I saw the image below on the front page of the NY Times website and thought I'd share it with you. I particularly like it because this is from my hometown and I see this intersection every time I'm there. The highway the photographer is standing on is I-164, Evansville's outer belt. The two overpasses you see further down are the eastbound and westbound sections of I-64, which I take whenever I'm traveling between St. Louis and Evansville.

My parents tell me that Evansville got 19 inches of snow yesterday, setting a single day record for the area. Nevertheless, they are planning to trek to St. Louis (where we haven't had any snow) tomorrow for Christmas festivities with my extended family. I'm predicting that it'll take them more than the usual two-and-a-half or three hours to get here. Good thing they have that new SUV, I guess.

Daniel R. Patmore/Associated Press

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 23 December 2004 at 6:50 PM

It's been widely known that Slate was on the auction block* and it had long been rumored that the Washington Post was the most likely buyer. All the speculation ended today when it was announced that, indeed, the Post had bought Slate.

Here are relevant articles from Slate, WaPo, and the NY Times (for an independent perspective). I found the Post article the most interesting.

The current line is that most things at Slate will remain the same. I'm just hoping they redesign their site to work a bit better in all browsers except IE.

* I first suspected something when the URL www.slate.com stopped redirecting to slate.msn.com. I suspected the were trying to reestablish that former URL in preparation for a separation from MSN.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 21 December 2004 at 11:49 AM

The weather on Saturday was just amazing, and I took advantage of it by heading to Laumeier Sculpture Park to shoot some photos. I ended up taking pretty many photos, but not too many of them were very compelling. However, I think the image here is pretty nice. This is actually a weathervane and the propeller at the back was spinning around at a pretty good clip when I snapped this photo.

In the evening michael, Jim, and I went to the Galleria to see Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. The movie seems to be going hit-or-miss in the reviews (Ebert and Roeper gave it two thumbs down, but the Post-Dispatch gave it 3.5 out of 4 stars), but I really liked it. I have a longer review at my review site if you're interested.

Sunday's weather was bitterly cold and today seems even colder. We're supposed to have "accumulating snow" on Tuesday night and Wednesday, so I'm guessing Saturday was the last gasp of fall.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 December 2004 at 11:59 AM

As requested, here is a photo of the Christmas tree I bought.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 18 December 2004 at 12:46 PM

So the FASB has created new rules that requires companies to count stock options as expenses. I really don't see what the big deal is. This is only an "on paper" change: actual profits don't go down because of this, just the reporting of profits.

Accounting rules in general leave me more than a bit confused. In the hypothetical world calculating profits should be easy. Here's how much I spent and here's how much I took in. The difference is my profit or loss. But then you add in depreciation for physical assets and deferred payments for things and you are quickly left with a system of accounting where published results don't tell me much about your business beside the fact that you have a good accountant.

So, coming back to counting options as an expense, I'm very much in favor of counting an expense at the time it was incurred. If I give out millions of dollars in stock options this quarter, I think my balance sheet for this quarter should reflect that. The article linked above says that "more than $3 billion in combined profits would have vanished at Cisco Systems, Intel and Sun Microsystems if the new rules had applied in their most recent fiscal years." If I'm an investor in those companies, I want to know that they didn't actually make the money that they're reporting to have made.

Anyone out there want to speak up for not counting options as an expense?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 18 December 2004 at 8:48 AM

"The West Wing," back when I used to watch it, had an episode called "Take Out the Trash Day." The idea was to hold a bunch of news until Friday and then release it all together. The idea was that no one reads the Saturday papers so the impact would be lessened and even if they did read the paper, the impact of any one item would be overshadowed by the other items they released. It's a form of spin control.

So I'm going to have my own Take Out the Trash Day where I fill you in on a number of things that I haven't gotten around to posting about yet or things I promised to post about but never did. This isn't exactly trash, but that ruins my introduction, so just ignore that aspect of things.

First, back in August I promised to share all the pictures michael and I took in California. I never found a good way to host them and display them here on -273, and in the meantime I'd started playing around with flickr, so the easiest way to let you see all the pictures is to send you over there to see them.

While we're on the topic of flickr, has anyone else played around with it before? It seems pretty full-featured, but the free accounts have some bandwidth restrictions that prevent you from making full use of the system. And I don't want to pay money for something that turns out not to be good, so if you have any experience with flickr or flickr alternatives, please let me know.

On a different topic, I seem to have gotten away from postings about me and the non-trivial aspects of my life. I guess the important news is that about six weeks ago I got a promotion at work which was retroactive back to my one year anniversary date in late September. My actual job hasn't changed in the slightest, but I think this bodes well for my career at E--.

More recently, I've been pretty psyched about Christmas this year. I don't really know what's come over me, but I wanted to go all out for Christmas and I've pretty much done that. I bought myself an awesome tree and with a great deal of help from michael and Rachel I got the tree lit and decorated. I've also enjoyed shopping for presents this year, which is odd because I've had a lot of trouble deciding what to get people. But with a week to spare I finished all my shopping today at lunchtime. I even had time this evening to get my Christmas cards stamped and addressed. Tomorrow when I drop them in the mail I'll be do my last act of Christmas preparation.

