Gender Studies

Sort of the opposite of the traditional symbolism of rockets. Full picture here.

Faster Mac Suspend/Resume

If you have a relatively recent OS X laptop, the default when you close it is to save your current state both in memory (fast) and to disk (slow). This way you get fast startup from memory, plus if you totally run out of power the disk saves your state. This is generally okay but one problem is, if you open and close your laptop several times in fairly quick succession, while it still seems to be busy writing to disk, this sometimes beachballs the laptop for a minute or so while it figures things out.

So if you basically never run your battery down all the way, you don't need the slow disk suspend. You can actually shut this off.

Thanks to ongoing for the tip.

Tough to get a mortgage without a "Real Job"

No kidding. Why is the world so harsh on "affluent self-employed professionals such as doctors, lawyers, accountants and small-business owners"?

In the past, most self-employed people took out "stated-income loans," which don’t require borrowers to fully document their income. Such borrowers typically made substantial down payments, had strong credit profiles and paid a slight premium — around 0.25 of a percentage point — on their interest rates. Defaults were low.

That changed as the loans grew in popularity during the housing boom and expanded beyond their traditional market of affluent professionals. Stated-income loans eventually became disparaged as "liar’s loans" because borrowers’ incomes were frequently exaggerated.

Many banks have eliminated stated-income loans entirely, and Freddie Mac — which, with Fannie Mae, is one of two government-backed buyers of mortgages — will end its stated-income lending program designed for self-employed borrowers next month.

"If the market stays as it is, we’ve frozen thousands and thousands of good borrowers out of the mortgage market," says Peter Ogilvie, past president of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers. "People who’ve demonstrated they can pay their bills cannot get a mortgage — and that’s people who have homes."

This sort of problem is happening to a couple friends of mine right now, including a strong candidate for Xoogler of the month.

A Wikipedia Search Trick

Do you ever search for something wanting Wikipedia but get frustrated that it isn't there? (At least if you're too lazy to scroll down.)

On the other hand, are you sick of typing site:wikipedia.org to do a search when you didn't have to?

There's a compromise. Just use the word "wiki" when you search. Google will generally interpret "wiki" as meaning "wikipedia", although if you really mean "wiki" rather than "wikipedia" Google will usually figure that out too.

Pat Buchanan on Never Forgetting

Pat Buchanan playing against Republican type:

Be it BMW, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi or Hyundai, the South has become a sanctuary for foreign assembly plants, for which Southern states have been paying subsidies.

Fine.

But why this “Let-them-eat-cake!” coldness toward U.S. auto companies? General Motors employs more workers than all these foreign plants combined. And, unlike Mitsubishi, General Motors didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.

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Here's a bunch of people who use "1234" as their password.

It's just not very hard to break into random accounts. Another method I've heard is to set up a website that promises something people want but that requires them to enter a username and a password. For example, post on Craigslist linking to your website and claim it has something like, pictures of your really cheap apartment you are offering in the Mission. When they actually log in you can just give them a message saying "site is temporarily down" - it doesn't matter. Once you collect a whole bunch of username/password pairs, just try them all on bankofamerica.com. Some reasonable percent of people just use the same password for everything. If you want to get fancier, you can even reject the first few passwords people use as an "insufficiently safe password". Recommend they add more numbers and punctuation - then you're likely to get the same password they use for their bank.

I am sad that I do not know the solution to this problem. Never ever using your bank password for other sites is a "personal hygiene" way of solving it - but it's kind of like a deer always running faster than the slowest member of the herd.

Best Use of Twitter Yet

This site StatTweets is running hundreds of different twitter accounts, all focused on a single sports team. So for example the BengalsStats twitter feed contains scores of games, a few articles about the teams, etc. You probably get a few tweets a day.

Previously, on my G1 I had been using a pretty lame NFL scores application that kept forgetting my favorite-teams settings because it apparently didn't understand the Android save-and-restore-state framework. I was also using Twidroid for Twitter access which is quite slow to update because they apparently don't understand the Android background-processes framework. And now I can just use Twidroid. Hmm.

Probably more useful for things I follow more loosely like Duke basketball, prevent me from being caught off guard and having nothing to say about the Duke game I ignored a couple days ago.

Anyway, I'm excited to see specific services being provided over twitter. They have a list of the team feeds they offer here.

And to be honest this is only the second-best use of twitter - my favorite so far was the election night live search feed for [Obama OR McCain].

CrapWrap

A new purposefully-bad giftwrapping option to make it seem like you did it yourself. Provided by "some tipsy bloke wearing boxing gloves and a sack on his head".

Last Minute Gift Ideas

Too bad my family isn't that into wine drinking - otherwise this handy gadget for closing up open bottles of wine would make a great present.

Coal Nightmare

From a WSJ blog:

Big Coal won’t be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE—he’s really, really not a big fan. “Coal is my worst nightmare,” he said repeatedly in a speech earlier this year outlining his lab’s alternative-energy approaches.

Job Opportunities

Apparently you can make $31 an hour for playing crossword puzzles. (Perhaps I should say one can.)

It Is What It Is

Gladwell article.

If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

Piling On

Apparently even Honda employees make more than professors.

(This post would include the chart directly, if Blogger hadn't claimed the upload succeeded, then published a blank post, twice.)