Good old Concord, NC!

How many ways are there of generating the 87 octane unleaded you find at a typical gas station?  Not all that many - find it in the ground, drill it out, refine it, ship it.

How many ways of there of generating electricity?  Many more.

However, the key point isn’t really about the ways of generating electricity that we have today (although those are definitely good places to start), it’s about the unknown ways we’ll be generating electricity in the future.

Production methods all fan-in to electricity as the universal energy medium.

Consumer methods all fan-out from electricity as the universal energy medium.

Once that’s happening, we can just keep switching ways we generate electricity on an ongoing basis.  There’s no need to deal with all the headaches and chicken-and-egg production/consumption pipeline issues like we have with other alternatives (hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, biodiesels, etc). That doesn’t mean the other forms of energy are bad - they just don’t come in a form that we already have full infrastructure for, that most of our energy is already consumed in (air conditioning, computers, most everything in a typical house), and that we have over a century of experience with. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/politics/19watch.html

The amount of scrutiny the two spouses face is not commensurate — Mrs. Obama has endured far more virulent attacks by her critics — but it is somehow symmetrical.

If you read FSJ you’ve probably read about how Walt MossGoatberg is infamous for posting with a ridiculous use of first-person pronouns.  I get the feeling that there’s a similar game to be found in the amount of bold tags used by Jeff Atwood. :)  I love his blog, but there certainly is a liberal use of bold tags. :)  They’ve got that whole implication of "I’m saying something profound here and you need to pay attention, mister!"

So, to put the two together, here’s a simple script that counts the number of times a substring occurs during the posts of a given RSS feed’s items.

param (
    [uri] $rssfeeduri = ‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror’,
    [string] $substringToFind = ‘<b>’
) 

$wc = New-Object system.Net.WebClient
[xml] $feed = $wc.DownloadString($rssfeeduri)
$feed.rss.channel.item |
    ft -a title,@{
        l="number of $substringToFind found"
        e={[regex]::Matches($_.description.psbase.innertext, $substringToFind, ‘ignorecase’).Count}
    }

And the output on Jeff’s feed at the moment:

# .\get-countinrss.ps1

title                                                                 number of <b> found

—–                                                                 ——————-

Don’t Go Dark                                                                           6

ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers                                              55

Markov and You                                                                          6

Exploring Wide Finder                                                                   6

Finally, a Definition of Programming I Can Actually Understand                          3

The Greatest Invention in Computer Science                                              4

Please Give Us Your Email Password                                                      7

Large USB Flash Drive Performance                                                       5

Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?                                                    4

Revisiting the Black Sunday Hack                                                        2

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held                                                            7

Designing For Evil                                                                      9

It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It                                         6

OpenID: Does The World Really Need Yet Another Username and Password?                  15

PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter                                                       10

http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/062800wh-bush.html

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality

…

"Ours is a nation that helped Kuwait and the Saudis, and you’d think we’d have the capital necessary to convince them to increase the crude supplies," he said.

…

Asked why the Clinton administration had not been able to use the power of personal persuasion, Mr. Bush said: "The fundamental question is, ‘Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?’ "

He went on to suggest, as he did in answer to other questions, that voters should simply trust him.

…

On a more serious note, Mr. Bush said that he had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 ruling on Monday that upheld the reading of Miranda warnings to criminal suspects.

…

He said he would "make the case that I’m the person that can change the tone of Washington, D.C.," and added, "Just give me a chance to be the president."

You could certainly make the case that D.C. has a different tone than it did 8 years ago.

To get around that, I needed to be able to tell him to set a static IP address so he could connect to the linksys box (at http://192.168.1.1) and enable the DHCP server.  I didn’t want to tell him to click through a bunch of UI and set values by hand - I wanted something he could copy-paste and have it (hopefully) Just Work.

I vaguely knew of netsh and it seems to be able to do what I need.  Here’s what I just emailed him to try (worked on my Vista box) to set the interface for a static IP.  The "store=active" is key since the default is to make it persistent.

netsh interface ip set address "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.1.3 255.255.255.0 192.168.1.1 store=active

Of course, those of you reading this on RSS 1) didn’t know and 2) didn’t (and don’t!) care.  I’m currently loathe to stick ads in the RSS feed, despite more and more of the blogs I’m reading doing exactly that.

Now it likely makes more sense why marriage (and IMHO the things that go along with it) kill off genius so well!

This isn’t nearly the worst of it, either.  Can I voluntarily have my mail (that isn’t from a person in my contacts list / whitelist) placed in an escrow?  I’m fine with that.  If after 2 hours, with the rest of the mail that came in, it doesn’t look like a piece of spam, send it along.

With all the spam they must get, they could probably knock the escrow window down to 5 or 10 minutes and still be just as effective.

It’s like tape-delay of a broadcast to protect us from the horrors of profanity… except I want protection from spamity.

It’s hard to find a definitive source, at least online, but the consensus appears to be 100 calories == 1 Activity Point

from http://www.weightwatchers.com/community/

Yes, 100 calories = 1 AP

from http://answers.yahoo.com/

I read somewhere that 100 calories burned equals 1 Activity Point - I’m not sure if this is true.
Correct

Here’s the exclusions listed when you click on the "See details" - yes, they misspelled Efficiency, but I’m going to let that go.

1.) 20% Off High Efficency and Energy Star(R) Home Appliances, plus, 10% Off All Other Appliances thru 04/09/08. Excludes Great Price items, Electrolux, LG Brand, Kenmore PRO(TM) small kitchen appliances, floor care, sewing machines, closeouts, dehumidifiers, water heaters, air conditioners, compact refrigerators, countertop appliances, microwave hood combinations, and outlet store purchases.

