An ESPGiving.org Update

So far I’d say ESPGiving.org has been a mild success. With almost 14,000 hits and what appears to be close to 1000 visitors, I’d say it went pretty well. Considering this was the first time I’d really launched a site like this I don’t think it went too badly.

Of course for all those visitors there were only a handful — 18 — that voted in the poll (which makes me start to question the statistics about visitors, but maybe people were just shy). At least “Willing to donate all $600″ received the plurality of votes. There were several others out there that commented on the site (though I did let it languish a bit by not adding their suggestions to the List of Charities), but hopefully many more found the idea interesting.

Today I posted an update to my personal ESP status and how the IRS managed to not pay use as much as we expected. Luckily this was straightened out pretty easily:

After spending a while on hold (that God for speakerphone!) I spoke with an incredibly nice gentleman we got it all straightened out. It seems that they somehow didn’t get the memo that we had a kid, but he corrected it and told me that we would get our additional deposit in 4-5 weeks. Overall the process was pretty painless. The IRS employee who I spoke to was quite knowledgeable about my return (after I waited a few minutes to pull it up — I’m sure everything was running slow because of the call volume) and even explained why this happened.

The call volume must have been huge yesterday, but I presume that it’s been that way for a few weeks. Not only did it take quite a while to get someone on the phone, but the process of pulling up my return (from wherever it was stored) took quite a while as well. Based on reports that ESP Payments were sent out based on the last 2 digits of your SSN, I should be one of the last ones to get theirs, so I’m guessing this has been the norm for the folks at the IRS for the last few weeks.

Unless it takes off like crazy as people start getting their money, I’m guessing this will be the last note on my blog about ESPGiving.org. It was fun and an interesting experiment — hopefully the first of many interesting websites.

Announcing ESPGiving.org

I’m not sure how much interest it will generate, but I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a site dedicated to raise awareness about what one can do with the money they will get from federal Economic Stimulus Package. Check it out here:

http://www.espgiving.org

The whole point of it is to encourage others to think about more than just themselves with the $146 Billion being passed out.

I’m a bit nervous about how the server will hold up to any significant traffic, but I might be fooling myself if I think there is going to be any significant traffic.

Well that’s it. Now I’m off to post about it in the facebook group for it and if all goes well invite all my friends to start checking it out tomorrow.

I’m not sure who ‘Craig’ is but I like his list

Problem: The old range, microwave, and dishwasher from our kitchen before we re-modeled were sitting in our garage taking up my parking spot. All were working and in good condition.

Solution: Post them on craigslist at 2:36pm Sunday listing them all for $300 total and see what happens. It seemed like a fair price based on what others were charging.

Result: Someone from Angier drives ~45 minutes and picks them up at 5:20pm and leaves me with three C-notes.

It’s amazing to think that only a few years ago I would be putting them in the newspaper or dumping them out of the back of a pickup truck while driving down the interstate.

Thanks Craig!

Amazon MP3 Downloader finally supported on Linux

So I somehow missed the memo on this last week. Probably because I was too busy worrying about whether or not I was getting paid. This morning I wandered over to Amazon to check to see if they made the downloader available and it was there! Of course, nothing ever seems to work exactly as I expect, so it was supported on Fedora 8 rather than Fedora 7, so I started digging around to figure out if I could run in on F7 so that I don’t have to re-install my lappy to test it out. Once I got it working (instructions here), I was off to make my first digital download of music. Many have been doing this legally for a while, but I completely refuse to lease my music from Apple and use iTunes, so I’ve yet to pay and download any music until today.

Before I began to shop for something I decided to sit back and think about the first purchases of this type that I made in the part. I’m sure many remember the first LP, Cassette Tape, or CD they ever bought, and I have been thinking about what my first digital download will be for quite a while (I’ve had a while since Amazon has been taking it’s sweet-ass time getting the Linux downloader working).

