Enginerve's Blog

Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping, and always have a mountain in life to climb

  • I was talking with someone about purchasing a Droid last night.  I saw this today from Engadget about a huge jump in the ETF fee associated with smart phones from Verizon.  I think that just like their major competitor, they can’t handle the new phones and so would appear to be hoping to freeze the early adopters into not canceling, or make a lot of money from them when they do.  If they put this time and effort into the network, they would own the market.
    Article is reprinted below for my storage, please go to the Engadget site http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/15/dont-shop-drunk-verizons-350-etf-is-now-live/ and read the actual article, comments, and see any possible responses.

  • 6th and 7th at site, good for 40th and 57th in 5-state area

    October 26, 2009

    Two Knox College computer programming teams finished among the top teams in the region, in the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competition held Saturday, October 24 at the University of Illinois-Springfield. In the annual competition sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, teams had five hours to solve nine programming problems of varying difficulty.

    Walker, Johnson, McGeeney, Samoore, Guy, Poley

    The Knox Gold Team — senior Peter Walker, junior George Guy and sophomore Casey Samoore — solved four problems and finished sixth among 15 teams at the University of Illinois site. In the official results, the team finished in 40th place overall among the 148 teams that competed at ten sites in the Mid-Central USA Region, which includes Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas.Solving the same number of problems, four of nine, but taking a few minutes longer, the Knox Purple Team — senior Eleanor Poley, junior Camile Johnson, and first-year Jason McGeeney — finished seventh at the Illinois-Springfield site and in 57th place in the region. Placements were determined by both time and number of problems solved.

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  • I found myself with a fully loaded iPod this week and without the iTunes library that used to support it.  I downloaded, and copied to run from the iPod itself, Sharepod.  From the website, Sharepod can:

    • Add and remove music, videos, playlists and artwork on your iPod.
    • Backup all those tracks you just can’t lose onto your computer. Import them automatically into your iTunes library.
    • SharePod can run straight from the iPod itself, so you can use it at work, school, home – wherever you and your iPod are.

    What I can tell you is that it is magic and easy to use.  Don’t forget to send in a donation, after all, it just saved your iPod.

    Note: The only step one needs to do is ensure you turn on the Disk Mode on your iPod.  Instructions from Apple are here if you forgot to do this during setup.

  • The NY Times discusses the issues, solutions, and equipment in the area of wirless home networking.  If you didn’t know that powerline networking is working on Gigabit speeds or where you might wish to deploy it check out the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/technology/personaltech/13basics.html.

    A reminder that for so many of the current uses, a wired network provides the best solution.  I have run into more and more issues with folks using only wireless and assuming that with the convenience comes everything else.  Trade-offs occur.

  • I took the time to actually read this Netflix presentation.  I think they really captured the point about not transitioning to a process company when you grow.  I know as I moved to opportunities that rewarded effectiveness I always wanted to be the kind of employee that would be ready for this kind of company should I be lucky enough to join them.
    View more presentations from reed2001.

  • I see that Seadragon (http://seadragon.com) has been released.  Try a large picture of something you like out, enjoy it.

    The aim of Seadragon is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays all the way down to cell phones, so that graphics and photos are smoothly browsed,  regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network.
    http://livelabs.com/seadragon

  • Paul Graham has a nice explanation of the difference in time and schedules between makers and managers at http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html.  For those of us who have worked at large companies it is the explanation of why we always sound like we have plans (Dilbert) but never accomplish them.  One of the nuggets in the article is that the work we take on is close to our capacity and THEN the world chips away at our time, our success, and eventually our self-image or self-respect.  Please look at the article online at the source where there are so many more things to see as well.  I have a copy here only in the event that the article disappears.
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