REM supplied the post headline, but Siliconvalley.com supplied the pointer.

The day the VHS died…

At this point, beating a dead horse, ja? WHO – in the last five or so years – has intentionally purchased a VHS player?? I don’t get it. Unless you have a lot of VHS tapes and your player died…

Well, it’s the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and below-zero temps here in Chicago.

So, the days will start getting longer (more sunlight), but will they get warmer? Nah…. Winter’s just begun here.

*sigh*

OK, Google’s App Engine launched back in April, 2008. Here’s what I wrote about same back in April.

I signed up for the service immediately, but just got my key (well, invite) yesterday. Eight months later.

I’m not sure what that means. But not a good thing, in my (addled) mind.

• Wow, we’re so fabulously successful that we’ve had to delay giving keys out until we can scale (uh, this is Google)
• We’re still testing (Valid, but, again, you’re Google…)
• Crap, we forgot about this service… (I doubt, but it feels like this).
• Yeah, we are giving out keys to people that matter (descending)… OK, I might even buy this.

And when will I get time to learn a new environment/language(currently Python only)? Who knows!

But it’ll be fun. I like new stuff with promise…

UPDATE: Interesting. I signed up tonight (12/17), and Google required a mobile number (to send the confirmation key to). So I got an SMS (after about one-billionth of a second [how does Google do that?] ), and all worked…but interesting.

I’m writing this up to help others, and so I can refer to it again.

Long story, but at work I was left with a text file that was a comma-delimited list that had:

• Order ID
• Order Date (YYYYMMDD)
• Customer Info (name, full address, phone etc.)

Example lines:

(The ellipsis […] is just a placeholder for the additional customer info, plus line feed.)

I wanted to do a quick transformation on this list and extract a list of Order IDs only. I was in vi (I had grepped this list out of a bigger list; long story that I’m not going to bore you with).

Now, the first set of data was the order IDs, and the second was repeated in every line (,2008[whatever]).

So, it seemed trivial to do a REGEX to find this repeating element in every line, and remove it and all that follows to end of line.

Seems simple, but it took three of us a half-hour of monkeying around and googling before we found the solution, which is:

At the replace prompt (:), run substitute against all lines (%s).

Find the repeating item(,2008) and replace that and all (*) printable characters (\p)that follow (\p*) with nothing (//)

End up with a list of order IDs, as desired.

Trivial now; just had to find the correct REGEX to replace all that follows that pattern.

This has been a Public Service Announcement from Stupid vi Tricks….

By this, I mean the Turkey Day weekend is over. (Actually, the non-frozen part of our yearly turkey has been gobbled up by me, so turkey be gone applies there, as well…)

*sigh*

Back to work!

Actually, I’m an ecommerce/web developer, so there really is no down time, unless you’re actually “off the grid” – on vacation, somewhere without VPN access or what have ya.

But it was a nice weekend; I think I (finally!) posted all but the last 5% of my vacation pictures from our trip to Maine in early September.

About freakin’ time – it’s been three months.

Some observations about this posting process:

• I have some good (homegrown) tools to help me with this process, but it’s still a very one-by-one process. Time consuming.
• Google/Google Maps are invaluable to this process. Hey, pic I took 90 days ago, where is this shop? Google it. Ah, on Middle Street…
• I suck as a photographer. That’s partly being on vacation (snapshots vs. taking the time to compose etc), but I’ve been out of game too long. Need to retrain myself.
• Great fun to revisit the photos – takes time to cull images in/out, but that’s fun. To me…
• I have to get better at processing pics. I have a decent camera, shoot at high shutter speeds/low ISO. Yet Dooce (Heather Armstrong) kicks my ass with her pics. She’s a graphic artist/web designer (hence way better than me at this stuff), but her pics rock. Mine don’t. I gotta get better.

Update 12/03/2008: Did I actually use the word “actually” three times in the first five sentences? Yes! We have a winner (loser)! Wow. Someday I’ll actually learn to aktually rite goodish. Eep.

After months of speculation, expectation [pick your own verb] Yahoo! co-founder and current CEO Jerry Yang is stepping down.

I have great respect for Yang, but little respect for his tenure as CEO.

It hasn’t gone well.

Yahoo is well on its way to becoming the latest version of Netscape, which is – to me – painful.

Yahoo is a great brand, and – more importantly – a great groundbreaking company. (As was Netscape.)

However, over the last few years – especially under Yang – Yahoo has done poorly, and shows no signs of really getting ahead of the curve.

