I do not want to pay $80 + tax + about $15 other charges for an off-contract iPhone. $39.99 for 450 minutes talk, $20 for 300MB data and $20 for unlimited text messages.
Switch to a prepaid plan. Since AT&T does not let us switch from post-paid to prepaid, you got to find other services. There are a lot of services out there.
Having two friends using Straight Talk, I switched to Straight Talk and am using it for three months now. I guess it's a good time to dump pros and cons.
You can save money. It's $45 + tax for unlimited data, talk & text. No doubt. It's good or bad, their network coverage is the same as AT&T by the nature of MVNO. Transfering my phone number from AT&T was the one I concerned when I reading threads on their forum, but they did it without any issue.
And you don't even have to unlock your phone in order to start using Straight Talk network which is how MVNO works.
Although it's fine to download data like listening on Pandora, they don't like upload traffic especiously continuous ones. When I was using Dropbox's new Camera Upload functionality with cellular network sync, my phone got easy to be throttled. I had to ask StraightTalk support stuff to reset it. In spite of fact that this is not a huge issue for me, it could be annoying if you want to use network in that way.
Another annoying thing (for me the worst thing) is that you can not sign in with Uber app. Yes, the on-demand private driver service. As exchanging emails with both Uber and StraightTalk representatives, it turned out that Uber have issues with StraightTalk and other less-known carries not let Uber to make "secure connection". I don't know about technical details but it sucks. Thankfully there is a workaround using https://m.uber.com/ if you are ok with that web UI.
StraightTalk is a great service for whom understands what paid for. There are some network glitches but you can save money with off-contract iPhones. Do the math how much you can save for a year. It could be more than $500 which is enough to buy a new iPhone. And also the easy of switching from AT&T is a huge plus, too.
Or maybe they are not.
First of all, I don't have a car. I live in the city and I can walk or ride my bicycle to commute between home and office. Without a car, I can avoid to pay for insurance, parking hustle, maintenance fee and more. When I really need a car, like going to Point Reyes for hiking, I use Zipcar, "wheels when you want them".
So I had used cabs a lot in San Francisco. But there are four things I really hate about cab drivers.
They don't show up. It really happens a lot. I have no idea why this happens but maybe they pick up someone on their way to my home. Calling to the dispatcher again does not work because they would say "nobody's there", a obvious lie. Even if they did show up, sometime they don't wait for us carrying two suitcases and being on a street.
They are on a phone and speaking unfamiliar language like Arabic, Russian, Portuguese. Sometime it's English but they are just yelling at person on a phone complaining about family businesses. They are not professionals at all. I have never seen a Muni driver speaking on a phone with his/her family. (Although Muni drivers have their own issues like leaving a bus to get a sandwich or go to a restroom. A different story)
They hate people paying with credit cards. Nobody has more than $20 cash in a wallet because everything, but a cab ride, you can pay with your credit cards. I know there is a transaction fee like 5% or 6%, but all other restaurants, glossaries are covering the fee. I am paying more than $20 for a ride most of times. It's not enough? Cab drivers should put a sign on their car "credit card purchase - $100 minimum".
They are rude. Honking against pedestrians, cutting lanes and spitting out f-words all the way through. I'd pay 30% tips to shut their mouth.
So, I started to use SideCar and Lyft, startups providing "ride-sharing" service (I use Uber for occasional rides. As you know, everybody loves Uber. Their drivers and cars are awesome for sure). So far none of "ride-sharing" drivers are rude. They are friendly and nice. They are startups so that they know about technologies and they provide a better way to "donate" with smartphone apps. Especially I love SideCar app very much. It's well designed in terms of user experiences. Before calling a driver, you can put your destination on the app and check average "donation" fee for your ride. With a driver's version of the app integrated with GPS and Google map, the driver knows the destination and a route as you hopping in a car. It's not turn-by-turn navigation so that sometimes it's challenging to follow the route but paying "donation" experience is way much better than dealing with cab drivers with a slow printers which takes forever to print a receipt.
At a night with my coworkers, when I was talking about my experiences of SideCar and Lyft services and apps, one of my coworkers said "I don't want to be with dangerous unlicensed drivers". Well, that's true but there are thousands of dangerous cab drivers out there too.
