Robot Monkeys

I have this fascination with Scott Banister. “Fascination” is too strong of a word for it, so I guess I should say “reoccurring curiosity” about Scott Banister.

I knew Scott Banister. Ryan introduced me to him early freshman year of college. He’s smart. He was big in the ACM, and founded the WebMonkeys sig there. Sophomore year he apparently quit bathing, but that’s something else.

Freshman or sophomore year he created Submit-It, a perl script and really crappy web form that submitted a url to every search engine known at the time. Pretty much Yahoo, Excite, and Altavista. (This was back in 1994 or 1995.)

Either the middle or the end of his sophomore year he dropped out and moved to The Valley.

He sold Submit-It to Link Exchange. Probably made a ton of cash.

He then went on to create Iron Port, take up bathing, but not shaving or cutting his hair. (I’m a hypocrite I know.)

He sold that to Cisco for $830 million in 2007.

I guess in a sense I compare myself to him. I don’t know why. Our lives are incredibly different, but I guess since I met him at 18, and he disappeared from my daily life at 19, it’s a bit odd, but it is what it is. Now in my defense, I don’t go google stalking him, it’s just that his name shows up in news articles I read. *sigh*

So what’s Scott Banister up to now?

Well he’s married to a girl named “Cyan,” but that’s not very interesting. So I’ll just say, in a word: Porn.

So CNN publishes an article about the Great Tomato Scare of 2008 (If anyone wants to use that, you owe me a buck.), and the headline completely misrepresents the article. The headline: “Health Officials Question Whether Tomatoes Behind Outbreak“. And what’s the quote from the story hightlights?
“FDA: ‘There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes.’” So where’s the source of the fear?

“Produce investigations are very difficult, because a lot of times, vegetables are eaten all together,” said Dr. Patricia Griffin, chief of the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. That makes it hard to trace back any one item to a source of contamination, she added. “We continue to keep an open mind about the possible source of this outbreak, as does FDA.”

Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, agreed. “There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes,” but the agency is also “looking into other ingredients,” he said.

So you have the scientists basically saying, “While we can’t be 100% sure it’s not from the tomatoes, we really really think it is.” Which of course means the take away is, “Scientists Dumbfounded!”

Now Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor says that I should attribute this to pure laziness, and that’s probably true. After all, the one story from Billy’s journalism classes is the time the TA or prof tried to explain the concept of a quorum using the example of “one more after the half.” Apparently this was too much more most of the students who would calculate the number required for a quorum as simply half, or one less than half. At least one proclaiming, “We’re not math majors!”

The future of American journalism at its finest.

However, I can’t help but think that this CNN headline is more indicative of American attitudes towards science. Nothing is known for certain, so nothing is known, and therefore everything is equally likely.
I believe this attitude comes from the poor state of math and science education in this country, and the need for “fair and balanced” coverage.

So I’m standing in this lounge thing at MSR when something outside catches my eye. So I casually stroll over to the window and what do I see?

I was wrong.

t-jokore(a)microsoft.com

I want nice RSS reader. I’ve wanted one for a while now. I even made one. It’s pretty cool, for being a ticker. Only there’s one catch. It’s a GNOME applet.

Fuck.

You can’t install a GNOME applet locally. You have to install it in /usr, which makes it absolutely useless unless you’re the sysadmin. God damn it. There’s just no good reason to do that. That’s just laziness. Unix has always been (mostly) agnostic, and then here comes GNOME botching things up as usual.

I really don’t want to have to use something Tickershock, since I already have something better. Well maybe I’ll give in.

Linux, can still blow me

The Kid from Buffalo, Tim Russert, is eating barbeque chicken wings with Alexander Hamilton now.

from CNN

The kingdom will work to ensure there will be no “unwarranted and unnatural oil price hikes that could affect international economies, especially those of developing countries,” said [Information and Culture Minister Iyad] Madani.

There’s just something bizarre about a cartel protecting us from high prices. That’s not what cartels do. Cartels maintain a price as high as possible that demand doesn’t appreciably suffer.

This means that the price of oil has become high enough that its beginning to effect the world economy, leading to inflation and decreased demand. This talk about cutbacks is what’s really got OPEC moving. Not the price itself. So they’re going to increase supply just enough to bring the price back down back down to it’s “natural” (read, artificially maintained) price.

Bank of America’s website lets you download statements in a variety of formats, including Quicken and “Printable text” and “Excel”. However, the “Excel” format isn’t Excel at all. It’s CSV. And just to make things just a bit more ironic, Excel 2004 for the Mac (aka Excel 11) won’t open file named stmt.csv. (Yes, that’s really the name of the file.)

I’ve discovered that if I drink a large iced latte on an empty stomach the caffeine really effects me. Usually caffeine doesn’t do anything, but now I’m really jazzed. I’ve got the caffeine jitters.

It’s kind of interesting. It’s a lot like an anxiety attack, but without the thoughts of going crazy. Well maybe there just a few crazy thoughts. Mostly jitters. I feel like a race car on ice. My wheels are spinning at a fantastic speed, but I’m barely moving.

Strange.

Uhura comes in Red Rock with a tethered hands free while carrying the phone in his hand.

Good thing he splurged.