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I have phone again – sorta

My replacement phone for my antique Motorola v3xx RAZR arrived today. Now I have an LG CF360 which looks and acts a whole lot like a Samsung A777. I lost everything! Every contact. Every picture. Every voice recording. Every shortcut in my life. Gone! My contacts in my phone had notes related to the contact, birthdays, private numbers, people I only talk to once in a blue moon and do so because I see (saw) them in my contact list and more.

So be it! Call this a new beginning. Let the burdens that accumulated in that phone be gone! We start anew today. If you call and get my voicemail, be sure to leave your phone number. Thanks.

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My typical night and day

I once lived a long time on 3 hours of sleep a night. In the long run, it hurt. I love to sleep and especially to dream but if I could take a pill and do away with sleeping, I’d be pill popping in a heartbeat. Over the years I have changed my habits from pulling alnighters and staying up until four in the morning to trying to consistently get to bed by 10pm. I know that if I get to sleep by 11:59pm that I sleep far better than if I go to sleep at 12:01am. If I get to sleep by 10pm, I can be up and productive at either 2am or 4am which makes for an astoundingly good day for me.

What really happens? I wander to bed at 10 or 10:30pm but lounge in bed chatting with my wife and watching television until midnightish. Between 2am and 2:30am, one of the dogs needs to be walked or rather she has formed the habit of going outside for a few minutes. I sit around for a few minutes and debating starting my day but acknowledge that on 2 hours of sleep my head is simply too fuzzy. I return to bed. At 4am, Evan wanders into our bed. I debate getting up but decide Evan will follow me so I conceded to another 30 minutes of sleeping. At 4:30am, I wake again and alter between cat naps and tossing and turning until between 5 and 5:30 at which time I finally get out of bed and try to get some work done before 6:15am. At 6:15am, Amy arises and I step away from the computer. If I spend time on the computer between 6:15 and 7am, she misses her bus. From 6:15 to 6:55, I make Amy’s lunch, chat with Amy, prompt Noah to brush his teeth, and then drive Amy to the bus stop. From 7:15 to 8:15am I try to get another hour’s work done but this is dependent upon whether or not Evan has awoken and whether or not Noah has missed his bus and needs a ride or Sarah needs a ride. Between 8:30 and 9am Monday through Friday, I am carpooling either Tommy or Evan to school. At 9:30 I am typically back at my desk trying to get work done. If I eat lunch, I take it at my desk. At 2pm, I will grab a 15-20 minute power nap and return to work by 2:30. At 5 or 5:30pm, I break to prepare dinner for the kids. This break typically extends to 7pm. I’m usually back on the computer no later than 8 and try to work until 10pm when the cycle begins again.

That is par for the course Monday through Friday. I try to avoid working on Saturday. I like to get up early on Sunday and try to work at least through lunch.

Update: A friend asked, "why doesn’t Cathy do the morning with the children?" There’s far more duties than what I’ve described with 5 children. She is not a morning person. We have no dishwasher so she hand washes the constantly barrage of dirty dishes our family produces. Our washer and dryer run 24/7 and she does all the folding (I’ve been forbidden from doing laundry…something about doing it wrong. Thank you Bill Cosby!). She handles all the school paperwork, homework, supplies, schedules and with 5 children in 5 schools there is plenty of that! She gets all the children’s clothing and backpacks laid out the night before so our mornings go smoothly. She also does the carpool pick-ups to balance my carpool drop-offs. She handles medical appointments, dentist, extracurricular activities, etc. The children also have their chores and areas of expectation. We are not the Duggars but we have a system that works for our tiny large family. I think we have a machine that runs pretty smooth but I certainly wouldn’t turn Mary Poppins away if she showed up on our doorstep.

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My Clients Now Get P3P Privacy Policies

Does your website collect identifying information on your visitors? If you think because you do not sell anything, ie. no shopping cart, and have no subscription services that you are not collecting identifying information on your site’s visitors then you are probably wrong. Most web servers log IP addresses along with the time of the visit and what that IP address read. ISPs keep logs showing which IP addresses were allocated to what users at particular times. Your logs can be correlated to their logs to identify a person. If your site as a comment form then you are definitely collecting information but more importantly that form gives you a name of a person to associate with the IP address without having to involve the ISP.

So now that we are clear that you are probably collecting identifying information about the visitors to your site, do you have a privacy policy? A privacy policy states how you will use that identifying information. For instance, perhaps you sell it to mailing lists. Or perhaps you specifically do NOT sell it to mailing lists but aggregate it to be able to explain to your potential advertisers that 70% of your site’s visitors are women between the ages of 22 and 35.