Yang’s departure is a milestone, but a good move, to me. Yang and David Filo founded and built the company, but – today – Yahoo is a completely different company, and Yang has not adapted. Hell, I wouldn’t either. Not a ding; just a reality.

NOTE: I’m not at all mentioning the Microsoft/Yahoo merger/takeover talks here. Just Yahoo.

Beware of thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources.

— William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

You (me) have been warned.

Some good can come out of same, as well, I believe.

A rumination coming out of our recent general election, specifically the 2008 presidential election.

I’ve never been a fan of the Electoral College, and this election again points out some of the, well, oddnesses of this institution.

A week and a half after the election, Missouri is still inexplicably not called, but let’s pretend it goes to the election’s loser, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

McCain still loses 365 to 173 electoral college votes. This is a landslide of sorts, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) getting approximately 66% of the electoral votes to McCain’s 33%.

Two-to-one margin. Blowout.

But the popular vote is way closer, roughly a 6% Obama win, not a 33% margin.

WTF?

Exactly.

At the same time, there are a number of reasons the Electoral College is not going to go away anytime soon, and here are some of the reasons I think this is so:

• Whatever party’s in the White House won the electoral vote: So there’s very little incentive for them to address this issue. The only exception would be if Party A is in the White House and Party B wins the election with a really low percentage (I think it’s possible to get ~21% of the popular vote and carry the electoral college). However, in this case, it would be in the midst of a lame duck period and it would look too partisan, even for D.C.
• We’re a Republic, not a Democracy: We democratically elect representatives to govern; we don’t personally vote on every issue. While a bit of an anomoly, the electoral college is just another check and balance, much as the Senate gets to approve a President’s choices of Supreme Court judges.
• States you might expect to be for abolishing the electoral college aren’t: Some argue that one-person one-vote elections would force candidates to court voters in smaller (electoral) states, but this isn’t really true.

  Let’s take an extreme example: Wyoming. The US’ least populous state, it has approximately 500,000 people. Wyoming has three electoral votes. Alaska, ranked No. 2 in population, has three electoral votes, as well, but with a population of approximately 700,000 for the same number of electoral votes. Therefore, Wyoming voters each have a larger influence on the state’s electoral vote’s than do Alaskan voters.

  In Illinois, where I live, there are 21 electoral votes for roughly 13 million voters, or about 600,000 people per electoral vote. In Wyoming, it’s 500,000/3 = 167,000 people per electoral vote, or about four/five times fewer than Illinois. So, a single user’s vote in Wyoming – at least statistically – is much more influential than same in Illinois.

  And you can repeat this exercise around the country, adjusting for voting age/registered population, but the bottom line is pretty much the same: The less electoral votes, the greater the impact of a single vote on those electoral votes.

• It hasn’t broken yet: There really haven’t been any game-changing electoral college votes (that I’m aware of), so it’s an if it ain’t broke don’t fix it issue.

Personally, I’d rather see the primary elections streamlined before we get around to looking at the electoral college; the primaries have become – since 2000, to me – way too long, way too inconsistent (caucus, regular vote, winner take all, proportioned delegates, those oh-so-mysterious Super Delegates) to make any sense. What did we have, like 1000 primary debates? Barack Obama’s been campaigning for almost two years; billions have been spent on this presidential run (all candidates from all parties). We gotta put the brakes on somehow, even if it is just market forces (i.e. no one watches anything other than the first and last primary debate, skipping the 998 betwixt).

But – as with Gore in 2000 – having the presidential loser the winner in the popular vote is, well, disconcerting.

Barack Obama sealed the deal earlier, securing the nomination election for the 44th president of the United States of America. And, bye the bye, the first African-American president.

Pretty amazing night. Obama gave a solid, emotional but realistic speech to the approximately 100k(?) people in Grant Park, Chicago.

John McCain gave a gracious, classy speech to about 1k folks at his party in Arizona. (Invitation only)

Sorta sums up the campaign that is now, thankfully, over.

Well, unless something goes very wrong tomorrow, by this time tomorrow, we – folks in the U.S. – will probably know that an historic event has occurred:

We’ll either have elected our first African-American president, or elected our first Female vice president.

Either way, historic.

I predict Obama with a 90-120 electoral vote win (over McCain), but a very low popular vote edge (~5-7%).

I could – and probably am – wrong, which is the fun part of putting this down on electronic paper.

So I can look at this tomorrow as ask myself, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Let the votes begin…