Everybody knows that the government is not the right organization to seek money-saving tips from.  Daniel Jacobson from Stanford found that out first-hand when he did his local government’s work for them.

For about 0.15% of the government-quoted cost, he came up with a plan for a community streetcar.

If you ever thought that you could do something cheaper than the government (a corporation, your employer, etc) can, here’s the proof.  It is possible.

Why not suggest it at your next planning meeting?

From Sally Field, via @ChangeJourney:

My agent said, ‘You aren’t good enough for movies.’ I said, ‘You’re fired.’

She then went on to be a successful movie actress.

The lesson of this quote is simple.  Never let anybody else dictate your limits.  If someone tries to tell you that you can’t do something, prove them wrong.

I’m sitting here with my son, and we’re watching Treehouse TV.  One of my absolute favorite shows is on.  (Insert sarcasm tags here).

The issue I have with it isn’t with the contents of the show.  Teach the kids to exercise, teach them to share, teach them to learn from the world around them.  Not a problem.

The issue I have is that, as with most shows where English is the primary language, they don’t speak proper English.  Dora and Diego teach Spanish; I have to presume they’re doing it properly.  Likewise with Kai-Lan and Chinese.  But it seems that kids shows want to dumb down the English language, which I feel is a completely backwards way of thinking of childhood education.

I shouldn’t feel stupider after watching a show with my kids than I did before it started.

Did my parents feel this way?

Yet another quote from my Twitter feed, thanks to @Flipbooks:

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future

This insight from gospel singer Guy Penrod implies the narrowness of the viewpoint through which most of us see the world around us.

Nobody, no matter how good or evil, is a one-dimensional character.  Not you, not me.

If you ever want to see the truth on somebody, find out what is hidden.  This is where you will often find the unwanted viewpoint, the one that humanizes the angels and demons that walk among us.

OK, I admit, I’ve been looking through Twitter for various quotes.  Yup, it’s filler for the blog, but it’s interesting (to me) filler.

Here’s one from one of the last century’s greatest minds.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein, of course.

This ties into a previous post of mine, where I stated that education doesn’t cover every possibility.  Well, neither does experience, the other major source of personal knowledge.

If we, as a people, had no imagination, there would be nothing to learn.  Without the imagination to spark investigation, we would not learn anything that wasn’t spoon-fed to us.  And if nobody had imagination, who would do the spoon-feeding?

During the Dark Ages, everybody knew that the sky was the absolute limit to existence; Earth was the center of all being, and that’s that.  That was knowledge.

Galileo disagreed.  He imagined a greater world.  Yes, I know it was based on his observation of planetary movement.  But if he had worked with the knowledge available in the day, he would have dismissed them as the hand of God working in mysterious ways.  Instead, he allowed himself to imagine worlds beyond our own; through his (and his successors’) imagination, the common-knowledge world-view was expanded.

But without imagination’s contribution, knowledge would never have grown.

By now, many of you have heard of Abby Sunderland, who has recently suffered a mishap in her attempt to sail around the world.

Congratulations, Abby, on making it more than half-way to your goal.

The media is all over her failure, rather than applauding her success.

Apparently, her parents should have stopped her from fulfilling her dreams.

Apparently, her professionally-built boat wasn’t good enough.

Screw all of you.  A sixteen-year-old girl has the skill and fortitude to sail, alone, all the way around the world.  And when it ends in an accident (don’t you dare say failure), what does she plan to do?

Abby Sunderland has already voiced her determination to set sail around the globe again.

“I’m definitely going to sail around the world again or really give it another try,” she said.

(From this article, because I can’t find a reference (yet) on her blog)

Abby: good luck on your next attempt.  Show these desk-bound commentators that you can do something that they will never do.  Something that I am not ashamed to admit that I would never be able to do.

And know that you have done an all-too rare thing.  You have followed your dreams.

