Nathan Alter

Loud river walk

Nathan — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:07:47 +0000

Yesterday evening, we parked at the back of the Walmart parking lot on Coors and I-40. From there, you can walk down a lighted bridge along the freeway to the river. (Walking along the freeway is pretty loud.) We saw bats flying around. I wanted to get a shot of a bat against the moon, but chances would have been one in a thousand.

Chamberlain 248754 garage door opener red light

Nathan — Wed, 22 May 2013 04:05:26 +0000

Just for internet posterity, the Chamberlain 248754 garage door opener may start beeping every 30 seconds with a red (not orange) LED. The manual claims that you need to call service for this issue. We just ordered a battery for in-store pickup at Home Depot and it was fine.

The tax laws of Hazzard county

Nathan — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:19:46 +0000

Because of complicated tax law, Apple used an interesting tactic to avoid taxes in one case. They set up a corporation in Ireland to hold a bunch of money. Ireland taxes companies based on where you operate. Apple operates out of the US. The US taxes you based on where you incorporate, which was Ireland in this case. So they just didn’t get taxed on the money.

the new version, but not quite

Nathan — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:44:23 +0000

Instead of calling it 5G, they called it 4G LTE. Instead of calling it SQL Server 2010, they called it SQL Server 2008 R2. Maybe these names are technically correct, but they’re horrible. They don’t exactly roll off the tongue.

the story behind Sriracha

Nathan — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:55:12 +0000

The story behind the inventor of Sriracha. Funny that he mentions “We don’t make mayonnaise here” but Subway was testing a kinda Sriracha mayo combo. (ew)

UK English is easier for computers to speak?

Nathan — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:30:51 +0000

Why does the UK Android OS voice sound so much clearer than the American one? I was trying out Pocket on Android since my data connection is almost always down. It saves webpages for offline reading and can even read them to you. The UK English voice was pretty understandable. Maybe their accident is more amenable to computer pronunciation.

bees!

Nathan — Thu, 09 May 2013 03:09:10 +0000

I talked to a friend about raising bees today. You can split the hives by taking out a queen and putting it in another hive. Some sort of swarming happens and half the bees stay in the new one. Meanwhile, you put a $25 queen in the old hive to take it over. I may have some of the details incorrect here, but hey, this post only took 30 seconds.

Open Source ain’t all cake and pony rides

Nathan — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:42:47 +0000

For a corporate web application, I was looking into using an open source DLL that was under the Affero General Public License. Initially, I thought it’d be free because it was open source. In this case, it turned out it’s only free for commercial use if you publish your own source code. Otherwise, you have to pay for a commercial license. This might be ok in the right situation, but I learned from this not to just assume that open source libraries are free in all cases. Check those licenses carefully before you do anything!

Bye, google reader

Nathan — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 05:44:39 +0000

Google’s shutting down Google Reader. It’s pretty much the way I surf the web. Guess it’s time to find an alternative. Is RSS dying or something?

And irony

Nathan — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:59:36 +0000

The HTML code for ampersand is & Ironic, yes?