" Work Time Change" written by Joe on estrip.org

Category: work

11/21/13 03:27 - ID#58330

Work Time Change

I finally got approval today from my supervisors to move my work time from 7:30-4:30 to 8:30-5:30. I asked to do this because not only will I get more sleep (hopefully) I also will be able to ride my bike in day light at least one at and avoid traffic both ways. Neither of them really understood why I'd want to ride a bike, they both thought it was because I didn't have full access to a car. Almost no one older at work actually seems to understand why I ride to commute and view it as a crazy death wish. Winter might be riskier but on nice days its just as fast and cheaper than driving. It seems like such a generational disconnect on how we think of cars.

Speaking of winter, I really want to get these studied tires and dayglo fenders for my bike. It'd be such a nerdmobile.

Permalink: Work_Time_Change.html
Words: 159
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/21/13 03:27

Category: politics

11/21/13 12:21 - ID#58329

PAI Power hour

After work yesterday, (e:Terry) and I rode our bikes over to meet (e:YesThatCasey) at the PAI Power Hour at Niagara and Rhode Island. PAI is the Public Accountability Initiative group that tries to expose connections and conflicts of interest between powerful people and decision makers. I actually have heard about them before in the news and never knew they were based out of Buffalo!

The director, Kevin Connor, talked about what the group did, before leading a sort of walk through on how they approach an issue. They take an issue, list the power brokers involved, and start to find relationships between them to see who and how can be leveraged into accomplishing a change. One example they did was identify the Center for Sustainable Shale Development(fracking), allegedly an industry/environmentalist group for fracking, as a sham. PAI investigated all of the environmental groups involved and found they were funded by the Heinz Foundation, which was controlled by natural gas directors. The report the produced ended up causing three people, including the president of the Heinz Foundation, to resign and pretty much ended the CSSD. Link

The example we ran through was with Buffalo Public Schools, which ended up getting derailed into pretty pointless discussion.

One of their main tools is a site called Little Sis. It's kind of a database of important people to list their connections, donations they've made and recieved, organizations they're in etc, and can dynamically generate charts showing the relationships between different people. It was really an awesome tool, and was basically developed by Kevin and another developer out of NYC. Apparently it's all PHP and MySQL now, but they're working to migrate it over to Ruby. I wonder if they ever considered open sourcing something like this, it looked powerful.

Permalink: PAI_Power_hour.html
Words: 307
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/21/13 12:39

Category: privacy

11/20/13 11:06 - ID#58328

Google wants a cut

Not that I really expect privacy using Google/NSA services for free, but I got this email the other day after reimbursing (e:Paul) for his services (really it was for a restaurant I think?).

Hello Joe,

It appears that you may be sending transactions that violate our Terms of Service for Send Money with Gmail.

Your Google Wallet account has recently come under review for a Terms of Service violation. Your transaction on 25 Oct 2013 for $25.00 to paulsidekick@gmail.com with the memo, “hookers and blow”, is in violation of Sections 6 and 7 of the Google Wallet Terms of Service for Send Money with Gmail. We may decline to process such transactions or close your account if we identify in the future that you are using your account for these purposes.

You can review the Terms of Service at: .

Please note that replies to this message are not monitored. If you experience any further issues with your Google Wallet Account, you may visit support.google.com/wallet .

Sincerely,
The Google Wallet Team

I think that is super creepy and a violation of privacy for them to be reading information put in Google Wallet memos, but I did agree to it in the Terms of Services agreement that I did not read.

Transaction Information: For each transaction, the transaction information about Google Wallet from us can be collected. This includes the date, time and the transaction amount, a description provided by the seller of the goods or services offered, photos that you have attached to the transaction, the name and e-mail addresses of the seller and buyer and the client and the recipient, the payment method used for your description of the reason for the transaction and, if the offer associated with the transaction.

