As a Cyclist, how long do you wait at a red light?
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How Safe Is Cycling?
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· Score: 1
I have ridden 4000 miles this year, mostly for exercise, mostly during non-rush hours. The routes I ride on have stop lights. I can tell you a bike at a lone intersection does not trigger many lights to change. So, the question is, at that point, should I wait for a car to trigger it, or go push the pedestrian button to cross in the crosswalk? So which am I then, a pedestrian, or an automobile? There is some ambiguity here that I've thought about many times. I have to admit, that when there are no automobiles around or in sight, I go ahead and run that red light, only after coming to a stop, unclipping, and evaluating the situation.
I can also say from experiencing squeeze outs from drivers that it almost starts to seem like they are purposefully trying to run you off the road. I ride on roads with fairly good shoulders and I can say that with high frequency I get someone passing me with the car tires inches from the white line. You have a whole freaking lane people. I stay well on my side of the line, you do the same. Show some common courtesy.
Devil's advocate here...How about medical / dental schools where 4-year tuition is ~250k no matter where you go. How exactly does one do this without taking out loans? Yes, I know there are some rich daddies out there who finance their childrens tuition to this level, but seriously...some degrees you can't come by without taking out loans of some amount.
At my dental school they tried to make us take exams using some software called "Secure Exam Browser" which apparently only ran on winxp. At the time I had a linux distro on my laptop and was trying to use winxp in parallels to get it working. There was some check that the program did to see if it was being run on a virtual machine or not and consequently it would not run. It all has to do with the fact that there is no trust that you won't screen grab, etc. Royal PITA if you ask me. Half the time the exam didn't work anyway so it didn't really cause much trouble in the end.
What about the canon 40D? It has live preview. I don't think it uses a second sensor either. When you turn the live mode on, you hear it click like something mechanical is changing. Also, resolution is pretty good on it.
I record lectures daily and podcast them for my classmates. It has helped a number of my classmates pass who otherwise would not pass. The way I see it is I really don't care if people skip class and only listen to podcasts. If I'm there I get a first exposure to material and if I go back and listen I get a second exposure to fill in the details. Works great for me, and I know listening with a pause button has helped a lot of people out as well.
MS definately does not use ESRI's software and is years behind the power and flexibility ESRI's suite of desktop and server tools provides. See ArcWebServices project for some really cool stuff. Street maps and satellite imagery are only the beginning. Try overlaying any number of datasets along with "live" data including traffic, weather, crime, etc. etc.
Yeah, I was not too impressed with the averatech's quality either. It seemed to be feature rich enough but it just felt like a toy. I'm looking foward to investigating the m205 and the fujitsu 4010D. Thanks for the suggestion.
I have to admit, I've been looking at the convertible form factor for TPC's lately and have grown increasingly interested in them for upcoming dental school. I went down to compusa the other day and fiddled around with the averitech 3500 something or rather model. It was pretty sweet and I can forsee how useful it would be to take notes on.
When looking at these I have also asked myself how I would use it in a classroom environment. My research on electronic textbooks has lead to many dead ends. It seems that when electronic versions are available, they're usually wrapped in some proprietary software which renders them mostly useless to products such as onenote and the like. Beyond this, there are options to get electronic textbooks via scanner (opticbook 3600 is nice) or digital camera with OCR step inbetween scan and end product.
I could be easily inticed to pay an extra percentage for textbooks that included fulltext in pdf format, however I see this as a DRM issue that will not be solved in my lifetime.
Does anyone else have any experience with aquiring full text of textbooks? I know there are alot of IT textbooks available in oreilly's safari but it seems that other domains are lagging behind.
I made the decision in December 2002 to make a 180 degree turn and move from computer science to dentistry (a profession common to my family). After working as a software developer for 4.5 years I decided that I did not like 1.) the long hours, 2.) the primarily untechie customer driving software specifications, 3.) my role as a worker (not a thinker), and 4.) the never ending sense of "we have to beat our competitors therefore we're setting unrealistic goals that we know will fail but let's put lots of pressure on everyone anyway".
In any case, I had a positive experience in leaving my company. Upon making my decision, I began droping hints to my project manager that the time had come that I really hand over my project lead to a jr. programmer on my team. At first he was like, "since when did you think you could make that decision?" But as time went on and the dust settled a bit, the jr. programmer did take on more responsibilities and I tried to spend alot of time with them in review of the architecture I had developed and all the ins and outs of maintaining a large scale web application.
When the time came for me to announce my resignation, I had all kinds of documentation and notes written and had set the team up for sucess in my absense. My project manager was very happy that I had asserted my desire to get off the project and felt good about having the jr. programmer take full responsibility for it in the final weeks before I was gone.
