distributed humor
I’ve added a page for Backpack Goodies, i.e. utilities and scripts I’ve written for Backpack. The first is Hide Backpack Page Warning, a greasemonkey script which does just what it says! When you’re at your page limit, it fades away the annoying yellow warning box.
Or: At least it wasn’t Fantasia.
Just like Clay outsold and outdid Ruben after season two, Bo shall outdo Carrie. Everyone had recognized his superiority for the full contest length. For reasons unknown, and somewhat fishy, he was a bit nervous Tuesday. Carrie still didn’t deserve to win - cookiecutters don’t make original music. Just like Fantasia was not like Macy Gray at all, cough…
At least Clive Davis knew what he was talking about, and offered Bo a record contract over a month ago.
Ok, so I was about a week late announcing the goodness that is Backpack. But this is just so cool I couldn’t wait.
Google introduced a new homepage, something like My Yahoo, except that it doesn’t suck. I know that’s a subtle distinction for the Yahoo engineers sometimes - particularly the ones working on the homepage.
Take your normal Google homepage. Add custom content to the bottom that you choose. Make it fully drag-and-droppable via AJAX, which is incredible to see done well. Make sure the content is actually useful, that there are no ads, and that it integrates nicely with good sites, rather than the crap that Yahoo floods you with. Google gives you the power to flood yourself, if you like, but you can strip it down to nothing but a search box if you like. Another neat feature to note is that, at least for me, the site loads the search bar first, and the extra content in one block last. I’m not sure if this is a function of the browser, the site, or chaos theory, but it keeps it nice and speedy for a homepage.
It’s funny, because my project for the past few days has been trying to screen-scrape together a nice integrated homepage, and they went and did all the work for me…
[edit] One remaining minor annoyance was the hugeness of the Google logo on the personalized homepage. Greasemonkey has fixed that.
I feel it is my duty to inform the readers of Halffull of good things. (I was going to say “all our readers who are virtuous and pure of heart”, but I want someone to actually read this)
37signals has come up with another gem, released this month, called Backpack. When they released Ta-Da lists, I was an avid user for quite a while. It only had a few minor issues like the reordering of elements not being quick enough - it could desperately use a drag’n'drop system. Other than that, it was marvelous - quite simple and intuitive, and with just enough use of AJAX to be useful.
Backpack has obsoleted it in one fell swoop. In essence, it’s a personal information manager, or PIM, on steroids. This is not to say that it has every feature under the sun, or even that it’s terribly innovative in its type of features. The genius was in getting it just right. It’s not a wiki, but it has some wiki-like syntax thanks to Redcloth and some wiki-style interconnectedness thanks to its page-based design and easy linking. You can have any number of notes, files, images, list items, and body text on every page. The free version offers 5 pages (more than enough for many people) and 10 reminders, with no images or files; the pay versions start at $5/month.
The reminder system is great - not only is its interface intuitive (”+15″ to be reminded in 15 minutes, or just “7:30pm” for a specific time) but you can be reminded via email or even to your cell phone. [Note: Currently you can choose one (or both) of these options, but they’re global, not per-message. Hopefully that will change soon.]
If you’re not a fan of web forms, you can even email content to your pages. Each page has a unique email address - you can send notes, files/images, and even make todo lists via email through an easy syntax.
Complaints?
These are really minor complaints though, and 37signals listens (and often implements) suggestions from their forum. If there’s something you miss, they’re probably already thinking about it.
Things I’ve used Backpack for so far:
[edit] They added drag-and-drop reordering, so my biggest complaint is gone. It works really well, too, and for both to-dos and notes. Check it out! [edit] After more than two years, they’ve finally added a calendar element. However, it’s extremely basic at the moment, and couldn’t be used as a full calendar system unless you have the most boring life ever. In addition, Backpack has been nearly obsoleted by newer, more interactive web applications. I personally haven’t used it in well over a year. However, 37signals is working on a Backpack rewrite which could be quite interesting.
If I could bring back one person to start beating people over the head, I would bring back Harry Truman. Why? “The buck stops here.” How easy is it to blame external conditions for our lack of satisfaction? It seems perfectly logical to trace events that have had direct influence on our lives and caused us some kind of hardship. However if you really look at many hardships, there is either a pattern or a series of exacerbations. Allow me to explain. I recently had an accident on the highway. I was driving at a high rate of speed in icy conditions because I couldn’t stand being behind slow moving cars. This ended up costing me $600 in repairs to my vehicle and who knows what kind of insurance hike is awaiting me when my next insurance bill comes next month. I am fairly clearly at fault here. Don’t you know someone who might blame the city for not plowing before rush hour? Or perhaps someone who would demand better industry-wide tire quality, or might ask for icy condition training to be incorporated into driver’s license tests? It’s certainly the response the government would take in response to a singular incident. Wow, I just thought of another rant, but I’ll continue with this one for now.
