Sandro's Journal

(Please take the time to answer this. It's important to me.)

Imagine if all the websites you use and the apps on your phone stored the data they collect from you in a place where you could control it. In today's world, every time you buy something, every time you search for something, every move you make in a game, every comment you post, every "like" or "+1" button you press, every time you follow a link from one site to another, ... everything you do online today can be recorded and kept, somewhere beyond your reach. Imagine if, instead, it was stored by a service that you selected and which would do as you asked. If you wanted it deleted, or changed (but not to cheat someone), you could open the control panel and do it. If you wanted to download it, archive it, even upload it elsewhere, you could do that. And everything still worked fine.

You might worry this new service would now know too much. But it would be one of many, and you could move between them when you felt like it, and maintain multiple independent personna accounts. More importantly, because you would not be locked in, these providers would be competing to serve you better, with the best privacy policies and terms of service, at a price you like.

Please, for now, ignore the questions of how this might work, and how we'd get everyone to switch.

Poll #1830744 owning your data
Open to: Friends, detailed results viewable to: Friends, participants: 29

If you could switch your apps today, so they would store your data like this, on a cloud server you control, would you do it?

View Answers

I don't understand, sorry
1 (3.6%)
No, I'm happy with things as they are
0 (0.0%)
No, I don't really like this plan
0 (0.0%)
Yes, I'd use it as long as it was free
4 (14.3%)
Yes, and I'd pay $10 per year for this
10 (35.7%)
Yes, I'd probably pay $5 per month this
7 (25.0%)
It's so awesome, I'd even pay $15/mo for this
2 (7.1%)
Other, please explain in comments
4 (14.3%)

So, if you had $10K you needed to invest in a startup, would you invest in this?

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I simply cannot imagine this situation
4 (14.8%)
I can imagine it, but I still have no clue what I'd do
9 (33.3%)
No, I'd rather invest in something that might rule some market
0 (0.0%)
No, this is too ambitious; it wont work out, long term
5 (18.5%)
Yes, even commodity business make money, if they are run well
1 (3.7%)
Yes, this just sounds so awesome
4 (14.8%)
Other, please explain in comments
4 (14.8%)

It's tempting to join the stream and post a (true and heartbreaking) ididnotreport (from the 70s), but I just use twitter for professional contacts, so that really doesn't seem like a good idea. I dunno. I'm not great at the whole "out" thing any more.

Anyone have an recommendations or advice about refinancing? I've never done it before, and there are a few complications in this case.

I suppose lj is passe now.

ETA: and the UI is confusing. I thought I was posting this in a different place, one that had been unused since 2005.

Poll #1806619
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

View Answers

I sometimes write code that uses a database (MySQL, Mongo, etc)
5 (17.2%)
I sometimes write code that involves users interacting with each other
4 (13.8%)
I'm comfortable writing in Javascript
4 (13.8%)
I'm comfortable writing in Python
4 (13.8%)
I'm local to Boston
6 (20.7%)
I'd be interested in attending a talk/tutorial on a new shared, open, global database platform you're developing
4 (13.8%)
I'd be interested in playing with it, but not attending a talk/tutorial
2 (6.9%)
This isn't for me, but you should talk to some friend(s) of mine, who I just emailed you about
0 (0.0%)
None of the above, thank you very much.
0 (0.0%)

View Answers

I'll need to see some technical details first
3 (30.0%)
I could probably attend on a Monday evening
2 (20.0%)
I could probably attend on a Tuesday evening
3 (30.0%)
I could probably attend on a Thursday evening
1 (10.0%)
I'd even give this a Saturday evening
0 (0.0%)
All day Sunday, too!
1 (10.0%)
None of the above / Not applicable
0 (0.0%)

I was looking at a google map of my neighborhood and noticed "Waltham Airport", more or less on a neighbor's lawn. Several sources confirm this location for "WLM". Very very strange. I guess maybe there used to be an airstrip there, and when they built houses over it, it never got de-listed from various databases?

Does anyone know of a carrier that will let you use a smartphone without paying $30+/mo for data service?

(this is for my kids.... they don't need data service; I just want to pay the $9.99 per line, but I'd like them to be able to be android phones.)

Am I right in assuming that laser disks are entirely worthless now? I have about 40 movies. I suppose I could keep their 12" sleeves as art....

The last time I wired a house for ethernet, 100Base-T was state-of-the-art.

The walls and ceiling in my new house are open now, so it's the time to wire it, but I don't know what kind of wires to use, and what constraints I have. It's hard to sort through the stuff I'm seeing on the Web. Anyone have a quick bottom line for me?

(If you say "just use wifi", I will smile and nod and ignore you. Wifi has it's place, but when it's not a problem, in my experience, wires are much better.)

Thanks!

Should I hold a little bbq/party Monday afternoon, at my new house? It now has electricity, a working bathroom, and two chairs. And it's kinda nice.

(it does not however, have any sort of kitchen.)

How should I pick colors for my new house?

It's currently painted in a fancy Victorian 6-color style, which is mostly pleasing, but incomplete in some places and peeling in others.

High-res pictures for anyone who wants to suggest a color scheme [possibly via photoshop :-) ] are here.

My offer for 23 Lord Street, Waltham has been accepted. Assuming there are no great unpleasant surprises in the inspection or mortgage process, by June I should be a home owner again.

