Tired of Incompetent Government Harassment

I am getting tired of all the reported instances of police officer harassment of people going about their own business. If police officers, federal law enforcement officers... don't put a stop to these repeated ridicules actions by their co-workers they are going to deal with having lost the respect for their positions. On the other hand in this case it provided an example that legislators do actually have a role in society (little used to serve as a check on unrestrained police powers) thanks to Congressman Rick Boucher for putting a stop to the abuse in this instance. Abuse of power by National Park Service police:

I pulled off the road ahead of the second NPS patrol car, grabbed my camera and headed back to take a photo of the police action. As I approached, the Park Service officer wheeled around and pointed at me.

"Sir, if you raise that camera to take a photograph I will place you under arrest," he barked. I identified myself as a working journalist on assignment and said I was simply covering a news event.

"Sir," he retorted, "this is U.S. government property and under the provisions of the USA Patriot Act you cannot take photographs of official government activity without authorization. Put your camera down now!"
...
he National Park Service recalled their CIT unit and ordered them back to Asheville after Congressman Rick Boucher, who represents the area, intervened on behalf of the festival. Boucher's office received numerous calls of complaints about the NPS police activity on Thursday and Friday and called the director of the National Park Service. Security for the remaining two days of the festival was turned over to the Virginia State Police who patrolled the Parkway but did not harass festival attendees.

It is critical to use police force in a responsible way. Authority given to restrict the rights of others is not something that a society can afford to leave in the hands of people that abuse that authority.

Related: Failure to Address Systemic SWAT Raid Failures - The Photographer’s Right

7 Clever Google Tricks Worth Knowing

There are lots of these list of tips. Some are good some are not. Here is one with some good ideas: 7 Clever Google Tricks Worth Knowing:

Find the Face Behind the Result... appending the code &imgtype=face to the end of the URL address after you perform a standard Google Image search.
...
Google + Social Media Sites = Quality Free Stuff... Examples: site:reddit.com free "wordpress templates"

Alexa for Firefox

Alexa toolbar for Firefox - I can't really understand why it took Alexa so long but they finally have a toolbar for Firefox users. Alexa is far from perfect but it provides the best data available for free (so even though the data is highly questionable it is used to gage the traffic to sites).

curiouscat.com report on Alexa

Curious Cat blog report on Alexa

Related: Compete Toolbar

Share a virtual Desktop Between Two Computers

Matt Cutts details how to share a virtual desktop between two different computers using Synergy.

Do you wish you could cut and paste between computers? Now you can! ... It's as if all your computers shared a single clipboard (and separate primary selection for you X11 users). It even converts newlines to each computer's native form so cut and paste between different operating systems works seamlessly. And it does it all in Unicode so any text can be copied.
...
Synergy also understands multiple screens attached to the same computer.

Looks very cool.

The Economic Benefits of Walkable Communities

The Economic Benefits of Walkable Communities. Examples of walkable design leading to higher property values, increased private investment, tourism, etc.. This is an example of positive externalities and the economic gain possible to all through proper regulation.

Related: Urban Planning - Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars - Car-free zones

Data on You

Interesting site: Attentiontrust to look at later.

Grandcentral and Spock

Grandcentral is a personal phone management system that manages voicemail messages, lets you listen to voicemail messages while they are being left, switch an active call from your cell to your landline phone (or the reverse), have different callers routed to different phones, have calls routed to different phones depending on the time of day, filter to weed out unwanted telemarketer calls automatically... Google bought the company yesterday

Spock helps users find and discover people. Over one hundred million people already indexed and millions are added every day.

Both of these sites are in invitation only beta release. Please let me know if you are interested in an invitation by adding a comment.

The First Blogger

According to Technorati (see image above) I last updated the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog sometime during 1970. I think this makes me the first blogger :-)

The Economist Evaluates Recycling

The truth about recycling:

Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain's recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain's annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads. Similarly, America's Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country's carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock.

Company Culture

via: Crunch Notes "Whatever company this is, they should use this as one of their primary recruiting tools." It certainly does show part of the culture of the company. The company? Connected Ventures, which is now part of InterActive Corp. Specifically, these are the teams from Vimeo, CollegeHumor, and Busted Tees.

Dofollow Trackbacks Plugin

Dofollow Trackbacks Plugin - new wordpress plugin that will remove nofollow attribute from trackback comments (rather than just removing the nofollow attribute from all comments). Thus those that link to your blog and are approved for display by you will have an actual link to their blog not a nofollow link. For more info see the link and Dofollow on bumpZee.

Flag Pie Charts

Flags by Colours - pie charts of country flag colors.

Seperation of Church and State

An easy way to determine whether separation of Church and State exists in a particular instance is to substitute religions that are not approved by whoever proposes some item that might blur the line for whatever religion they want to promote. This post provides a great example:

Backpack Blowback: Religious Right Activists Want Preferential Treatment From Public School Forum They Created

Outsmart Your Toddler

Outsmart Your Toddler: 5 tricks for getting yours to do what you want

Act like an idiot

"Even the most defiant toddler will take pity on us if we seem like total incompetents," says Harvey Karp, M.D., author of the DVD and book "The Happiest Toddler on the Block." The trick is to convince your child that you should be helped, not resisted:
...
Be wrong. Next time you foresee a battle getting your toddler in the stroller, try squeezing into it yourself. Chances are good she'll announce, "That's mine!" Finally her possessive streak is good for something.

