Android Pumpkin!

So my buddy Dan came over to help carve pumpkins, and gave me the idea to carve an Android one. So I downloaded the pumpkin carving app, and it carved the pumpkin for me. Android phones are so awesome.

Where are all the billionaires at?

This is a pretty interesting map showing where all of the billionaires are in the world. The bigger the circle, the more money. I suppose it's probably their main home, as they probably all have many of them. If there is a billionaire in the same place, they stack them up. The US is crowded with them. If any of those billionaires want to give me a few million, just send me an email and we'll figure out how to transfer it over. I will be eternally grateful, or at least for another 70 some odd years. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, do you have a PayPal account? Love what you guys are doing with the company. I'm probably not your number one fan, but I'm at least in the top ten. They didn't have a good way to import to a blog, so it's just a trimmed screen shot. Go to the site and check it out for an interactive map.

http://www.forbes.com/static_html/bill/2005/bill05distmap.shtml

Three big changes coming

There are three big changes coming that I think will affect our population more than any other.

• Vertical farming in skyscrapers, growing our food where we live in a closed system allowing maximum growth from minimal resources all while being organic.
• Clean power, or maybe a better way to store/transport already existing clean power. This could be significantly better batteries, fusion power, neutrino based wireless power, who knows I'm just making stuff up know.
• Cars that drive themselves.

I should have known that Google would be the one to save the day. Apparently they've already driven 140,000 miles in an automatically driven car in the San Francisco Bay area. I'm excited about this, and can't wait for it to be mainstream. Hopefully it won't take long.

Modest and proud of it

So it's been an interesting time for me lately. The contract that I work for didn't get picked up by my company. Another company was probably going to get it, and we were all going to have to switch companies. Then because of some kind of legalese stuff, maybe we weren't. Then maybe we were going to have to go on furlough, then blah, blah, blah, they don't know. So while all of this stress inducing stuff was going on, I'm also refinancing my home for a lower rate, registering for college at Columbia Southern University to finish my bachelors, and still trying not to be a pig and have some sort of a healthy-ish diet. Then, on top of that, I was trying to find reasons to justify a raise because I felt like I was being under paid for the skill sets and experience I bring to the table. While searching to find other jobs that I would qualify for and what salary they would pay, I came across a job that I would much rather have, and I qualify for it. So I decided to test the limits of my stomach lining and my sanity by trying to get a new job on top of all the other things going on.

So trying to get more money for myself is very difficult for me. I'm basically modest. I can sometimes be cocky, but it's more of a joke than anything else. I am pretty confident in my skills as an electronic technician, but I'd rather prove myself by fixing something than I would by talking about how awesome I am. I'm also more of a jack of all trades than I am an expert in any one particular piece of hardware or software. I have some basic knowledge of a whole bunch of things, and then I've got really good fiddling skills, and I'm not afraid to click buttons or flip switches to figure out what something does. I'm also not afraid of technical manuals, in fact if there is a well written one for whatever new system I'm about to try and fix, then I'd rather dive in to it and learn. I can't say how many times I've "fixed" a system just by following the instructions that no one else wanted to read.

One caveat about the level of confidence that I have, it's based on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Here's the most important parts of it grabbed from Wiki

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

I remember a time when I thought I was a lot better at fixing electronics than I actually was. I thought I was the shit, and that I could fix anything just by being near it. I didn't know any better techs than myself. I was in over my head pretty quickly. That pretty much matches a description of someone that doesn't know what they are doing so much so that they can't even identify that they don't know it well. It's been a long road since then, with many lessons learned, and I can see now how naive I was. I also see how much I still don't know, and that most of it will probably remain that way. I've also met some real geniuses that are astounding in the things that they know.

More from Dunning-Kruger effect..

Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.

I also get confused looks quite often, and I falsely assume that things that are simple to me, are actually simple to everyone. So based on the fact that I know I was ignorant before, and that I also know that there is a lot I don't know now, and the confused faces people make when I talk about technology, I have to force myself to be confident, in order to more accurately represent my skill level. So in applying for the new job, I was astounded by the things my references said and wrote about me. Thank you so much, and thanks for giving me a big head. Now I've got to figure my stoked ego into the reverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Oh well, who knows. Maybe I'll never know if I'm talented or delusional.

I ended up getting a job with the new company as a Field Support Engineer (FSE) and at a substantial raise. Cool new job title, a job that actually aligns with my talents, experience, and interests, and more money? So is it a happy ending? Well, mostly, but I will have to go overseas again, possibly Iraq, probably Afghanistan. Feeling a little over whelmed being the lowest on the totem pole, and the least trained. Guess we'll see how smart I really am...

And now for one of my favorite quotes. Seems the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't exactly a new idea.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. - Charles Darwin

Now for something that's fucking peristeronic as shit for XKCD.

Cupcakes...

PROBLEM!

There are two things about cupcakes that I don't like. The first being that the icing and the cake are not evenly distributed causing an imbalance of tastiness depending on what part of the cupcake eating event you are at. One viable solution is to take very large bites, therefore giving yourself the correct ratios of cupcake to frosting in your food intake receptacle. That's were my second dislike of cupcakes comes in. Taking large bites can lead to your mouth being to full to accept the necessary amount of milk, it can lead to long awkward pauses in conversation and most dangerously, frosting on the nose.

SOLVED!!!

Not being one to bring up a problem without at least offering a feasible solution, I give you the cupcake sandwich. It's really quite simple, and I'm not sure how I've gone so long without figuring it out. I quite accidentally came across the solution. I was in the midst of a conversation, and was playing with my cupcake, delaying the awkward pause that I was inevitably going to create by taking a bite out of it. When I removed it from the cupcake wrapper, the bottom half cracked a little and almost came off. I haphazardly removed it, and placed it on top (also haphazardly). So I can't really take credit for discovering it, haven't even searched the internets to see if it already exists, but I can at least recognize a good situation and capitalize on it. Enjoy!

Perspective

It's difficult to imagine a world without myself in it. I've never seen the world through anyone else's eyes. Maybe I've seen a movie shot from someone else's point of view, but I still watched it as something external to me, and through my perspective. I've never known what someone was truly thinking.

It's also hard to imagine a day after I've died. Everything that has ever happened with out me there, is irrelevant to me, only the things that I've seen, experienced, felt for myself are real. Every book, every movie, every song, whether fiction or fact, the characters don't actually exist. The tragedies, the comedies, the romances, are only ideas that enter my mind. Some of the ideas stay, set up house, rearrange the person I am, into something new, and other ideas they leave without another thought given to them. There is no external world to me. It is only raw data streaming into my mind. When I die, my world disappears, ceases to exist. Life ends in my world, the sun stops shining, the stars fade, the earth dissolves into nothing. Everything dissolves into nothing, and then even the concept of nothing is gone.

Were any of the things I saw real? Are there other people experiencing their own world too? Does their world exist when mine stops? I don't know. Every bit of the world I've ever known has always existed within some form of myself. How could it possibly exist without me?

When is the HTC EVO going to get Android 2.2? TODAY!

I haven't even started thinking about when I'm getting the Android 2.2 (Froyo) on my HTC Evo, because the 2.1 upgrade for the HTC Hero took close to 6 months. I wasn't going to even start looking for info on it until Halloween. To my surprise, this morning I woke up to an update notice on my phone that said, 2.2! Wow! That was fast. It's way to early to see if it broke any apps, added any bugs, or if it's super awesome like all the hype is saying. I'll have to do another post about it later, just wanted to say that I was pretty jazzed to get the update so soon. The HTC version is 3.26.651.6 if anyone is interested.