Looks like hanging out on Twitter can get me some interesting quotes to work with, and the tradition of retweets allows me to hear from those I don’t directly follow.  This quote is from Joseph Uranowski (@uranowski), via Renee Stephen (@reneestephen):

Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten

In the traditional dragon fairy tale, the beast destroys a village or two, then sets up residence near town.  He then tells the locals that, if they send him a virgin sacrifice every month, he won’t destroy them.  The townsfolk, eager to not be like the village, agree.  Eventually, some hero says “screw this bullshit”, and goes to kill the dragon.  The townsfolk try to talk him out of it because they’re afraid that it will get worse, but when the hero kills the dragon they all find out how much better it is without him.

Compare that to reality.

The dragon represents some sort of evil or problem.  Either it shows up gradually and nobody notices, or it shows up suddenly and takes everybody by surprise.  There are two solutions to the problem:

1. Send out the monthly sacrifices.  As long as it’s I’m safe, who cares if someone else is hurt or killed?  The “big bad” will continue to not hurt me, and I can live happily ever after.
2. Take the risk and kill the dragon.  I put myself in harm’s way.  There is a risk of failure, but success means that the dragon will continue to kill nobody, because the dragon is no longer in a condition to do so.

Life has many dragons.  Some are there for anybody to see.  Some are in your own life.  Many times, you won’t even think the dragon is there, because someone else is continuing to sacrifice on your behalf, yet there he lurks in the shadows, ready to pounce as soon as the sacrifices dry up, or when he decides that once a month isn’t very filling.

Look for the dragons in your life.  Then decide how you can handle them.

I’m a communications technician in the Canadian Navy.  As such, I spend alot of time either on ship or in school.

I’m currently in a school phase.

One problem with technical education is that, no matter how good the instructor is, there’s absolutely no way that he can show you everything that can possibly happen with the kit.  You can spend years studying one piece of equipment in the classroom, and as soon as you see it in the real world, it will do something completely new.  Especially when users are involved.  And more especially when it’s designed to be shot at.

One of my fellow students seems to disagree.  He feels that absolutely everything should take place in class; he seems to feel that education is a replacement for experience.  Given enough time in the class, he feels, you should be able to solve any problem without any thought.

I guess it remains to be seen once we get back onboard ships, but I truly believe in education as a base for and a supplement to experience, not a replacement for it.

As I previously mentioned, I’m doing some work on RentACoder.com.  I’ve noticed a few trends there though.

• Unreasonable maximum bids:
  • Emergency!  Expert needed!  Must fix absolutely everything wrong with my system!  $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable communication requirements:
  • Bidder must be reachable at all times, 24 hours a day, Antarctica time zone
• Unreasonable experience requirements:
  • Bidder must have written 20 apps from scratch using the TwitBook API.
• Unreasonable demonstration of experience:
  • Bidder must show us 20 apps they have written.  We require an NDA before you get any more info
• Unreasonable grasp of reality:
  • (repost) (repost) (repost) Why isn’t anybody replying to my ad? $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable grasp of geography:
  • Need programmer for North American properties database.  Geographically restricted to Antarctican coders only.

Yes, it’s better than going out and trying to find clients, but some of the ads are painful to follow.

As previously mentioned, I’m doing some coding for clients, something I haven’t done in some time.  One of the projects works with the Facebook API.  Specifically, it allows users to set their status through another website.

However, hunting through the docs was painful.  The official docs aren’t organized in a logical way (I had to rely heavily on example code, rather than proper API documentation).  Then, there’s the errors.

You see, unlike a local library, there is no debug version of the FB API.  This means that, if I’m having issues, all I can do is plug in a parameter and rely on the error code to tell me what I’m doing wrong.  This doesn’t help AT ALL if the error message I get back is:

{“error”:{“type”:”Exception”,”message”:”(#1) An unknown error occurred”}}

Not very helpful.

Eventually, I figured it out, but couldn’t find any documentation (or even a blog post) on it.  Facebook only allows Unix-style EOL characters (LF), not DOS-style (CR LF).  Not fun to debug