Alex's Soapbox

In Remembrance

Lay down
Your sweet and weary head
The night is falling
You have come to journey’s end
Sleep now
And dream of the ones who came before
They are calling
From across the distant shore

Why do you weep?
What are these tears upon your face?
Soon you will see
All of your fears will pass away
Safe in my arms
You’re only sleeping

Don’t say
We have come now to the end
White shores are calling
You and I will meet again
And you’ll be here in my arms
Just sleeping

Into The West – Howard Shore & Annie Lennox
 

Happy Easter

In a world that seems to be full of bad news, there’s always music to make you feel good if only for a few minutes.

And from a cross they say you give your love to everyone
I think of all I’ve done
And still you care for me
Your love
You give it away
I fall to my knees and I pray

“Brightest Star“

Prius Sales vs Gas Prices

Here is a chart showing the effect of US gas prices on the sales of the Toyota Prius. Sales generally increase with gas prices; sales increased by 44% when the $2 per gallon barrier was broken in early 2005. You also see the 2006 summer spike when gas hit $3 per gallon. The February 2007 sales are the highest ever with the 0% APR financing being offered by Toyota, combined with the reduced federal tax credit.

Data sources:

• Prius sales data
• US Gas Prices

Transitions

I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a
thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a
free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long
journey whose conclusion is uncertain. – Red Redding

One Year of Prius

Today marks the first anniversary of my Toyota Prius. My sister said that I should expect mileage to go down with age, and my plot of cumulative MPG shows that this is indeed the case. However, I think that another reason was that I know too much – using various kinds of driving techniques like pulse-and-glide may have actually decreased mileage.

World Cup Coverage

I’m watching the Sweden-Trinidad World Cup match and have a big problem with ABC and ESPN coverage. Look at the picture below and see where the ball is. They should move the status bar to the bottom and make sure their camera crews accounts for this dead space.

Iraq + 3

Today marks the third anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the past 12 months, we have lost another 800 soldiers, and Iraq may be on the edge of a civil war that may engulf the region. I can’t believe that this Administration is still giving the public unrealistic expectations and hopes; everything they’ve said as been based on lies or willful ignorance.

Fantasy.            Reality.

2.0 Upgrade Successful

I’ve successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and have reverted back to the default blue theme. Instead of bringing back the old blue-and-gold theme, I will probably pick one of the canned themes since I’m not much of a CSS maven.

Advanced Firefox Filtering

When using Firefox, I accumulate a list of domains for filtering out both ads and cookies. After a few weeks using Firefox 1.5, I collected a set of domain names that deserve to be filtered out for their annoying ads, especially the in-line text ads from IntelliTXT.

One can use Adblock for this, but you can “take it up a notch” and use a proxy filter – I found the idea over at MozillaZine. This can be done by creating a text file, inserting the text below, and saving it as a proxy autoconfiguration file (PAC). From Firefox, select Preferences…General tab…Connection Settings and select the “Automatic proxy configuration URL”. Enter the URI to your PAC file (e.g. “file://Users/alex/etc/firefox.pac”) and click Reload.

Matching entire domains is more effective than building a list of individual hosts which seems to be the common way to filter ads.

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
  host = host.toLowerCase()
  if (dnsDomainIs(host, ".casalemedia.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".adonspot.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".adserver.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".advertising.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".paypopup.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".doubleclick.net") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".intellitxt.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".interclick.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".imrworldwide.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".linksynergy.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".trafficmp.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".yieldmanager.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".mediaplex.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".serving-sys.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".hitbox.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".maxserving.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".statcounter.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".sitemeter.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".valueclick.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".zedo.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".esominiture.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".tribalfusion.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".webtrendslive.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".clicktracks.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".roiservice.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".searching.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".pointroll.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".checkm8.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".ihost.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".falkag.de") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".falkag.net") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".tacoda.com") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".tacoda.net") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".2o7.net") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".affilliatetracking.net") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".netshelter.net") ||
      dnsDomainIs(host, ".fastclick.net"))
    return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:80"
  return "DIRECT"
}

Monopoly Pricing on iTunes

Lately, there have been news reports of the RIAA cartel pressuring Apple to raise iTunes prices, saying that the laws of supply and demand should determine prices. Joel Spolsky’s essay clearly shows that the RIAA is lying as usual. In a monopoly or collusive oligopoly like that of the RIAA and MPAA, price is not determined by supply and demand; price is a market signal set only by the suppliers.

On a side note, I’ve been perusing the TV shows available on iTunes (all five of them). Episode descriptions are quite long, but Apple has provided an “Info (i)” button to show the text in a popup.