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What I want from a weather widget and why I'm not getting it!

My new Motorola Droid is one week old. Happy birthday!

I want a widget on my homescreen that tells me the current conditions. It should show the temperature in Fahrenheit, and the icon should change from sunny to cloudy to rain to snow.

When I tap the icon I would like for it to quickly tell me what the rest of the day will be like: Will it rain? Will temperatures be hot, or cold? Humidity is also important. Just show me conditions and temperature range for the day! In other words, I just need to know what to wear.

I downloaded two weather widgets: (1) the Weather Channel, and (2) Weather Widget - Free (by Android Apps).

The first one is overkill. It several screens of detailed reports (now, hourly, 36 hour, 10 day, video, and maps!). But when I tap the widget it does not show today's temperature range. It's got too many bells and whistles which drain the battery.

The second app is very simple but it lacks one important ingredient: The icon does not change to show current conditions! You must tap the icon to get that information. Humidity would also be a plus.

Equilateral triangle

§ The area is A=a^2\frac{\sqrt{3}}{4}

§

§ The perimeter is p=3a\,\!

§ The radius of the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumscribed_circle>
circumscribed circle is R=a\frac{\sqrt{3}}{3}

§ The radius of the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscribed_circle>
inscribed circle is r=a\frac{\sqrt{3}}{6}

§ And the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_(triangle)> altitude is
h=a\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}.

Re: Radius of a Circumcircle of an Equilateral Triangle

OL-301: The Strange Behavior of Quicken for Mac and How I Got It Fixed

I'm a PC; my girlfriend is a Mac. Being a girl, her finances are a mess. I offered to help her get set up on Quicken, and followed through by installing Quicken 2007 for Mac on her OS X 10.3.

 

THE PROBLEM:

I use Quicken 2009 on my PC for my finances. Both of us have our checking accounts and credit cards at Chase. When I tried setting up her automatic downloads from Chase I kept getting an error saying OL-301. So I began to tinker... First, I tried downloading her banking info on my PC, and it work fine without any problems. I was sure this is a Mac issue. Next, I tried downloading MY banking info onto her Mac, and that worked fine too! I was sure at this point that it must be an issue with Chase.

 

I got on the phone with Chase, and the rep (with a filipino accent, yes, it was after 11pm ET) told me to go into chase.com and click on activate quicken. I did that, and it gave me two choices: A) Manually download the transactions from the web and import to quicken, or B) Pay $9.99 a month for automatic download.

 

I immediately began to kick and scream telling them that I can download my transactions for free, so there's no reason my girlfriend shouldn't be able to do the same! After a hold period the rep came back and explained that I had initially set up my online access with my credit card which offers free downloads, but my girlfriend set up her online access with her checking account. She transferred me to Chase credit cards services to pass the buck along. By now my girlfriend went to bed and I could not get her to verify her info on the phone so I hung up.

 

HOW I FIXED IT

1) I logged onto chase.com and click on "Display/Hide accounts". I clicked on "hide" for all accounts other than credit card accounts, and clicked the "show/hide" button to save the changes.

2) I clicked on the top bar on "Customer Center" and scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked on the link "Activate money, quicken, etc." and activated (this time it just activated without the $9.99/month).

3) I went back "Display/Hide accounts" from step 1, and put back the checking account and money market account to "show".

4) I went back to quicken and hit create account, put in the user ID and password, and it worked!!

 

LESSONS LEARNED

1) There doesn't seem to be any logical consistencies to the behavior of IT departments of online banking.

2) Customer service reps and tech support from larger companies are useless, but they do clue you in a bit about the problem which can sometimes help you go fix it yourself. (This lesson was actually learned long ago with Verizon tech support for my Blackberry...).

 

The future of phone numbers

You buy your computer from Dell, your Internet access from Verizon, and your e-mail address from Google (at a 100% discount off the MSRP!). So why is it that when you buy a cellular phone you get the phone number, the smartphone, and the subscription service from the same company, Verizon?

