U.N. Chief Urges Warning on Sudan Fighting

After the recent cease-fire in Sudan, you might expect UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to be taking a break from the whole Sudan thing. But, you'd be wrong. Apparently, he's not content with simply waiting for the fighting to end, he wants to ensure that it ends soon. In fact, he has gone so far as to urge the UN Security Council to issue a warning to the troops fighting in Sudan. While this urging was probably unnecessary, since I'm sure we can trust the Sudanese to stop fighting anyway, I hope that Sudan's troops are braced for the vehement warning that they might possibly receive from the all-powerful Security Council. Let us hope that Annan is not being too merciless to Sudan's fair troops by urging such a strong warning, and that in the future Sudan's troops will not have to bear the brunt of any more stern warnings.

Supporting Linux

I've been a theoretical fan of Linux for a while, despite the fact that I haven't put it on my computer yet. I intend to download Mandrake Linux when I get a fast internet connection again in my school dorm, but other than that I haven't done much to support Linux. Well, today I financially lent my support to Linux - that is to say that I invested some money in Red Hat, a Linux developer. My reasons for investing also include potential financial benefits for myself, but I'm pleased that I am now able to support Linux.

Irate Savant

This guy brings a new level of pretentiousness to blogging. I must admit that the formality and pedantry of the blog does make it a more entertaining read.

Taskbar on the left side

I'm doing something that I've never seen anyone else doing, despite the many years in which this has been possible and the many computers I have seen. I have put my Windows Taskbar on the left side of the screen. Yes, it's crazy, I know, I hope I don't get locked up for this. The taskbar has been at the bottom of every computer that I can ever recall seeing, but even since Windows 95, it has been possible to move the taskbar to dock to any of the other sides of the screen. In my more sane days, I knew of this capacity, but I thought, "Why put it elsewhere? It works fine on the bottom of the screen, what kind of strange person would dare move the taskbar and thus defy Microsoft's infinite wisdom that has so appropriately located the taskbar on the bottom?"

The seeds for my present deviance were unknowingly planted when I commented (September 5) on how monitors should be rotated 90º so as to be oriented like portraits. Then, this week, it happened. I suddenly had an idea: why take up space at the bottom of my screen when I could put the taskbar on the left side and thus make the viewing area taller? I've been trying it this way for a couple days and it's not as hard to get used to as I expected, and I am afraid that I am so far gone that the taskbar almost makes more sense on the left side. I don't know if I will ever be able to fend off my ruinous insanity and shuck the pernicious crutch of my left-docked taskbar, and if I don't make it I hope that you will remain vigilant in avoiding the pestilence that I am having to deal with now. If only we could have been protected from something like this, why did Microsoft allow us this ability? I cannot doubt their wisdom in doing so, but I cannot imagine the devastation that could occur if more people do as I have so foolishly done.

Cirque du Soleil

For some reason, Lockheed pays for its interns to attend an event every semester. In the Spring we chose to go to a Dallas Mavericks basketball game and this semester we chose to go to Cirque du Soleil.

On Tuesday we went to Fair Park in Dallas and with our Lockheed-purchased $47.25 tickets, we got to go inside the big tent (although in the worst seating section) and experience Cirque du Soleil.

Where do I begin? Well, in short the performance was very impressive.

The performance included the awesomest acrobatics and gymnastics that I've ever seen. There was a performer who juggled two ping pong balls with his mouth, a contortionist with amazing balance, performers that flipped and balanced other performers with their legs, and much more. The costumes are very elaborate with beautiful colors and intricate features. Like many good works of art, humor was a substantial part of Cirque du Soliel's show.

One person said that Cirque du Soleil was to the circus as Kiss is to rock, but I completely disagree with that, I'd compare Cirque du Soliel to a classical artist.

There is so much happening on stage at one time and, like a good orchestral piece, it is hard to absorb all of it. Each performer does his or her part and they collectively contribute to the performance. There are no guitars or drums here, but a symphony of violins, bassoons, even a slide whistle and moraccas, and so much more (metaphorically).

I don't really know what it all meant, there was a guy and a girl and a guy with a lightbulb in his head, and quite a few other performers, but it was basically a love story, I suppose.