It was a difficult decision to make, however I have not looked back. I still love computer stuff as a hobby, but when it comes time to make some good money and work reasonable hours I want nothing to do with programming.
compared to $20 to put it in paper, $40 + $40 for ebay, $30 for autotrader, it is not that far out of line. The number of calls I received for the short time I had it on google was pretty good and I don't think it was any more expensive than any other pay to advertise option.
Just my thoughts. Dealer wouldn't give me anywhere near my asking price anyway. I'm still ahead.
I recently put an ad for my jetta on google ads and watched what happened. I wondered why some days the count of clicks was on a completely different order than other days. I also worried about people clicking over and over again at around $1.50 a pop. I even caught myself almost clicking to check if the link worked. Probably not any fraud going on in my case, but I still wondered.
It seems like there should be some way to limit cost from a certain host, or somehow prevent multiple clicks. I suppose some sort of a virus could provide clicks from each infected computer, but this seems like more of an isolated problem.
Either that, or google should provide a flat rate option. I have no idea how this would work, but it would prevent pay per click fraud.
I am all for google ads. As many have posted, they are minimally intrusive, and at times I even find them useful both for advertising my own interests or finding things directly relevant to my searches.
I also ask this question every time a new version is released. My system is running fine, why upgrade. I always end up upgrading, however because I worry that at some point, there will be a feature I need to have and the upgrade process will not work because I have not been updating all the time. Dependencies bleh. I think that's the only reason I keep upgrading.
May whatever forces that keep us moving toward whateverness please please please put Bush into office. Not because I think he's a better man, but he's hella better than Kerry.
-- Why was this modded Insightful? Oh how I wish I had mod points.
I have to interject here. There are some comments about palm devices not having "useful" apps. For me (your mileage may vary) I would have a hard time parting with QuizWiz (a 3x5 notecard replacer) and eReader (ebook reader). I love going somewhere and having several books to read (in case I finish one) or additionally the *ability* to study should I feel so compelled.
The other thing I would like to speak to is one posters comment about not syncing email with mozilla email. This is a non issue as programs like versamail allow sync-time synchronization with a pop or imap server directly. I do this all the time & use thunderbird for my desktop client. It is very seamless as I sync via bluetooth & cell phone when away. If I'm going to read/write more than a handful of words, I am very glad to have the additional screen space a palm provides without having to lug a notebook around.
Ok, well with those positives stated, here is my complaint request for the ultimate tool for me. In transitioning back to acedemia after spending 4 years doing software engineering, I really really really want something to take notes on. Cell phone? forget it. Palm? Almost. Tablet pc? getting very close. Only a few things keep me from investing. 1. Cost. 2. Still have to carry textbooks anyway. 3. Educational institutions aren't ready to accept digital work or transmit results back digitally -- still have to carry snailbook for returned assignments. 4. Do I really trust the stability of paper vs. fragile computer?
Mod parent up...I love reading books on palm from palmdigital media. Although *All* the books I want to read are not there, i have noticed that lately more and more new releases are there. I have been happy with the selection there and although it is sparse now, it seems like it is getting better.
Thinks I like about eBooks: can have several with you in a small form factor (great for traveling), bookmarks / notes are easy (despite some comments here), can read in the dark without an additional light on
Your comment sums up my thoughts exactly. In fact, I'm thinking of transitioning out of CS into a medical field, perhaps dentistry. As another post mentioned, I enjoy computers but when they become part of my profession, I get sick of dealing with them. As a hobby -- yes, but as a profession (where I'm the programmer you described above) -- no thanks.
That being said, I will always enjoy mucking around with computer technologies. Whether or not I make any money doing so after I change careers remains to be seen.
You raise some good points. I would like to add that I think the music store will not become useless to me for several reasons:
1. I like to have a physical product 2. Physical product serves as a backup should my data become unuseable. 3. Lyrics, artist information, etc. are nice to have in cd inserts 4. I can rip to whatever format I want, I'm not limited by whatever format the online store provides me. This means that future formats can be utilized without a lossy conversion process.
These things being said, I do value the online store if for no other reason than I can preview most tracks from the comfort of my home.
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I have ridden 4000 miles this year, mostly for exercise, mostly during non-rush hours. The routes I ride on have stop lights. I can tell you a bike at a lone intersection does not trigger many lights to change. So, the question is, at that point, should I wait for a car to trigger it, or go push the pedestrian button to cross in the crosswalk? So which am I then, a pedestrian, or an automobile? There is some ambiguity here that I've thought about many times. I have to admit, that when there are no automobiles around or in sight, I go ahead and run that red light, only after coming to a stop, unclipping, and evaluating the situation.
