O’DonnellWeb

I got an email from Vanguard asking me to log into my IRA account and check out their new user interface. It is in beta and they were looking for feedback, it would only take 5 minutes, etc. When I logged in I got a pop up asking me if I or a member of my family had worked in financial services or web design in last 10 years. I checked web design and submitted the form.

Then I was informed that they didn’t want the opinion of people with a web design background, and I wasn’t allowed into the beta. That makes perfect sense, given that they are beta testing a fracking web site! Not to mention that utter cluelessness of emailing a customer and asking for their opinion, and after said customer committing to helping out an organization that he generally admires, telling said customer his opinion isn’t important.

Well played Vanguard, well played.

It’s too hot to be outside, so in my efforts to amuse myself indoors today I give you a new page on O’DonnellWeb. It’s a directory listing of my MP3 directory. It’s not pretty or even particularly user friendly, but if you were dying to know if I owned X record, well this list may or may not give you an answer. Not everything I own made it to MP3, although I’d guess 80% of it is here. And some of the oddball pop stuff isn’t mine. It belongs to Michelle or Delaney. Really. It does. I swear it’s not mine.

Last evening as I was headed South on 15/29 cutting over from I-66 to Fredericksburg, I called home to have somebody check Google traffic for conditions around Rt 17, I-95 and Rt3. The report was good, but as approached the left hand turn onto RT 17 at the Sheetz, it was backed up quite a bit. So I kept going straight and came in the back way via Carrico Mills Road. As I passed the left turn from 15/29 to 17, my GPS indicated a 7:14 arrival time at home via Rt 17 and I-95. I got home a 7:20.

Given the likelihood of a more than 6 minute delay up around Rt 17, I-95, and Rt 3, I think Carrico Mills just became my default route home. I’ve always used that route around rush hour when I knew Rt 17 would be backed up, but my perception was that the back route was more like 15-20 minutes longer.

This nifty trick, requiring Firefox and the Adblock Plus extension, will block Facebook from your computer, except when you are on the Facebook site, or using the photo uploader on Facebook. Personally, I recommend not hosting your photos at Facebook. Use PicasaWeb or Flickr and link to them from Facebook. That way you don’t lose the photos when Facebook does something that incites you to delete your account.

Sal Khan is a Harvard educated CS major with a MBA. He spends his days in the corner of his bedroom creating bite sized tutorials on YouTube, on subjects ranging from Algebra and Calculus to economics and science.

“I’m starting a virtual school for the world, teaching things the way I wanted to be taught,” explains Khan, 33, the exuberant founder and sole faculty member of the nonprofit Khan Academy, run out of his small ranch house, which he shares with his wife and infant son.

He sounds like a future homeschooler in the making

Jason Fried, CEO of tech company 37signals, said he invested in Khan’s nonprofit because “the next bubble to burst is higher education. It’s too expensive. It’s too much one-size-fits-all. This is an alternative way to think about teaching — simple, personal, free and moving at your own pace.”

His videos are being viewed 70,000 a day, and growing 10% every month. Revolutions generally don’t start in the board room. Maybe the education revolution that is so sorely needed is starting in Sal’s bedroom.

(Cross posted from HSdads.com, because I’m too lazy to come up with original content for more than one blog)

Not the weekend review, the post about HSDads.com. That was my 5000th post to this blog. It was such a significant event that I didn’t even notice until 2 weeks later.

It was one of those weekends that makes going back to work on Monday look like a break. Friday night Breck and I checked out History at Sunset, a program by the National Park Service here in Fredericksburg. I deeply regret somehow missing out on this prior to this year. Every Friday night during the summer Park Rangers provide detailed walking tours of subsections of the battlefields in the area. This weekend, it was Bernard’s Cabins and Latimer’s Knoll, the site south of the city of the near Union breakthrough of the Confederate lines during The Battle of Fredericksburg. I learned more about that battle in 90 minutes than most school kids get in a year of history class. The session was led by Ranger Frank O’Reilly, who wrote the book on the Battle of Fredericksburg. Even the young kids that were dragged along by parents were enthralled by Frank’s descriptions of what happened. It was professional storyteller quality, except it was all driven by a very obvious deep, deep passion for the history of this area. An older gentleman thanked me for bringing Breck – commenting that the the younger generation just doesn’t seem that interested. I decided it was not the time for a rant on that being the fault of how our schools teach history. However, I will say that I was probably below the median age of the 150 odd attendees for the program. It was definitely an older crowd.