It must have taken an incredibly long time to plan the performance, including the set, the costumes, and of course the acrobatic and gymnastic moves.

If you're going to die this year, I'd recommend you go see Cirque du Soleil, they're at Fair Park in Dallas until December 11.

By the way, one thing I don't understand is that because of child labor laws, our kids can't spend their free time in the factories, but they can spend hours a day training for and performing intensely effortful physical acts. Isn't there something wrong with that?

Peace in Sudan?

Sudan, Rebels "Agree" to "End" Civil War:

Rebel officials and the Sudanese government committed themselves Friday to ending the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan before January, signing an agreement at a special meeting of the U.N. Security Council in Africa.

I'll believe it when I see it, or rather, read about it, but I'm not yet celebrating the end of the war. Promises have been made in the past and nothing has been done, so I'm skeptical of this deal. Furthermore,

But the aid organization Oxfam International condemned the council's new resolution for failing to take a tougher line to help those in Darfur.

"From New York to Nairobi, a trail of weak resolutions on Darfur has led nowhere," said Caroline Nursey of Oxfam. "Yesterday, Oxfam was unable to get vital aid to 200,000 people in Darfur who are cut off by renewed violence. Today they would still be in the camps, still waiting for aid. ... We needed the council to take action now, not yet more diplomatic dithering."

So, we'll see how it goes.

Old articles about the Incredible Universe

The Incredible Universe was a large electronics store that is no longer in business. I found a couple articles about it from www.findarticles.com (which seems like a website that I might be able to spend a lot of time at). My favorite part of an article from November 1992:

With 50 stores planned, The Incredible Universe could be a $2 billion to $3 billion division of Tandy in five years and possibly the largest CE chain in the nation!

One company executive said the concept "will rejuvenate Tandy over the next few years."

Regardless, one thing is certain. The Incredible Universe, which is a hot new concept, will be a major competitive force over the next few years for every retailer in the consumer electronics business.

Here's another astoundingly optimistic article about The Incredible Universe from January 1996:

When the chain was launched in the fall of 1992, Roach thought that the United States could accommodate up to 50 of the 180,000-sq.-ft. gigastores, each generating annual sales of $60 million, or about $3 billion overall.

Now almost halfway to that store count and with almost $1 billion in sales, Roach has upgraded that estimate: 100 stores nationwide, with total sales of $7 billion.

Here's an article about Incredible Universe's closing from January 1997. It seems quite strange to me that the article from 1996 would be so positive and that the stores closed only one year later. I'm not sure how much I can trust Discount Store News in the future.

Mark Cuban's apologevent

I like Mark Cuban. Read his well-done suggestion about having the FCC as a marketing partner and his sensical criticism of the FCC's policies.

Incoming e-mails from <outside>

I use my SMU e-mail address as my primary e-mail address and it works well for me. On Tuesday, however, the SMU ITS, in its continued effort to protect us from spammers and scammers, implemented a feature that now appends the tag <outside> to the subject line of every e-mail coming in from outside of SMU.

I can understand how this might be useful to some people who might otherwise fall for some scams that might try to seem like they're coming from SMU, but for me, it's a big annoyance.

Most of my incoming e-mail is not from SMU, so all of the e-mails in my inbox are polluted with the tag <outside>. This is an annoyance and a distraction made worse by the fact that when I respond to any of those e-mails, the <outside> tag remains. This tag is either confusing to the people who receive my response to their e-mail (with the <outside> tag attached) or it is an impractical inconvenience for me to remove it.

I e-mailed the help desk so hopefully this will change. Notice the mispelling of my name in the last e-mail from the help desk:

From: H., Troy
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 7:07 AM
To: Help Desk
Subject: tag appearing on incoming e-mails

Since Tuesday morning, almost all of my incoming e-mails have had the tag, "<outside>" at the end of the subject line. This tag is being added by SMU webmail, how can I turn it off?

Thanks,
Troy H.

From: Help Desk
Sent: Thu 2004-11-18 09:02
To: H., Troy
Subject: RE: tag appearing on incoming e-mails

Can you trust the email you receive?

