Bell is ass raping Grandmas

Rogers is too.

For a princely sum of ~$25/mo you can get a whopping 2 (that’s TWO) Gigabytes worth of data to download from the Internet. Like omg, a whole 2 gigs? Really? Cuz that’s, like, half of my little USB stick.

Who’s going to pay for such a crappy plan? Grandmas, who just want to share some photos with their grandkids. And what happens when the kids send Grandma a digital video they made for her birthday? BAM! Grandma has to pay extra PER Gig over the measly 2 GBs.

And now Bell wants to limit the usage of all the small ISPs that buy service from Bell AND throttle traffic when there’s no need? FUCK YOU BELL. The only reason you have this monopoly is because of your infrastructure. Your infrastructure was built with taxpayer money. So fucking lay off the other ISPs, do something real to grow your business, and stop ass raping your customers!

I particularly liked one person’s comment: “A box of expired cereal can run that company better.” Amen.

P.S. Don’t even get me started on 15cents for incoming text messages!

What to get your Mom for her birthday

Ever had the dilemma of not know what present to get? Isn’t it even harder when it’s your Mom? Well, in this day and age, just type your query into Google, and surely you’ll be blasted with lists of thoughtful, useful gifts to delight Mom. Surely.

After endless handmade chocolates and birthstone jewelry, there’s this little nugget: a solar-powered mystic garden gnome. Yep, you read that right. “Darling during the day, enchanting at night. Solar panel lights up the toadstool inside the magic ball at dusk.” Whew! Another birthday successfully dodged. And i’m covered for at least Christmas and Mother’s Day with the Solar Hiking Gnome, and Solar Cottage Toad Abode. Or should I get the Dyson hand vacuum instead?

Rambo : Great or Greatest Movie ever?

Have you seen the movie everyone is talking about?  What are they saying, just read these reviews:

“A cinematic master piece!”

“Best movie of the year!”

“Will solve world peace”

These are some of the official reviews that may or may not be by real critics (or just my friends).  I went into this movie believing it was going to be this action, explosive, gut twisting, kill fest….but I was wrong, dead wrong.  The protagonist, Johnathon Rambo leads a quiet life, but don’t let his solemn tone and stern look lead you to think he’s one dimensional.  The depth of his character is like none other, he continually struggles with his past and present internal battles.  He engages other dynamic characters with their own sophisticated back stories arise to increase the excitement.  We are engrossed as the story explodes with dialog and snakes like winding river to several confrontations where the softer side of Rambo surprises us more and more.  The superior skills of the actors bring new meaning as their words seem to cut into you like a sharp blade and leave you gushing.  Rambo’s character is ever changing as he melds with antagonists and wins them over with a barrage of timely aphorisms that instantly win over his enemies.  Timeless, generous and heroic is the character of Rambo, he could blow the minds of any rebel and leave their evil thoughts lying lifeless at his feet.

I’m sure I’m not the first to say it was a fantastic piece of American Cinematography and should be given the Nobel Peace Prize.

Stallone for President,

Ben

n800 with os2008

I have successfully installed the OS2008 (cnet install guide) software and I am finding the changes very nice. l can’t wait for the official release to come out. Here is a quick likes and dislikes list:

• SPEED! I didn’t think I would notice an extra 80mhz but it totally makes a difference in loading menus to apps-the entire system just seems more respondent. I didn’t think I would notice an extra 80mhz but it totally makes a difference in loading menus to apps-the entire system just seems more snappy
• Look and feel- there are some nice new ui tweaks that make the prettiness factor increase, not to mention bigger menus that don’t require the stylist
• facebook, i never tried it before-but now it’s a link on the main web menu and it works great. standard popups appear and scrabulous even works

Dislikes

• Apps aren’t out yet, so no mplayer and skype with video has been delayed…:(
• youtube…still has jitter in the stream for me, watched movies before and after the upgrade, def better, but still annoying
• maps – huge map packs 1gb+ for the US, dling tonigh, will report tomorrow – maps won’t be available till December : /

That’s all for now,

Benjamin Willis

Canadian skill?

McDonald’s commonly holds contests to have people win something if they provide feedback about their service. Well, I was browsing their Customer Satisfaction Survey and found something quite interesting in the disclaimer:

Ha! Upon further inspection of the Official Rules reveals some more interesting details that this “skill-testing question” is a mathematical question. I found this odd and did a wiki search to reveal the reasoning Canadians must prove their “intelligence” because Canada bans “for profit gaming”. But if there is a game of “skill” involved, then it’s free of the law.

So what does Canada consider skill:

“A court decision ruled that these [an arithmetic exercise] must contain at least three operations to actually be skill testing”

I’m not even going to go there . out.

Benjamin Willis

Benjamin Willis needs Core Stability

Dearest Lori,

I noted your concern about my well being in a recent comment on a blog post of mine. It is not above me to admit I have many, many problems (83.45% mental, 15.34% physical, 1.2% other) leaving me with a small portion of sanity/normalcy. Do not think I have let your kind thoughts and gestures (“I’m here if you need help…..”) drift aimlessly into the forgotten caverns of my mind. I have taken it upon myself to re-orient the path that is my life by enrolling in a Core Stability course in my final quarter at RIT. The course “will focus on developing/strengthening the body” which I undoubtedly need.

In just my first session I must say I was excited to get started. Well actually, I showed up a little late and wasn’t sure I was in the correct room until I saw several females in front of the instructor- then it made sense because it’s usually women who need the most Core Stability. I snagged a corner spot behind all of the other pupils and began to soak in the environment. We began several exercises of which I intently focused on the tight concentration of those in need females.  With the intensity of the class, I was soon feeling mentally and physically exhausted. The class was over before I knew it and it left me feeling relax, tired and for some reason, hankering for a cigarette.  With 19 more classes left, I was feeling excited that this was truly going to help.

