Personal

I am outraged at the SF Muni and their adoption of the TransLink card.  Soon, there are certain bus lines that will only accept the TransLink card during rush hour... you won't be able to ride the bus except with one of these evil devices.

So, what's my outrage?

See Jack Die was an awesomely fun read.  A few months back, I got a bit of Twitter spam from Nicholas Black (@NicholasBlack60)... author of See Jack Die.  I followed him (a rare thing for me to do.)  Black tweeted an offer for a PDF review copy of the book.  I took him up on it.  It took me a month to find the right eReader to read it on (a Kindle DX), then I was off to the races.

Folks, a few months ago, I had a bad experience upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 and recommended against upgrading.

I have had a bunch of good experiences installing (not upgrading) 8.04 and it seems that ThinkPad T61p support is pretty reasonable, so I am now recommending installation of 8.04. I still think that the upgrade process is a bit suboptimal and suggest that if you can, make backups of the data you want to preserve and do a clean install.

There are still problems with the NVidia drivers (this is not unique to 8.04 and in general, Ubuntu does a better job with "proprietary drivers" than any other Linux distribution I've found.) If you can avoid NVidia cards and buy a system with Intel graphics chips, you'll likely have a better Ubuntu experience. For the kind of work I do, I don't care about super-fast 3D, so the advantages that NVidia (or ATI) have over the Intel chips are near zero.

So, I need to go to New Jersey today. Rather than renting a car, I'm taking a train from Newark Airport to New Brunswick. I book a hotel on Hot Wire. I book a hotel for "New Brunswick." Not "New Brunswick and surrounding cities and towns." Not "Within 7 miles of New Brunswick." I book a hotel for "New Brunswick." Hot Wire shows me a bunch of options, including hotels in other cities and towns near New Brunswick. I choose the hotel in New Brunswick.

I book the hotel and pay. Then Hot Wire tells me the hotel is in a town 6.3 miles away from New Brunswick. I call their 800 number of explain that I booked a hotel for New Brunswick. "Chris" the customer service rep explains that there's a "map" that shows what "New Brunswick" means to Hot Wire (hint, it's not New Brunswick.)

You know what, I don't give a shit about a map. I give a shit about getting a hotel in the city that Hot Wire promised me a hotel in.

So, I'm disputing the charge. Will I prevail? Maybe... maybe not.

I'm also posting this warning: don't do business with Hot Wire. They are scammers. If they really meant for me to understand that the hotel in New Brunswick was not in New Brunswick, they would have listed the hotel as "New Brunswick or nearby city."

I'm a Netflix subscriber. Netflix is pretty cool. Too bad I'm bad at planning and knowing what my wife and I are going to be in the mood for. We often get movies from Netflix, don't watch them for months and just keep paying our Netflix fees.

The following appeared on headenergy.com. I went to look at the post, but headenergy.com was taken down. I found a copy of the post in Google's cache. I don't know if it was taken down because of this post or because of some other reason. However, I think the post contains a good idea. So, I'm reprinting it.

Digg is a site I look at regularly. It has its problems but it does show strong opinion on certain subjects and one of those is the RIAA. Its no secret that the RIAA has built a large amount of hatred among the Internet Savvy and beyong. Their aggresive tactics are becoming common knowledge and there appears to be no limit to how far they will take something. One thing that has been highlighted is a point made by the EFF whereby the idiots over at the big brand police RIAA say that even copying your CD and ripping it on to your IPOD or backing it up is not fair use. As by their usual standards this generates an anger amongst users as you can expect.

Story aside I think its high time that the RIAA is not referenced by its name but rather by its members. The point here is that slagging off the RIAA has no effect and thats how they want it to be. It doesnt matter how many stories, user comments, discussion goes on, the RIAA only exists to take all of the abuse away from the brands it represents. Imagine how much it would hurt someone like Sony if each time a bad article, comment or story reached the masses it had the words representing Sony in the title. Enough of that would force a brand to leave the RIAA group because it was too damaging to their brand name. Consumers have power and all the tools are available to use right there in Digg with its big audience reach. Press the right buttons and those members will jump ship to prevent extremely costly damage to brands that have taken decades to build.