted to impress the people at your next cookout with super-hot sausages or even a whole pig. A few years ago, I stopped in to buy a brisket when I was in my "I live in KC, so I should know how to BBQ" phase, and I realized that not only did they sell uncooked meat, but they also offered complete meals.

I guess I wasn't hungry that day, because I didn't even think about the prices, but we happened to be cruising State Line today and decided to stop in for a bite.

Just like most of the cheap places I have found, it all comes down to ordering the right thing. Sure, they have BBQ sandwiches that probably rival some of the more famous joints in the city. Yeah, you can get a whole slab of ribs with fries and a Coke. But for my money, the best deal at Fritz's has to be their hot dogs and sausage.

$2.50 will buy you a hot dog or sausage of your choice, and another 50 cents gets you that honest-to-goodness can of Coke to go with it. If that isn't enough to fill the tank (and believe me, those sausages are bigger than they look), you can always tack on a potato salad for a buck or some fries for $1.50. No matter which way you go, it works out to one filling meal for under $5.

Fritz's Meats is located at 102nd and State Line right next to Gates BBQ....so close that you'll be able to laugh at the people who are still in line there after you've finished your meal.

A New Era of Uno Mas

2008-05-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't blogged in a very long time. I'm one of those people who has a lot to say but no reason to say it, so I just never figured it was worth my time. Recently, though, I, along with some coworkers, have been on a mission to find the best, cheapest places to eat around the Kansas City area, and thought maybe it would be something fun to post...maybe someone would actually read it and take some advice.

Now, I know that there are an infinite number of sites where you can find reviews of restaurants and suggestion about places to eat, but I have never been able to find anything that was geared towards us broke folk, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

I am sure that there are plenty of places that I haven't found yet, so if you know of a great, cheap meal around Kansas City, please let me know. I'd love to try it.

IOGEAR Releases New Digital Scribe

2007-08-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

I don't normally brag about new tech toys until they are actually available and I have had a chance to test them, but this one is pretty cool, and I think that it may be something that people, especially those of us in the corporate world, might really be able to use.

IOGEAR just released an announcement about a new device known as the Digital Scribe (Model # GPEN100C) Click here to see the product info on their website.

Basically, this is how it works...

You plug the sensor into a USB port on your computer and attach the sensor to the top of a notepad or piece of paper. The pen that is included is actually a combination pen/transmitter that relays everything you write to the sensor at the top of the page, where it is fed to the computer and transcribed.

The transcription is, from what I can tell, the coolest part about the whole thing. Based on demonstrations from IOGEAR and the description on their site, the included software, "My Script Notes v 2.1 Lite", is a pretty powerful OCR that can recognize handwriting and convert it to typed text. It is also smart enough to recognize drawings and pictures and convert them to JPEGs, so that you end up with a nice clean document of what you wrote.

I still have a couple of concerns, though. First, every demo I have seen and every picture I can find shows the sensor clipped to a fairly small notepad. I don't know about you, but I like to have a larger sheet of paper if I am really going to be drawing diagrams or flow charts, so it will be interesting to see if the size of the page has anything to do with the accuracy of the receiver.

The second concern that I have is about how well the My Script Notes software really works. I have used a lot of different OCR software in the past to scan handwritten notes and I have never been very impressed. Just by their nature, they normally don't understand what I want when I draw something. Sure, I want it to transcribe the paragraph of text, but I would rather it not mess with the labels on my cute little diagram. There was a reason that I wrote "My Work" next to the circle instead of the sqare; I don't want my software moving that around.

Having the software running while you are writing may be a good way to avoid this. If there is some sort of pen-gesture to indicate to the software, "I don't want you to transcribe this," maybe it will solve all of my problems.

Also, I am not convinced that the whole thing is worth the price yet. I have manager to survive meeting after meeting using handwritten notes, and I don't normally find myself cursing the heavens that I can't easily share the doodles on the corner of the page or the dumb little notes I wrote, but I can definitely see the benefit of being able to archive it all.

I guess I'll have to wait and see what kind of response it gets, and maybe try it out firsthand, before I can make any official judgement.