We did two horse shows this weekend, neither with Skip. Saturday we left the house at 5:15 AM to head to the Upperville Colt & Horse Show, where Delaney was showing a 2-year old Cleveland Bay in-hand. Cleveland Bay horses are critically endangered. There are only about 600 left in the world. Upperville is the oldest horse show in the US, and maybe the most prestigous. It is sort of the Wimbledon of horse shows, or maybe that should be US Open. Or The Masters? I don’t know, it’s a large, very well known horse show where you can earn $100,000 if you win the big jumping event. Just being there and participating is something a lot of horse people never get to do. I was surprised at the laid-back vibe of the pace. I’ve sensed a lot more tension, and seen a lot more crying kids and screaming Show Moms at a 4-H horse show than we saw mingling with the crowd of this AA rated show. I asked Delaney if she wanted to bring Skip next year to jump and she said no. We didn’t see many (any?) Palomino horses. It was all expensive hunter and jumper horses, probably Thoroughbreds and Warmbloods. Not Skip’s crowd I guess.

Sunday was split parenting day. Michelle and Delaney went to a local show to jump the Mustang Pony she is training for the farm. Breck and I went fencing. For the 3rd or 4th consecutive time events conspired to have Breck’s placing not be a good indicator of how well he fenced. In this case, somebody that should have been seeded 1 or 2 came out of the pools seeded 11. Breck’s reward for fencing well and being 6/17 was to fence #11, who should have been somebody he would be expected to beat. Instead it was somebody that was a serious threat to win it all. So instead of top 8 and winning a nice sharp prize, he’ll end up 9th. I think next season Breck will be greatly improved for the beating he is taking this Spring at the hands of higher rated fencers, bu his ego would prefer a top 3 finish now. We’ve skipped a couple of lower rated events in favor of the tougher ones. In retrospect maybe that was a mistake. Oh well, I was never a competitive teenage athlete, so this is all new to me too.

How was your weekend?

Check it out. I think you’ll recognize most of the authors.

It’s been a while since I browsed my incoming search traffic. This is all from the last month.

odonnellweb movies seen – 12 visits in the last month, and I have no idea why. This has never been a movie blog, and the bounce rate of 50% indicates that 1/2 of them found what they were looking for.

medtronic sucks – Heh. That didn’t take long. 3 visits with an average of almost 20 minutes. Sounds like they found plenty to read.

ocular intercourse – I get a couple of hits every month on this. I’m #4 on Google. It points to an old post about Pensacola Christian College.

pandigital problems – 4 years ago I wrote a post complaining about the poor quality of pandigital digital photo frames. It lives on as the #1 link on Google.

conservation of apostrophes – I’m pretty sure I’m in favor of it.

fat camps in fredericksburg,va – I’m #2 on Google. Google works in mysterious ways.

jamies japedo mccue – That is Skip’s sire. I mentioned it once and I’m #1 on Google. Skip’s dad needs a better social media strategy.

quotations on family merriment – How about ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

reporting rape in 22407 – I suggest dialing 911 and not searching Google.

I’ve been a huge Butch Walker fan for years, but his concerts local to me always seem to happen when I can’t make it. Not this time. I took the afternoon off, hooked up with a hot date, and headed North to Baltimore.

Slowly. Really slowly. I mean really freaking slowly. A combination of Friday traffic and numerous accidents conspired to interfere with my plans to get to Baltimore around dinner time and have dinner at the Papermoon Diner. Instead, 2:45 after we left we were we just getting to Columbia MD, and we were hungry. So dinner ended up being at The Cheesecake Factory and we actually made it to Baltimore just before 8. I had gotten lucky and snagged a cheap room at the Doubletree. So we stopped by just long enough to check in and drop our bag, and then we headed back out.

