Every year the Ringling Bros Circus comes to Madison Square Garden.  And every year New Yorkers are treated to the spectacle of elephants and horses marching through the streets of Manhattan on their way to the Garden.  The entire procession lasted only a minute.

I recently noticed I use Wikipedia to look up movies.  I also use Wikipedia to look up music.  Not IMDB, not AllMusic, and not Google.  The notion of Wikipedia as Google’s worst nightmare wasn’t quite real to me until now.  

This radio royalty thing is the last straw.  From now on, every CD I buy needs to come up as “Safe!” on RIAA Radar.

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/software/Default-browser-ftopict170215.html

New Mouse

We got some wonderful new Logitech G5 mice in the office the other day.  Among its many features is the ability to dynamically adjust the mouse speed with the little +/- buttons on top of the mouse.  I mentioned before how important mouse speed is to productivity (especially with a lot of screen real estate).  So every few days I’ve been bumping up my mouse speed to go a tad faster.  Its a bit jarring at first, you miss clicks and stuff.  But after a few hours, you get used to it, and you are moving across the screen in no time!

Firefox profiles

My Firefox has been a memory hog for some time now.  I’ve followed all the articles on improving performance, but with no luck.  I suspect it has to do with all the random add-ons I run in Firefox.

Looking over my list of add-ons, I realized that all the most important add-ons are related to web-development; I can live without the rest.  So I set up two different firefox profiles, one for surfing the web, and one for web development.  This article from LifeHacker explains how.  I also gave the web development profile a different theme, so I can easily distinguish the browsers.

I’ve only been using it for a few hours now, but the difference is remarkable.  The web surfing profile is fast, and uses a lot less memory.  However, I can still forsee a few issues coming up.  The profiles aren’t easily distinguishable in the Windows taskbar.   And I will have to be vigilant to keep a clean separation between the two profiles.  Only time will tell if the productivity improvements are worth the tradeoff.

This is going on right now, in our neighborhood.  We can still hear the helicopters circling.

A block radius around Sullivan and Bleeker is closed off.  Apparently there was a robbery attempt at Sullivan and Bleeker, shots were fired, one cop was shot in the head.  Walking home from dinner we just heard people saying “rat-a-tat-tat-tat”, which everyone heard.  We caught the reporter from the CW11 doing a live update:

I just caught the tail end of the CW11 report, the shooting actually
happened at DeMarco’s pizza, which is at Sullivan and Houston.  This
all sounds weird: who robs a pizza joint, in one of the most popular
neighborhoods in NYC, at 9pm?  Still its scary to think this happened
right down the street.

Scott Hanselman recently asked are you banking online?  I’ve been doing all my banking/bills online for the last few years.  However recently I’ve run into some issues that have me seriously considering going back to paper.

1) Online banking availability.  I do bills at night, usually around midnight EST.  I’ve consistently hit downtime messages, slow responses and dropped connections during this time.  I assume the majority of online traffic happens during the day, so banks choose to upgrade and maintain their system at night.  At the very least this is an annoyance, and I pay the bill the next morning.  At most it turns into a late fee, since I forget to pay the bill the next morning.  That sucks.

2) Obscure/Complicated sign in procedures.  A lot of sites have started moving towards security questions to access your account.  Does anyone actually remember these?  I’m currently locked out of my ING Direct account because the system thinks I’m answering the question “What street did you grow up on?” incorrectly. 

Take a look at some of the absurd questions I was recently asked to choose on a credit card site:

What is the most unusual job you have had?
What is your youngest child’s nickname?
What is your favorite song?
Name the place you’d go to on your ideal vacation?
Name the highest mountain you’ve been to the top of?
If you could control your height, how tall would you be?
Name of a college you applied to but did not attend?
What is your most unique characteristic?
Who is your favorite person from history?
Which foreign country would you like to visit?
What is your favorite flower?
What is the last name of the funniest friend you know?

For the security question to be effective it has to be a) memorable and b) have one and only one answer.  Some of these questions (what is your favorite flower?) I’ve never thought of, while others (What is your favorite song?) could have multiple answers that change depending on my mood right now.

I think the best way to go with these security questions is to pick a single word (your first name, your birth month, etc) and make that the answer to every question.  This defeats the purpose of the security question, but it supports the purpose of actually accessing your account.

So, do any of you guys bank online?  Why or why not?  Have you run into any issues?

This is for sean.

Even with dual monitors, I like to keep my desktop sparse.  Programming/work on the left, browsers/IMs vertically on the right.

I tag the rest of the Xanga Techies…