Brad's Rant

I'm spouting

Barry Bonds, please stop at 754

At this point it seems only people in San Francisco want to see Barry Bonds break Aaron's all time home-run record of 755. He has 753 right now. In San Francisco, the crowds get on their feet every time he gets on deck, and that was even before he got on the cusp of the record. Outside SF, fans boo him, and it's commonly believed that should he tie or break the record in Los Angeles or many other cities, he will get booed for doing it. In SF there is a willing suspension of disbelief.

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How to stop people from putting widescreen TVs in stretch mode

(Note I have a simpler article for those just looking for advice on how to get their Widescreen TV to display properly.)

Very commonly today I see widescreen TVs being installed, both HDTV and normal. Flat panel TVs are a big win in public places since they don't have the bulk and weight of the older ones, so this is no surprise, even in SDTV. And they are usually made widescreen, which is great.

Stop the bad math on alternative energy

I think it's important that we stop burning petrofuels or indeed any fuels and get energy from better sources.

But there's a disturbing phenomenon I have seen from people who believe the same thing too much. They want to believe so much, they forget their math. (Or I may be being charitable. Some of them, trying too hard to sell an idea or a product, may be deliberately forgetting their math.)

I see this over and over again in articles about photovoltaic solar, wind and other forms of power. They suggest you could put in a PV panel array for $20,000, have it provide you with $1,000 worth of electicity per year and thus "pay for itself" in 20 years. Again and again I see people take a series of payments that happen over a long time and just divide the total by the monthly or annual amount.

Why do people put angle brackets around <urls>

Quite frequently in non-HTML documents, such as E-mails, people will enclose their URLs in angle brackets, such as <http://foo.com> What is the origin of this? For me, it just makes cutting and pasting the URLs much harder (it's easier if they have whitespace around them and easiest if they are on a line by themselves.) It's not any kind of valid XML or HTML in fact it would cause a problem in any document of that sort.

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