March 29th – Anti-Indy Day

Sorry this post is a few days late, but I was take a few days away from the computer.  

March 29th was a sad anniversary for most in Baltimore that follow football.  March 29th marked the 25th anniversary of the Colts leaving Baltimore and moving to Indianapolis.  Even though I was pretty young at the time, I still can recall the picture of the Mayflower moving vans leaving in the dead of night as the snow fell.  When the team left it took its history and records, and team name with them.  To this day I cannot stand when an Indy game is on and they talk about Indy’s history including Johnny U and the “greatest game every played” like it was their team that did all that.  It was even more frustrating that the NFL was so against Baltimore getting a new team during the expansion years as we were told to go build some museums and forget about a football team by the commissioner.  It also frustrating that it took almost 13 years for the city to get a new team, and we had to unfortunately take another city’s team to do so, but at least the Brown’s got a new team ONE year later, and was able to keep the name, colors and the history of the team in Cleveland.  

The only good thing to come out of the whole move was that the Baltimore became a baseball town for many years to come, and we cheered for Cal, Eddie, Jim Palmer and the likes just as Johnny was cheered for in his playing days.  And even with the team in the rut they currently are in, the city still roots for them, and cannot wait for they day season for it all to come together.

The Baltimore Sun collected many past articles and new articles covering the event.  Click the link below to read more:

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BearingPoint Sold Off In Pieces

Most of you will not care, but my old stomping grounds were sold off to its competitors in little pieces this week.  BearingPoint declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy near the end of February with hopes of restructuring its debt load.  That didn’t happen, so the company was broken off into two parts; Public Service practice was sold to Deloitte, and the Commercial practice was sold to PriceWaterhouse.  The commercial practice was sold for a measly 25 million bucks.  Kinda makes me happy that I jumped ship when I did.  Anyone that is interested, click the link below:

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Headline Of The Week…Maybe The Year

I really don’t think I can add much more, so I will let the headline speak for itself:

“Michigan man accused of performing sex act with car wash vacuum sentenced to 90 days in jail.”

Grind My Gears – Random Rants

I’ve got some more rants to lay down…don’t worry it won’t last long!

Last week my rant was filled with a lot of driving related rants. Well I only have one today:

• Don’t mind me, I cannot read or decipher what shapes look like - I am sure some of you think you are smarter than the engineers that built the roads you drive on, and the ones that determined which road signs go where, but just to make sure that everyone is aware Yield DOES NOT MEAN STOP!  If the person that built the road wanted you to stop at an intersection instead of slowing down to make sure you don’t hit anyone they would have put this big eight sided sign up with the word STOP in big letters…not a triangle with the word yield in it. 

Next rant of the day

• Let me see how few oxygen atoms I can put between me and you – Look I am a pretty laid back person, but if there is one thing that really gets to me is people I don’t know that are up in my personal space.  I cannot stand the people that are like one inch from my back when standing in a line.  I don’t know you, I don’t want you that close, and being that close does not make the line go any faster.  There is one group of people in particular (which I wont get into since its not part of the rant) that cannot seem to grasp the concept that people don’t want unknown people so close to them.  One day I am going to be in a bad mood and due to my twitchy elbow some one might just happen to get one in the face…don’t let that person be you OK?

Final one of the day.  This one has no effect on me, but it just bothers me for some reason.

• The reason that I am eating my food with the wrapper on is because I just put my hands in a big pile of poop – Look I understand there are just some things that make sense to eat with the wrapper on.  Candy bars, and those burritos that will completely fall apart if you don’t keep them on.  In these instances I get it.  But the people that go to McDonald’s and eat a cheeseburger, or a quarter pounder with the wrapper on, or the ones that pack your lunch and eat your sandwich with the zip-lock bag you packed it in surrounding the sandwich…you people need to know – you are really weird.  I have a concept for you…if your hands are so dirty that you cannot touch your food…every eating establishment has a place to wash your hands… so go wash them.  Or if you cannot stomach to go use the bathroom, bring some hand sanitizer.  It’s like you just put your hands in you know what and can’t bare to be near your food.  I have a feeling if your hands are so dirty that whatever wrapper is on your food is probably just as dirty.

That’s all I have this week…you may carry on with your life now

Twitter Vulnerability Out In The Open

There is Twitter vulnerability out there in the wild that is starting to spread.  Its a scripting error that will allow an attacker to post anything they want if you’ve clicked their infected link.  It could be innocuous as posting embarrassing text, or posting to some places that you would not want your followers going to.  Twitter is working on the problem, but does not seem to have the problem under control yet.  The bad code under the link can only be posted to your twitter account by being logged in, so if you are worried about it just make sure to log out of your account once you are done twittering.