Note to anyone using Google for anything financial related: you can opt out of sharing your transactions with marketers here.

joe writes at 02:50:58 11/23/13 - Comment #70799: Unfortunately the NFC features require access to the secure element on the SIM, which they use to encrypt the payment information from what I can tell [link=http://www.smartcardalliance.org/pages/publications-nfc-frequently-asked-questions#7]Link[/link]. Since it's on the SIM the carrier controls access to it. I'm not sure what carriers allow access to it, but for at least AT&T they block Google Wallet's access and only allow their competing ISIS app to use it (which doesn't have half the features or card support that Google does.

tinypliny writes at 01:04:08 11/21/13 - Comment #70793: I am guessing here, but I think if you have an open Google phone + a Google voice account operating over wifi, you can use those NFC features. I have seen them being used.

tinypliny writes at 01:02:15 11/21/13 - Comment #70792: When you have infinite datasets, each of them petabytes or higher in size, classification and prediction algorithms become incredibly precise. There are no crippling distributional or parametric assumptions you need to make for your models because the real distribution of the data is available to you without any restrictions (I am drooling at this thought and (e:Paul) can understand why. ;))

If I were take a guess, it's not just the words, it's the nature of the words. I would speculate about the usage of the words "hookers" and "blow", the contexts in which they most occur, the demographic that is most likely to use these particular words, the geographical region they arose from (proximity to state/international borders etc).. the list of information extraction inferences are fascinating and endless. Put those all together, and its a flag serious enough to trigger that email.

Statistics is the most fascinating subject on the planet. :)

joe writes at 12:25:33 11/21/13 - Comment #70791: Google Wallet hooks up to your bank account through ACH I think. I almost never have cash, and since there's no transaction fee for bank transfers I can transfer money right out of my account to someone else's Wallet. They can either keep it in their wallet or transfer it into their bank account!

There's a bunch of other crazy awesome features it's supposed to do like NFC tap-to-pay with whatever credit cards you enter in your phone, but I don't think there is a carrier that allows it in the US.

libertad writes at 12:19:03 11/21/13 - Comment #70789: I'm just curious as to why you would use google wallet to pay someone back? So when you pay someone what do they do with the virtual money? It is funny that they flagged you for this!

joe writes at 12:12:16 11/21/13 - Comment #70787: I'm sure it is and I understand why it's monitored, and that it's likely never even come close to being looked at by a human . I just think it's crazy that they even monitor the memos automatically. Would someone actually using google wallet for drugs/prostitution really put it in the memo? It seems like the signal to noise ratio for something like that would be ridiculous!

Maybe not though, I mean who else is better at data mining than google?

tinypliny writes at 02:14:14 11/21/13 - Comment #70786: Money laundering and sex/drug trafficking is more prevalent than you think. For a free service, it's a massive nightmare to protect its interests in the face of >1 Billion users in the system. That is ~ 1/8th of the population on the planet. Most of this usage is very minimally monitored and that too by predictive/statistical machine-learning anonymized algorithms.

Think of how the govt. or the "Rockstar" consortium can use that to shut Google down and you will start to understand why this is so necessary.

Permalink: Google_wants_a_cut.html
Words: 325
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/26/13 03:54

Category: goals

11/20/13 10:55 - ID#58327

On that grind

I have so many projects and things I want to do and not enough time. I feel like outside of work I am going pretty much all the time, or feel guilty if I'm not. I have been so motivated lately that I don't want to give them up.

I want to :

Arduino/Raspberry Pi - There are so many awesome projects that I've seen and (e:Paul) and I have thought up, and we almost have all the hardware we need. The Arduinos themselves can be super frustrating to deal with but I think there is a lot of potential in what we can do if we can get around all the hardware and software quirks.

PHP - (e:Paul) got me back into programming. It's definitely much better this time around without slogging through . If I get good enough I want to freelance. Terry may have clients who could use help and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of work on Craigslist. Plus brushing up on my programming skills makes things at work and my other projects easier too.

Deutsch learnen - This has no practical use besides talking to (e:Paul) and (e:Terry), but it's really satisfying to learn so far, mostly through Duolingo. This is the first non-technical subject I've studied in almost 5 years, so it's nice to switch it up. Apparently second languages slow brain decline as you age (http://news.discovery.com/human/bilingualism-protects-brain-into-old-age-130108.htm) Sorry I don't have a link to the OG study. I want to get to A2 (basic) level by March, which would be about 6 months.