Can you trust your incoming email to be from the person listed in the “from” line? With the weak security design of today’s internet email the answer to this question is all too often ‘no’!

Since the public use of the internet and email took off in the late ‘90s, address spoofing, spam, viruses, phishing scams (see October ITS newsletter) and other email maladies have combined to make email less safe and secure. To address these issues, ITS has taken several steps over the past few years to ensure that the ITS Campus Email Service (ICES) is as safe and secure as possible. Those steps include checking every email for virus, eliminating as much Spam as possible and authenticating every person that sends email from the ICES system. That means that if you receive an email from another member of the ICES you can trust the ‘from’ address to be accurate and your new email to be as free of virus and Spam as possible.

So how do you know if the email came from another member of the ICES system? That’s easy to tell if you understand internet email protocol, but not so easy if you don’t. So, to make it easier to distinguish email that comes from inside or outside the realm of secure ITS managed email servers, the outside email will have “<outside>” appended to the subject line. This new feature will be added to inbound email on Tuesday November 16, 2004.

Thank You,
[name removed]
ITS Help Desk

From: H., Troy
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 9:12 AM
To: Help Desk
Subject: RE: tag appearing on incoming e-mails

[name removed],

I understand the benefits of this feature, but it is quite confusing to people when I respond to their e-mail and it has the <outside> tag and it is very inconvenient to manually remove the tag in a reply e-mail. Can I prevent this tag from showing up for people in my address book? Or, could the feature be changed to show <inside> for communications coming from SMU?

Thanks,
Troy H.

Tony,
There is not a feature to turn this off for an individual email account. I will relay your concerns to the Director in charge of the Exchange Systems.

Thank You,
[name removed]
ITS Help Desk

Follow up post here

Eagles vs. Cowboys: review

Things started not too bad, the Cowboys defense held the Eagles to a few three-and-outs and so I thought the game might be somewhat competitive. I emotionally gave up on the game after Donovan McNabb's 14 second defender evasion and 60-yard pass in the second quarter.

I thought Lance Frazier made a couple really good tackles of Terell Owens at the beginning of the game, but that was offset by his muffed punt. Also, I've realized that Roy Williams is highly overrated. Sure, he's a good hitter, but he misses a lot of the time and doesn't wrap people up. Furthermore, for the second week in a row he has given up a big play. I'm not on the "start Drew Henson" bandwagon yet, but I suspect I will be soon. I have no idea why the Cowboys are so terrible this year. Last year's #1 defense gave up 342 yards in the first half and 4 touchdowns in the 2nd quarter. Whatever.

Self-Transportation Study

Introduction

There is no clearly-defined best route for me to take to home from work, so in order to increase my transportational efficiency, I decided to perform a study in order to find the best route home from work.

I planned to try several routes and pick the best one for continued use. The criteria for "best" include the route that takes the least time and has fewer stops.

I looked at a map and tried to find several reasonable routes. My initial plan was to try several different routes once and then try the fastest routes a few times more to get an idea for the range in travel times.

Criteria

While time is the chief consideration, efficiency is rather important as well. A route that may take 15 minutes but consists of heavy traffic and many stops will probably not be chosen over a more efficient route that takes 17 minutes. This consideration for efficiency is for two reasons: 1) More efficient routes generally involve less stress and 2) More efficient routes are also more fuel efficient and thus, cheaper. My overall opinion of the route, independent from the statistics, can also have an effect on my choice. If I feel that the route has an obstacle or a problem that the statistics do not reflect, I reserve the right to factor that into my choice.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is definitely a consideration, but I don't believe it affected any final results. Obviously the timing of traffic lights, the heaviness of traffic flow, and my driving behavior could affect the duration of the trip, but in order to reduce the effects of these variables, the better routes were traveled multiple times and the average reading was used. For the routes that I only took once, I felt that their differences in time or efficiency from the faster, more efficient routes already tested were great enough to indicate that the route was not feasible.

Average speed is considered to be indicative of efficiency. While traveling at 35 miles per hour is actually probably more fuel efficient than traveling at 50 miles per hour, it was assumed that lower average speeds were indicative of more stops. This assumption might lead to the largest uncertainty.