Will it be some crappy pop music like my first CD– which I think was the classic CooleyHighHarmony by Boyz II Men. (Stop laughing I was in eighth grade and they were popular at the time. My second purchase was much better.) Or will it be something a bit more classly like my first Cassette Tape (which I think was this).

As I go to my browser to buy some interesting music, I notice a new tab is open — and it’s a page on Amazon indicating that they noticed I got the downloader installed and wait to test it. So I click the link and realize I’m already making my first download (for free). So before I know it Energy by The Apples In Stereo is being pushed to me by Amazon. It looks like my first digital audio purchase is following in the steps of my previous purchases — pop crap.

Oh well, hopefully my next purchase will be a good one. Maybe a classic like this or something more sophisticated like this (since it was the first song Jennifer and I danced to as a married couple). Maybe I’ll let you know later today. I’m sure the seven people that read this blog can’t wait to find out!!!

Getting the Amazon MP3 Downloader to work on F7

Here is a quick summary about how I got this working.

NOTE: I’m not sure if I use any other applications that use the boost libraries, but there is always the chance that an upgrade to the F8 versions of boost on F7 install might break things, so be careful!!! Don’t come complaining to me if this doesn’t work for you!

It turns out the version amazon publishes will mostly work with F7 as well, but a few shared libraries need to be slightly newer (and it’s because of an actual change, not just a re-naming of the shared libraries). The library is provided by the boost and boost-devel packages so I rebuilt the F8 packages for F7 and now the Amazon MP3 Downloader seems to work just fine.

If anyone else out there wants to run the downloader on F7, you can probably just get the mp3 downloader from Amazon and the boost libraries from my Red Hat people page. Then do something like this:


# yum localupdate ~/Desktop/boost-1.34.1-5.fc7.i386.rpm
# yum localupdate ~/Desktop/boost-devel-1.34.1-5.fc7.i386.rpm
# yum localinstall ~/Desktop/amazonmp3.rpm


You may not have boost installed already, so you might need to run

# yum localinstall ~/Desktop/boost-1.34.1-5.fc7.i386.rpm
# yum localinstall ~/Desktop/boost-devel-1.34.1-5.fc7.i386.rpm
# yum localinstall ~/Desktop/amazonmp3.rpm


instead but the first version worked for me.

Am I getting paid to work today?

For those of us in the real word that are considered to be on salary there are normally 3 ways to get paid:

• Bi-Weekly — get paid every 2 weeks
• Semi-Monthly — get paid twice per month
• Monthly — if you can’t figure this out stop reading

If you are one that gets paid Bi-Weekly then the leap-year isn’t that critical. Every two weeks your company probably cuts you a check for 80 hrs of work — except for that last check of the year your company probably pays you for 88 hours since there is an extra day of work that year. (The math might be slightly different depending on your company does it’s fiscal year, but you understand what I’m saying the extra day should mean 8 hours of extra pay.)

So what about people like me that get paid Semi-Monthly — on the 1st and 15th of the month? Should I assume that my employer will take my salary at the beginning of the year and divide it by 24 and pay me in 24 equal increments whether we are in a leap year or not? Or should I assume that my employer will consider the number of hours and pay me ~0.38% more this year than last (assuming there are normally 260 working days in a year, so this year there would be 261)? (Of course the same problem applies to those that get paid monthly but they get paid in 12 equal increments and possibly get screwed out of the extra day.)

I think this is an interesting question to research and will make sure that I get my extra $46.80 for working today.

Feel free to post your thoughts and whether or not your company will pay you for working today.

Someone at google doesn’t get it

So not everyone is going to see this is a problem, but today I ran across this article (courtesy of slashdot). It seems google has some interest in photoshop running better on Linux, so they are going to fund some development to get that done. It seems to me that Dan Kegel (whoever he is) might be of those someones:

“We hired CodeWeavers to make Photoshop CS and CS2 work better under Wine,” Dan Kegel, of Google’s software engineering team and the Wine 1.0 release manager, said on Google’s open-source blog. “Photoshop is one of those applications that desktop Linux users are constantly clamoring for, and we’re happy to say they work pretty well now…We look forward to further improvements in this area.”

