kahunaburger

The ad below appeared in the latest print version of Time Magazine. I happen to have a subscription to it, because I converted a number of useless miles on Frontier Airlines to a few one-year subscriptions for magazines. I will not renew any of the subscriptions and printed media consumption in my home (except for books) is down to almost 0%.

The ad was a two full-page spread and begs the question: If you are not worried why bother printing it in the first place?

“Did you hear the one about the dyslexic man who sold his soul to Santa?”

Wow – editorial cartoonist, Mark Fiore, wins the Pulitzer price. The interesting thing about his work is that it is not printed at all, but only appears online.

Here’s a classic example: Learn to Speak Tea Bag.

Congratulations, Mark!

I had vowed not to write about it when the whole iPhone/Flash mess started to unfold.

Because of recent developments and because nobody ever talked about the real truth, I’m going to have to break that vow.

Do you want to know why Flash will never be on the iPhone/iPad and why OS 4.0 changes the developer agreement?

It’s all about money!

Flash may be resource intensive, it may even be a CPU-hog, but those are not the reasons why Steve does not want it on it’s platform. There are hundreds of thousands Flash games out there. The vast majority of video delivery on the web is still driven by Flash. Apple does not want all those resources to become available on their platform for free – they want a chunk of every single game, every single song and every single movie that is being delivered to their devices. And the only way to get that chunk of money is by making things exclusively available through iTunes. So Apple will do everything to reduce the number of ways that you and I, as Apple users, can get our hands on content that is not coming from one of their online stores.

Let’s say hypothetically that the Flash Player had a feature that would send a fingerprint of the currently playing video or song to the iTunes store and would offer a simple way how people could purchase that video or song from the same store. No matter how resource intensive, no matter what a CPU hog, the Flash Player would be bundled with every single Apple device – no questions asked.

I’m sick of all this hypocritical bullshit that Apple’s direction only has the user in mind and that their every move is only to benefit the customer. All they want is to milk the cow as much as possible. If they continue down that path they’ll rip off the udder sooner or later.

On a lighter note: “Lunch-only beer policy prompts Carlsberg strike”.

I’m still laughing about:

“Carlsberg’s truck drivers joined the strike in sympathy — even though they are exempt from the new rules, Bekke said. The truck drivers are permitted to bring three beers from the canteen because they often don’t have time to have lunch there.

The trucks have alcohol ignition locks preventing the drivers from driving drunk, he added.”

(thanks Candice!)

Apple just dropped another bomb with the iPhone OS 4.0’s new developer agreement. I smell mutiny around the corner …

PS: I guess that also means that any application that uses code generated by lex/yacc is out of the picture

It’s tax season. I was a good boy this year and my returns were filed weeks ago. On Friday I already received my refund from the State of New Mexico (thanks Katherine!).

On Monday morning, right after dropping Pia off at school, I headed to Wells Fargo and deposited the check. When I looked on Monday afternoon, I saw that the transaction was still pending, but then in the evening the moneys had arrived in my checking account.

I only have emergency funds in my Wells Fargo account and everything else is over at E*Trade. So, Monday evening I initiated a transfer of the newly added funds to my E*Trade savings account. One second after hitting the “Transfer” button, I saw that my WF checking balance had already reflected the transfer.

Today is Thursday and earlier in the day, I saw the transfer appearing at E*Trade with a “pending” notice. I suspect by the end of the day, the money will actually be available for withdrawal.

That makes a total of 3 days where the 1500+ dollars were floating around in financial no-mans land. Where were they? And what’s taking them so long?

I’m certainly aware that this is one of the areas where banks make a lot of their money: getting pennies (or fractions thereof) of interest on money that they don’t own. And old banker friend of mine back in Europe also once told me, that his employer made massive amounts of money from those fractional amounts in normal transactions: if you were to get 0.333 dollars, you got credited 0.33 and the bank pocketed the 0.003 – for 0.339, you would still get 0.33 with the bank keeping the 0.009. Multiple that by a few million transactions per day and you end up with a nice chunk of money.

That three day delay to move money from one bank to another made sense when the financial market was not standardized yet – when bankers still had to fax transfer slips from one bank to the next. But it does not make sense now where my check card purchase at the grocery store appears seconds later at my online banking site. I’m sure the inter-bank network is as good as the network going from the grocery store to my bank.