Most departure times were around 5:00 and none of the tests encountered unexpected delays, such as due to a wreck or natural disaster.

Results

Here are the tabular results of my study. These results do not reflect the number of times I traversed each route, merely the average.

Route #	Path	minutes	miles	miles/hour
1a	341 to I-30 to 820	13.6	11.5	50.74
1b	341 to Downe St to Cherry Ln to I-30 to 820	13.47	11.5	51.42
1c	341 to Scott St to Cherry Ln to I-30 to 820	13.3	11.5	51.95
1d	White Settlement to 820	14.1	11.5	48.94
1e	White Settlement to Cherry Ln to I-30 to 820	15.1	11.4	45.30
1f	Clifford to Las Vegas Trail to I-30 to 820	17.48	11.70	40.17
2	341 to Lackland Rd to Camp Bowie to Bernie Anderson to Vickery to 820	16.1	9.18	34.20
3	341 to I-30 to Bryant Irvin to 820	14.5	7.8	32.28
4	341 to 183	10.9	7.04	38.80

Conclusion

For a couple weeks prior to performing this study, I carpooled with someone who preferred to take route 4, but I believed that route 4 was inferior to route 1a, which is the route that I always took. However, it has become clear to me that route 4 can consistently be the fastest way. Route 4 takes the least time to traverse by far, though route 1a, 1b, and 1c, are the most efficient, in terms of average miles per hour.

There are a few reasons why I thought route 4 was inferior, but not anymore. Firstly, when I would carpool, we would leave at approximately 5:20, at which time the traffic was heavier than it usually is when I usually traverse route 4 on my own. This slowdown would cause us to have to wait through one green cycle of a light on occasion. Also, I was under the mistaken belief that the stopping, idling, and accelerating on route 4 required more fuel to be expended than did the steady highway travel of route 1a. However, considering the different distances of the two routes, the variation between my city mileage to my highway mileage would have to far exceed EPA estimates. So, while route 4 allows fewer miles per gallon, it requires fewer gallons. And, the final reason why route 4 is the right route for me now, whereas it wasn’t when I passengered along it, is because of my driving style. As a driver, I have discovered that it is not necessary to be in certain lanes that are commonly perceived to be the best lanes to be in, and that by not following everybody else, I can save minutes off my commute.

So, after a few weeks of testing different routes, I have determined for sure which route is better, and I shall continue to use it for the remaining 5 weeks of my employment.

I didn't change my clocks

I did not change any of my clocks on on Sunday, October 31. Yes, I was supposed to change out of Daylight Saving Time into Standard Time, but I refused, I have been continuing to live in Daylight Saving Time, rather than Standard Time.

Fortunately, my job lets me come in basically when I want. Not changing my clocks so far has been met with limited success, I've been able to do it but I estimate that I've fallen off my schedule by about 15 min (which is still 45 minutes better than everyone else). It was initially difficult to continue life as normal, I'm an hour ahead of everyone, and it's hard not to think of things in terms of their time. However, I think things are getting a little easier for me now, I've gotten pretty adept at looking at my clocks and knowing that they're an hour ahead. This is kind of silly for me to do this, but I am rebelling against the ridiculous practice of semi-annual clock-changing, and I want to get home before it gets dark. I think this will continue for a while longer, it seems to be working pretty well

www.standardtime.com is a page dedicated to abolishing Daylight Saving Time. I'm not sure I agree with their proposed replacement, I think that we should all just stick with Daylight Saving Time, which is what we had been using. It's just ridiculous, we need to join the 21st century, unless UNLESS we get clocks that change automatically and each day is a minute shorter in the spring and a minute longer in the fall so that we gradually and automatically adjust to schedule. That doesn't seem feasible with current technology. We must terminate this clock-changing ridiculousness.

More backgrounds

More backgrounds. I hope you like them, I have a picture of downtown Fort Worth at night, a field, a building with broken windows, and a tall tower in Dallas. Also, the Backgrounds page has been reorganized with the old backgrounds divided by category.