Or maybe just played the actual song. Remember how google paid $1.6 billion for YouTube and it made TV irrelevant because of how it would be a catalyst for the new social media revolution??? That was sweet!

But boy, oh, boy did I get the message when their bumper abruptly stopped my car hood from going forward! I had a couple thoughts like “I can’t believe I just did that” and “I hope there isn’t damage” (from what I could see, the Explorer seemed fine). But after pulling over I could see that despite the Explorer seeming OK, my hood definitely was not. It’s amazing how much damage I sustained and how little they appeared to.

Anyway - the *good* news is that after calling Progressive and talking it over with my adjuster, I think I’m going to be covered for anything beyond my $250 deductible! Yay! This is especially good news because while I have no real idea how much it’s going to cost to fix my car, I am fairly positive it’s going to be far, far more than that deductible. More updates to come (if I continue to post in my blog, that is).

• Read anything - take a .doc, .pdf, or whatever, email it to your personalized kindle email address, and the infrastructure will convert it to a kindle-friendly format and deliver it to your device.
• Great experience with the store - things worked great for me from the device. My first interaction from a PC trying to buy something for my kindle failed, though. Boo.
• Text-to-speech is really decent - I’m surprised by this, but I think the text-to-speech is much better than I expected and better than any others that I’ve used. TTS has been so awful for so long that I’ve mostly ignored it as a technology, so it’s not too surprising that now that I finally give it a chance again that it sort of works. Example: after I unpacked my kindle, I set it down in the kitchen while I did some chores, cranked the speakers and had it read me the user guide (which comes as a book on the device).
• Super cool mp3 playing - drop mp3’s in the /music folder and then you can play them. This is supposed to be a podcast feature.

That gets me to my question. Now I’m actually kinda interested in getting podcasts and getting them onto my device. How should I do this? I could use Amazon’s service and have them all automagically, wirelessly delivered to my device through Whispernet (the network that you can use forever for free with the Kindle) but then I’m paying for a subscription for that content, and that would just be silly (I’m happy to have my laptop download a podcast and push it to the kindle when it’s plugged in). Do I have to use itunes? Would it even work with my kindle? I might just keep ignoring this - or go look at Juice again which was the last podcast application I used.

More on “You should really go get a Kindle today”

• Integrated web browser - you can point this at Project Gutenberg and get any of their books for free (or wikipedia, etc.)
• Did I mention that document conversion service is cool? You tell the service which email addresses are allowed to send content to your kindle. This prevents spammers from sending a bunch of junk to the device. Also, you can choose to send the content to either [youraddress]@kindle.com or [youraddress]@free.kindle.com. The difference is that the free version won’t sync content unless you plug in the kindle. The pay version has pretty reasonable fees to do this and will deliver the content to the device over Whispernet. You can send a number of files in a *.zip attached to your email and Kindle then charges you something like $0.15/MB (rounded up to the nearest MB) for the conversion and transmission.

I work in exactly this space and the stated goal is just not impressive at all.

# “Downtime” means, for a domain, if there is more than a five percent user error rate. Downtime is measured based on server side error rate.
# “Downtime Period” means, for a domain, a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime. Intermittent Downtime for a period of less than ten minutes will not be counted towards any Downtime Periods.

• they measure this strictly from the server side - hello? Last time I checked I didn’t care if their service was self-aware that it was broken or sending me errors - I cared if I (the client) could not use it.
• they measure downtime as a 5% error rate - this doesn’t give enough granularity to really understand what this means, but I suspect if 4.9% of gmail users are google apps for domains, or if they have segmentation such that no more than 5% of accounts are colocated, they would never hit this threshold for a complete outage of GAFD or a complete outage of a fleet node. 5% is a good number, but without further details, it’s hard to tell if a 5% aggregate is really aggressive or not.
• they don’t care about outages of <10 mintues - what? you can engage an engineer and fix your services in 10 minutes or have systems autorecover in that time, no sweat.

