The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

2007 Tour de France

Today, Michael Rasmussen, general classification leader (yellow jersey holder) of the Tour de France, was fired by his team for missing two drug tests this year. This marks the first time I’ve ever heard of when the race leader was removed from the event. The lead goes on to the Discover Channel Team’s Alberto Cantador.

Yesterday, Alexandre Vinokourov popped positive on a blood test and his entire team withdrew from the Tour, taking two of his teammates who were in the top 10 out of the competition.

Cycling, ladies and gentlemen, is not a joke. These fucking poseurs who can’t seem to ride up a hill without doping are. Ask Outdoor Life Network to carry a real race. I would tivo the Race Across America.

Let’s hope there’s something to give a crap about on le Tour next year.

Pownced

About three weeks ago, Ozreiuosn invited me to Pownce, the latest of the responses to Twitter. Leah Culver and Kevin Rose have launched a nifty little service with a few features Twitter lacks completely. Pownce offers a different feature set than Jaiku, of which I’m also a fan.

What I like about Pownce:

1. The message window doesn’t limit posts to 140 characters.
2. You can include files, events, and links.
3. You can either post publicly, privately, or just to your friends.
4. You can rate comments and posts.

What I like more about Jaiku:

1. I can include RSS feeds into my Jaiku stream, although with too many of those Jaiku becomes cluttered.
2. Icons! Juhu includes far more of them than either JaikuBerry or the native Jaiku application. Icons are nifty!
3. I can specify where I’m posting a particular item from.

Features I’d love to see in Pownce:

1. RSS feeds
2. The ability to receive notifications by SMS or IM
3. Geotagging posts
4. Image uploads displaying inline, even if resized to the layout.

I have been added and subtracted by a few people over the three weeks that I’ve been on Pownce. Many of the people requesting adds seem to be friend aggregators (people who add tons of people, whether they know them or not). I like that when I deny their request, they’re still a fan. (I have a thing about adding people to my friends list who neither message me with some introduction or that I don’t know. Color me old-fashioned, but I don’t see the value in having 1,584 friends in my network.)

Big kudos to Leah and Kevin and the whole Pownce team.

Parking Lot Blunder

After I grabbed my morning fix at Starbucks (yeah, yeah, I know) near my house, I was backing my purple car out, when I overestimated how far back my car was and scraped the hub cap of the Subaru SUV parked next to me. The lady who owned it had just pulled in and it was a case of bad timing. I backed out, stopped my car to inspect the damage, and consulted with her. Time to get my insurance information. I got the info out of my car and headed over there without noticing that my driver’s door had closed.

She decided not to submit a claim, since I did about $30 worth of damage to her hub cap and her deductible was higher than that. Besides, there was my car, driver’s door unlocked, car running, backed out and ready to go. Then, I remembered the problem. With a locked passenger door and an inoperative driver’s door handle, my car was effectively locked.

I wandered around a little, looking for a cop or trying to get the Starbucks girl to call a locksmith. “We don’t have a phone book.” Finally, a good Samaritan in a brand new Porsche offered to help. I live about a mile away by road. He drove me home, I sprinted in and got the spare keys I have for my car, and I hope I didn’t make him too late.

Fortunately, as we returned, the owners of the Honda my car was almost completely blocking in returned and I waved my apology and drove my car away. I really should consider a replacement soon. It’s only my luck that I did this so close to home. Next time, I might have to break a window or spend more than the value of my car ($111, according to Edmunds) to get someone to let me back in.

Oops.

Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0

Alison of Bluish Orange hits the nail on the head. She calls it:

i loved you, 2001 internet, because you enabled people to create and communicate in ways that really meant something. i liked reading what my friends thought about their lives and about what was going on in the world. i liked reading what strangers had to say, too, as sometimes those strangers would become friends.

I started “blogging” here on January 1, 2000. (Note for the curious: My archive has a large multi-year gap in it. Never got around to importing it all to WordPress.) Back then, it seemed much easier to meet bloggers. There weren’t that many of us. Going to Fray Days (four through eight) allowed me to meet many of the early A Listers that I’d been reading, including Derek Powazek, the nicest most positive guy I’ve ever met. Many of them had heard of me, some of them even read my ridiculous little site. The blogosphere was a much tighter knit place back then.

