the bofe blog

I’ve been using the product Campaigner lately and it’s reminded me of a Calculus professor I had.

This is a part of Campaigner’s interface—only six steps!

The sad thing is it’s actually at least 12 clicks to finish a successful Campaign.

Just like Dr. Roach’s Calculus tests. “Only three problems!” he’d boast, and the first time we all fell for it. Little did we know, solving his “only three problems” meant going through an ungodly amount of work for an answer that was usually 1.

JOTD (Jank of the Day):

”) * 40); ? > px” >

Lovely.

A good comment on Think Vitamin article entitled Show me the Money…in open source

I’m sorry, is there a point to this article? You ask a question in the beginning , and then go off on some comparison tangent. So what is this article about exactly, certainly nothing about how to monetize?

Thank you. My thoughts exactly.

The personal life is lacking lately. I’m just sitting around and lusting after items I have no business buying, anticipating going out on a boat this weekend, and missing my friends and family at home. I’ll be in KY in a week, though.

• 37svn talks about project estimates

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!” To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

• Jakob Nielsen talks about ecommerce usability

Menus of state abbreviations, such as for U.S. mailing addresses. It is much faster for users to simply type, say, “NY,” than to select a state from a scrolling drop-down menu. Free-form input into fields with restricted options does require data validation on the backend, but from a usability perspective it’s often the best way to go. (This is guideline #178 for e-commerce usability because of the many errors we observed in check-out forms with state drop-downs.)

• Wikipedia: Survivalism (Not too unrelated: Desert Eagle Mark XIX )

• FreeTDS enables a Linux server to connect to an external SQL server and perform queries.

• Drak’s Linux RAID Setup proves that Drak’s too smart for his own good.

• Apache Mod_Rewrite provides URLs that are easy to digest. The manual is not easy to digest.

Sorry, this is a geek intensive post. Don’t read it – just go read a letter from Stephen Colbert if you’re disinterested.

In the lastest post on my favorite site, Dive Into Mark , Pilgrim puts alot into perspective as to the cyclical nature of standardization, cultural norms, and the world.

Back when I posted intensive geeky guides I’d allude to the Automotive Industry to put things into perpsective.

People forget that the web is so young. It’s been around since the early 1990s. The Internet has been around since the 60s, but the web is not the Internet, fucking differentiate the two already.

The Web is not:

• A quick dollar
• Stagnant
• Proprietary
• Controllable
• Not immune to The invisible hand
• Private

It will be interesting to see how the web evolves. Will it evolve like the education system has? Or will it evolve like the music industry ?

The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create
a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should
be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for
us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it
and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment
in America.

Is the Web itself inherently flawed? As the paradoxes article points out, the decentralized centralization of the web is a source of many of its problems. Any protection mechanism, for instance, the DSBL, provides a quick list of open proxies that can be used for malicious purposes.

We’re in a time of instability.

My first purchase from an Uncrate recommendation. Rome.

I’m excited.

I beat Guitar Hero on Expert today.

I’ve gotten >=4 stars on the all but the following:

• cowboys from hell (barely survived)
• bark at the moon (ditto cbfh)
• frankenstein
• texas flood
• no one knows

Maybe one or two more. It’s just a matter of time until they’re all 4 stars. Then 5. Then GH2 will be out.

Speaking of GH2, there’s some other anticipation going ‘round in my world:

• Arrested Development Season 3 (Pre Ordered, comes out next Thursday)
• LOST Season 2 DVD (released early September)

As for me, things have been better, things have been worse. I’m hoping to get to see a lot of people when I’m in KY (yay Labor Day Weekend).

Bye.

From Fred P. Otts Kareoke …. in Olathe, KS:

• Van Morrison – Brown Eyed Girl
• Steppenwolf – Born to be Wild
• Limp Bizkit – Faith

(Craig and I did the last song)

It didn’t all suck.

New links (co-worker edition):

• KFAdvertising
• Derek Gathright
• Tremendous Blondette

The weekend needs to be here now.

Our site launched.

Doctorpricing.com has launched. The idea isn’t mine, but I did do some of the backend on the site.

The idea behind the site is to empower patients. The biggest obstacle in consumer driven healthcare is information. Doctorpricing.com aims to provide pricing information and an easy way to access it.

Check it out. It’s growing every day.

[/shameless plug]