To me, it sounds like they’ve constructed this somewhat to nail MTTR and accelerate that (and the comment in the published response to this event makes that very clear: “Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds”), but but it’s not clear that they care about MTBF at all or that they’re really making more robust systems. The emphasis on recovery is pretty reasonable - things definitely are going to fail and solidly architected services will be designed around the premise that they will fail, will fail frequently, and can recover quickly from those errors. But to say “we’re 99.9% available (measured against outages of 10 minutes or greater as measured on the server)” is really not awesome.

Oh - and on top of the other goals and outage counting shenanigans, they give themselves a 12 hour scheduled downtime buffer. Yawn.

Jim Nicholson, 30, who had worked for more than two years at a Key Bank branch near the Seattle Center, says […] instinct took over when a thin man in a beanie cap, dark clothing and sunglasses pushed a black backpack across the bank counter on Tuesday and demanded money. Nicholson threw the bag to the floor, lunged toward the man and demanded to see a weapon. The man bolted for the door with Nicholson in pursuit.

To cut to the chase, the teller caught the guy, held him until police got there, and lost his job for confronting the robber (Key has a policy of not confronting robbers). The happy ending comes when Nicholson says he understands Key’s policy and seems to have no ill will over the situation, explaining…

he has run after shoplifters while working at other retail jobs. “It’s something I almost look forward to. It’s a thrill and I’m an adrenaline-junkie person. It’s the pursuit”

I’m torn. Is this guy an amazing badass? An idiot? Or a superhuman combination of both?

ARGH! So last night I’m watching an episode of The Wire, Season 3. A funeral scene is featured and in it they play The Body of an American by the Pogues:

I decide to look up the lyrics (what Shane has in songwriting brilliance he more than makes up for in incomprehensibility) and I inadvertently get back a search suggestion which is, in effect “body of an american wire mcnulty funeral”. GAH! Stupid, stupid internet. I don’t know if this is actually how the show will end (so please don’t comment saying so!), but it makes pretty obvious sense, so now I suspect I know what’s waiting for me a season and a half from now.

Am I the only one who’s actually kind of entertained by spam? The evolution of spam has been kind of interesting. Today, I believe that heuristics in any remotely decent email system are good enough that I really feel like spam, as a problem, is pretty much a dead issue. It’s certainly not gone as a phenomenon and I don’t predict that for a very, very long time (as long as I get ads for the local grocery store in the physical mail, I’m sure that the vastly cheaper ads for viagra will keep coming to my inbox) but I almost never have to see spam anymore. There are probably no more than 2-5 spam messages per week that hit my gmail inbox. But when it does, I mark the message as spam and sometimes, like today, I notice that there are 2,000+ spam messages in my spam folder and then I take a peek at what’s in there. In their efforts to try to get past spam filters, there seems to be a lot more creativity to the spam messages now than there were a couple years ago (though I have to confess I don’t pay close attention to this). Anyway - here are some of my favorites, just from the ~30 that showed up on the first screen, and just the subject lines:

• “Support for your boning!”
• “The most advanced PE pill available today”
• “Be super stud de luxe!”
• “The effects of this pilule raise your prick. What else does a man need?”
• “Having a bigger thing in pants is every man▓s dream”
• “No problem in raising wang”
• “Become her passionate lion”

• June 25 Scott Jurek runs Western States in 16:40:45, 27 minutes ahead of second place - and gets his seventh consecutive win at Western States.
• July 11-13 16 days after stepping up to the Western States starting line Scott runs Badwater in 24:36:08, wins the race, finishes nearly 2 hours ahead of second place, and sets the course record.

He’s also a 10 year vegan.

Apparently John Curley is some local news personality, who’s willing to pay thousands of dollars on wheels for his bike, one-upping me in his stuffwhitepeoplelike quotient. All I know is there’s this deal where you can run some upcoming race and if you sign up to beat him, he gets a 3 second handicap on his start and if you *do* beat him, you get a free Brooks technical shirt and get entered in a raffle for $1,000 to go to a charity of your choice at the awards after the race.

He ran the Fremont 5K last Friday and finished in 22:50 after what appears to be about a 2:00 handicap (40 challengers earn a 3 second handicap each for a net of 2 minutes). Seafair has 46 challengers at the moment, which means Planned Parenthood has pretty good odds on getting that $1,000 on race day.