Let me make a more realistic point: I’ve had some trouble at work getting the technicians producing parts for me to adequately inspect the parts. They are all of similar age and background and one of them is able to find defects while the other two cannot. She spends more time with the parts and takes a closer look at them. The other two take a detached attitude to the parts. Should I not come home complaining about lazy techs who are so hard to work with? I would not do this since I know all three are excellent workers. Let’s say I didn’t know them. Wouldn’t I blame any missed defects on their “laziness”? Also take an operator who was, until recently, performing some operations involving cutting on my parts. I found, upon inspecting her work before shipping, that she had cut up several of the parts improperly, rendering them useless. She had lied to me about not finding any defects when I asked. Should I not blame her for my loss of parts?
OR: Should I take responsibility as the engineer for the project? Should I design a better inspection process that is more foolproof and requires less effort from the technicians? Should I define better what a defect is and hold a training session to show them what I am looking for and what I am not worried about? Should I have inspected the operator’s work earlier to make sure she was not improperly cutting parts, or explained to her more carefully which sections of the parts were necessary and which were not? Should I have given her tools that would have made it difficult to accidentally mangle the parts?
Here lies the freedom you can grant yourself with personal responsibility. When external factors are turned into internal factors, you find that there are actions you can take to counteract undesirable conditions. It’s liberating, ironically, to blame oneself for problems because you can immediately see your areas for improvement.
A released criminal recently brutally murdered his daughter and her friend because he felt she was misbehaving and needed to be taught a lesson. I should avoid labels. A man with a LONG criminal history was released on parole and moved back in with his family and proceeded to kill his daughter and her friend. Apparently he was upset with his wife going easy on the girl on a matter of discipline and followed her to the park to drag her home. She resisted, he beat her, and according to him, her friend pulled a knife on him and he stabbed them both to death. How many little girls carry knives? Yep.
I’m sure at this point some lawyer is salivating over the opportunity to show his moral superiority by defending this guy. It shows our amazing morality, doesn’t it, to defend criminals to the point of gaining their release at any cost, at any confusing flurry of words aimed at a jury, or exploiting every loophole in the legal code to give people who commit crimes as many rights as possible. The man who recently murdered Jessica Lunsford was a convicted sex offender living, without notice, in her neighborhood. He didn’t get found out because he was simply boarding with a relative, not owning any property in the neighborhood. Some lawyer defended him. Others debated, afterwards, whether it was alright to demand that convicted sex offenders wear locator bracelets. It shows our morality as a society to defend criminals to the point of freeing them on technicalities and allowing them to roam free and demanding parole for them, right? Especially if they are a minority. Then it’s just plain racist to demand justice for their crimes. Well, what is justice? Here’s my idea of justice: Not giving them the chance to hurt anyone else. Now, we can certainly debate the severity of crimes. Murder and rape should be #1. I don’t really give a rats ass about potheads or drug possession or financial crimes, compared to those. As far as I’m concerned marijuana should be legal, as this would remove potheads from general society since they’d be too high to remember to eat and they’d all wipe themselves out and stop singing crappy music. Sorry, tangent.
So why is it so important to defend murderers and rapists? Why do lawyers jump at the chance to defend these people? Because a moral society protects the weakest of their citizens, and people who commit crimes must be weak since they’ve given in to their animalistic nature. So, on the 1% chance that they might go out and commit another horrible crime, we press for their release, mistrials, appeals, parole, and their “rights”. They’re still human beings, right? Yes. Human beings who show a penchant for harming other human beings. It’d be immoral to lock them up and throw away the key, wouldn’t it? I’d say for this to not be a debate, we’d need some kind of average on the number of murderers who go on to murder again once out of jail. If it’s so much as 1%, then you’re sacrificing at least one human life for the “rights” of another. The harsh decision that has to be made is to imprison one person to protect another who wouldn’t commit these types of crimes. Our society simply lacks the stomach for it. So we flip to the other side and cry every time another victim is made but rush to defend whoever committed the crimes. We want to help. We want to heal them. To hell with the victims. Two little girls are dead because of one man’s “rights”. This should sicken you enough to give you the stomach to support jailing violent criminals for life.
And guess what? You’re going to be running a risk. A great example explaining the normal distribution shows the criminal system and shows a conservative approach to crime compared to a liberal approach to crime. The liberal approach to crime has 1% of people who are innocent being imprisoned and 5% of people who are guilty walking free (not actual figures, don’t start debating statistics with me, I’m too lazy to worry about the math). The conservative approach to crime has 5% of people who are innocent being imprisoned and 1% of people who are guilty walking free.
Which do we choose? What do you worry about more at night: Men with tortured souls crying in jail at night, and possibly innocent men being imprisoned, or two dead little girls? If you worry about the men with tortured souls, then your morality would lead you to kill a baby to save a puppy.
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