leo.notenboom.org

New unit of measurement: The Bible?

The Bible turns out to be a handy unit of measurement, particularly when you're trying to help folks some grasp large storage media or data transfer rates.

It doesn't matter whether you believe in what's in it, of course, it's just that most folks have seen one. I'd wager that most folks have a reasonable concept of its size, even if only in heft or "thud factor".

I used it as an example way back when as I tried to convey some concepts to my parents. This disk? It could hold X bibles! And this connection here, we can send the entire Bible in Y seconds! Wow!

A random copy of The Bible, text only, from project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) "weighs in" at roughly 5 megabytes.

With that as a unit of measure:

My phone now has enough memory for about 200 Bibles.

The USB thumb drive on my keychain? Over 6,000 Bibles. (6 KiloBibles?)

And the new hard disk I just installed?

186,000+ Bibles. Almost two tenths of a MegaBible.

Now doesn't that just sound way more impressive?

Seattle Native Test

OK, this is a test for everyone who claims to be a Seattle native/local.

What is this:

It'll should bring a fond smile to true natives.

I'll update this post with the answer in a few days.

Seattle has no full time news radio station.

Yes, yes, I know that the two heavyweights in the Seattle marker, KIRO 710 and KOMO 1000 both claim to be news stations. And yet...

KIRO changed branding some time ago from "News Radio" to "News Talk" to finally reflect more accurately what they really broadcast: News and Talk. More of the later than the former, I'm afraid. Fair enough, at least they're honest about it. (And I'm a fan of the talk part ... if that's what I happen to be looking for.)

The real offender, in my mind, is KOMO.

KOMO promotes themselves as the only all news station in Seattle.

The only? Perhaps.

All news? Hardly.

One of the most frustrating things is to hop in your car, turn on the radio, switch over to the news station and find ... baseball. Hours and hours of baseball. (Doublely frustrating when the other "news" station is in one of it's talk segments.)

Almost all news programming on KOMO is out the window during a Mariners game. Perhaps you'll get periodic updates during the hours and hours of pre-game, in-game and post-game non news programming.

But you certainly won't get normal news programming.

I love it when baseball season is over. Real news radio comes back, once again.

Anyone remember KNWX? KIRO's sister station was truly 24 hour news. A great refuge for information when other stations were off doing other things. Sadly it turned into KTTH ...

and more talk.

Why yes, I do live in Seattle.

During my recent trip to San Antonio, I found myself in a small shop (gourmet dog cookies, if you must know) across from a Starbucks. I told the proprietor that I was visiting from Seattle, and she immediately said, "Yes, the home of Starbucks!"

Indeed.

It made me realize that I'm really, really from Seattle, because:

I've had coffee at Starbucks original store - before they took over the world even.

I regularly shopped at Costco's flagship store until they built another closer to my home.

Yes, of course, I worked at Microsoft, before they took over the world too. (1983-2001, employee count ~360 to over 54,000).

My dad consulted for Boeing on a regular basis and his equipment was used when building the 747 in its early years.

I know that UPS started in Seattle.

And I know how to pronounce both "Puyallup" and "Sequim".

There's a bunch of local trivia too, but those would interest only those that live here. I may have one specific one in the coming days ... a test, of sorts, for the locals.

Geek is Good

So my credit card company (or rather, the credit card company that issued the corporate cards used for my wife's business http://dollsandfriends.com) "upgraded" their card access web site recently.

Already you can see where this is going.

I'm a little behind in my bookkeeping this month for various and sundry reasons, but the other day I figured I had a good chance to catch up. Off I went.

I use Microsoft Money (I mean, I'd have to - I was development lead for version 3, after all). In the past the credit card site supported downloading in Money's "OFX" format and that worked great. The site "upgrade" appeared to have removed that - perhaps something about market share?

No worries. Money also imports Quicken's QIF file format, and that of course was supported. Except for one thing ...

Downloading the QIF, all the debits became credits, and the credits debits.

I called customer support, but since this was a technical issue someone would call me back in 24-36 hours.

3 days later I decided to take matters into my own hands. (This is the "geek is good" part). QIF is a text format, and I wrote a little sed script to reverse the sense of all the transactions in a QIF File.

For those so inclined, here 'tis:

s/^T-/T/
t
s/^T\([0-9]\)/T-\1/

I have no idea what an "average" person would have done in a situation like this.

But wait, there's more.

After I successfully downloaded everything with the correct sense, the account still wouldn't reconcile.

It turns out that if a transaction of the same amount to the same payee occurred more than once on the same day, the "extra transactions" are excluded from the QIF download. They're still on the statement and on-line display - and of course my bill - they're just not present in the download. Apparently someone decided that "remove duplicates" was somehow desirable in this case. (Hint: it's not.)

So after fixing the download through geeky machinations, and hand-entering the missing duplicate entries everything balanced at last.

Who know what'll happen after the next "upgrade".

[This post was created using a new email-to-blogpost technique. Any formatting issues are probably the result of that. I'll fix 'em. Eventually.]