Today on my way to a soccer field, I talked with a cab driver about those startups. He pointed out that those startups does not paying proper insurances whereas each cab driver paying $300 to $500 per month. He complained about credit card transaction fees of course. I told him about Square which requires only 2.75% of a transaction. He needs to do the moth how much he can make money by using Square.
I saw a driver using Square about a month ago. Maybe there are a few cab drivers who are smart and recognize those issues I listed. But, the problem is, how can I find them?
Now I come up with an idea. What if we have a list of cab drivers who are using Square? Actually you can do that with Square app. Search "cab" or "taxi" on the app and you get a list of cab drivers who have the pride. I'm sure I'll try one of them next time.
photo credit KayVee.INC
Don't use it.
I mean it. Do not use auto-reply vacation email setting because there is no effective way to use it.
Getting "OOO I'm on vacation" email from a guy who has a desk next to me is just ridiculous. I can visually see his empty desk now and he told me he will be on vacation before he left. Vacation auto-reply email function is not smart enough to determine if recipient knows sender's vacation schedule or not because there is no such a technology to look into my brain from any mail exchange servers delivering the shit. What is even worse is that I'm getting the same auto-reply message every single day! I'm getting old and have a short memory but I not that old to forget you're out or not each day. I DID send an email to you to let you read it later and I knew you're off. (oh wait, are you using vacation mail to prevent getting more email in your inbox? smart ass).
Email (technically its delivery protocol SMTP and client access protocol IMAP and POP) is designed in a way to allow us asynchronous communication unlike the usual telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Your recipient might see your email or might not. There is no guarantee to have your recipients read your email. Conversely it is totally fine that a sender doesn't get any reply from recipients during his or her two-week vacation. Getting no reply clearly tells me you did not read (or you did not pay attention) my email. I'll find another way around if I need to get your reply like making a telephone call or trying to reach via IM, whatever. It is a absolutely sender's responsibility to complete a task communicating with recipients.
I'm telling this now because I think you never noticed how annoying the auto-reply is.
Photo Credit: Beach Umbrella by Timothy Valentine http://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/4686431861/
here's the result of python text_strip_margin.py
I was reading a book "Programming Scala" and
noticed that there is stripMargin method in
RichString class in Scala.
It's damn useful.
And...
There is strip_heredoc in Ruby's String object.
Now you don't need a leader "|".
It does do a great job even if the string has
multi
level
indention.
It's damn useful too.
especially for usage docs like:
-h This message
yay or nay?
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tambako/6946251557/
My favoriate two tools git and vim look good in colorful mode like syntax highlight or colored diff. You can put "almost unlimited" 256 different information in your terminal and which is huge. Well, using all 256 colors at once is not so useful, but I'd like to share my two coloring configurations.
Using git means you would have a lot of branches in your working repo. And the git-completion.bash is the magic which allows you to use Tab key to complete name of branches, git sub commands and so on. I've added a little spice to PS1 environment value to display a branch name more clearly. Add these lines in to your ~/.bashrc:
if [ -f $HOME/bin/git-completion.bash ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then
. $HOME/bin/git-completion.bash
PS1='\[\033[1;35m\]\u: \[\033[0m\]\W\[\033[1;32m\]$(__git_ps1 " %s")\[\033[0m\] \$ '
fi
And you'll get this.
Now, you won't get lost in tens of thousands branches. Btw, I'm using Inconsolata dz font in iTerm2.
As looking for a way to coloring with git-completions.bash, somehow I came up with this page explaining how to display colored text in man pages.
# Less Colors for Man Pages
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' # begin blinking
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m' # begin bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' # end mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' # end standout-mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[38;5;246m' # begin standout-mode - info box
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' # end underline
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m' # begin underline
After putting these into .bashrc, I got these from man and Python online help:
Neat.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bwaters23/4894078408/ Ban Pong Coloring by bwaters23
It was a raining week in San Francisco. We got enough rain to talk about the origin of "raining cats and dogs" phrase and expressions for heavy rain in different languages.