Get more sleep - I'm practically narcoleptic lately. Hopefully this will change soon since I asked my boss to start at 8:30 instead of 7:30. It'd make it easier to bike to work.

This doesn't even count all the projects at my parents house that need to get done with whatever time on the weekends, or things like the tree planting. Or the fact that I should really try and see my old friends more and meet new people. Or doing things that don't really have any use but are still fun too.

A hustla's work is never through.

Permalink: On_that_grind.html
Words: 365
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/20/13 11:17

Category: going out

11/19/13 12:26 - ID#58322

hodown throwdown

(e:lilho) came back into town. Friday night (e:terry), (e:lilho), (e:mike), (e:libertad) and (e:casey) managed to pry (e:paul) and I away from the Arudinos for a few hours to go out to Cathode and then Marcella's. Another weekend, another crazy fun night.

Cray eyes

All decked in plaid - schwul!

Crossing the fence

twerkin it like a champion

Permalink: hodown_throwdown.html
Words: 77
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/19/13 09:18

Category: food

11/17/13 10:19 - ID#58320

fine Eyetalian dining

Paul is definitely related to Clidia.

Permalink: fine_Eyetalian_dining.html
Words: 15
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/17/13 10:19

Category: food

11/14/13 10:38 - ID#58304

Mazurek's Bakery

I was starving all day at work so naturally I had to look at food porn. Somehow I started on Dunkin Donuts page, and upgraded when I found the website for Mazurek's Bakery. Apparently they've been around since 1933, super old school. It was on 543 South Park Ave, so I had to stop on the bike ride home. I had a hard time choosing but I got three pastry hearts, a chocolate chip cookie and a black raspberry paczki. I wish I took a picture before there was just one heart left.

The lady didn't know what to do while I took the picture

love these pastry hearts

So nice out today

Permalink: Mazurek_s_Bakery.html
Words: 130
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/14/13 10:41

Category: beer

11/14/13 10:25 - ID#58303

Bierklub part drei

Don't ever try to go beer for beer with (e:Terry), it won't end well.

Terry on a typical day

Aroo!

Permalink: Bierklub_part_drei.html
Words: 30
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/14/13 10:28

Category: computers

11/14/13 10:20 - ID#58302

Windows XP is still (not) kicking

Who would have thought I'd be trying to support Windows XP 12 years after it came out?

I was attempting to get QuickBooks working for Squeaky Wheel on a donated computer they had. on opening any new workbook, the error "Unrecoverable Error 20888 41171" would come up and it would crash to desktop. Looking in the .NET error log, it would hang when it tried to write an XML file to the temp folder, thinking it didn't have proper permissions. In XP running as an admin this is pretty much impossible since there aren't granulated privileges like in Vista and after, so there must have been an issue with the .NET install itself.

The installation was a fresh copy of Windows XP, so you think it would work out of the box. somehow though the .NET framework got completly borked. QuickBooks requires the .NET 4.0 framework, which was partially installed on the machine, although Windows was only reporting 3.5 being installed. The installer for 4.0 couldn't rollback the the libraries already installed or finish the current installation. All that I could do was either manually roll back to 3.5 and try again, or uninstall all the way back to the default 2.0 framework. This would have taken forever on a Celeron D, so I just installed an extra license of Windows 7 I had.

Reinstalling is such a Windoes solution to things. I am glad (e:Paul) got me on Fedora.

Permalink: Windows_XP_is_still_not_kicking.html
Words: 232
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/14/13 10:20

Category: holiday

11/12/13 09:16 - ID#58290

Veterans Day

So I was thinking about Veterans Day and how weird the idea behind it is. It's so tightly wound with the cultural worship that seems to go along with the US military. Besides the veterans of World War I and II, what is being celebrated? The day originally marked the armistice of World War I, but it seems to be so far from celebrating peace today.

