Pepsi is currently running a promotion with the caps of its 20oz bottled sodas. They are giving away free songs on iTunes. So I came up with a word problem. I’ll post the solution tomorrow:

Under each cap you can get one of three things: “Free Song” [FS], “Try Again” [TA], “Buy One Get One Free” [BOGO]. Pepsi (as required by law) gives you the odds of winning. You get a FS 1/3 of the time and BOGO 1/6 of the time.

So the question is, given $100 (and assuming that each bottle costs only $1), how many Free Songs can you win? And what algorithm would you follow to maximize your return?

Extra Credit: How many iPod Mini’s will you have won when you run out of money?

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Dear College Sports Television,

I want to start by thanking you for your coverage of the Penn vs. Princeton matchup this evening (3/8/05). It is hard for fans of Ivy League sports to get out-of-area coverage of our games. It would have been nice for it to have been a meaningful game, but I’ll take what I can get.

Ok, maybe I won’t take just what I can get. It would be wonderful if you could pick up more than just once Ivy League Basketball game a year. The games of the “Big” leagues are available on ESPN or Network Television. Slightly smaller conferences and you can at least pick up some of the games on Espn Full Court (for pay). But us “Small” [market] leagues don’t have an outlet like that. I always thought that your network had made a niche for itself by covering Small Market sports (like college baseball and lacrosse), so why not expand your coverage of small market leagues as well? It seems like a natural fit for me.

Sincerly,

Bill Napier
Penn ‘98

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Margaret and I decided to take CJ for a hike this weekend, to explore a trail near our house. It’s the Seneca Creek Greenway Trail and it is about a mile or so south of our house. It was a pretty nice day, so we packed the dog into the car and off we went.

The full trail is 7.8 miles one-way, so there is no way were going to be able to do that without working up to it. But we did end up going 5 miles round trip. It’s a nice hike, mainly because it is wooded and close by. The trail follows Seneca Creek as it cuts through a valley in this area. As you walk along, you get to see the backs of many of the houses in the area that back up onto this valley. So while you’re really not near anything, every once in a while you are reminded that you aren’t really that far out from civilization.

I think our trips to Tennessee and the lake have really turned CJ into a water dog. At one point, I brought her down to the waters edge so she could get a drink. And what did she do? Jumped right in without hesitation.

I was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to navigate some of the areas we had to go through. There were some steep hills to climb and some logs to navigate. But she had no problems, running up the hills and leaping over the logs. She loved it. At one point we had to cross a little branch of the stream on a rock “bridge”. Really it was just a series of rocks that you could step on to get across the stream. CJ took it more easily then either Margaret or I did, hopping from rock to rock across. On the way back she was a little more tired and just jumped into the stream to cross it…

All in all, it was a wonderful way to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

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I usually don’t like to cover technology that has already been covered by the New York Times. By the time the Times gets around to covering technology, it is no longer breaking news but rather old news. But I’m going to make an exception here and cover something that made the Times about 6 months ago. I took a look into it shortly after the Times covered it, but didn’t keep up with it until now. Podcasting.

Podcasting is just like blogging, but done with audio files. Just like a Blog allows you to publish whatever you want just like a magazine, podcasting allows you to run your own radio station. With just a little bit of equipment (basically a computer and a microphone) and some basic web knowledge, you can setup your own podcasting channel. And even the web knowledge part is being reduced by services like FeedBurner who make it easy.

With a podcast feed, you have two options to get your next episode. You can either remember their publication schedule, or you can use some software and RSS to get your feed for you. If you remember from my post on RSS, you can take a guess at how I get my episode. I use a program called Ipodder (free!) that runs twice a day to check for new podcasts for me. When it finds a new one if downloads it and registers it with Itunes (it can also register it with Windows Media Player if you don’t have/like Itunes). When I sync my iPod the next time, the new episode magically appears on it.

Now don’t expect a podcast from me or Margaret any time soon. I have enough problems finding time to blog, much less creating the time it takes to record, edit, and mix a podcast episode. But I will recommend some of the ones that I listen to (or have listened to).

Probably the most popular podcast is the Dawn and Drew Show. They are really just a married couple (about my age) who talk about things in their life. But be warned: this isn’t Ward and June Cleaver talking and the FCC isn’t involved, so it sometimes get a bit raunchy and Dawn can be a potty mouth at times. But they are laugh-out-loud funny.