As I mentioned above work is going fairly well. Today there was actually some good news (in a two steps forward, one step back kind of way) for the little project I'm the lead on. Our software vendor finally figured out how to fix the problem that has had us at a standstill for six or seven weeks, but within minutes of us getting things up and running we had a scope change that will probably set us back three or four more weeks. But the end is finally on the horizon, which is definitely a good thing.

All right, that's enough trash for one night.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 17 December 2004 at 11:52 PM

Apparently the blogging world is leaving me behind. As others embrace the latest and greatest in trendy blogging, I cling to what I've always done and wonder why the cool kids have abandoned me.

The new trend I'm talking about is podcasting. What is podcasting? It's the practice of recording your weblog posts as audio files (typically as mp3s) for other to listen to. I'm not opposed to trying to expand the boundaries of the web, but I don't much like this implementation.

My objections cover a number of broad topics: bandwidth, archiving, searching, accessibility.

First, bandwidth. Distributing weblog posts as sound files eat much more bandwidth both for the distributer and downloader. And you no longer have the instant gratification of getting a post when you want it; you have to wait for it to download. It seems to me that you need to offer your listeners something more than the sound of your voice if you expect them to download these things to their iPods.

Next, archiving and searching. Archiving these things would be a ridiculous expense. All the posts on -273 and the affiliated weblogs fill slightly more than 7 MBs. That's four podcasts at the most. And I can compress the whole database with proper SQL markup down to 2 MBs. Have fun trying to further compress your podcasts. And how on earth do you search these things? I guess a diligent person marks their podcasts up with decent meta-data, but it seems unlikely that most people do that. And I haven't seen any tools that effectively search audio contents. Text, of course, is easily searchable.

Finally, we have accessibility. I'm sure podcasters will tell you how they can listen to podcasts in places where they don't have access to or the ability to read typical weblog posts. Working out at the gym or something like that. But you also limit who can get your posts because those who browse at libraries or at work might not want to listen to your post but they might be more than happy to read it.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on podcasting. Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.

Comments: 5 Posted by david on 16 December 2004 at 3:14 PM

Apparently scraping off your car windshield with a CD jewel case is a St. Louis tradition. I first heard about it last year when Nathan reported that he used a jewel case to clean his car's windshield off. Then I saw not one but two people cleaning the frost off their windshields with jewel cases yesterday. Come on people: ice scrapers only cost one or two dollars and are certainly going to be more effective than a jewel case.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 16 December 2004 at 8:49 AM

At work they're half-heartedly going through this effort of trying to get everyone to know everyone else. Part of this effort is an "Employee Spotlight" where each month a different employee will be honored with a section of the bulletin board devoted to them. As part of this effort they emailed out a list of questions they want all the employees to answer for future inclusion in the "Employee Spotlight." Below you'll find my first attempt at answering those questions. (I translated it into HTML for you. Here's the original Word file.) I'll probably clean things up a bit before I turn it in but I thought you might be interested in what I had to say.

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 9 December 2004 at 5:20 PM

The following is an email I sent to the television sports talk show "Pardon the Interruption" which airs on ESPN.

From: David Warner
To: Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 11:03:21 -0600
Subject: Steroids in sports

Guys,

You and your guests need to be more careful in your word choices when talking about the Giambi (and now Bonds) steroids issue. During the show yesterday it was remarked that Giambi wouldn't be stripped of his MVP award because steroids "weren't illegal at the time." This is simply not true. Steroids have been illegal since 1990 and are classified as Schedule III narcotics. What the guest meant was that "baseball hadn't banned steroids at the time," which is a completely different issue from the legality or illegality of steroids use.

On a broader point, this example just illustrates that fact that reporters and fans continue to hold athletes to a standard different from the one the rest of society is held to. Use of illegal drugs is a lesser issue because baseball hadn't banned them; hockey players assault each other and some reporters argue that what happens on the rink should not be subject to criminal prosecution. It's issues like this that lead athletes to think the rules don't apply to them. The
end result of all of this is the brawl from a few weeks ago between basketball players and fans.

So please, at the very least try to draw the distinction between illegal acts and banned workplace behavior; they are very different things.

Thanks,
David Warner

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 3 December 2004 at 11:07 AM

Have you guys heard about Robert Scoble? He's a blogger who was hired by Microsoft to say nice things about their products. (His title is "technical evangelist.") I've been reading his blog for a while now, and in truth he's more of an apologist than anything else. His MS-related posts seem mostly to follow one of the following scripts:

Script One (Example: Dave, your screen is blurry!)

• A friend has a problem with a MS product.
• Scoble tries to fix the problem.
• Scoble realizes that it's really hard to fix the problem.
• Scoble promises that MS will work really hard to fix this problem in the next release of whatever product is under discussion.

Script Two (Example: MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me)

• MS releases a new product.
• Scoble tells you why the new product is a step in the right direction, but that he won't be using it.

Script Three (Example: Mike's MSN Spaces blog is most interesting)

• Scoble discovers a new blog by a MS employee or a new Channel 9 story.
• Scoble tells us that this new discovery is great and an example of how all {new discoveries} should be.

So having discovered both that its possible to make money by writing posts about MS products and that the posts can follow a few simple styles, I want to know where I go to sign up for a job like that. And if they won't pay me, they should at least hook Ron up; he's been very good about explaining why pretty Apple boxes don't necessarily make for nice products, which ought to be good news for Microsoft.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 3 December 2004 at 10:11 AM