Google has recently rolled out a new service called Google Voice. The service gives you a free phone number that will ring on any or all phones that you set it to ring. You can use the number to send and receive text messages, and you can listen to your voicemail online. This is the greatest step in the direction of number portability since the 2003 federal court ruling that forces carriers to let consumers take their numbers with them when they switch carriers. While the ruling did break the hold carriers had on phone numbers, consumers who cancel service completely without switching to another carrier will lose their phone number for good.

I like to think of phone numbers as identification codes that should be issued for free like e-mail addresses. With the convergence of cellular phones, VoIP phones, and e-mail, I see phone numbers becoming passe, replaced by e-mail addresses. Yes, in order to make a call someone you will enter their e-mail address, not a 10-digit phone number, or you will just simply shortcut the process by pulling up their name in your address book.

In 5 years from now, or sooner, when you buy a cellular phone you will be asked, "Would you like a phone number with that?".

More proof the MTA of New York City is run by dumb, unintuitive nitwits

Every Subway car has a sign that says the train's destination, and the train's origin - in that order. It does not, however, say which is the origin, and which is the destination, leaving the commuter to guess on their own. Simply adding the words "to" and "from" would mean a world of a difference.

I had thought the newer trains with the better lighting and clear-sounding announcements would have fixed this. But no, just the same of the old.

One can easily argue that the sign above on the platform is sufficient. But anyone who has been in New York for more than a week can tell you that trains frequently change routes, which is another point of grievance by subway riders.

Is it so costly to add to short words, "to" and "from" to the sign? Perhaps it is too taxing on a non-thinking mind.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Combinations with Repetition - A Shortcut

You may have had a math problem similar to this one:

Let us say there are five flavors of ice cream: banana, chocolate, lemon, strawberry and vanilla. You can have three scoops. How many variations will there be?

The solution your math teacher will give you lies in the following formula:






Where n is the 5 available flavors, and r is the 3 scoops you can have. (You should already know what a factorial (!) is. If you don't, go read up on it before you continue reading this. Don't worry, this blog won't go away...).

So the answer is 35.

But what if there were 100 ice cream choices instead of 5, and you had only 2 minutes to answer the question? It would take forever to find the factorials for the numerator and denominator.

The shortcut is to multiply only 3 numbers of the numerator, and 3 of the denominator (representing the three r choices), since the numerator and denominator cancel out much of the work automaticaly.

For example, instead of





You can cancel out half the equation,




leaving you with:





So if there were 100 ice cream choices, I would first figure out the numerator (n + r - 1) as
100 + 3 - 1 = 102
Then 102 x 101 x 100 = 1,030,200 as the numerator.
And 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 as my denominator



If you'd like to try other problems and check your answers, visit Casio's online calculator.

NEW QUARTER'S EVE

I don't get the whole hype about New Year's Eve. So what if the calendar changes to a new year number? It's just another day in the natural world.

I just finished listening to my co-worker whine about who she will or will not invite to her party, and how her best friend will not come unless his girlfriend's college friend and her boyfriend will be invited. Everyone wants all their friends to come to their party, but it's obvious that your friends have more than just you as a friend. When there are parties going on everywhere at the same time, it is impossible to have all your friends at one party. There's no reason to be so upset about it...

Has it ever occurred to them that some people have a different fiscal year? What about the people who have to work on New Year's Eve? How are they supposed to feel?

All this led me to think that New Year's Eve should be staggered into different times so that people can participate in more than one party. I came up with the idea of NEW QUARTER'S EVE. Instead of one party to usher in one month of the year (really, is January any more significant than October?), we should have a party for every quarter at midnight of April, July, and October 1st, each with equal importance.

Education Costs: A Hidden Tax on the Middle Class

Most people don't realize what their tax burden actually is. This one is about the non-deductibility of your education expenses.

