Kids Back to School – Rusty Math – Solution!

The kids are headed back to school.  My kids start next week, but a lot of folks I know headed back this week.  And lots of folks are about to find out that their kids forgot a lot over the summer.  I have a solution that the kids will love!  I wrote a game especially [...]

My Email Privacy is Worth more than $36 per year

I’ve been using Google Apps Mail to host my mail for herlein.com for years.  In fact, I was a very early adopter.  I’d say I was in the beta, but hey, so was everyone!  Seriously though, I was pretty early.  It seemed like the thing to do.  I had been hosting my own mail forever [...]

Shifted to a Mac – Selling my Linux Notebook!

As I mentioned previously, I’ve gone all Mac for my desktop needs.  My old notebook is listed on eBay now.  It’s a great notebook at a very fair price.  I am certain someone will snap it up.  Here it is:

This Dell XPS M1530 was originally designed by AlienWare as a gaming laptop, so [...]

For the First Time in My 20 Year Career, Microsoft is Irrelevant

I got home last night from a whirl-wind trip to the East Coast (Boston/DC/Princeton).  I fled DC just barely ahead of the big storm – by train, luckily, since my flight Thursday night was cancelled as I was scrambling to get on a train that afternoon.   If I was going to get caught in [...]

Emacs, my old friend

I’ve been an emacs user since 1995.   Yep, 15 years of muscle memory just knowing how to navigate around.  I’ve developed a .emacs file over the years to help me work the way I like to work.  If I’m editing C code, my fingers are still back in the muscle memory from when I learned [...]

Playing with Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a new micro-instance. If you reserve it for three years (cost: $82) the per minute cost is a penny. Yep, a red cent. All in I think this means that the monthly cost for running a server there is under $10 per month. For that you get a decent [...]

The iPad is Bad for the Consumer

I’m really confused about why so many people are fawning over the Apple iPad.  I really don’t get it.  It’s an oversized and stunted iPod Touch.  I read silly things like “I’d buy one just to watch movies when I travel.“  Excuse me:  what????  The darn thing has a 4:3 aspect ratio!  We’ve come so [...]

The Cell Phone Ecosystems

I’ve been musing recently about how the cell phone world is split into fairly distinct ecosystems.    I know I’m generalizing (I’m trying to do that to draw some generalizations) but I see the following kinds of breakdowns:

iPhone Users: typically young (or want to be young), hip, and very media savvy.  They tend to be [...]