I’ve ordered some various snacks from SnackAisle a few times now. I’ve gotten Pretzel Crisps, Kettle chips, and fruit strips from them. Those are all some great snacks, and you’re not stuck just getting one variety. You can get a bulk size package containing a mixture of different varieties.

Give it a go sometime. You can find coupon codes from time to time if you subscribe to their newsletter. They also seem to have nice sales during the holidays.

First is an inquiry I had made regarding division by zero. I never felt that division by zero was quite fully explained to me in high school and prior, so I did some number fiddling and consulted with the Dr. Math program about it. It ended up turning out that division by zero wasn’t always as undefined as high school made it out to be.

Second was an inquiry regarding the average rate of change. Our teacher had taught something that wasn’t working out in practice, so I inquired about it. Turns out the teacher was wrong, but looking back on it, I could see an out of practice teach confusing averaging the derivatives between the end points with averaging the derivatives of the end points.

There was a problem of the week program too that I found interesting and participated in on occasion. It’s not as free as it once was, but it was exciting and helpful to me.

So far, the book has been interesting. Despite its technical nature, its conclusions and lessons are pretty straightforward, almost to the degree of what some would call common sense. The author, Benjamin Graham, passed away in 1976, so this book is his most recent edition with updated commentary from Jason Zwieg after each chapter.

The overall lesson seems rather straightforward: Regard investing as investing and you’ll be okay. Everything seems to support that. Be disciplined so that speculation doesn’t do you in, and avoid being drawn into the speculative world of day trading through watching tickers constantly. Remember to regard these as actual investments in a company and not to let the abstractions of ticker symbols and stock prices hide that.

I only just finished the third chapter, so it’ll be interesting what other lessons can be gained.

I’ve completed my income tax return for 2009. This return was more complicated than in the past since a portion of my work has been in a self-employed situation. For that reason, I opted to have a professional tax preparer review it before submitting it. The experience does help me understand better how to manage financial information in the case of the business we’re looking to create. There’s basically two types of business arrangements: informal and formal. The informal arrangements are sole proprietorship and general partnership. The taxation of both arrangements is part of your typical income tax return. On the other hand, formal arrangements like corporations get taxed separately in addition to being taxed on your income from the corporation.

The W3C came up with a technology at the height of this issue called PICS, short for the Platform for Internet Content Selection. In some ways, that technology saved the Internet. If you read Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
by Tim Berners-Lee, you will read how there was legislation in progress to restrict the Web. PICS revolved around content providers being able to rate their own content, rating criteria from third parties, and rating decisions by end users. It was a system based on trust that didn’t impose anything on anybody.

As the technologies used to communicate metadata evolved, so did rating bureaus communicating their labels. Originally the Recreational Software Advisory Council for Internet used a system based on PICS. As RSACi morphed into the Internet Content Rating Association, the labeling became more detailed and granular. As ICRA has now morphed into the Family Online Safety Institute, they have moved their labeling to leverage RDF. I learned this when a 404 report for my site was for labels.rdf. I have now created that latest version of the labels for my site and link to it from my WordPress site.

My site is rated as having no nudity, mild language, and user generated content amongs other things. Check for yourself with the label checking tool.

Beta software is software generally regarded by its author as not well tested or not reliable. Sometimes beta can also be used as a marketing gimmick. Companies like Google have done this with Gmail and Google Wave where only a small amount of people were initially using those products and others could only be invited through invitations. This brings an exclusiveness to those products just like a club that only allows entry to those with invitations.

Anyhow, I run beta software mostly. The main reason is that the occasional problem I encounter with the software is educational to solve as well as fun. That doesn’t mean things always go well though. When the Office System 2007 was still beta, I used it for homework. There was a case where Word corrupted my document so that the file I sent to the professor could not be openned, and the version saved could not be openned. The professor was understanding though, and Microsoft was able to give me a way to recover the document, which was surprising. That is probably the most data loss I have had in using beta software.

Back when I was more involved with Mozilla Firefox, I would run the nightly builds. They were generally pretty stable for me. Mozilla inherited one of the best software engineering infrastructures I’ve seen from Netscape. They have a system integrating source control, issue tracking, and continuous integration. They have systems set up for each of their target platforms constantly building Firefox with the latest changes. If it does not build or the basic tests fail, the build is broken, and the build sherrif is notified. The build sherrif either gets the pertinent person to correct the problem or reverses the change to quickly get the system back into a relatively stable state. I’ve held an admiration for this setup.

Technologies like OpenID are going some way toward being able to log in to multiple sites without constantly needing to make new accounts. This is good for several reasons. It is most definitely more convenient. It is also more secure because you can use an OpenID provider that support multiple factors of authentication instead of relying on every website to do so. You are also more likely to protect those authentication credentials and change them on occasion where applicable.

Another piece of the puzzle that I do not yet see being solved satisfactorily is profile duplication and synchronization. I have a Fakebook profile. I have a MySpace profile. Shouldn’t they contain the same information? I have way more than these too. Just look at my DandyId list, and that’s not even all. I want to see a solution to that problem.

With each meal at Bravo, you get a receipt and like many receipts at restaurants, there’s an opportunity to take a survey. This survey doesn’t get you entered into any sweepstakes. It doesn’t give you a free ringtone. It doesn’t even give you a dollar off your next meal. It gives you $5 off your next meal. It’s not a one time thing. I have only paid full price once. Ever since then, I have gotten $5 off. Their lunch menu hovers around $8. I only pay about $3. At that price, I’m getting better food in a better atmostphere at a cheaper price than if I went to Hardee’s.

To do even better than $5 off each visit, you can sign up for their e-mail club and get a free appetizer just for doing so. They are also doing a lunch club deal where you get a meal free for every six meals. These deals largely aren’t exclusive either in my experience. They will give me $5 off and stamp the card. Recently, for not particularly clear reasons, they have been giving me free meals too. Twice now, I haven’t paid a cent for lunch and gotten food that adds up to being around $18 without any discounts.

Even with all that, I can still do better though I likely won’t pusue this with what little time I have left working at Vontoo. You can buy a $50 gift card and get a $10 card free. When you go frequently, that’s even more savings.

Personal website on December 10, 2003

In the earliest version of my site I could find, I found this version from shortly after starting college. This is a page that was generated by the Blog software I played with for a while. I think I eventually abandoned Blog because it generated flat files that revealed the technology being used. I wanted to heed the guidelines regarding “Cool URIs Don’t Change“.

Website from April 21, 2004

Apparently for a while, I didn’t bother having much of a site. It was just a page with my e-mail address.

Website from June 8, 2004

This was a nicer version of the site. I actually have content and the start of the style. I have a purplish/blue background hinting at the blue theme I would eventually have. I believe this design was shortly after reading Jakob Nielson’s Designing Web Usability. I had a breadcrumb style navigation that appeared on the top and bottom of the site. This remained the overall design for several years.

Website from October 30, 2007

In early 2007, I went through a personal branding phase and came up with my prior website design. This was also when I migrated my site from my school website to my personal gurganus.name domain. The page content is simpler without the navigational overhead since I had been manually modifying the breadcrumb structure, and that became error prone and burdonsome.

Website Today

Now, I’ve migrated to WordPress so some of the overhead of maintaining navigational structures isn’t there. I’m still working on theming my WordPress installation though.