IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
Betsy Mason, at Wired's MapLab blog writes:
This map shows the paths of every hurricane and cyclone detected since 1842. Nearly 12,000 tropical cyclones have been tracked and recorded, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps them all in a single database. Long-term datasets can be really interesting and scientifically valuable, and this one is undoubtedly both. The map is fascinating. Check it out.
And now I would like to take some time out from my normal posts about technology, politics, and Cool Stuff I Find On The Internet™ to let you know about my wife's wonderful new website she just re-launched over on Shopify.
As you may or may not know, my wife runs a side business on her own (with minimum lifting of heavy objects help from me) in which she makes homemade soap of various types and sells at local markets. Artisanal, you might even say. Early on, she began hosting via Etsy but Esty's high fees drove her off to her own site, which I helped start on WordPress. She later found a designer to help her make it look a lot better and we were using a plugin called WooCommerce to host our own e-commmerce solution. Due to the clunkiness of this solution, and some of the fees that the payment provider that we had to use with WooCommerce, Steffanie decided she wanted to try out Shopify. With minimum help from me, over the past few weeks she has slowly migrated over and a few days ago she relaunched there.
So far I've been very impressed with the backend dashboard of Shopify and how simple it is, especially for a non-developer/designer type to use. Migrating her color scheme/theme over was very simple and it required minimal effort on my part to solve the one or two technical issues she came across (CSS tweaks ).
So far the experience has been great. Their themes are responsive and look equally great on mobile as well as desktop browsers. If you get a chance, and have a pressing need for bar soap (or other types) check out OldTownSuds.com.
Alex Altman and Zeke Miller writing for Time's Swampland:
In 2007, Barack Obama was asked when Presidents have the authority to launch a military strike without congressional authorization. He had a precise answer at the ready. “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat,” Obama told the Boston Globe. While I fully support this President's actions with regards to social policy, I am continually disappointed by his firm Republicans beliefs when it comes to national security, civil liberties and foreign policy.
This is the sort of damage that can be done to your organization when you let a "sales guy" be the CEO. David Auerbach, at Slate writes:
The stack rank was harmful. It served as an incentive not to join high-quality groups, because you’d be that much more likely to fall low in the stack rank. Better to join a weak group where you’d be the star, and then coast. Maybe the executives thought this would help strong people lift up weak teams. It never worked that way. More often, it just encouraged people to backstab their co-workers, since their loss entailed your profit. The entire performance review process at Microsoft encouraged horrendous office politics that enabled backstabbers to profit at the expense of the companies performance. The stack rank was a zero-sum game—one person could only excel by the amount that others were penalized. And it was applied at every level of the organization. Even if you were in a group of three high performers, it was very likely that one of you would be graded Above Average, one Average, and one Below Average. Unless your manager was a prick or an idiot or both, the ordering would reflect your relative skills, but that never came as too much comfort to the hard-working schlub who just wasn’t as good as the other two. Quotas. When review time came, and programmers would fill out a short self-assessment talking about their achievements, strengths, and weaknesses, only some of them knew that their ratings had been more or less already foreordained at the stack rank. The ones who knew could sometimes be recognized by their flip comments on their performance reviews, like the hot-tempered guy who wrote every year in “Areas to Improve,” “I will try to be less of an asshole.” (That guy is awesome). This sort of organizational dissembling skews your psyche. After I left Microsoft, I was left with lingering paranoia for months, always wondering about the agendas of those around me, skeptical that what I was being told was the real story. I didn’t realize until the nonstacked performance review time at my new job that I’d become so wary. At the time—inside Microsoft—it just seemed the only logical way to be. So ex-Microsoft employees are likely to be temporarily bad employees at other companies they work at until they realize the rest of the world doesn't work like the horror that is working within the Microsoft organization? Yikes.
Sarah Kliff, at The Washington Post's Wonkblog writes:
To test out this theory, a team of psychologists asked study participants how they felt about a number of mundane and unrelated subjects that included (but was not limited to) architecture, health care, crossword puzzles, taxidermy and Japan. They wanted to figure out if people tended to like or dislike things in general. This was dubbed the individual’s dispositional attitude or, more simply put, checked for whether they were a hater who pretty much hates on everything that comes across their path. Haters are gonna hate.