So while some read this as an endorsement of Linux, to me it reads like a denouncement of basic Free Open-Source Software (FOSS) ideals. What is Linux going to become it it’s nothing more than a platform that simply serves as one that runs Windows compatible software without paying Microsoft for the OS license?

It would make more sense to me for Google to invest some cash on some developers to improve The Gimp. It seems like a much better place to invest in FOSS rather than funding more work that still locks others into closed-source, proprietary applications.

Maybe Google isn’t interested in many of the other ideals that draw others to use, support, and develop FOSS? Maybe they are just doing this as a way to further cut Microsoft out of the picture? Either way I’m not a fan. If you want to invest in FOSS, invest in developers who are working to enable FOSS as an end to end solution — not just when FOSS is part of the equation.

facebook birthday

No I’m not talking about the number of years I’ve been using facebook. Or the number of years it’s been in existence. I’m here to talk about the interesting phenomena that occurs whenever you have a birthday and have an account on facebook.

Since all of your friends get the little notification in the right panel of their ‘feed’ page that it’s your birthday, many will write on your wall or send your a quick message. As cheesy as this sounds it’s pretty interesting. Some of the people that write a good friends or family members, so you expect to hear from them. But others are people you haven’t seen since college or high school, so it’s fun to hear from them again. It’s not like the messages are that meaningful, but it’s still fun.

So maybe facebook isn’t so worthless after all….

Avoid driving everywhere in Raleigh

A co-worker brought this site to my attention today and it’s pretty interesting. Go Triangle is basically a route planner for taking public transportation in and around Raleigh.

The site is neat, but I’ll have to say that I might not like taking 1:44 to get to work when I can generally drive in about 20 minutes. I can even ride my bike in about 1 hour. Taking the bus might be worth a try though.

2008 Krispy Kreme Challenge

Run 2 miles, try to eat a dozen doughnuts, run 2 more miles with 3000 of my closest friends. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do on a cold (for NC) Saturday morning.

While it seemed like a good idea when I signed up, my total lack of preparation came back to bite me in the ass. Sadly, I haven’t run 2 miles consecutively in a LOOOOONG time and those days of Cross Country running have been long since forgotten by my body. Going into the event I decided I would only try and eat 6 (1000 calories was enough for me based on my current fitness level), but while the doughnuts were fresh, they were not warm and easy to eat, so only pounded 5 of them. (If you have ever had the joy of eating a hot Krispy Kreme doughnut you know what I’m talking about — if you haven’t you are really missing out.) Running the 2 miles back to the Belltower was pretty bad, but I think my physical condition had more to do with my slow time (around 50 minutes) than the doughnuts sitting in my gut.

The whole event was a struggle, but I’m glad I did it. Not only did I help raise $20,000 for the NC Children’s Hospital, but I got to experience the scene at the downtown Kristpy Kreme where 3000 people are all trying to grab their dozen doughnuts and eat them as quickly as possible. It was quite a spectacle and I hope more people sign up next year than did this year.

The NandO published this article which I thought had a few worthwhile quotes regarding the impact that the KKC can have on the NC State community and Raleigh in general.

“We’ve been losing our traditions,” said runner Andy Gospodarek, a 2001 State grad who works as a software developer at Red Hat. In short succession students have seen school administration put the kibosh on the beginning-of-school block party on Brent Road, an annual frat-fest called Lawn Party, tailgating before football games, camping out for tickets before big basketball games.
“It’s something students can rally around,” said Gospodarek. “I’d love to one day see 10 or 15,000 people running in this. It could put Raleigh on the map as one of those quirky things that would make people think of Raleigh as a cool place.”

Of course they didn’t publish the quote I really wanted him to use:

As long as the streets aren’t covered in puke this race will be a huge success.

I’d say it was a successful event.