Its equivalent is 土砂降り (doe-sha-boo-lee) in Japanese. 土砂 literary means "earth and sand" but these are phonetic equivalent for どさ coming from a word どさくさ (doe-sa-koo-sa) to express confusion or mess. So, it's more like "what a mess! it's raining so hard" which is just express one's emotional and it's not a metaphor expression unfortunately.
My French co-worker told me that they would say "Il pleut des cordes" (it's raining ropes) in French. I love the one. So vivid.
Now I assume you got curious about other languages. As you expect, there is a page for that. idiomatic expressions for heavy rain in many different languages. Enjoy.
The origin of "raining cats and dogs" phrase? Who knows!
I’ve been active in trying to get pipelining more widely deployed, but to date I haven’t tested mobile browsers much. So, one VM and two test pages (20 images on each) later, I asked my twitter peeps to hit it with their phones while I was watching with htracr.
The results confirm what they saw; mobile browsers do pipeline, sometimes aggressively.
how are the mobile browsers doing it today? First, Opera Mobile:
via www.mnot.net
It looks like pagination is a new marquee tag. Now all hip websites like Twitter, Facebook got a fancy infinite scrolling. Scroll down more, you'll get more tweets, status updates or contents. Just for browsing stuff, scrolling with space key (or petting your shiny trackpad) is good enough for those lazy people.
Currently TypePad provides only paginations on monthly archive pages like http://sekimura.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/index.html. But you can make your own infinite scroll page by following these steps:
* Step 1: Create a new "Page" *
Go to "Compose" page and select "New Page" from Compose pull down menu.
* Step 2: Put base html and save it as "all-archives.html"*
Click "HTML" tab and put html code input area.
Here is html code I used. Replace "blogId" with your own. To find your blogId, go to the dashboard for your blog and look at the URL. You will find something like:
http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00d8341d3fee53ef010535c8916d970c/dashboard
In this case, 6a00d8341d3fee53ef010535c8916d970c is your blogId.
And then save this page as "all-archives.html" or something relevant to publish it.
* Step 3: Enjoy infinite scrolling *
Go to the page you just created and scrolling down. It will automatically loading more entries when you about to get the bottom of page. Mine is here. http://sekimura.typepad.com/blog/all-archives.html.
TypePad JSON API provides such a powerful way to render your contents. Go to the page and find more fun! http://www.typepad.com/services/apidocs
In this weekend, I've got asked about sumo match-fix scandal and realized that the news spreads the world over and people outside Japan are also interested in. I said to my friend "they have been doing that and media keep on hiding the fact. So, it's no surprise to me". After checking some blogs, I found out that a controversial book, Freakonomics by Levitt, mentioned sumo wrestlers are match rigging. I haven't read the book yet but there's a pdf file of his paper about corruption in sumo wrestling. Some quotes here:
The key institutional feature of sumo wrestling that makes it ripe for corruption is the existence of a sharp nonlinearity in the payoff function for competitors. A sumo tournament (basho) involves 66 wrestlers (rikishi) participating in 15 bouts each. A wrestler who achieves a winning record (eight wins or more, known as kachi-koshi) is guaranteed to rise up the of cial ranking (banzuke); a wrestler with a losing record (make-koshi) falls in the rankings. A wrestler’s rank is a source of prestige, the basis for salary determination, and also influences the perks that he enjoys
"Figure 1" on the paper demonstrates the importance of an eighth win to a wrestler.
The critical eighth win—which results in a substantial promotion in rank rather than a demotion garners a wrestler approximately 11 spots in the ranking, or roughly four times the value of the typical victory. Consequently, a wrestler entering the final match of a tournament with a 7-7 record has far more to gain from a victory than an opponent with a record of, say, 8-6 has to lose.
He found out the peak on 8-7 records. See below.
Figure 2 provides clear visual evidence in support of the model’s prediction. Approximately 26.0 percent of all wrestlers finish with exactly eight wins, compared to only 12.2 percent with seven wins.
There're some more interesting analysis such as a give-and-take case "What Happens When Wrestlers Meet Again in the Future" so download the pdf file to read a whole paper.
You might be disappointed with the fact but don't get wrong. Sumo is "professional" wrestling and you won't be noticed how they cheat. Just enjoy watching two naked fat guys hugging each other. ;p
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