EGLZFAN.com - Random Neural Firings

I was visiting my parents last weekend when I showed my mother my setup with Google Reader.  At this writing I have 38 RSS feeds ranging from Roll Bama Roll to Telegraph’s election coverage to Scott Adams’s Dilbert blog to Charles Krauthammer, all dumped into Google Reader.  In a given 24-hour cycle, I would guess around 300-400 new articles are delivered to me, but since 98% of the time all I care about is the headline, I can typically get through a pile of that size in about half an hour.  I also like Google Reader because I can “star” or “tag” items for archival (either because I really like the article or because I want to make a special point of reading or re-reading it later), and another feature I find myself using frequently is the ability to quickly email any story to anyone I want.

So Mom is standing over my shoulder, watching me click around in Reader, and she asks me, “How did you ever learn about all this?”  I mumbled some nonsense because I really didn’t have a good answer, and then luckily my daughter grabbed our attention, neatly diverting me away from the topic altogether.  But, I thought my answer was unfair, and it seemed like Mom was genuinely interested in maybe learning a bit about how to set it up herself.  So, I decided to post on my setup and let you, the reader, adapt it to your liking.
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Every now and again (maybe twice a year) I find myself in a bit of a rut.  It’s a very general feeling - maybe I don’t like most of my cases, maybe I’ve got a project that seems way bigger than I can handle and I can’t motivate myself to start working on it, maybe people around me are out of sorts themselves somehow.  This is one of those times.

I started looking at ways to break out of the funk.  I enjoy writing and I enjoyed writing on this blog.  So, I started wondering why I stopped.  The main reason was time, but that’s a convenient excuse for not doing anything.  The number two reason, though, was that administering this thing was a pain in the ass, because of comment spam.

So, I finally started digging into the settings for the blog, and cleaning house.  First, all the spam comments have been trashed.  Spam-bot users have been shit-canned, as well.  I also locked down the signup so that every new user has to go through me.  So, if you want to email me to ask me to create a username for you, I’ll be happy to do so, and then you can comment anywhere you want.  Hopefully I’ll be more inclined to post more regularly in the future.

I’ve also recently started becoming Googlized.  I absolutely love Google Reader, and it has replaced every RSS reader I have experimented with over the last few years, permanently.  I’ve also recently been ramping up my use of Google Calendar, which is pretty cool because you can split your calendar into multiple layers - very handy for keeping your work life separate from your personal life, and allowing some to view one but not the other, but still allowing you to see the whole thing in one place.  All of this is probably fodder for new posts in the future.

So bottom line - welcome to my second effort at my blog.

In my law practice, I keep all of my client files in one “clients” directory on our server. However, there are hundreds of files in there, but typically only a couple of dozen that I’m actively working on. So, I keep an “Active Cases” folder, which contains shortcuts to the active cases. To add a case to the “Active Cases” folder is a two step process - right-click and create shortcut, then right-click and “Send To Any Folder” (a Windows PowerToy - Google it if you’re interested, it’s pretty handy). However, I wanted to streamline this even more, so that I could create the shortcut and send it to the “Active Cases” folder in one fell swoop. I finally figured out how to do it, so I figured I’d share the technique with the world. (more…)

My dad sent me an article recently about some sort of software package that (assuming I read the article correctly, it was pretty dense) allowed you to develop web applications that were more extensible by the user, thus presumably moving web apps closer to traditional desktop applications in terms of functionality. That sparked a return email tirade over why I think that’s stupid. When I was done, it occurred to me that it would make a decent blog post, so here it is. (more…)

I’d like to thank Scott Adams (creator of the Dilbert cartoons and all-around philosopher) for removing any need or incentive I may have for further posts about global warming any time in the near future:

Adams on Global Warming, Part 1

Adams on Global Warming, Part 2

Adams on Global Warming, Part 3

Adams on Global Warming, Part 4

The Christian Science Monitor and the Cato Institute have recently run op-eds that have prompted me to write about something that has often occurred to me in the past about agricultural subsidies. Without belaboring the details, the government pays huge subsidies to farmers, who then grow less than what they are capable of growing, which in turn raises the commodity prices of various agricultural goods. The fact these programs are effective demonstrates a basic economic truth about agricultural markets - if allowed to be purely competitive markets, the equilibrium price for the otherwise-subsidized goods would be much lower, to the point that many farmers would likely face poverty. However, I submit the subsidy programs are a bad idea. (more…)

‘Nuff said.

As any of you who have been reading this blog have probably figured out, my brain is cluttered with more useless crap than I can objectively measure. Predictably, my home - and especially my home office - and how I live are an unfortunate reflection of that phenomenon. Earlier this week, something in my head snapped. I am going to slay this clutter dragon now if it kills me. (more…)

More geeky shit today. JavaScript has a Math.round() function, but no convenient way to achieve a precision round. So for example, if you have a value of 8.942 and you want to round it to 8.94, you have to do some more math in your code. This handy little function lets you do that a little more easily.

Building on that, here’s another function I wrote that’s pretty handy for expressing numbers as formatted dollar values, complete with commas for values above $1,000. You can call this function one of three ways:

var v = dollar_value(); // $0.00

var v = dollar_value(3.4); // $3.40

var v = dollar_value(3.4, ‘€’) // €3.40

Here’s the dollar_value() function.  Note you need the precision_round() function for this to work.

Here’s an article about the Iraq situation that I think is superbly written, and to date I don’t think I’ve read anything on this matter with which I find myself more in agreement. And it’s an interesting position to take, too. For those too lazy strapped for time to read the article, the gist of it is that the Democrats could achieve their supposed objective - ending the war - by shifting their focus from “it’s a failure, we should cut our losses now” to “we accomplished what we set out to do a long time ago, so now we can bring our troops home and celebrate our victory”. By so doing, Niskanen argues, enough Republicans could be convinced to essentially change sides. The interesting aspect of this to me is that it highlights something I find at once obvious and little-known (or at least, little-appreciated). (more…)