This is the letter I just sent to SDG&E's customer support, with the title of "A Formal Complaint"

Last week I received notice that power would be shut off to my neighborhood today (August 4th) for four hours. I accepted this willingly as four hours sounded understandable, and as long as I kept my refrigerator and freezer closed there shouldn't be any spoilage.

I just came home from work to find a notice that this saturday electricity will be shut off to our neighborhood for a full ten hours, from 10pm to 8am. Ten hours? Is this for real? I will be forced to throw out everything in my fridge and completely restock my food supply. Who is going to compensate me for this cost?

Additionally, my fiance and I will likely have to stay in a hotel, since it is still August and temperatures at night are still too high for us to be able to sleep without air-conditioning.

I am outraged at this complete disregard for SDG&E customers. This is only a major inconvenience for me, but there are members of this neighborhood who are on life support, people who need electricity to stay alive. Their battery backups may have been capable of surviving a four hour interruption, but not this.

Frankly I am outraged over this.

I posted this as a comment on an Ajaxian article about rating multiple frameworks and thought I'd mirror it here.

I’m afraid my experience isn’t as diverse as most of these other comments, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I started using prototype about 8 months ago, it was the first framework I had dealt with, since prior to that I had avoided frameworks thinking it added too much unused bulk to the page. I still think that, Prototype made my life so much easier in so many ways that I include it anytime I have to do more then just basic style changes.

I kept seeing really good libraries being made for MooTools, so I decided when i rebuilt my website last month to build it using Moo. At first it was awesome and made a lot of stuff much easier then prototype. Then I tried to do some ajax form submissions, and it completely fell apart. MooTools just does not have the same level of power and flexibility when it comes to forms that prototype has to offer. Or, atleast if it does I couldn’t find documentation on how to do it. I switched back to prototype and rewrote everything that had used Moo functions.

jQuery gets an insane amount of attention, but the bulk of it and the performance tests I’ve seen with it strongly discourage me from wanting to use it. The examples I’ve seen written with jQuery feel like it is trying to treat JS like something it isnt, using it as a page building system rather then as an extension to JS and the DOM.

When Dojo first started showing up I watched a presentation here on Ajaxian given by one of the Dojo leads. About ten or 15 minutes in he said something along the lines of “Dojo was built so that you don’t have to know HTML to create websites.” I stopped the presentation right there and wrote Dojo off forever. I strongly dislike frameworks that are meant for people who hate making webpages, it’s why I refuse to touch CakePHP.

I know it’s very opinionated of me to say this and I’ll probably take flack for it, but if you don’t know/like HTML, you shouldn’t be developing for the web.

So, yeah, there it is.

io9 has an article up about Cartoon Network's new fall lineup, pointing out that several of their new shows aren't cartoons at all, but live action kids shows.  Live action... on Cartoon Network...

Cable channel execs are morons. They are changing all the channels that were once focused on a particular niche and turning them all into TNT and USA. CourtTV becomes "Tru", MTV doesn't show videos, G4 shows Cops and Cheaters, the Weather Channel shows programs instead of just running weather forecasts 24-7, Headline News has programs other than just the headlines, SciFi is SyFy, Cartoon Network is showing lots of things besides cartoons, the History Channel showed Planet of the Apes, AMC airs Catwoman. That is just off the top of my head. Why can't channels be what their name says they are?

On sunday NBC Networks issued a press release that the SciFi channel would be changing its name to SyFy.  I found out about it via a New York Times article that Kat found yesterday.  Not surprisingly, this has created a lot of negative feedback.  Not only does it make it very clear that the channel has abandoned everything it was founded on, but was Wil Wheaton pointed out, the statements made by the network's leadership have been downright insulting to SciFi fans.

“We couldn’t own Sci Fi; it’s a genre, but we can own Syfy." Another benefit of the new name is that it is not "throwing the baby away with the bath water,” she added, because it is similar enough to the Sci Fi brand to convey continuity to “the fan-boys and -girls who love the genre.”
--Bonnie Hammer, President of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions, quoted from NYTimes article.