Be incompetent. Put your coat on backward and place your shoes on your hands. Say, "I'm ready to go, are you?" She'll laugh, straighten you out, and get her own shoes on for once.

Using Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same Time in Ubuntu

There are several reasons to run multiple FireFox windows that are disconnected (not the same profile). Using the same FireFox profile means all windows are connected so all cookies are set the same for each window - which can be annoying at times (for example having multiple accounts with a web site). Another reason could be to separate extensions onto different profiles (in case they conflict or are slowing down FireFox due to the sheer number of extensions you have).

To create an additional profile in FireFox (using Ubuntu) close FireFox. In terminal type firefox -profilemanger

Use profile manager to create new profiles.

Then create an additional FireFox shortcut.

Next edit the properties of that new shortcut: in the launcher tab update the command field:

firefox -P newprofilename -no-remote

where newprofilename is the name you gave your new profile in the profile manager. I hope this is helpful.

I found the following useful in getting this to work in Ubuntu 7.04 and FireFox 2.0: Use Multiple Firefox Profiles at the Same Time - Geek to Live: Manage multiple Firefox profiles

Tags: ubuntu - FireFox - FireFox profiles

Consumer Reports

I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports online. I can't believe they don't even provide simple sorts by obvious criteria. I want a cordless trimmer. They provide information on the major types of trimmers, one of which is cordless. Do they give me a list of those cordless models? Nope.

They list like 30 models without any indication of which are cordless and which are not. That is really lame for a web site which should be data base driven and give users an easy way to view just what they want. It seems they act like they still are printing everything on paper and you just happen to view it on your computer screen. I guess it isn't quite as bad as one pdf for each magazine and you just read from the pdf but it isn't much better.

They also don't let you click on the model and get more information. They really should do a much much better job of making the material effective over the internet.

Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars

Designing Cities for People, Rather than Cars (sadly they broke the link so I removed it, why can't people figure out that breaking urls is a very bad idea):

Amsterdam only 40 percent of workers commute by car; 35 percent bike or walk, while 25 percent use public transit. Copenhagen’s commuting patterns are almost identical to Amsterdam’s. In Paris, just under half of commuters rely on cars. Even though these European cities are older, with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.

Not surprisingly, car-dependent cities have more congestion and less mobility than those that offer a wider range of commuting options. The very vehicle whose great promise was personal mobility is in fact virtually immobilizing entire urban populations, making it difficult for rich and poor alike to move about.

Fix your mom's computer for mother's day

Great marketing (and a cool product) - Fix your mom's computer for mother's day:

This Sunday is Mother's Day. Why not fix your mom's computer?
...
To make it easy, this Sunday we're making Fog Creek Copilot absolutely free.

No strings attached. Just go to https://www.copilot.com on Sunday, get a free pass, and we'll email your mom a link she can click on to download the helper application. It's really easy. P.S. Same deal applies for Father's Day, June 17.

Copilot provides a very easy way to remotely control another computer - and in this case fix your mom's computer.

More Phone Company Fees

Once again Verizon shows the tendency to charge customers fees at every turn. Any wonder I have no interest in being a customer of them no matter how many junk mailings they send me with marketing claims? Yeah I am going to trust them to clearly disclose all the hidden fees they will charge - not.

Not calling causes a fee:

Verizon last month introduced the $2 fee. It is charged to customers who could dial out for long distance, but don't subscribe to a long-distance service and don't make long-distance calls. Durham retiree Daniel Bius discovered the $2 charge on his April bill. He says he has no use for Verizon's long-distance calling plan because he makes long-distance calls on his cell phone.

"Even though I don't have a plan with them, they say I still have the ability to make a long-distance call if I ever need to, so I have to pay them $2 a month?" Bius said. "What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to pay them $2 for no reason?"
...
State regulators require phone companies to provide basic local-phone service. The phone companies have to give customers a way out of the new monthly fee -- but they will charge another fee to eliminate the first fee. For instance, if Bius pays a $6.75 charge to have his long-distance access disconnected, Verizon will end the monthly $2 fee, but block his outgoing long-distance calls.

How ridicules, pay us a monthly fee. Or if you don't want to pay us a don't pay the monthly fee fee.

Related: Telephone Savings - Customer Service is Important - Verizon Limits Its "Unlimited" Wireless Broadband Service

Car-free zones

On the rise in American cities: the car-free zone

New York is proposing to shut down perimeter roads of Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park all summer long. Atlanta plans to transform 53 acres of blighted, unused land into new bike-friendly green space. Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas, are planning events to promote car-free days in public parks, most in the hope that the idea will become permanent or extend for months.

Cities across America are increasingly declaring that parks are for people, not cars, ... and closing roads within parks is one result of that," says Ben Welle with The Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, in Washington.