5 Quick Ways To Raise Your Metabolism

Doesn’t everyone remember the days that you could eat 20 Oreos and not worry about the 10 pounds you’d gain the next day? The reason that was the case was a growing kid’s metabolism is higher than a middle aged person.  To keep an older person’s metabolism higher there are a few tricks a person can use.  5 of these tricks were in an CNN article this morning:

1. Exercise more: The more you exercise, the more muscle you have, the more calories you need to keep your body operating, and the quicker your body burns calories.  Little known fact – your metabolism stays at a higher level for hours after you exercise. 
2. Work out with weights: As I mentioned above, the more muscle you have, the more calories your body will burn doing every day tasks.
3. Practice portion control: This one is easy, the less you eat, the less weight you put on.  As in PUT THE FORK DOWN!
4. Eat smaller meals more often: This one has always been tough for me.  The premise is if you eat 5 smaller meals instead of the 3 typical meals most people do, your body spends more energy digesting the food, plus keeps you fuller throughout the day so you don’t go run and eat that whole bag of microwave popcorn after lunch.  BTW, making microwave popcorn at work puts you in line for a flogging…it smells up the office for hours!
5. Laugh it off: This one was a new one for me.  They say that laughing throughout the day allows a typical person to burn 10-40 more calories per day.  It’s not much, but if I knew I could lose weight by laughing I’d be watching Family Guy all day!

Review of Apple Event – iPhone/iPod Touch O/S 3.0 Preview

Well the event has now passed, and everyone has had a chance to review what was discussed at yesterday’s event.  Since I don’t own an iPhone, and I use my iPod for little more than music in my car and it’s Version 1 of the device, none of the new features have made me giddy.  I’ll give a quick rundown what was discussed and then give you my thoughts:

• New subscription apps: Now you can subsrcribe to apps and get updates on the fly.  This also will allow developers to find new ways of charging you.  For instance. I can make you pay 5 bucks for the first 10 levels in a game, and when you are done you can pay 5 bucks more for the next 10 levels.  To me it just a way to get more money out of the customer.
• Peer to peer: This sounds like an interesting idea.  Either through wi-fi or bluetooth, users can link up to other users and play multi-player games, or share information (such as contacts).  Since my iPod doesn’t even have bluetooth…I’ll need wi-fi for it to work right.
• Accessories that can talk back to the ipod: Apple is providing the code to allow devices or accessories to talk back to the iPhone.  They showed an example of a glucose meter talking back to the iPhone so it could track your blood screenings.  If some developers find a way to use this correctly, there could be some ingenious things created.
• Embed maps into their applications: Apple has so far prohibited developers from accessing the maps within the iPhone to use in their apps.  That has changed and now developers can use them in their apps.  Should create some decent programs.
• Allow turn by turn directions: This should have been done when the thing first came out with GPS built in.  They can easily take over the GPS market if they do this correctly.
• Push notification:  This was promised last year, but quietly disappeared.  Apple is not going to allow apps to work in the background, they have their servers “push” things out to the devices in order to save battery life.  Good idea in thought, but Apple later said they will provide no up time guarantee on their servers.  So basically don’t rely on the service to work right.  

Then they got into the part of the event which I like to call “Lots of Crap.” This is when they brought developers onto the stage to present what they’ve done.  After seeing “crap” for about 30 minutes I almost gave up.  I got to see the wonderful development of a game called “Touch Pet Dogs Playdate” or what I like to call dog porn, and a game called “Smule.”  To use it in a sentence, I could say “Look I just Smuled on myself.”  After trodding what seemed like 30 people up to talk they got back to business.  Other features they talked about:

• Cut, copy and paste: Again something that should have been on there from the beginning, but I can at least understand the difficulties of getting this to work.  Now people can cut, copy or paste words, pictures to their hearts content.  
• Landscape keyboard for all apps: Landscape keyboard was only available for certain apps, but now is provided to all of them. Especially helpful for note taking and emails.
• MMS: Again something that should have been there on the beginning…since almost every phone out there allows that.  
• Voice memos: If you have a mic…which I don’t.  You can also send voice memos using MMS, so you can avoid calling someone all together…kinda defeats the phone part of the iPhone!
• CalDAV, and ics support (subscription calendars): This will help people without Macs, and who don’t use MobileMe.  Now if MobileMe would just support Exchange I’d really be happy.
• More stocks information: More information so you can see how even more crappy your 401(k) is doing
• Spotlight – Search for everything.  Pretty good idea, if they implement it right.
• Note Sync: Again should have been there out of the gate…nice feature.
• Auto-fill: Could get annoying if they auto-fill the wrong things.  Sometimes Safari gets on my nerves when it does this.
• YouTube accounts: Might as well you-poo accounts, because I have no idea what this is, and they didn’t describe it. I am guessing it will allow you to submit movies under your account, but who knows.
• Stereo Bluetooth: Nice – if you can find accessories that use it.  I want to see the first guy wearing two bluetooth headsets on each ear so I can slap them.  
• WiFi autologin: Again not sure what this means, I guess it will safe your password info if it is protected.  Not a bad idea.
• Anti-phising: Not to be confused with the anti-hunting.