It just feels like another area where the customer is getting screwed …

PS: While I was walking the dogs I remembered the following. Had I gone to Wells Fargo on Tuesday morning and taken out the money from my account in cash and then had I gone over to another local bank, deposited the cash, it would have been available on that same Tuesday …

The Masters tournament (http://www.masters.org/) looks beautiful on my screen. If you have a minute, go check it out. A fine example of a Flash Live Video site with lots of features.

“Want to know the difference between North and South? Well, a man once told me that up North, it is OK to have a Black as your boss, but you will be damned if you will have one for a neighbor. Down South, it is OK to have a Black neighbor…but you will damned if you will have one as a boss.”

Less than an hour ago, WikiLeaks released the video that they announced weeks ago. The video as well as accompanying information is available at http://www.collateralmurder.com/ (NSFW, do not watch if you don’t want to see graphic content).

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”.

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

I feel for every soldier who has to work under stressful war conditions and has to make split-second decisions whether to save his own life or risk losing it. However, what’s portrayed in the video is a bunch of trigger-happy cowboys joking while they are eliminating more than a dozen civilians. What prompted my post was the fact that afterwards the military was not man enough to admit their mistake, but tried to brush it under the carpet – that is NOT acceptable.

That’s right: yesterday afternoon we went up into the North and managed to hit three different State Parks in one day. Pia, Oakley and I started off towards Las Vegas (NM) and then headed north on 518 until we hit Storrie Lake (Park I: map, description). The lake is out in the plains and if it is windy, it’s very windy there. That was the case yesterday and we only stopped for five minutes, because the wind was just too strong. Of course in those five minutes we manage to run into a Ranger Patrol, who reminded us very directly that we have five minutes before we have to purchase a ticket or get a ticket.

We continued on 518, turned onto 94 and made a left in Ledoux (what, are we in France already?) towards Morphy Lake (Park II: map, description). The lake is set lovely into the mountains and while it is only at 8000 feet elevation, it sure felt like it was a lot higher. We hiked around the lake for about an hour and met many people who tried their luck fishing for some trout in the waters. There were plenty of climbing opportunities for Pia and more than once did I have to look away when she was attempting to get to the peak of another 40 feet boulder:

Morphy Lake

That hour in the sun made all our tummies grumble and we needed to find some food quickly. Mora, where we started to look for food, was dead as a door nail. Every single food joint was closed, which wasn’t that big of a surprise given that it was Easter Sunday in the catholic back country. Oakley spotted an ice cream parlor, which also seemed to have “normal” food. I forgot the name of the place, but you can see it in this street view photo (I believe it was not yet an ice cream place when the photo was taken).
The couple running the place were the nicest people ever, something you really only find out in the country. We filled up on food, drinks and threw in a monster ice cream (black cherry).

We headed further north on 434 until we hit Coyote Creek (Park III: map, description). That one looks like a nice place to come back to for a camping trip.

Two hours later (including one where it was very quiet in the back seat, because Pia napped) we were back in Rowe.

On Friday Pia started early in the morning with Easter preparations. At 8am the first eggs were already colored.

coloring eggs

We did some more projects during the day and for the evening we had a boneless leg of lamb for dinner. Face paint (it was actually not supposed to get on the skin) can’t miss from any special event:

face paint

Before dinner we also got visited by the real Easter Bunny:

the bunny

On Saturday we met some of Pia’s friends at the Mountain Center in Tesuque for an Easter Egg hunt. Where are the eggs?

where are the eggs?

Guess who brought the biggest basket for all the goodies?

biggest basket

While it was cold and windy in the morning, I warmed up very nicely in the afternoon. The stream at the Mountain Center was the main attraction and I got asked more than once if it was warm enough to put the footsies into the water – it wasn’t wam enough.

crossing the stream

If you get offered to take a relaxing dog-walk, high up on the Rowe Mesa and the roads are muddy, I suggest you politely decline and hike elsewhere. Otherwise you may end up as I did …

after the walk

The car got stuck in deep mud and it took quite a while to get it out again.

PS: Thanks, Oakley, that was fun

i7 running at 3.2 GHz with 12 GB RAM. Now I got to learn how to think faster …