I don’t think everyone should go away or anything. But, I really miss the novelty of it all, the thought that someone out there gave a crap about what I had to say, the notion that my stupid party reviews and other minutia of my life would be of interest to any other human on this planet.

I miss those days like I occasionally miss college. I don’t miss 4 hours a day of practice. I don’t miss getting low grades in lots of different subjects. I do miss having a staggeringly large population of delicious strangers to crush on constantly.

Maybe that’s what I miss about the web in 2007. The ability to find something nifty, something unexpected, a plethora of delicious strange writers to give me someone to relate to and wonder about.

Yahoo! Go

Recently, I downloaded Yahoo! Go after seeing it on a friend’s Pearl. It is really, really sexy.

Here’s what I like.

1. Flickr integration: I can see my contacts and their latest photos.
2. Weather: The ability to set multiple locations is really cool. The interface is beautiful and the content is fast.
3. Local & Maps: The “Find Nearby”, “Driving Directions”, and “Traffic Watch” are fun to play with and the Traffic Watch is surprisingly useful, especially here in the Silicon Valley. I can plot and save routes. I can also get timely information about conditions on area roads and freeways. Talk about a timesaver.
4. Yahoo! oneSearch: Integrating the Calendar and Address Book with Search is nifty.
5. Overall look and feel: The user interface in Yahoo! Go is beautiful, probably one of the most adorably cute user interfaces I’ve seen on the Blackberry Pearl. It just makes you want to use it.

What I think could be improved.

1. Enable SureType: I’m used to using SureType on my Blackberry Pearl. Every application I use allows this kind of input. Yahoo! Go doesn’t. Let me type the way I’m used to typing.
2. News, Sports, Finance, Entertainment: I should be able to switch these icons around and add RSS feeds that I like to these subheaders, even if I swap out the Sports icon for “Web” and Finance for “Music”. At the end of the day, these things are just feeds anyway. With a limit of two items by default and an ability to add “Watchlists” (not so useful for news), there doesn’t seem an easy way to customize the categories, add fields of interest, and delete the stuff I could care less about.
3. Calendar integration with Upcoming: This would kick more ass than Jackie Chan. Having a list of events my friends are going to available on the fly would be great.

Overall, I really dig Yahoo! Go. It’s a nice piece of work.

Stupid Job Post of the Year

Okay, I understand if your company doesn’t have a big budget. These things happen. But, there’s such a thing as idiocy.

Look what I found on craigslist!

$12/hr + benefits. You just have to know MySQL, PHP, AJAX, LAMP/WAMP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. They’ll smile on you even bigger if you know C++, Flash, Photoshop, PHP-PDF Conversions (heh), XHTML, XML, and “WEB 2.0”.

That’s $24,000 a year, folks. So nice of a company in Fremont, which is right on the edge of the Silicon Valley, to be so pants-shittingly generous. Hey, TEMCo, you might want to do a little research about what the kind of laundry list you’ve posted warrants in the real world. It ain’t a dozen an hour, sweet cheeks.

Hooptie Grumbles

Today, I took my car into the shop. Last week, my driver’s side door handle stopped working. Having gotten spanked at DMV on Friday, I took the car into the shop to see what a new door handle was going to cost.

After disassembling my door, the mechanic at my local shop told me, at first, that the new handle would be $55 plus labor. The local Chevy dealer (my car is such a beast) would have ordered the part, slapped on the new door handle, and let me drive it home only to find it not working. This mechanic double-checked the inside of the door and determined that the door latch would have to be replaced, too. Parts: $300. This mechanic gets extra points for being far more thorough.