Why is someone who spent 18 months slogging around a base, or drone bombing random Pakistanis considered a hero, to be protecting our freedoms, to be serving our country? Who in this country are they actually serving, and what are they actually protecting us from? When people use that kind of language they expect that it makes the military exempt from any sort of criticism, disconnected from what they actually do. I don't see what invading Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, or Somalia did to protect or serve the US. I don't see why we should be proud that $682 billion will be spent this year on an army when our Congress claims we can't afford food stamps, basic research or healthcare. Obligatory cost of war link

I know the military is an employer of last resort for many, making it difficult to blame the soldiers on the ground. But they still choose to take part in a unit that instigates rather than defends. This isn't to say there is no good in the military, or those in it haven't done good where they're deployed - I just don't think signing up for a fighting force is a job worthy of the language and reverence that it currently gets. There are so many people in this country struggling to make it a better place through service and self-sacrifice - we could be celebrating them in the name of peace instead.

Maybe I am jealous of everyone who got off of work.

uncutsaniflush writes at 05:30:26 11/13/13 - Comment #70752: Gandhi has said "Means are after all everything. “As the means so the end." It is the morality of the means that must be judged. It is wrong to use immoral means to achieve a moral end. In such a case, the end, itself, becomes immoral. Certainly, if one applies that standard to the United States and its military action in recent history, the country is a moral failure. The very idea that it is acceptable to kill innocent, unarmed noncombatants during the efforts (such as drone strikes) to kill leaders of organisations that oppose the U.S. is immoral.

Terrorism exists in the eye of the beholder. To those perpetuating the "terrorist" actions, terror is an acceptable, justifiable means to a desirable, moral end. If one thinks about it, the very idea of the "Shock and Awe" Iraqi invasion was to instill terror in the hearts of the Iraqis. Thus, it is terrorism.

There has always been a gap, if not outright dichotomy, between the actions taken to protect the U.S. and lofty ideals of American freedom and democracy. It saddens me that nothing has changed and that the U.S. is still killing in the name of . . . It saddens me even more that a Democratic administration is doing the killing.

paul writes at 03:11:04 11/13/13 - Comment #70751: We are the terrorists. I mean who killed more innocent people and caused more terror at this point. I am pretty sure its not them.

ExBuffalonian writes at 03:08:18 11/13/13 - Comment #70750: It starts to be absurd when our country has drones patrolling other countries, looking for terrorists to attack, bombs their targets, takes out innocent civilian bystanders and considers them acceptable collateral damage. At what point do you have to start asking who's the terrorist? Too many people think they've finished doing their part in this so-called democracy just by going out to vote once every 4 years or so. We should all be asking ourselves these questions and engaging in these conversations. We need to stop assuming people are virtuous just because they served in the military, because that's a very naive outloook. In my book, nobody is above suspicion until proven otherwise.

paul writes at 10:32:22 11/13/13 - Comment #70746: I guess I like to fantasize that everyone has at least limited free will in a democracy without conscription. When it comes down to it, the choice is, will you possibly kill people for money or not. We aren't talking about a defensive war in any of the situations mentioned and honestly most of the military people I have personally met aren't that stupid that they cannot be accountable for the decisions.

tinypliny writes at 12:55:23 11/13/13 - Comment #70744: Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:

uncutsaniflush writes at 11:18:18 11/12/13 - Comment #70743: Not everyone is as clever as you and (e:paul). Many who serve in the U.S. armed forces believe the lies that they are told about God and Country. Don't hate and despise them because of that. Ultimately, every country has a war machine that needs cannon fodder. I don't despise the grunts who do the fighting and the dying. Many of those who survive come back broken physically and spiritually and mentally. My anger is for their masters.

paul writes at 09:56:41 11/12/13 - Comment #70742: I feel the same way but the last time random guest said to me, " Sorry paul but anyone that lives in america and doesnt like it needs to cross the border. Go to Canada PAUL. yOU HAVE THE FREEDOM TO DO THAT YOU KNOW CAUSE OF THE THOUSANDS OF MEN THAT DIED TO KEEP US FREE. sTOP COMPLAINING OR MOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Permalink: Veterans_Day.html
Words: 314
Location: Buffalo, NY
Last Modified: 11/12/13 09:25