Twitter Downtime

[Edit]: I have since had luck accessing twitter. An odd fluke.

Twitter.com and related services appear to be having some technical difficulties this afternoon. I was getting some odd errors from my firefox extension (TwitterBar) and on my blog that shows current twitter status. I decided to go to the main URL and this is what I found:



Not entirely convinced, I tried downforeveryoneorjustme and this is what they said:

US Military vs. Education and Energy Budgets

Here we have a chart that displays some disturbing figures. These figures were taken from the Budget of the U.S. Government. Every year we spend about a half trillion dollars developing our war machine. Our combined budgets for education and energy fail to make up even 10% of our Defense budget.

Charts on Productivity

Here are a few charts I've put together to explain some of the subtleties in my relationship with internet access. The first one here is a bit more qualitative. I'm sure you can relate, however.








I hope that this information will prove useful for your own self-analysis.

Move from one Google Account to Another

If you've found this post, I sympathize for you. This means that you, like myself, have been searching for a seamless way to transfer all of your various Google services from one account to another. The unfortunate news is that there is no such easy transition, but at least I can tell you what you're in for.

Perhaps you have decided that the email address you chose when you were 14 is no longer appropriate for professional encounters or communicating with relatives. Sure, you created that second Gmail account and use it through your first one. That worked for a while, but then you start needing to share things from other Google services, and the fact is that they all link back to your embarrassing old email. The problem is that -everything- you use: your calendar, your documents, your web albums, blog, maps, and more are all connected to WhyDidIPickThisStupidEmail@gmail.com. This will become even more obvious once Google decides to integrate the Google Profile more ubiquitiously.

You are simply going to have to take the plunge. You will not be able to bring over your hard earned web history, so say goodbye to the thousands of queries and results. There are many things you are going to have to manually recreate, but it must be done. Let's start with the foundation of this whole operation: Gmail.

Gmail

1. If you already use your good email address through your bad old one, the first thing you need to do is remove it. Go into "Accounts" and remove the goodemail@gmail.com from the "Send mail as" and "Get mail from" sections.
2. Also under Settings, go to Filters and hand copy any of the Filters you would like to still have after the transfer. You may want to delete all Filters and labels when you are done, just for the simplicity of knowing that all of your mail is together in one place.
3. Export your contacts by going to the Contacts menu. In the top right, there is an "export" link, choose the Google csv format. Save it to upload to your goodemail account.
4. Take one last look through the different Settings tabs to remind yourself to settings you will need to alter in the new email account.
5. Log into your goodemail@gmail.com. Add the bademail@gmail.com to download through POP/IMAP, also "Send as" if you so desire. Depending on how many emails you have, expect it to take a day or two for all of the emails to be downloaded into your good email account.
6. Manually reenter all of your filters and labels. You may want to check on the progress and make sure things are being filtered properly.
   
7. Import your Contacts list.

That was kind of ugly, I know. It won't improve much from here.
Google Calendar

1. First make sure you load Google Calendar from your goodemail@gmail.com address. Go through the inial setup process, this way you will get the invitation we're going to send from your other account.
2. Log into your bademail@gmail.com calendar account. Go to "Settings" and "Calendars" and edit the share properties of the calendar(s) you want to transfer. Invite your goodemail@gmail.com to share the calendar with the "Make changes and manage sharing" permission settings.
3. Log into your goodemail account. From here you have two choices: you can simply use the shared calendar, or you can transfer each individual event by clicking on them and choosing "Copy to my calendar". Google Calendar requries that you keep your original calendar, even if it's blank. This bothered me enough that I transfered each event other one by one. Then I remove the shared calendar.
4. Don't forget to configure your custom view or other settings you might have had before.

Google Documents

1. Log into your bademail@gmail.com documents account. On the bottom left of the screen, click on "Select All" to select all of the documents. Right click on the documents and choose "Change owner" from the Right-click menu. Enter in your goodemail@gmail.com address and select "Change owner". It may take a couple of minutes to process all of the documents.
   
2. Some documents may not change owner. For those types (such as spreadsheats), select them and choose to share them with editing privileges.

Google Maps

1. If you have saved Maps, log into your bademail@gmail.com account. Under "My maps", select the map you want to transfer and click on the "Collaborate" link. Enter your goodemail@gmail.com and send.

Other google services such as Groups or picasa are equally tedious. If you have any helpful comments or want to share your own experiences, leave a note below.

Toilet Seat Statistics

It has long been the burden of men to leave the toilet seat down after going #1, so that women do not have to move it every time they use the throne. However, we are well into the 21st century and I think it's time for more toilet seat equality. This gentleman breaks down the problem pretty well.

There are several different goals:

• Reduce the overall number of times the seat must "move positions"
  
• Disperse the burden of moving the seat evenly between the genders
• Mind the gender distribution of the household

For instance, while women need the seat in position 2 100% of the time, men may only need it down 30% of the time.

Gender	% Position 2	Position Breakdown
1 Woman	100%	33% Position 1
1 Man	33%	66% Position 2

In this situation, you can see that it's still more statistically fair to leave the toilet seat down. When you have two men in the household, things take a turn.

Gender	% Position 2	Position Breakdown
1 Woman	100%	61.4% Position 1
2 Men	%16.6	38.6% Position 2

Now, politeness dictates leaving the toilet seat up when you are finished. The real problem gets more complicated when you consider that a toilet seat must be moved twice to put it back in its original position, but only once if you are to leave it in another.


There's a really good article here which gives the problem a Game Theory perspective.

A Desktop Comparison: Ubuntu vs. Windows Vista

Even without all those personal documents, the philosophical differences are very apparent. Guess that's what happens when you purchase your operating system from a giant corporation bent on squeezing every last penny out of you.

19 Great Verbs for Ubiquity

For the tech-savvy and webapp oriented, Ubiquity seems like a great direction. Every Ubiquity command is like having a command line interface for your favorite web services. I've browsed through the herd and found a few that are either very useful, interface with webapps I like, or otherwise show a lot of promise.
(note: I have intentionally left out most "search" verbs, as I find they are superfluous)

Webapps

Todoist - I was actually in the middle of writing a verb for todoist myself when I discovered this project. I think I may still finish my own, but it appears this fellow has run into the same roadblocks that I have, which picking specific projects.

add-task - Adds task to RTM (Remember the Milk)

delicious - Add tab's URL to delicious with user specified tags.

share-on-facebook - Post the current URL to your facebook feed.

30boxes - While I don't use the 30boxes calendar, I figured many people do. You can add to your calendar with this verb.

later - Adds the URL to the instapaper.com service, so that you can read the webpage later.

Web Utilities

myip - Insert your public IP address into an editable area.

isdown, ping, whois, tracert - Just like they sound.

add-on-search - Search for Mozilla Firefox add-ons.

foaf - Searches for Friend of a Friend data on the current page. Very neat.

Developer Tools

validate - A w3c validator tool.

lorem - Insert lorem ipsum filler text.

java - Find API on java classnames.

bz - Launches bugzilla for given bug number.

Odds 'n' Ends

integrate - A ubiquity integration calculator!

sms - Uses autosms to send messages to cell phones.