A lot of things struck me when I saw this scene last week:
Why has it taken 1.5 years to redo a 3 block length of roadway, all the while stealing parking spaces, rerouting traffic and somewhat blighting the neighborhood, traffic cones keeping people off the road and sidewalk.
What actually needed to get done that took all that time and money? I now see a slightly wider sidewalk (ripping up a perfectly fine one), a raised road divider, some bump-outs for traffic calming stealing a few parking spaces but helping pedestrians cross the road (I have never seen a car race down this road, traffic calming wasn’t needed), a new roadbed (the old roadbed looked fine), a few mounting holes for large something-or-anothers (look in the middle of the picture, I dunno what they are for), and some new pretty street lighting (the old lighting seemed reasonably ok when they kept bulbs in them).
Divisions between the concrete “panels” in sidewalks are all artificial, carved after the whole sidewalk is poured. So why do cracks tend to stop at the panel edges? That’s totally freaky!
Sidewalk finishing is an art. With just sticks and sheets of metal, they make the surface exactly the way they wanted it to be.
Ugh, I haven’t been able to speak in a normal voice since Friday afternoon! Friday evening my voice got hoarse. I figured it was from teaching all week and maybe a bug. Daniel Bauen, my friend from Colossus came through town so I talked to him with my froggy voice. I really shouldn’t have. It hurt my throat to speak every time. Saturday morning I had no voice. I could whisper quietly but even that hurt a little so I generally refrained. On Sunday morning I was having a whispered conversation with Daniel in the kitchen. At one point he turned on the tap to get some water and I was unable to speak over the sound of running water, ugh.
Here we are Monday and I’m coughing up more phlem than ever and I still feel kinda sick. Not really sick but certainly under the weather. And I still can’t speak.
A friend of mine who works and lives in Berkeley injured her shoulder yesterday. She does not have health insurance. Can you recommend where she might go to have it looked at? And/or acupuncture…
Is a walk through the yellow pages the only reasonable way?
Beaner is selling her beautiful home in Monroe New Jersey and moving to sunny Florida! Darn, it’s right on a golf course, and she keeps the place impecably. The pictures in this little Flash video actually don’t do it justice. It really is a beautiful home, so you should live there!
Surprise! I went to Yosemite on Sunday with Binka’s relatives. It was pretty awesome.
We scrambled up to the base of El Capitan from the valley floor. It was maybe a 30 minute scramble over a mix of easy forest terrain, steep hills, and, giant steep boulders! It was pretty terrific.
How do I tell if an Android program is stealing my data?
For example, here’s what I can find out about “Tank Hero”. It has been downloaded more than 250,000 times and gotten 28,000 ratings, mostly very good. The program gets “Full internet access” and “Modify or delete SD card contents”. So it has permission to look through the contents of most of my phone… and upload it to their server. The game maker has listed a website, Clapfoot Games with precious little information. The game is free. There are a lot of programs like this in the Android Marketplace.
When looking for bad things, you can often “follow the money”. If a deal seems too good to be true, it is. If an Android app is free, well, it’s not, you just don’t know it yet. It’s good that I see ads in the Tank Hero game, but that isn’t enough.
On a multitude of online forum posts, people keep saying “Oh don’t worry about it, I haven’t found malware yet.” The problem with that logic is that I see no mechanism for discovering and notifying the public about malware.
I looked at the antivirus programs that are out for the Android and they haven’t gotten good reviews yet.
So what am I to do? How do I tell if an Android program is stealing my data?