It gives us a unique word and it gives us the opportunities to imbue it with the values and the perception that we want it to have. -- Tim Brooks, SciFi Network Founder

“If you ask people their default perceptions of Sci Fi, they list space, aliens and the future. That didn’t capture the full landscape of fantasy entertainment: the paranormal, the supernatural, action and adventure, superheroes.” -- Dave Howe, President of SciFi Network

I guess they're counting wrestling as being fantasy entertainment. Howe continues to say that the new name got very positive feedback in their testing procedures.

“If I were texting, this is how I would spell it.”

Right, so I guess the only testing you did was with teenage non-geeks, the exact demographic this network DIDN'T get founded on.

Been a long time since I posted here, a long time indeed.  Many things have changed since 2006.  I asked Kat to marry me (wedding is in October). Robbie moved out, giving me sole residency of my home. I left Abtech and got back into web development. My mother sold her house and moved to Indianapolis for two years, now she wants to move back.  I met Orson Scott Card at last year's Comic Con.

Last week, Robbie at work told me about this new site he was using now for all his cable purchases, Monoprice.com. He was going through them because they had Cat6 cables at really low prices.

Tonight I went on there to look at getting some audio cables, 1/8" to RCA adapters. They had them, at just $1 for a six foot length. ONE DOLLAR! Even the best price I've found locally is over $5. I then started browsing the site and picked up a bunch of other things that I had been needing (Ethernet cables, USB cables, etc). I ordered almost two dozen cables and the total came to just over $20. Even if these are shitty cables, that's an insane price.

I placed my order at 10:08pm. I instantly recieved an automated confirmation email.
At 10:09 I recieved a personal confirmation that the order was being fulfilled.
At 10:15 I recieved both a notice that my order was fullfilled and shipped, and also a confirmation message from USPS with my tracking number.

Seven minute from placement to shipment.... this is unheard of! I've never had an online vendor with this fast of turnaround. And at ten o'clock at night! HOW THE HELL DO THEY DO THAT!?! And no, this isn't some chinese outfit, these parts are shipping from LA (Rancho Cucamonga to be exact).

Needless to say, I will be shopping from these guys from now on. They've got sections of the website set aside for computer parts, from CPUs to Video Cards, but the sections are all empty. I hope that means they will be adding more parts in the future.

WARNING: If you have not read the entire Ender series by Orson Scott Card, the following blog post will contain spoilers.

Over the past few months I've been listening to a lot of Audio Books, and just today I finished the last book in the Speaker for the Dead trilogy, Children of the Mind. At the end of the recording, Orson Scott Card himself speaks about the book and his plans for the series. He mentions that originally he planned to stop the series at CotM and leave it at that, but then he started writing the Shadow series, focusing on Bean.

This is just fucking awesome!

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/rubens-tube-p1.php

Not my own words, but something I never thought of.

Money does exist in Star Trek. Starship crews get paid. Some writers confuse not needing money with not having it. 40 + years and 700+ scripts and you're bound to have inconsistencies.

The Federation has near-unlimited power generation, replicators that can rearrange matter however they want, trasnporters that can move resources anywhere they want in an instant. Drudge work is taken care of by advanced machines. Plus dozens of other fantasically advanced technologies.

The result is that the cost in resources in taking care of a human being has zeroed out. It costs the Federation less than a few pennies a day to feed, clothe, educate and provide medical care for the average citizen. So the government provides all that for its citizens because its cheap and relatively effortless for them to do so.

Hence, you don't need money in the Federation, because all of your essentials will be taken care of. Apparently people can live their whole lives with never seeing money. BUt if you do want to work, something the Federation society strongly encourages, you get paid money ("credits") to pay for luxuries and other sundries. Hence Picard's brother maintaining a vinyard, Sisko's dad running a restaurant, Harry Mud always trying to get rich quick, etc.

Its not communist as profit and personal gain is still strongly encouraged and sought after; its just that the lowest rung on society's ladder has been raised quite a bit higher than what we have today. Its kind of what the western democracies might be like today if they had an all-pervasive but cheap societal sfaety net for its citizens.
-- Dhusk on Slashdot