Butch Walker live was everything I expected, and more. He played for 2 full hours, and nobody will ever accuse him of going through the motions on stage. He leaves it all on the stage, pouring his heart, soul, and seemingly every ounce of his being into every song. He came out during the opening act and played a song with them. I have never seen the headlining act do that. Then he broke rock concert convention again by opening his set by sitting down at the keyboard and playing a couple of ballads (Cigarette Lighter Love Song and Passed Your Place, Saw Your Car, Thought of You) before moving to the stage for a solo acoustic tune. The band finally joined him in song 4 and they mostly kept the volume up from there on. The encore featured a rousing rendition of Rich Man by Hall and Oates with Butch on banjo, before he closed the night by joining the fans on the floor for a frenetic extended take of Hot Girls in Good Moods.

Last half of Cigarette Lighter Love Song – taped by somebody at The Recher last night.

Butch doing Rich Man .

This is going to get ranty. You’ve been warned.

My wife wears an insulin pump. It costs over $5000 and has be replaced every 4-5 years. The supplies it consumes monthly run several hundred dollars. Every.Month. There are no generics, no alternate suppliers. We bend over and pay whatever Medtronic wants. Insulin pumps have been generally available for about 15 years, and nothing about them has gotten less expensive. We also have a $70 USB dongle that allows the pump to talk to their website and uploads all the blood sugar readings on the pump so Michelle can print them out and bring them to her doctor appointments.

It is too much to ask that the damn thing work with modern operating systems? The USB piece only works with XP or Windows 2000. That’s right, it only works with obsolete operating systems. They claim it will work with 32 bit Vista, but I couldn’t get it to work. Based on my Google results, I’m not alone. Michelle had to come to my office this morning to use an XP machine to get her data off the pump for her appointment today. Her doctor mentioned that she has been complaining for years about the lack of Mac support. When Michelle called tech support this morning they told her that her information was wrong. XP is not obsolete, and Windows 7 support is years away.

Should I be concerned that my wife’s life is dependent on a company that believes Windows XP is a modern operating system? Coming next year from Medtronic, Carelink 64, diabetes management for the Commodore 64!

Medtronic is a $4 billion dollar company with over 41,000 employees. They can’t find someone that can dedicate a week to porting the USB drivers to 64 bit? Microsoft stopped selling XP to consumers in June 2008. In reality the vast majority of consumer systems were shipping with Vista as far back at Christmas 2007. The XP virtual machine available for Windows 7 is only available if you have Windows 7 Enterprise. Consumer PCs will not have access to it. So basically if you have bought your computer since late 2007 your $5000 insulin pump is useless for sharing data. You can’t print reports for your doctor. You’ll have to spend 3 hours before every appt clicking through every blood sugar reading for the last 90 days and writing it all down. Welcome to the future, Medtronic style.

Michelle has already decided that her next pump will come from some other company. Not just because of this. Medtronic customer service has sucked for years. Actually, it’s sucked every since Minimed got bought out by Medtronic. They’ve dismissed Michelle when she reported defective supplies. They dismissed her when she reported that her pump would freak out when she got near gas pumps. Years later they acknowledged the problem with static electricity. They dismissed her when she reported that her pump won’t work with any battery other than Energizer. (Actually, I thought she was nuts on that one too. I was wrong. It is the weirdest thing. The pumps will not work with any battery brand other than Energizer.) They too frequently run short of supplies and ration them. And of course since they’ve locked everything down with numerous patents nobody can offer an alternative source of supplies for the pump. The company, and the whole closed proprietary system just sucks. I guarantee you if open competition existed in the insulin pump market these issues would not exist. They have over 80% of the market (I’m guessing, concrete numbers are impossible to find), so competition really isn’t an issue. They didn’t get there by superior service. they have bought up technology and been very aggressive with patent lawsuits against smaller competitors.