Now the person considered the father of podcasting is Adam Curry. He has his show “Daily Source Code” that broadcasts daily. He is really pushing the envelope here with his podcasting setup. I’ve heard him broadcast from the middle of the Atlantic at 37000 feet. He’s got a wireless setup so he can broadcast from his kitchen with his wife and kid. He recently did a broadcast from behind the wheel on his way home (which I wouldn’t recommend doing on your own).

In addition to the ones I’ve mentioned here, there are all kinds of other ones that you may be interested. You can find a directory of podcasts here, or you can just go to ipodder.org to read all about it.

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I made the switch to using Firefox as my internet browser about 8 months ago. With the exception of a few web pages (like the outlook web access pages for work and MSDN (both Microsoft web sites)), I can view them all without any problems. The Mozilla team has spent a lot of time trying to emulate the bugs in Internet Explorer. You can force Firefox into a 100% compliant mode that breaks the bug-for-bug compatibility, but you may have some problems with poorly written web pages (or some from Microsoft).

So why did I make the switch? At the time, it was for the integrated pop-up blocker and spyware blocking abilities. With XP SP2’s update to IE, this is less of a reason to switch, but IE still doesn’t do as good a job of blocking spyware as Firefox does. So why haven’t I switched back?

When the Mozilla project (the parent project of Firefox) branched from Netscape, they started to re-architect the product. They did this in a highly flexible manner to make Mozilla more of an application platform. By doing this, the Mozilla project opened up development and customization of their product to a whole new set of people, people who can’t program in C/C++ but cat do simple XML customization and javascript.

When Firefox branched from Mozilla, one of the driving forces behind the split was the size of Mozilla. It did everything and then some. It was massive. It was so big they had to pre-start it for you so it would start up in a timely manner when you wanted it. Firefox was and is a stripped down version of Mozilla. It does one thing and it does it well: It is a web browser.

Tabbed browsing is great. Instead of opening each web page in a different window, if you turn on the right options Firefox will do all your browsing tabs in the same window. This is a lot easier than trying to manage many different application windows.

There is a full extension system to Firefox that allows developers to add features to Firefox and to customize things in the browser that they don’t like. This is really where Firefox outshines IE. There are enough hackers out there putting things together for firefox that if it doesn’t do something you want it to do, there is likely an extension that does that for you.

I had to re-install Firefox this morning because I completely screwed it up earlier this week. So I got a chance to re-examine what extensions I had installed before and find a couple new ones. I’ll summarize some of the ones that I have used before and also some of the new ones that I found.

Known Good Extensions

These are all pretty much must have extensions.

• Adblock allows you to specify a set of rules to block images. This allows you to block things like image-ads on yahoo and slashdot. For some reason it doesn’t come with a default rule-set, but I’m pretty happy with mine. Drop me a line if you need a copy of my settings.
• Flashgot allows me to use Flashget as my download accelerator.
• Tab Clicking allows you to assign actions to do when you click on tabs. I usually set mine up so a double click duplicates the tab.
• Tab Browser Preferences allows you to setup full tabbed browsing mode. I set this up so I only ever have one window with many different tabs in it.
• Gmail Notifier puts an indicator at the bottom of your browser to let you know how many messages are in your inbox and provides pop-up notifications of new messages.
• WebmailCompose is a godsend for anyone who uses webmail as their primary mail client as opposed to something locally installed. The best part is the mailto: URL handling, so when I click on a mailto: url I get a new tab that allows me to send mail from Gmail as opposed to trying to start Outlook…

New Untested Extensions

• Forecast Fox puts a little indicator at the bottom of your firefox window to indicate what the weather is now and will be tomorrow. It occasionally puts up a popup to let you know when the forecast changes.
• Delicious for Firefox provides del.icio.us integration for Firefox. If you remember from my previous post, del.icio.us is a social network bookmarking service that I’ve been using to track all of my bookmarks. It used to be a little bit of a pain to add a bookmark to it, but this plugin makes it really easy.

In short, you should at least give Firefox a shot. It is a small download and is worlds better that Internet Explorer.

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Margaret just reminded of how much of a dork I am. I’m blogging at 9:30 on a Friday night. Well, I’ve come to terms with my dorkiness and plan to thrive in it…

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I got into the elevator at my office this morning and the floor I was going to was already selected for me. A very unsettling feeling ensued.

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