I can also say from experiencing squeeze outs from drivers that it almost starts to seem like they are purposefully trying to run you off the road. I ride on roads with fairly good shoulders and I can say that with high frequency I get someone passing me with the car tires inches from the white line. You have a whole freaking lane people. I stay well on my side of the line, you do the same. Show some common courtesy.
Devil's advocate here...How about medical / dental schools where 4-year tuition is ~250k no matter where you go. How exactly does one do this without taking out loans? Yes, I know there are some rich daddies out there who finance their childrens tuition to this level, but seriously...some degrees you can't come by without taking out loans of some amount.
At my dental school they tried to make us take exams using some software called "Secure Exam Browser" which apparently only ran on winxp. At the time I had a linux distro on my laptop and was trying to use winxp in parallels to get it working. There was some check that the program did to see if it was being run on a virtual machine or not and consequently it would not run. It all has to do with the fact that there is no trust that you won't screen grab, etc. Royal PITA if you ask me. Half the time the exam didn't work anyway so it didn't really cause much trouble in the end.
For some reason at first glance I read "Mach 6 Test Aircraft for sale" and I reached for my wallet...
What about the canon 40D? It has live preview. I don't think it uses a second sensor either. When you turn the live mode on, you hear it click like something mechanical is changing. Also, resolution is pretty good on it.
Seriously? Did you RTFM? It has Edge. I agree, lack of 3g seems lame, but it shouldn't take apple long to put this in a future version.
I record lectures daily and podcast them for my classmates. It has helped a number of my classmates pass who otherwise would not pass. The way I see it is I really don't care if people skip class and only listen to podcasts. If I'm there I get a first exposure to material and if I go back and listen I get a second exposure to fill in the details. Works great for me, and I know listening with a pause button has helped a lot of people out as well.
My $0.02.
I was involved with programming the first version of national geographic mapmachine back in 2001. Good to see another rendition.
MS definately does not use ESRI's software and is years behind the power and flexibility ESRI's suite of desktop and server tools provides. See ArcWebServices project for some really cool stuff. Street maps and satellite imagery are only the beginning. Try overlaying any number of datasets along with "live" data including traffic, weather, crime, etc. etc.
Why not use the yahoo toolbar? It was recently released for firefox and seems to work just fine.
http://toolbar.yahoo.com
Yeah, I was not too impressed with the averatech's quality either. It seemed to be feature rich enough but it just felt like a toy. I'm looking foward to investigating the m205 and the fujitsu 4010D. Thanks for the suggestion.
My bad, the averatech was at circuit city.
I have to admit, I've been looking at the convertible form factor for TPC's lately and have grown increasingly interested in them for upcoming dental school. I went down to compusa the other day and fiddled around with the averitech 3500 something or rather model. It was pretty sweet and I can forsee how useful it would be to take notes on.
I am also considering the Fujitso 4000 series convertible TPC.
When looking at these I have also asked myself how I would use it in a classroom environment. My research on electronic textbooks has lead to many dead ends. It seems that when electronic versions are available, they're usually wrapped in some proprietary software which renders them mostly useless to products such as onenote and the like. Beyond this, there are options to get electronic textbooks via scanner (opticbook 3600 is nice) or digital camera with OCR step inbetween scan and end product.
I could be easily inticed to pay an extra percentage for textbooks that included fulltext in pdf format, however I see this as a DRM issue that will not be solved in my lifetime.
Does anyone else have any experience with aquiring full text of textbooks? I know there are alot of IT textbooks available in oreilly's safari but it seems that other domains are lagging behind.
I made the decision in December 2002 to make a 180 degree turn and move from computer science to dentistry (a profession common to my family). After working as a software developer for 4.5 years I decided that I did not like 1.) the long hours, 2.) the primarily untechie customer driving software specifications, 3.) my role as a worker (not a thinker), and 4.) the never ending sense of "we have to beat our competitors therefore we're setting unrealistic goals that we know will fail but let's put lots of pressure on everyone anyway".
In any case, I had a positive experience in leaving my company. Upon making my decision, I began droping hints to my project manager that the time had come that I really hand over my project lead to a jr. programmer on my team. At first he was like, "since when did you think you could make that decision?" But as time went on and the dust settled a bit, the jr. programmer did take on more responsibilities and I tried to spend alot of time with them in review of the architecture I had developed and all the ins and outs of maintaining a large scale web application.
When the time came for me to announce my resignation, I had all kinds of documentation and notes written and had set the team up for sucess in my absense. My project manager was very happy that I had asserted my desire to get off the project and felt good about having the jr. programmer take full responsibility for it in the final weeks before I was gone.