Many of you have ridden in my car. I drive a purple (yeah, about the same color as my header) 1994 Chevy Cavalier Z24. After today’s news, the list of things that need repaired on the car are extensive. Off the top of my head:

1. Driver’s side door latch and handle.
2. Driver’s side window motor (it takes about half an hour to roll the window up, an inch at a time with 40 second pauses between each inch).
3. Passenger side mirror (I hate it when they put columns in parking garages).
4. Main intake manifold (so says the dealer).
5. Starboard (heh) front axle bearing.
6. Turn signal flasher (after the fuckers at the local Chevy dealer replaced it three times, soaking me with a large bill each subsequent time).

Each item on this list will cost $300 to repair, at minimum. According to Edmunds.com, in mint condition, my car is worth about $1500. In the condition it’s currently in, it’s worth about $500. Continuing to pour money to constantly repair a $500 car is stupid. It’s time to find something new. I’ve driven the Z24 130,000 miles over the 11 years I’ve owned it.

I think the easiest course of action will be to donate the car. I’ll probably get a tax write-off worth more than what I’d get if I sold the car. What charities do we like?

What I’ve Been Waiting For

Google has done it again with a subtle little change to their Maps. You can now drag and drop route corrections on the fly. I’ve been waiting for something like this for quite a few years. It works spectacularly, although it remains to be seen how many of these intermediate drag and drop points are possible in one route.

Lifehacker has the scoop. Special nod to Oz for the four eleven.

Note: It looks like the routing is limited to 25 points. Origin, 23 intermediaries, and destination.

Test-Only Smog Stations

In 2003, the State of California passed legislation that allowed for test-only emissions certification shops. Apparently, there had been a rash of shops that were failing motorists in order to be able to charge them for emissions repairs. Having test-only shops was a good idea, because then the shop owner didn’t have a vested interest in the failure of their customers.

My plates expire in June. This means that today was the big day to go get a smog test on my embarrassingly busted ass hooptie. Remembering that I received a notification that my smog had to be conducted at a test-only station, I drove around for a while looking for a smog station.

1. Station 1, Sunnyvale: Normal service station. Smog test: $29.99 + paperless transfer fee ($2.50). Their unit was out of service, though.
2. Station 2, Sunnyvale: Normal service station. Smog test: $24.95 + paperless transfer fee. Sorry. I need test-only.
3. Station 3, Sunnyvale: Test-only. Smog: $69.99 + DMV fee ($8.95) + paperless transfer fee. Moving on.
4. Station 4, Mountain View: Test-only. Smog: $71.99 + DMV fee + paperless transfer fee + sitting in our waiting room fee + bullshit added tax (bend over, Apollo). Next.
5. Station 5, Mountain View: Test-only. Smog: $64.99 + about $12 in fees.
6. Station 6, Mountain View: Test-only. Smog: $51.99 + fees. Total: $62.50. Screw it, I’m tired of driving around town looking for one place that charges similar rates as a service station.

Service station owners: I don’t care why you feel the need to charge three times as much for a smog as a place that can fix my car if something’s wrong. Don’t tell me about how I’m not educated about my smog needs as you gleefully and mercilessly poon me for your fist full of cash. This kind of highway robbery should be a felony.

No wonder traditional service station owners are pissed. I’m pissed, too.

Google Mobile

The other day, I noticed that Google Maps was available for mobile devices, particularly my Pearl. So, a week ago, I installed the suite of Google applications (particularly after blowing it with a search via the Google website in my mobile browser).

Before, I had installed the gmail application I found online and it worked just fine. Then, I installed the Google Services pack and now nothing works. So, I’m currently in the process of deleting Google Services and attempting to reinstall the applications one by one.

• Gmail: Seems to work like it did before I installed the whole suite of Google Services applications.
• Google Maps: Seemed to install fine. I like the fact that zoom/pan levels are handled with a key command, instead of clicking the menu button and then trying to maneuver the trackball just enough. My trackball is dirty. I can move any direction, except right.
• Google News: I didn’t really need this, but I installed it anyway. After deleting Google Services, I chose not to install this one.
• Google Search: This really only opened Google in my mobile browser. Specific application not installed.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the misfortune of having to reboot my phone with a battery removal just to read Gmail. This is a deal breaker. I was going to post a big rant about that, but now I’m trying reinstalling all the pieces I need individually.