If you have a privacy policy, as a human, I can follow the link to that policy, read it, and try to interpret it. But why should I do that when I may not even understand what I’m reading? Shouldn’t the browser or other software handle the privacy policy for me? Yes! And on April 16, 2002 the W3C recommended the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project or P3P which is "a machine-readable language that helps to express a website’s data management practices." What this comes down to is that you can set your privacy preferences in your browser and if the website’s policy does not match, the browser blocks cookies from that site. Certainly there is a bit more to it than that but for most users, it boils down to blocking cookies.

P3P is a bit of a pain in the neck but every website (and that means your blogs) should have a privacy policy. This is definitely something I will encourage of each of my clients.

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I’m heating Knoxville

I want a Christmas tree. Not the kind with pine needles but the kind you find in a submarine that tells you which hatches are open. With the beautiful weather we have been experiencing, our windows open during the day. The nights are a little to chilly. Of late, the heater has been turned on to combat the cold, but much to my chagrin, at least one window seems to remain open each night. If you have noticed slightly warmer days in Knoxville, you can thank my family and my elevated electric bill.

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Too stressed to type

Thy todoth list overfloweth. Nay, thine own muse shouts silence. Gagged. Hiding in thy shadows within the deepest recesses of mine own mind. Today’s stories shall be passed upon to giveth thy brain a necessary reprieve such as tomorrow’s adventures shall be retold with vigor! William eat thine own heart out with a spork!

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Where the Hell is West Knoxville?!

Our professional journalists don’t know our city. Our newspaper is guilty. All the television stations are guilty. Our "professional" online news outlets, WATE, WBIR, etc. are guilty. WBIR is by far the worst offender. Each of these professional journalism businesses purport "West Knoxville" to be random places that are not downtown or South Knoxville.

Knoxville has a bad case of poor urban planning and sprawl. If you look at Knoxville with a critical eye, and I mean go back and look at the trolley maps, and pay attention to the way schools were laid out, our city’s earlier developers had to believe Knoxville was going to sprawl north. But the people north of Knoxville did not sell their farms. Instead, the people to the west of Knoxville sold and development, and money, built toward the setting sun. Somewhere along the way, some silly "us versus them" started between the westies and the downtownies which continues to this day. Anyone living west is painted as unfairly privileged by the rest of Knoxville; and anyone not west is painted as..well.."not west" but generally downtownies. I believe our news agencies stoke the fires of this west versus everyone else problem. So where exactly is West Knoxville?! WBIR just ran a story about a robbery in West Knoxville that is a 20 minute drive from where I live in West Knoxville. I usually avoid commenting on our local news sites but had to leave this:

Do you have a map that shows the areas of Knoxville? By WBIR’s reports, "West Knoxville" seems to be everything except Gay Street. This Petro’s is practically in Lenoir City. Seems to me that giving a location like "West Knoxville" is supposed to help the reader put the place into their mind but how can we do that when one news report has West Knoxville just North of Alcoa Hwy, another puts West Knoxville at the intersection of Old Kingston Pike and Kingston Pike, another puts West Knoxville in Bearden…West Town Mall..Farragut.

For clarity sake, shouldn’t "West Knoxville" be a little more specific? Heading West on Kingston Pike from Downtown perhaps we need: Downtown -> Campus -> Sequoyah -> Homberg -> Bearden -> West Town -> West Knoxville -> Farragut -> Dixie Lee Junction. Seems to me those are the names that come up in face to face conversations to identify "West Knoxville" specifically.

I’ll start collecting a list of West Knoxville stories and see if we can put together a map.

Update: Here’s a story by Knoxnews where the shootout victims might be in Northwest Knoxville or maybe they are Downtown. See the article’s comments to understand why.

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It’s the simple things that make tech hard

You might be in a technology job if…

  • …you commit to building a website that should have been done in an afternoon and you are still scratching your head a week later because the data provider has no API and is afraid of you stealing your own data.
  • …you open up Internet Explorer to test your website but cannot get to it because "Internet Explorer is currently running without add-ons"
  • …you try to bang something out in 5 minutes but 20 minutes later you are still trying to correct typos because of the blasted hourglass.

Update: The silly Internet Explorer problem was between the seat and the keyboard:

This message appears when Internet Explorer is opened with add-ons disabled. To run Internet Explorer normally (with add-ons turned on), make sure to select Internet Explorer on the Start menu and do not click Internet Explorer (No Add-ons). [Microsoft, Internet Explorer add-ons: frequently asked questions]

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Incommunicado

My phone has died. If you are trying to SMS me or call me, I am not receiving your messages. Please contact me through Twitter, Skype (djuggler), or Cathy. You can try my Google Voice number 865-686-8693.

If you have the next killer iPhone app idea that could make you millions, I’ll happily build the app for you in exchange for a MacBook Pro and an iPhone (say, $5000).