In a word, Medtronic sucks. And my wife’s life depends on then.

Update; I Googled Medtronic sucks. I was curious what would come up. I did, on the first page. It’s a post from a couple of years ago detailing one of of those episodes with Medtronic not taking Michelle seriously about defective supplies.

Update #2: Barely one hour after I posted this and it’s on the first page of Google for Medtronic sucks. Fear the power of O’DonnellWeb!

Update #3: Medtronic won’t spend $10,000 to fix their USB dongle, but they did spend over $1.2 million lobbying the US Govt in 2009. And you wonder why we can’t have decent health care reform in this country?

We had some time to kill after dinner Friday evening before we needed to pick up our daughter from a Girl Scout event. So we wandered into the new Joseph Beth store at Spotsy Towne Center.

I don’t get it.

They are trying to play up the independent bookstore angle, but there is no indie vibe about the place at all. Had I not known where I was I could have easily been convinced that I was in Borders. Their definition of “indie” seems to be that they aren’t Borders. Fine. I’m all for indie bookstores, but if you are going to be an indie bookstore you need to give the customer something they can’t get from Borders. The space seems way too corporate to provide any indie cred for shopping there, and the prices and selection on my meander through the store did not do anything to inspire me to return. The books themselves are a commodity and I just don’t see near enough differentiation from Borders or any other corporate chain (are there any others left) to make we want to shop there.

I guess I’ll be sticking with the $25 free shipping deals at Amazon, the 30% off (or better) coupons that Borders emails to me a couple of time a week, and the used bookstores throughout the FredVegas area.

Last night when we came home from dinner we had no internet. After I rebooted the router and modem and tested a few things to convince myself that it was not an issue with my equipment, I sucked it up and called tech support. In the 3 or 4 years we’ve been on CavTel DSL I have never called tech support. I’ve never needed to. The service has been rock solid. I used online chat once when for some odd reason I could not get to any Google site. They gave me new DNS addresses and the problem was solved in 5 minutes.

It took about 10 minutes to get a live person on the phone. I can live with that. I told her I had already done the reboot and recycle thing with all the hardware. She did not ask me to repeat it. She did ask me to take the router out of the loop and plug the modem directly into a computer. She asked what OS I was using and I said linux, and waited for the inevitable “we don’t support linux” bit. It didn’t come. As long as I could execute the commands she needed it didn’t matter. So we set up the Ethernet connection with my static IP address and proceeded to confirm that I could ping the gateway, but nothing else. She put me on hold for a couple of minutes, and when she came back she said there were no known outages and that maybe something with my IP address was hosed. So she reconfigured my account for DHCP, and I did the same with the connection, and boom. I had Internet back.

All told, it was less than 30 minutes. At no time did she treat me like an idiot by asking me to reboot a computer for the 4th time, and at no time did I feel like I was wasting my time because I knew more than her. It was simply two people working together to solve the problem…exactly how tech support should work.

I wish I had written her name down, but I imagine they can look in my account and see who worked with it most recently. I’m going to spam a few addresses at CavTel with this blog post. It’s a sad statement on the industry that somebody doing their job well was so exciting, but maybe me making a big deal out of will help it happen more often.

If your computer crashes on resume with any version of Ubuntu after 9.04, and you have a Radeon video card, this might be your answer.

Open a terminal and type the following.

sudo echo options radeon modeset=0 > /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf

Then reboot, and you may have resume back. I did.

If you care about the techie details, read on.

Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) is a feature that was introduced with Ubuntu 9.10. Also, I think it hit Fedora with Fedora 12. It helps improve video performance. Google it if you want more info. However, it doesn’t play well with older graphics cards. So if you have a 5 year old computer, it may break suspend, resume, hibernate, or other features. The line of code above simply creates a configuration file named radeon-kms.conf, and adds a line to it to disable KMS.

None of this is original, I found it in a help forum somewhere.

A richly detailed account of post WWII history and the espionage, political, and scientific machinations that surrounded the quest for an even bigger and better thermonuclear bomb.

Read the review.