All these features will be available sometime in June (just as they are ready for a new device hint, hint!).  And as always it will be free for iPhone but cost 10 bucks for the iPod.  I could see some people wanting the features, but to me they won’t be getting my 10 bucks.  If Verizon would just come out with the iPhone I’d be set, but no dice on that yet.  Also 1G iPhone users wont be able to use the MMS and the bluetooth features since their tech doesn’t support it.  Sucks for them, but Apple and AT&T want people upgrading to the 3G version, and this might do it.  I give them credit for including these features where most companies would come out with a new phones and leave the others in the dark waiting for the chance to upgrade.  Hopefully one of these days we’ll see a CDMA version, but again not holding my breath.  

What Should the Execs From AIG do? According to the Senator From Iowa…Kill Themselves?!?

Look I cannot stand the people that got us into the mess we are in any more than the next guy.  Pretty much ever facet of my life has been effected. My home’s value, my retirement, my taxes, my raise at work (or lack thereof), the value of my car, the cost of goods in the store, the lack of credit available, the cost of education…and on and on and on.  

My solution?  Take them all somewhere like North Dakota, or the deserts of Nevada, and let them live the rest of their lives, having nothing but the shirts on their backs to survive.  I think most of them really belong in jail, and I could care less what would happen to them while they were there, but if I were a Congressman I don’t think I would say the following publicly:

“I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed. But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide. And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”

I am not even really sure what to say in response to that.  I think he might need to learn how to use a filter and not say what is exactly on his mind…especially if you basically are getting paid to talk (and represent the people from your state).

Mac Tip – Moving Your Mail

I am a Mac fan.  I converted to an iMac back in 2005, and I haven’t looked back.  My problem?  I am by no means a Mac expert.  Using PCs/Windows while I grew up gave me the opportunity to learn it inside and out. I grew up knowing how to use the DOS prompt, and I grew up knowing how Windows worked (even though I was still scared to get into the Registry).  I cannot say the same for my beloved Mac.  I don’t know how to use the Terminal, I don’t know the numerous number of shortcuts, or productivity enhancers that is built into Mac O/S X.  I use it to do what I need to do, and I go on with my life.  The biggest reason I love my Mac is its simplicity, and I don’t have to worry about every email I open or every file I download containing a virus.  I am kinda stuck in the middle…I could just as easily go back to Windows for my next computer, or I could stay with a Mac…either way I’d be fine.

OK – why did I just go on like that? There are some things on the Mac that I want to be more comfortable with, but just am not knowledgeable enough to deal with (yet).  One of those is the way the mail application handles your mail.  With Outlook, if I ever needed to backup all my mail it was easy, just backup your .pst file and be on your way.  With Mail on a Mac, if I need to backup and start over I wouldn’t know where to start.  So I thought I would post this article from MacWorld which explains the process if anyone else out there is in the same boat as me.  If not, and I am the only one out there, at least I’ll have a place to search when I need to do it in the future  

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Grind My Gears – St. Patrick’s Day

This isn’t really something that really grinds my gears per se, but it falls under a rant so I figured I’d label it as such.  I find it odd that this holiday is so widely celebrated in the U.S.  We don’t live in Ireland, and it’s estimated that less than 12 percent of the U.S. have Irish roots.  So for you 12 percent go party…for the other 88 percent…it’s Tuesday – go to work!

I’ve never really gotten into St. Patrick’s Day.  Green beer…well the green dye makes my beer taste weird so I rather just have regular beer.  I don’t like getting pinched for not wearing green.  The last time someone pinched me, I didn’t realize it was St. Patrick’s Day so I was close to slapping them. So the only reason I am wearing green today is because I don’t want to get pinched and get arrested for assault and battery.

In Ireland, March 17th was a celebration of planting the potato harvest. It wasn’t to celebrate beer.  Also did you know that before the 1970s, all the bars in Ireland were closed on St. Patrick’s Day?  My question then is how did it turn into a drink all day fest?  I don’t know how, but I bet it had to do with easing the pain of disco music.