weekends are for leisure

A summary of news stories presented out of context that end up changing culture and laws anyway.

There are so many wonderful avenues for thought in the linked Quora question. From exposing some of the misconceptions of the early 1990s McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit, to the real cause of our economic crisis, the responses are great reads. Quora often has high quality analysis, from people that know how to think about the details while engaging in civil, ethical debate. I like!

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Unfortunately there are people on both sides that would make such arguments (the “support X and you’re an idiot” part).

The common man is the majority, and I long for the day when he is able to present a civil, well-thought-out argument.

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From the transcript at TBO.com.

Blockquotes are Mitt’s words, followed by my response to the quote.

I wish President Obama had succeeded because I want America to succeed. But his promises gave way to disappointment and division.

It was neither his promises nor the disappointment that gave way to division. We did that ourselves, and continue to do so, with the political culture/climate we keep alive. The division is caused by our tendency to perpetuate the following:

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Boosted is making electric longboards.

Engineering. Just, wow.

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Sounds reasonable.

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An article about competing myths in politics.

The two sides of the coin representing what it means to be an American. I’ve got a foot on each side. It’d be better for our country if more of us were open to that.

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Sounds reasonable.

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There’s a quirk with Android that renders a partial wake lock useless if you want to poll the accelerometer while the screen is off. The workaround is to acquire a screen-dim + acquire-causes-wakeup wake lock. The screen turns on while you’re polling, but that’s the only solution I’ve found.

I’ve implemented the workaround in my GPSing project. Hopefully this won’t cause a drastic change in battery usage.

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The data hoarder in me is making an appearance. Been tracking my GPS coordinates more consistently for the past few weeks, but InstaMapper on Android is less than ideal for the task. Geoloqi as well. They consume too much battery. I’d rather not have to turn them off when I’m going to stay put for a while – I don’t enjoy fiddling with my phone in public.

Last weekend I began a project of my own that uses the accelerometer to determine when GPS should turn on. Every N seconds it checks the accelerometer for motion, and pulls GPS coordinates into an SQLite database if I’m moving. It doesn’t ping the accelerometer or GPS consistently, and it doesn’t transfer the coordinates to a remote server (though a conservative approach to this will come later).

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Writing code that works with time seems easy. But there are many time pitfalls.

Non-coders can skip this article …

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