Most middle class employees in the United States work in jobs that require a post high school degree. These degrees are quite expensive, but we are willing to pay it anyway. We believe that the expense will pay off during our career, just the way and entrepreneur sinks money into a new business expecting the investment to pay off. Except that the entrepreneur's investment is fully deductible for income tax purposes, but your education expenses are not!

You may only deduct the interest portion of your education loans IF your income is below $50,000-60,000. The principle is deductible only up to ($4,000) only in the year it is paid (or borrowed). Most students have little to no income during those years, so the deduction is lost. You cannot "capitalize" and "amortize" the cost in future years the way an entrepreneur or a business does.

This is another example of the inevitable inequities that arise when government chooses to tax people based on income.

Fuck the wounded marine - I just got an e-mail!

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., reads her Blackberry as she talks with wounded Marine Lance Corp. Matt Bradford during the rededication ceremony of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2008.

(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Gmail app for Blackberry

I love this app - it makes my email very manageable. However, there are two features missing that I hope Google will include in their next version of Gmail for Mobile:

1. The ability to copy and paste text from an email.

2. The ability to save/download attachments to the phone's memory.

To ask Google to add this feature, use this link.

Yahoo: The paint is peeling

So I'm checking out my "My Yahoo!" page this morning, and I see a headline that says it was added 27 minutes ago(!) The title: "Republican National Convention". Huh? Are they falling asleep on the job at yahoo? More like a 4-month hibernation!

MTA in NYC - Letter to the mayor

I sent this letter to the mayor today using the "contact the mayor" page on NYC's website.

"Form: Customer Comment
Topic: TRANSPORT
Name: [withheld]
Street Address: [withheld]
City, State Zip: [withheld]
Country: United States
Email: [withheld]
Company:
Work Phone: [withheld]
Message:
Dear Mr. Bloomberg:

I have written to you twicw before about the trouble I have getting around town by bus, specifically between the East Side and the west side of Manhattan. I often wait more than 15 minutes, and when the bus does arrive it moves very slowly making a 10-minutes-by car-ride last over 40 minutes, not including walks to and from the bus.

I believe the mayor should introduce legislation allowing for private transportation opreators to pick up passengers along the bus route for faster transit and shorter wait time.

I'm sure the mayor knows better than me about the merits of competitive free markets. Whatever regulations that are in place now, if any, to allow this form of transportaion obviously does not work since private multi-passenger transportation is virtually non existent.

The price gap and service gap between a bus and a taxi is grossly unreasonable. People in this city suffer because the laws don't allow for a satisfactory medium. Everyone but a small percent of the population, who can afford to take cab frequently, suffers.

Speak to people in governments like jerusalem and tel-aviv and find out why their transportation works, and use it here!

[Signature]"

As many of you know, the city is controlled by people who keep their job by hindering progress. They are elected by communities who they "protect" from the tides of change, and have their loyal votes. This is the bureaucracy that residents of New York City face every day.
The MTA announced this week its plan for major service cuts and fare hikes. It is obvious that the agency whose every move is controlled by the city council and state government, is unable to maintain its current level of service, let alone increase and improve it. The MTA does not have the most talented individuals (they don't pay enough to attract them from private industry), and consistently needs to deal with unions and government bureaucracy.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! LET THE PEOPLE HAVE CHOICES FOR TRANSPORTATION, NOT ONE MONOPOLY CALLED THE MTA!

Support Wikipedia

We all have benefited immensely from Wikipedia. It has clearly change the world for the better. Knowledge is amazing - and with Wikipedia it's free!

Wikipedia is not for profit, so it never ceases to amaze me how they are able to run such a successful and well-managed website which requires so much man-power, since the website is edited by users, and needs so much protection from bad information or vandalism.

