Backyard Visits

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A spider glows in infrared

I have a Nest camera in my backyard. So far it has caught zero criminals. It's not completely useless though as it has captured many raccoons, several skunks, eerie spiders glowing in the infrared lights, a couple of rats and one cat. Parkside police say I can stop calling now.

HOWTO: Fix Twitter

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HOWTO: Fix Twitter

Wired (and everyone else) is reporting that Twitter is finally testing longer tweets. Maybe 280 characters! I had a better fix six years ago:

ITHCWY: Twitter: Put some status in status updates: Give me an extra character for every year that I’ve been with… http://goo.gl/fb/gCEpT

— Robert Ellison (@abfo) July 8, 2011

San Francisco Street Tree Datalapse

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San Francisco Street Tree Datalapse

A datalapse video of San Francisco street trees:

City elevation contours and street tree database  from DataSF. I included all trees with a latitude, longitude and known planting date. On the visualization trees grow over 25 years to a generally exaggerated 25 meters radius. Each species of tree is assigned a random color.

Why Microsoft is Likely Doomed Based on one Email Folder

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Close up of the useless Junk folder in Microsoft Outlook

When you get a piece of spam in Outlook you move it to Junk or block the sender. And then, even if that junk mail is marked as read, the Junk folder has a BOLD MESSAGE COUNT. It's the only folder that does this. I cannot do any other work while I have a bold message count and so I have to switch to the Junk folder and delete the message to get rid of it.

Regular email: read, file, done.

Junk email: recognize as spam, click block sender, confirm that I really want to block the sender, switch to Junk folder, mark as read, delete.

Something is really wrong with this workflow. It's a lens through which you can view the ultimate demise of the company. Sure, Office isn't going away soon and Azure is growing like crazy and SQL Server runs on Linux. But somewhere in Redmond 5,000 people designed a Junk email folder that is the MOST IMPORTANT folder in Outlook. The rest were presumably too busy making Windows Update worse to stop this.

My Google experience is that I really don't get much spam. The spam that I do get is hidden from me unless I actually need to rifle through it for some reason. On the occasion I actually get legitimate junk I just flag it as such and never have to touch it or it's ilk again.

As a courtesy

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As a courtesy to the next passenger

I'm on a recently built A340-600. This sign is about as useful as the ashtrays. This must be a weird tradition that gets handed down from airplane to airplane from one sign author who got grossed out by the thought of a moist sink but has never squelched around in piss on the lower deck stink fest that is installed on this particularly strange airbus.

It's like someone loved the whole elegant spiral staircase up to a bar motif of the 747 and thought wouldn't it be a giggle to do the exact opposite.