So what did we buy?  This Energy Star washer from Frigidaire, expecting to get the 20% off.  Looking at the exclusions above, none applied to this washer, so it seemed to definitely qualify for the 20% as it’s quite clearly Energy Star compliant.

So, it’s quite clearly Energy Star, but the listed price shows only 10% off.  I figured there was one of two possibilities:

1. It’s accidentally marked 10% off and we’ll get another 10% off
2. or even better, the 10% it’s already off is unrelated and we’d get an additional 20%

Either way, it seemed clear to be that we should get at least another $75 off the price (the additional 10%), so I went ahead and ordered it (yeah, I know, in retrospect that was a bad idea) and just sent in a customer service request after the order went through asking for the price to get adjusted.

Today the response comes as:

We appreciate your consideration of Sears for your shopping needs. Unfortunately, the Black w/ silver trim Frigidaire 3.5 cu. ft. I.E.C. King Size Capacity ENERGY STAR Washer, Sears item# 02606296000 did not qualify for the 20% discount. You may view the appliances we offered this discount for on our Sears.com homepage. To view the list please click on the "20% off" wording on Sears.com. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced and hope to provide you with a more satisfactory online shopping experience in the future.

So, when I follow their instructions and hit the main page instead, sure enough it adds in the word "These" with a link provided, and following the link (and a couple extra click) leads to a list of 29 specific washers that are in the 20% category, one of which is basically the identical washer, but "Arctic White" instead of "Black with silver trim" (neither of us care about the color, so that’s fine)

Now, the story has a happy enough ending - I call the 800 number in the email, explain the confusion, and they go ahead and cancel the order (although the web site doesn’t show that order as canceled yet) and tell me to go ahead and place to the new order, which goes through fine and it’s scheduled for delivery 3 weeks earlier than the first one (woo hoo!).

Admittedly, I didn’t push to get the 20% on the original washer since the other version (both same specs, same maker, same list price of $750, etc) was available sooner, and I’m willing to blame the appliance page’s lack of clarity on an honest mistake instead of malice.  Since everything worked out fine (assuming the original order *does* end up actually being canceled in the system), then I guess it’s no harm, no foul.

I get a few questions per week regarding weight watchers points stuff.  Some of them I don’t know and couldn’t easily find on google ("how many points do I add to each day if I’m pregnant?", to which my answer was "First ask your doctor if you should (still) be on the diet when pregnant!"), but some I know.

Here’s one from today, mainly because I want to just point to blog posts (like I do for work stuff) rather than continuing to answer the same questions :)

Note that in this instance, I didn’t exactly answer the initial question, but I answered the question I thought she should be asking :)

Q:

A friend of mine is in the Weight Watchers program, and for fun I was adding up my points for the day to see if my calorie counting was less or as productive as points.

Last night for dinner I had 2.5 servings of mac’n’cheese. Now from what I understood of the calculating process you count things out separately so I calculated it by each serving. My friend said that I should have counted it all together. But if I were to eat 2.5 servings throughout the day, then I would count each serving separately. I don’t understand how this doesn’t come out to the same thing. I mean 2.5 servings should be 2.5 servings regardless. So if I eat it throughout the day should I add all the servings together, or when I eat it all at once should I separate it?

If I should separate it when I eat it at different times, and add it together when I eat it at once, why? What is the reasoning behind doing it sometimes and not others?

A:

This is an ongoing point of turmoil and confusion, unfortunately.  You’re absolutely right, 2.5 servings should be the same regardless.

There’s a good amount of foods that are, for instance, 0.4 points per serving, but it rounds down to 0, so some people end up eating many of those servings and still counting it as 0.

IMHO the easiest way around it is, while unfortunately a little more complicated, more fool-proof regarding the rounding - keep the points to one decimal place throughout the day.  This is one of the main reasons that my own points calculator site gives you both the exact and rounded points, so you can decide for yourself which to use.

If you take this kind of approach, the 2.5 servings should be the same number of "whole" points regardless of whether you count is as 1 lump sum or 5 portions.  Let’s say it’s (random guess) 0.8 points per serving.  If you ate 5 portions of 1/2 serving each, then that would be 5 * 0 (since the 0.4 would round down to 0), making it a total of 0.  Or 2.5 times 1 (0.8 rounded up), for a total of 2.5 (which would round to 3).  However, if you counted it to a decimal place, then 5 parts is 5 * 0.4 = 2.0 and 2.5 parts is 2.5 * 0.8 = 2.0 and 1 part is 1 * 2.0 = 2.0 - all are the same value, regardless of how you break it up.

Admittedly, this is picking a point value that is exactly 1 decimal place (0.8), and you could get the same kind of issue with something that’s 0.85, but then your rounding error makes you off by ~0.1, so the total points for the day isn’t affected.

Hope this makes sense - since there’s a good chance it doesn’t (the above is very stream-of-consciousness), just ping me back and I’ll try to rephrase it with a bit more clarity :)

Remember, null in C# isn’t like Ruby’s nil - in the typical case, you’d get a NullReferenceException (like if the below snippet had called GetType() instead of GetName()).

It’s not a big deal, just a funny little thing.  If you don’t use extension methods, of course, then you won’t see this :)

public static class ExtensionMethods
{
    public static string GetName(this Program prog)
    {
        return “oooooooooooohhhhhhhh”;
    }
}
public class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Program prog = null;
        System.Console.WriteLine(prog.GetName());
    }
}

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.google.com/products