Newspapers, as we know them, need to die

If the New York Times shut down their presses and bought everyone a Kindle, they would actually end up saving money. Brilliant.

People really need to move on from dead trees and get their information online. I love how a lot of the comments in the article are of the form "what would I use to soak up the dog piss or keep the door propped open?" That is exactly why newspapers need to die. It is such a waste of energy to produce something that just ends up in landfill. Advertisements could also be shown on the Kindle so that argument doesn't fly either.

Update: Hearst to launch a wireless e-reader

Update

I haven't been blogging much this month. I've been busy working on the motorcycle; ordering parts and adding heated grips / hand guards, frustrated with massive amounts of stupidity at work, sad about the layoffs; also at work, enjoying hanging out with the gf, rock climbing a lot and solidly leading 5.11's now, keeping up with too much bad tv, depressed about the recession and ugly weather. Today is also the 5th anniversary of my mom's death. I'm a bit sad about it, but overall I'm doing well. She is definitely in a better place.

I'm hoping that March is better.

Saturday Night

iMob

Fun and addictive.

My friend code is: 148-406-488. Add me.

Monkey Bar

Is this going somewhere?

Tennessee Valley

The sun came out, so we went hiking in Tennessee Valley this weekend.

We also checked out the Nike Missile Site for a large dose of cold war creeps.

Click through on the image to see more photos from the set.

Netflix popup windows

In Safari, I have "Block Pop-Up Windows" enabled which seems to save a lot of grief. The only windows that ever seem to popup are from Netflix who somehow is able to get around this blocking mechanism. Well, actually pop-under as I only seem to notice them when I close all my browser windows.  Why isn't there more of an internet revolt against Netflix flow allowing this to happen?

Hardly working

someone put tecate in the vending machine. $0.25. rock on!

Bill Gates has gone buggy

(Picture by an old friend of mine. James Duncan Davidson.)

Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd to prove a point. Nice one.

More head banging

MySQL will allow you to alter a column name to be a reserved keyword.

ALTER TABLE `pornstar` CHANGE `isforeign` `foreign` bit NULL DEFAULT NULL;

But, as soon as you try to insert a row with that column, you get a totally unhelpful error message.

Why do you make my life so difficult sometimes?

Dick-Tater

I just thought this was funny.

'Minor' means nobody died.

'Minor' crash between 2 BART trains. I guess there is a new definition of 'minor' now.

jboss deployment problem

I was getting an NPE like this one when I was trying to deploy a new .ear file. If I removed the @RemoteBinding off the bean, it worked fine.


java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.util.Arrays$ArrayList.(Arrays.java:3357)
at java.util.Arrays.asList(Arrays.java:3343)
at org.jboss.ejb3.stateless.StatelessRemoteProxyFactory
.getInterfaces(StatelessRemoteProxyFactory.java:76)


For about 5 minutes, I couldn't figure out what this pointless exception is until I realized I was missing the reference to the @Remote interface at the end of the bean. Since I couldn't find any other references to this on the net, I figured I'd add it here and file a bug with JBoss as well.

Good catch

The flickr page

Cupping

Yesterday I went to an acupuncturist and got cupped for the first time in an effort to relieve some stress in my system. Apparently I had a lot of toxins to get out and it left some bruising. The process wasn't painful and I'm not really sure how well it helped, but I'll try it again in two weeks and see if there is any progress.