It was a difficult decision to make, however I have not looked back. I still love computer stuff as a hobby, but when it comes time to make some good money and work reasonable hours I want nothing to do with programming.
My $0.02. Good luck!
compared to $20 to put it in paper, $40 + $40 for ebay, $30 for autotrader, it is not that far out of line. The number of calls I received for the short time I had it on google was pretty good and I don't think it was any more expensive than any other pay to advertise option.
Just my thoughts. Dealer wouldn't give me anywhere near my asking price anyway. I'm still ahead.
I recently put an ad for my jetta on google ads and watched what happened. I wondered why some days the count of clicks was on a completely different order than other days. I also worried about people clicking over and over again at around $1.50 a pop. I even caught myself almost clicking to check if the link worked. Probably not any fraud going on in my case, but I still wondered.
It seems like there should be some way to limit cost from a certain host, or somehow prevent multiple clicks. I suppose some sort of a virus could provide clicks from each infected computer, but this seems like more of an isolated problem.
Either that, or google should provide a flat rate option. I have no idea how this would work, but it would prevent pay per click fraud.
I am all for google ads. As many have posted, they are minimally intrusive, and at times I even find them useful both for advertising my own interests or finding things directly relevant to my searches.
Who cleans up after you shoot something? Is there a timeout for someone to go bag your deer? Can you have it shipped home or even better, stuffed?
This also kind of reminds me of a short story I read in high school called the most dangerous game" by Richard Connell. One of my favorites.
I also ask this question every time a new version is released. My system is running fine, why upgrade. I always end up upgrading, however because I worry that at some point, there will be a feature I need to have and the upgrade process will not work because I have not been updating all the time. Dependencies bleh. I think that's the only reason I keep upgrading.
Go Bush!
May whatever forces that keep us moving toward whateverness please please please put Bush into office. Not because I think he's a better man, but he's hella better than Kerry.
--
Why was this modded Insightful? Oh how I wish I had mod points.
Does this mean iPhoto for windoze is on the horizon?
um...what about portland, OR?
I have to interject here. There are some comments about palm devices not having "useful" apps. For me (your mileage may vary) I would have a hard time parting with QuizWiz (a 3x5 notecard replacer) and eReader (ebook reader). I love going somewhere and having several books to read (in case I finish one) or additionally the *ability* to study should I feel so compelled.
The other thing I would like to speak to is one posters comment about not syncing email with mozilla email. This is a non issue as programs like versamail allow sync-time synchronization with a pop or imap server directly. I do this all the time & use thunderbird for my desktop client. It is very seamless as I sync via bluetooth & cell phone when away. If I'm going to read/write more than a handful of words, I am very glad to have the additional screen space a palm provides without having to lug a notebook around.
Ok, well with those positives stated, here is my complaint request for the ultimate tool for me. In transitioning back to acedemia after spending 4 years doing software engineering, I really really really want something to take notes on. Cell phone? forget it. Palm? Almost. Tablet pc? getting very close. Only a few things keep me from investing. 1. Cost. 2. Still have to carry textbooks anyway. 3. Educational institutions aren't ready to accept digital work or transmit results back digitally -- still have to carry snailbook for returned assignments. 4. Do I really trust the stability of paper vs. fragile computer?
My $0.02.
Mod parent up...I love reading books on palm from palmdigital media. Although *All* the books I want to read are not there, i have noticed that lately more and more new releases are there. I have been happy with the selection there and although it is sparse now, it seems like it is getting better.
Thinks I like about eBooks:
can have several with you in a small form factor (great for traveling), bookmarks / notes are easy (despite some comments here), can read in the dark without an additional light on
Your comment sums up my thoughts exactly. In fact, I'm thinking of transitioning out of CS into a medical field, perhaps dentistry. As another post mentioned, I enjoy computers but when they become part of my profession, I get sick of dealing with them. As a hobby -- yes, but as a profession (where I'm the programmer you described above) -- no thanks.
That being said, I will always enjoy mucking around with computer technologies. Whether or not I make any money doing so after I change careers remains to be seen.
You raise some good points. I would like to add that I think the music store will not become useless to me for several reasons:
1. I like to have a physical product
2. Physical product serves as a backup should my data become unuseable.
3. Lyrics, artist information, etc. are nice to have in cd inserts
4. I can rip to whatever format I want, I'm not limited by whatever format the online store provides me. This means that future formats can be utilized without a lossy conversion process.
These things being said, I do value the online store if for no other reason than I can preview most tracks from the comfort of my home.