I donated $1 today after seeing the donation banner while I was on the site. At first I wanted to ignore it, like I do all panhandlers and charity drives that come in the mail. My mind went quickly through the pros/cons of bothering to make a donation, and settled on donating one dollar. A dollar is not much, but if everyone did, it would add up to a lot. But not everyone does - and even I almost didn't. Small contributions add up to a lot ONLY if you actually make them. So here's my dollar, now go donate yours...

Odesys Chess on Blackberry Curve

I downloaded the free version of this game from www.odesys.com. The program seems to easy to use. You have the options of (a) playing against the computer, (b) 2-players, and (c) playing online against someone on the FICS. The free version will only let you play against the computer on level 1, which frankly, plays as well as 5 year old on crack cocaine. Don't even bother playing level one unless you enjoy mindlessly pushing the pieces around the board. Also, the computer uses the same response to my opening every time. The game is, however, useful to play other players online.

Someone else wrote about this game here.

Opera Mini 4.2 beta on Blackberry Curve 8330

I downloaded this browser from www.operamini.com and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with its capabilities. With the standard Blackberry browser I could not log into my bank account at Chase.com, but with the Opera Mini this was possible. The webpage will display in it's normal html format and you can scroll down or side scroll and then zoom into the part of the page you want to see up close. This is great for those times when you really need to look up something on a site that won't display properly on the regular blackberry browser. It's not great for extended browsing, but it's definitely something to rely on when your regular browser won't do.
One downside to Opera Mini is the inability to select and copy text on a webpage.

Update: I just discovered after writing the above that Chase in fact does have a mobile version of their site (www.chase.mobi) that can be accessed with the blackberry default browser. Touche.

Annoying Youtube Slideshows

There's nothing more annoying than going through Youtube videos and having to skip these sappy slide shows posted by people who have nothing better to do with their time, and have nothing better to post. They clutter Youtube, and get in the way of your desire to watch real content.

I suggest that Youtube add a button allowing users to flag the video as a "slide show", or "non video content". When searching Youtube, users should be able to filter out those videos from the search results.

I cannot find a link to send this suggestion. Does anyone know where I contact them?

Mobipocket for Blackberry Curve is a memory hog and never shuts down

I downloaded Mobipocket reader onto my Blackberry Curve 8330 (Verizon Wireless issue). I noticed a slowdown in the phone's performance since I installed this app. Also, when you close the program it does not terminate the app. The app always runs in the background. Other than this problem, I think Mobipocket is an excellent e-book reader. I will try to alert the software maker about this problem.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Update: It appears that this issue was addressed in a forum on Mobipocket's website http://www.mobipocket.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13270&highlight=close

Until this problem is fixed, the workaround is hitting shift+q to quit the application (the menu close won't shut it).

Why hedge fund managers make very risky bets with other people's money

Well, the simple answer is already in the question: It's Other People's Money (title of a 1980's Wall Street movie starring Danny DeVito).



But many hedge fund managers have a portion of their own money invested in the fund, and stand to lose when their investors lose. This practice is designed to give investors confidence that the hedge fund manager will use judgment and invest wisely. Yet, these "investment" managers make exorbitantly leveraged suicidal bets with derivatives and lose their investors' money along with their own. Why?



The truth is, even when the manager is invested in the fund, his risk/reward ratio is not the same as his investors. Let's say I manage a fund of 100m dollars of capital, 10m of it is my own money. Bob, one of my investors, has 10m in the fund, too. I want to enter into a risky derivative contract which if successful, will yield a 100% return (the 100m fund will grow quickly to 200m). If the bet fails we lose everything (100m).



For me, the investment manager, if the bet fails, I will lose all my 10 million in the fund - the same amount Bob will lose. Bob feels confident now that I'm in the same boat as him.



However, if the bet succeeds I will make 10m on my own investment, plus another 18m from the other investors' money (the normal 20% performance fee), for a total gain of 28 million dollars.



Bob, on the other hand, will only make 8 million dollars if the bet succeeds (10m profit less the 20% fee to me!).



My incentive to take risks is high!





Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry