We choose

This week marked the 40^th Anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. In honor of that event, I reread JFK's "We choose to go to the Moon" speech,* and I was reminded of an epiphany I had just a few months ago. Consider the gravity of this statement:

We choose to go to the moon.

I can't help but be reminded of the the alchemists, who chose to turn lead into gold. And yet, where they failed, we succeeded. We took a task that, on the surface, is no less impossible than turning lead into gold, and willed it into existence (albeit with billions of dollars and millions of man-hours).

I sometimes wonder if that sort of willpower still exists in the United States today, and I generally conclude that it does not. Imagine if Obama made the following statement:

We choose to be energy independent in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Think about the challenge of becoming energy independent in the next decade. It's certainly no harder than putting a man on the moon was in 1962, and arguably more important.** And yet, can anyone here honestly say that we're on track to accomplish this? Have we even accepted the challenge? Is it something that we intend to win?

If so, consider this: Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House. Ronald Regan removed them.

And so, I ask: What can we as individuals do? What should we be doing?

---

* As all of the Owls in the room will tell you, JFK's "Moon" speech was made at Rice Stadium. The statement immediately before

We choose to go to the moon.

was

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this asour goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

** Comparing the challenge of putting a man on the moon to that of becoming energy independent, especially as seen through the lens of national security, the latter is clearly more important. Putting a man on the moon was about developing rocketry to prove to the Soviets that we could obliterate them from afar. Because of our energy dependence, we've shipped a huge percentage of our national wealth abroad, toppled democratically elected governments (directly and indirectly), waged wars against peaceful nations, and allied ourselves with nations whose ideologies directly undermine our own. And for all of this, our energy sources are not really any more secure. Energy producing nations still have a head-shot they can fire at anytime.

I should also point out that all of this ignores the political instability that will be brought about as climate change becomes a reality, the amount of habitable landmass decreases, and displaced people are forced to find new homes.

Star Trek: Insurrection Resurrection Drinking Game

In honor of the new Star Trek movie, JA and I have developed a drinking game.

Take a drink each scene where

• Kirk gets a girl or catches a right hook
  
• McCoy performs a miraculous medical procedure
  
• Spock's humanity gets the best of him
  
• Scotty pulls off a miraculous technological feat
  
• Uhura hooks up with another Enterprise crew member
  
• Sulu shows off his sword fightin' skills
  
• Chekhov isn't needed
  
• "Captain's log" is said
• An alien language is spoken
• There is a box / door that no one can open
  
• The weapons, shields, transporter, or communications are rendered inoperative
  
• A captain declares a Red alert
  

Bonus

• Raise your glass, salute, and drink the first time Kirk takes the captain's chair
  

Things that didn't make the cut

• Kirk gets a clipboard
• McCoy says "He's dead Jim" or "I'm a doctor, not an X"
• Spock raises an eyebrow; says logic, illogical, or fascinating; has a mind meld; or does a neck pinch
• Uhura opens a channel or sings
• Sulu sets course
• Chekhov gives a Russian history lesson
• Any two Enterprise crew members hook up
• A red shirt gets killed

Gmail and IMAP and BlackBerry (Oh, my!)

This post is about how to get GMail filters to apply to mail coming to your Blackberry via IMAP. Specifically, it is about how to prevent messages from GMail that are automatically archived from reaching your 'Berry. It is in response to Gmail and IMAP and BlackBerry (Oh, my!).

The Skinny

I get a lot of e-mail.

Most of the time, I don't want it to show up in my inbox. To help deal with the deluge, I've set up some tremendous filters. However, I'd never found a way to get my BlackBerry to respect those filters - until now. I assumed the answer would come from the new Advanced IMAP feature of GMail Labs. In fact it, the answer came from tricking the BIS Server into thinking this was a standard IMAP mail account rather than GMail IMAP account.

Click here for directions on how to manually configure your mail account.

Note: The directions use imap.google.com. This is incorrect. Use imap.gmail.com instead.

The Back Story

I've had a BlackBerry for several years now. However, unlike most smartphone users, e-mail is the least used function on my device. (The reason I pony up $20 / month for data is because of Google Maps Mobile. Over-the-air contact and calendar sync via Google Sync is nice too.)

Up until last week, I blocked all mail from coming to my 'Berry, almost without exception. Every time I tried to switch, I was deluged by mail from mailing lists where I didn't want immediate notification.

There seemed to be no hope - until Advanced IMAP. Its a GMail labs feature that lets you choose which GMail labels show up as folders on your IMAP account. "Perfect!", I thought to myself. "I'll just enable those labels where I want the mail to show up on my BlackBerry."

But then there was ec-discuss. Its an MIT dorm mailing list that will bounce any message (including ones where its bcc-ed) and didn't do anything to the subject line. Last week, I redirected that mail to its own e-mail address and set up GMail to periodically check that account. (This would have been much simpler if there was an option to filter based on header fields / routing information in GMail, but oh well.)

It seemed like I was finally ready for e-mail on my BlackBerry.

The T-Mobile Paradox

Naively, I thought this would be a snap. Enable IMAP, enable Advanced IMAP from the Labs tab of the settings, and then delete / re-setup your email account on the T-Mobile site.

Via Advanced IMAP, I disabled all of the folders except for my inbox. I then deleted and re-setup my e-mail account. After a couple of test e-mails, I realized that no e-mail was making it to my 'Berry. A tech support call to T-Mobile yielded no results, but the woman did tell me which server my mail account was using - imap.gmail.com. Given that everything was pretty stock, I decided it was probably something experimental, and decided to disable Advanced IMAP. Once again e-mail started flowing to my phone, but I was deluged with messages from freecycle.

I remembered that once before, I had been able to manually configure my mail settings. I then went through this insane cycle of disabling POP and IMAP from GMail and setting up my mail account on the T-Mobile site trying to get a menu where I could manually enter some settings. Every time I did this, the T-Mobile site successfully added the account, and POP and IMAP were magically re-enabled GMail and e-mail was flowing. How was T-Mobile magically re-enabling these services remotely? Where were the settings coming from? I didn't understand.

I re-enabled Advanced IMAP and the mail stopped. Then, I started re-enabling each IMAP folder. Moments after checking the "GMail / All Mail" folder, mail started flowing again.

One mystery was solved, but it raised a host of new questions. Why was mail coming from the "GMail / All Mail" folder, but none of the others? Why wasn't it pulling mail from all available folders? What about standard IMAP accounts (which don't have that folder)? Which folder did it pull from for those accounts?

And then I remembered something - my work e-mail account was also set up on my phone and it worked perfectly. The two were almost identical - both were running over GMail and both were set up via the BIS. What was the difference? Why was one sending auto-archived messages to the 'Berry, while the other didn't? For some reason, I suspected it had something to do with the fact that my personal account was older than my work account. I couldn't prove it, but that's what I suspected.

Having spent a ton of time changing my GMail settings, I started digging through the BIS. Eventually, I noticed that my work e-mail had an "Advanced Settings" tab on the BIS. 

A clue!

I called T-Mobile support and had something resembling a discussion from an Ayn Rand novel:
Me: "Why does one have the Advanced Settings tab and the other doesn't?"
T-Mobile: "One is a work account"
Me: "True, but they're connecting to the same server. Neither is using a BES."
T-Mobile: "One is special"
Me: "Why is it special?"
T-Mobile: "One is using IMAP"
Me: "They're both using IMAP! Can you just set them up so that they're the same?"

T-Mobile rep hangs up

At this point I was ready to give up. T-Mobile didn't seem to understand my plight, and there seemed to be no way to manually setup my mail account.

Moments later, my roommate walks in. Frustrated from my call, I told him the tale. He listens intently and says:

"Oh - there's a way to trick the BIS into using IMAP."

Voila.

I've disabled Advanced IMAP and only the messages that make it to my inbox make it to my phone.

Get Involved!

With the new White House Blog up and running for a few weeks now, I decided to see how its readership staked up against some of the more well-established blogs on the Internet.

For my quick and hugely unscientific study, I employed Google Reader, which has had subscriber statistics available for some time now. I figured that Slashdot, the BBC homepage, and the New York Times homepages would be a good place to set my baseline as they had national audiences and an equally well recognized brand.

BBC News - 2.8 Million
NYTimes.com - 2.2 Million
Slashdot - 326,000
White House.gov Blog - 15,000

What concerns me isn't so much the apathy as the squandering of an opportunity. Doing anything in a transparent manner is hard. Not only do you have to execute, but after you're done, you have to document your actions, publish the document(s), and then inform everyone where they can find said document(s). The White House may be taking note that their efforts to be more transparent are going largely unnoticed.

Whatever the case may be, I hope that people will start reading the White House blog. A new-found pleasure of mine is watching the President's weekly video address on YouTube. I now have some idea how people must have felt while listening to Roosevelt's fireside chats.

Sgt. Peppar's Lonely Livers Club Band

For the past few months, I've been using Mint to manage my personal finances. It does a wonderful job of integrating information from all of your accounts in one place.

The best feature, from my perspective, is the ability to set a budget. When you start to get close to going over budget, Mint will send you all sorts of alerts, so that you can plan accordingly.

In planning my budget, I discovered that Mint also lets you compare your spending to that of other Mint users in various regions of the United States. I'm always concerned about how much I'm spending at bars, so I decided to do a comparison. First, I decided to compare myself against the average American – Joe the Six-pack Plumber.

Double the national average?! This concerned me a little bit. But there are tons of people in the US who don't drink, drink more cheaply, etc. Surely I would stack up better against my peers in Austin:
Uhh… maybe I'm more like my New York City counter parts?
Where in the US could people possibly spend more on booze than in NY?

Looks like I'm moving to Vegas.

Social Reading, or How to Optimize the Use of Your Friends

Since the dawn of time, people have relied on their friends to help with tasks that they cannot do alone as a result of time, geographic, or physical constraints. Examples include baby-sitting, moving, and sometimes, shopping.

Which brings me to my new idea: Social Reading.

On any given day, I read between 50 and 75 articles on Google Reader. I'm not sure how this ranks in comparison to everyone else, but I'd be willing to wager that its on the high end for people who are employed and whose job does not involve researching current events.

At the end of the day, however, I stack up somewhere between 10 and 20 articles that I would have liked to have read, but didn't quite get around to. I could boost the amount of time I spend reading by 20%, or improve my reading efficiency, but that's pretty hard. Instead, I'm considering farming out the work to my friends.

Here's where Google Reader (specifically its 'Share' functionality) comes in.

Currently, when I share an article, its because I think my friends might be interested in reading it. But what if I started sharing only those articles that I might be interested in, and kept a separate feed of articles I'm actually interested in? Two scenarios emerge:

1. Everyone else keeps sharing items that they're interested in.
2. Everyone a else adopts my strategy.

Let's take situation 1. If an item I shared appears in both my potential items feed and a friend's 'interesting items' feed, I'm more likely to find it interesting than anything else they share, and I should probably read it.

In situation 2, the same logic as situation 1 applies, but we get a boost from chaining. Let's say that a bunch of people friends and friends of friend flag an article as potentially interesting. If one person has some spare time and actually bothers to read the article, it tells us a lot. If they find it interesting, they'll share it on their 'interesting items' feed, and it should indicate to everyone on the chain that they should reconsider reading the article. If they don't, you probably shouldn't waste your time. (If you had enough users, you could even rank items in your 'potentially interesting' items feed based on how many people found it interesting, and weight based whether those people are inside or outside of your social circle). I should note that this is a kind of a giant group-think, but given that these are just current event items that I didn't consider important enough to read to begin with, I'm sort of OK with it.

The only real danger is that the number of people who read my shared items may shrink to zero, at which point the system would completely break down.

And here's where I get a bit nerdy…

I really like this because of its analogy to cluster computing. People with spare reading cycles (unemployed, underemployed, geniuses) read so that those who are fully utilized can focus their efforts on completing the jobs assigned to them.

Which brings up an interesting point: are there other tasks we should be farming out to our social network? I welcome suggestions.

Perfect Poached Eggs!

I made these perfect poached eggs this morning!

The trick is to stir the water vigorously to create a sort of whirlpool. This causes the egg white to wrap around the yolk and keep a nice shape. Also, be sure to crack the egg into a small bowl and tip the egg gently into the water in the direction of the water flow. Don't try to crack it directly into the water. I've ended up with perfect easy-medium yolks every time.