Lori, I appreciate you putting me in this position to help me help myself. I would recommend anyone else with as many problems as I have to join a class like this one.

Born Again,

Benjamin Willis

Core Stability class description:

Core Strength Conditioning will focus on developing/strengthening the body’s core muscles, lower back, abdominals, hips, & gluteus. The body’s core muscles are the foundation for all other movements of the body. Through use of Resist-a-Balls, weights, bands & conditioning exercises, the focus will be to develop and strengthen the body’s trunk and pelvis area where the center of gravity is located. Benefits include improved posture, increased flexibility & range of motion, increased strength and protection of the spine, more stable center of gravity and controlled movement. This class is designed for all fitness levels. Instructor lead exercises and explanation of core principles and proper technique will be covered. A course fee applies. Check SIS for quarterly course offerings (Core Glutes/Abs) options.

Seam Carving

Ok, what useful things ever came out of Intelligent Systems? Not much, but this topic is inspired by the area Computer Vision. Overall, this is one of those useful things that could have been done a long time ago, but the principles, though simple, were never applied. Here is the video, prepare to be amazed

A researcher who helped implement the algorithm is employed by Adobe so expect to seem some cool applications in the coming future. Maybe they will integrate it into browsers eventually and cause a whole new world of pain for front end web developers . Or, expect to see some awesome dynamically resizing videos for different devices, easily watch a widescreen dvd on your new n800.

Benjamin Willis

n800 + Ben = trouble

I broke down and have ordered the n800 internet tablet. Go ahead and look through the pictures-it’s really sweet, I’ll wait……Awesome huh? Some people say that it’s an iPhone without the phone, but I totally disagree, they are not even comparable. The n800 is really just a tiny ass computer that you can do anything on, because it runs a modified version of linux.  So, unlike the iPhone, Nokia has given anyone the ability to develop applications for this sweet tablet. So if someone hasn’t already added that sweet feature you wanted, you can do it yourself.

Here are some of the existing built-in features that make this device kick-ass:

• Cheap, less than 400$
• 2 sd slots, with 1gb (20$) and 2gb (40$) prices falling you have great storage ability
• Web browser (Opera or Moz) with Adobe Flash 9 support
• Skype compatible
• Built in video camera
• Google Video Conferencing
• Streaming Media Player (for your youtube or pron)
• Email
• RSS Feed Reader
• Bluetooth connectivity
• and much more…

As soon as I get this I will post pictures and movies of my in depth review, unless I’m too busy playing with it. But now I can do remote blog postings from almost anywhere-just need Google to take over the world and give everyone free wireless access.

If you absolutely need a constantly connected device, just wait, this same device is coming out next year with wiMAX ability – see here.

Excitedly yours,

Benjamin Willis

iPhone Hack

Quick post:

The typical nerd from my school Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and also a fellow New Jersian just hacked the iPhone to allow it to be used on other cell networks (tested on T-Mobile). His blog about hacking the can be found here. He is also planning on trading in his original hacked iPhone for a $30k car from the Fast and the Furious, a bit unusual, but we all have our weaknesses. Hopefully he doesn’t do to this car what The Hulks son did to his FnF car. I def give props to this guy and hope he doesn’t get too much trouble from Apple’s Law team, though there are no immediate legal issues.

It’s pretty ironic that Steve Wozniak-one of the founders of Apple-is coming to RIT for Brick City Festival as a distinguish speaker. Maybe this will raise some interesting talk this year, if not, Howie Mandel will certainly be able to think of a stupid game to wake everyone up.

Sextastically yours,

Benjamin Willis

Concept Maps…wtf

Warning: boring content ahead, again for you illiterate users just watch the video and look at the pretty pictures.

I have always found it hard to tell someone in detail, technical or not, to do a knowledge transfer. It usually consists of sitting down with someone for a long time while they take notes and look very confused. After hair pulling questions a general concept can be understood, but the details are almost never transferred. Every time I do a coop or short job term it is always the same thing, how do we get what’s in my head out into someone else’s? Well, starting about 12 years ago the solution for this problem was coined with the buzz word Knowledge Management. There have been a bunch of tools that are used, the main stream ones are obviously wiki, blogs, forums, comments etc. One other tool that is not commonly used struck me at a previous job to be quite ingenious.

When I worked a while ago and I did some interesting work with a free tool called CMapsTools (there are a bunch of others out there). The software used to be free, but now it has been aquired and costs and arm and a leg to used. But anyway-the purpose was to easily place out what you know into organized maps or concept maps and link to other detail content. The concept map is just a tree with linking phrases that explain the relationships between nodes, as you can see from their webpage. I, personally, think that a tree structure is one of the easiest and fastest things to understand. Now-it is not the end all be all of knowledge management tools, but it makes the high level overview extremely simple to understand. A wiki backend to link to more detailed descriptions of the major topics can be a very complementary pair. Yeah all very boring but….

…what do you get when you add technology with concept maps? Just watch this :

Yeah, pretty freaking awesome, huh?

Shameless plug: Still think trees are boring and worthless, take a look at the one we developed for eBay categories on getitnext. Aside from some ui improvements I couldn’t have been happier about the way it came out. I would love to hear comments about how awesome it is, otherwise, cram it with walnuts . Just compare it against eBay, which would you really find more useful:

VS.

No contest.

Benjamin Willis – out.