This is fantastic. I am floored. I cannot begin to express how much I love this. C-ville.com has produced a New York Times 'Snowfall' style local investigative piece covering a contentious local battle over a road project in central Virginia around Charlottesville. This got my attention because I frequently drive this route to go home and visit family and hate driving through this section of Charlottesville on 29 due to how much it slows me down (stoplights, congested traffic, etc). I had no idea that there was a 30 year old issue surrounding this section of road, a proposal to make a bypass around it and huge local political fight over it.
The Road
Albemarle County's three-decade fight over the Western Bypass isn't over yet
Late on the night of Wednesday, June 8, 2011, a few prominent Albemarle County real estate developers and other vocal supporters of the long-stalled plan to build a Route 29 bypass around Charlottesville strolled into Lane Auditorium at the tail end of a marathon meeting of the Board of Supervisors…. I would love to credit whomever reported on this and developed the story from a code sense. C-ville just credits its writers so it looks as if their whole news division contributed. Shockingly well produced.
Update: I've now learned that while C-ville handled all the reporting, their code monkeys appear to be Vibethink. (Twitter)
Martin Weil, at The Washington Post writes:
The mission will not land on the moon, but it is intended to go into orbit around it. The robotic mission is to collect detailed information about the moon’s thin atmosphere. Sometimes thought to be nonexistent, the lunar atmosphere has been described as extremely tenuous and fragile, but present. According to the space agency, the launch will record many firsts. One will be the first launch beyond Earth orbit from the Virginia facility. Cool.
I need new glasses. My current frames are beat to hell, and I've been using them with various lenses for over ten years now. This, plus the fact that Tiffany Arment and Casey Liss both spoke very highly of their experience with Warby Parker on a recent ad on Accidental Tech Podcast persuaded me to give Warby Parker a shot.
Taking Warby Parker up on their Home Try-On Program offer, I picked out five frames that I thought I'd like and ordered them. The Home Try-On Program is a free service in which they send you five frames, for free. You try them on, and within 5 days, put them back in the same box and drop them off at a nearby UPS store, where Warby Parker ships them back for free. You have nothing to lose, what-so-ever, by trying this. I placed my order on Thursday of last week, and they arrived around noon today. My wife agreed to take 5 quick pictures of me wearing the various frames. What do you think? Which one should I go with? I've written my thoughts about each pair of frames below the corresponding picture.
Webb in "Revolver Black Crystal"
Visually, I liked these a lot. You cannot really tell from this picture, but the frames have a clear backing along the interior edges which make peripheral vision very nice (no dark outline of a frame all around your eyes). These frames fit horribly though. They were too tight on the sides, too loose in the back and kept feeling like they are about to fall off the bridge of my nose. These felt a little more like a rounded rectangle rather than a circle as well, and were a tad narrow in height.
Fillmore in "Revolver Black These felt too tight along most of the stem. From the front they felt wide enough for me but overall I just didn't like the style - mostly the bridge. Because these hugged the side of my head so tightly, they were slightly lifted off the bridge of my nose and overall just did not fit well.
Wiloughby in "Revolver Black
This was my oddball choice. I picked one very square frame just to verify that I wanted round. I thought I wouldn't like them, but had to try them on to be sure. I confirmed my suspicions. I definitely want round frames again. I had a pair of rectangles such as these back in the '90s and grew sick of them after a short while. The lenses are too narrow in height which results in my seeing either the tops or the bottoms of the frames in my view most of the time. This is annoying.
These fit okay. They were a little tight in the middle of the stems but loose towards the back over my ears.
Begley in "Whiskey Tortoise" In the mirror, I felt these were not wide enough from the front. However, these felt too loose - almost as if they were going to fall off. The stems that extend over my ears actually get wider near the back of my head. Too wide. I like the shape and would probably choose these if they were widget from the front but narrower at the back.
Watts in "Sugar Maple" As soon as I put these on I could tell the difference. They fit perfectly, and felt it. These were not too tight or too loose. Also, you cannot tell from the photo, but the stem of each side of the frames curve inwardly, slightly, behind the ear and sort of wrap around the head behind the ear. This gives a comfortable feeling that they will not fall off. The lenses do not feel too large or too small when worn. They seem to be the appropriate width, and overall, I like this pair the most. The more I wear these, the more I like them. They also feel nice when wearing headphones (which I do for 6-12 hours a day.