I'm a bit nervous about moving after five years renting the very comfortable house I'm in now, and about taking on a big old house in need of work, but the location and price and size and architecture ... well, it's the best option I've seen on the market in years.

Now, if I can just figure out what to do with that absurd koi pond in the front yard.

I seem to be the only person who has submitted an elevator pitch for the Semantic Web, yet, so they featured my video:

http://semanticweb.com/

(in a few days, it'll move off that page; here's the permalink.)

Is there an effective technique for finding out which of my friends, or even friends of friends, wants to chat about some particular topic I feel like talking about?

... without bothering everyone else.

I saw a facebook meme with all the usual rules, about coming up with 15 of your favorite albums in 15 minutes. In thinking about that, it seems to me there's a big gap between the albums I merely liked a lot and the albums I listened to a hundred bajillion times. And it seemed like there were about 20 of the latter, so I've listed 20.

Berkeley Years (childhood)

I saw Apocalyptica tonight. I hung out with

miss_chance and

palmwiz; Gregorian was there, too, with friends of his. I love that he loves this band; I think he listened to their first album a lot in utero. (Hmmm, I wonder if he also listened to Nirvana's In Utero in utero. I don't recall. :-)

Mostly I just like their first album; I don't care for rock-metal drums along with cello very much, which seems to be their later sound. There was one song off their just-released album that I liked a lot, though (and it used a more subtle drum): (Sacra)

They have a few songs with vocals, and they had a vocalist on stage to sing them. I have no idea who he is; I don't think they introduced him or anything. Websearching I haven't had any luck, although I find reports of who they used as a singer in other gigs.

By my memory, it was my first (real?) concert since Gregorian started being too big to take. I have vague memories of us taking him at a few months to see Bad Religion at Avalon, but... ah, it turns out that show was 3 months before he was born. If my memory is that bad, maybe there are shows I'm completely forgetting. (I guess I was quite aware that we were bringing him to the concert. The fact that he was only a fetus is what I forgot.)

As for the co-headliner, Dir En Grey... Ummm. They are clearly very talented, enthusiastic, and ... pretty, but I wish they'd play something else. :-) [Maybe it's an acquired taste; this was the first I'd heard them.]

One funny thing --- lots and lots of people using their cameras to take pictures and videos (this wasn't so common back in 1996!) -- and I saw lots of android phones and only one iphone. Maybe this is because, like the band, Linus is from Finland? (As are the creators of IRC, MySQL, and ssh, I see.)

I can't believe how much I love this video.

It's a "literal" video (I love them), really well done, with the Eclipse trailer.

I recommend positioning the video window slightly off the bottom of your screen to block the lyrics, which are mostly distracting. At least on the second or third watching.

Tobuscus: Twilight Eclipse LITERAL Trailer Parody .

The Afterlife one is quite nice too, but not quite as epic.

While getting hungry sometimes makes me irritable and even miserable, at other times it's just a physical sensation, with no negative mental impact. Now I just need to figure out how to keep it in the second camp more.

Lots of exercise, and hard exercise, are fine. They don't make me sick; they're not unhealthy. (previous theories have been discarded due to contrary evidence.)

Carefully fitted running shoes from the place near Harvard square may be good for running (unclear yet), but they are bad for walking. They are too tilted, and hurt my ankles after a while.

I have zero interest in fancy, special, or interesting food. Perfectly ordinary food can be just as pleasurable (to my philistine palate), if not better. [[ETA: Or maybe this is just wishful thinking. Hard to tell.]]

Exercise alone is not enough to make me lose much weight, at least not in reasonable quantities (~1hr/day) (This fits with that interesting study recently showing that fat kids are less active because they are fat, not fat because they are less active.)

Using albuterol before exercising is probably good. Even if it's not needed on the asthma front [my doctor says it helps even if I can't feel it], it may help me stay motivated, being a stimulant.

Somewhat less specific: it's good to find stuff that makes you feel good. :-)

It's much easier to take care of myself physically, including eating right, when I'm calm/happy and don't have the kids around. (those are two separate factors, and are probably not positively correlated; my point is that when they happen to coincide, food/body stuff is easier to deal with.)

In a bizarre postscript to yesterday's question about hair styles (as I contemplate cutting my long hair), and my happening across the nicely written if historically inaccurate Louis CK Poker ("faggot") scene earlier today (and on Fresh Air yesterday), I got rudely called "long haired faggot" for the first time in my life today.

I've held hands with and even kissed boyfriends in very public mainstream places before, but never had someone do something like that. So it was odd.

It was a trio of teenagers who had been awkwardly, coincidentally following me walking across Belmont at nightfall, for about 20 minutes. I bet they felt weird at me (unhappily) hearing all their conversation, taking the same turns they were about to, and walking too fast for them to pass. Perhaps they were surprised when they figured out I was a guy, although in all their loud conversation they didn't seem to notice me. When our paths finally diverged, and we got some real distance between us, one of them called that out.

I almost ran after them to confront them on it, but I didn't. Nor, alas, did I think of a clever retort.

Seriously, if I go ahead and cut my hair now, I hope you'll all accept it was despite this little incident, and hardly because of it. :-)

(And next time, someone ends up following me for more than a block, I think I'll stop and stretch for a while, or something. Crazy.)

How do you decide what your hair should be like?

(Seeing myself in videos recently has made me seriously dislike my current hairstyle, but I don't know what to do instead.)