I have to confess, I wear a wrist watch perhaps once .. (wait for it) .. every two years. At least that’s my best estimate over the last 6 years or so. I use my blackberry exclusively for my time-telling needs (and all the appliances that tell time – my computer, microwave, cable box, tv, alarm clock, etc).  So you could say I’m the last person to have any sort of useful input on the subject of wrist accessories.  But after seeing this image on the right, I had an idea (assuming the watch on the right doesn’t already do what I’m proposing here – I don’t know the manufacturer unfortunately, so can’t check).  What if wrist watches came in pairs? Think about it – that way you don’t have to wear a bracelet on the hand opposite the one you wear a watch on.  That way you have twice the room to accessorize and you don’t have to go through all that “my accessories have to match” hooplah.

The example on the right seems to suggest keeping an analog version of time on one hand and a digital version on the other.  That would indeed be interesting – if you’re righty, keep your digital time on your left hand so you can use your good hand while looking at your bad hand.  If you’re being artistic with your left hand, use the analog time on the right.

But here’s an even better idea – instead of trying to cram the time, the date, the year, the day of the week and all the other features onto one display – separate them onto different wrists.  This also opens the wrist watch up for use as a cell phone.  Set the right half to be the earpiece, and the left to be the microphone.  The reason regular wrist watches can’t be used like this is because they’re just not big enough (and you don’t want them to be that big honestly) to both be the microphone and the earpiece.  But this way, hold your right wrist up to your ear – you’re doing that in any case with your cellphone.  Whenever you want to say something, hold your left wrist to your mouth and say what you need to say.  Have the two halves connect via bluetooth.  Add accelerometers or something else that’ll let the phones know which one is where, and if your right arm gets tired, switch and hold up the left wrist to your left ear, and that half becomes the earpiece (and vice versa).

Of course, as an engineer, I also can’t help but think of the value of redundancy.  You lose one half of your two-part wrist watch – have a button that switches function on the other side so you can always see your digits.  The optimist can also say “wow, there’s less of a chance I’ll forget to put on at least one of the watches”.  The pessimist of course will say “its just as likely for me to forget to put on both halves of this watch”.

So who’s gonna work with me to develop this idea? While I’d love to see this in a Rolex or a Breitling, Omega, TAG Heuer or whatever your favorite luxury watch brand is – I think its way more likely that a more technology-oriented brand like Seiko or Casio would probably be more up to this sort of exercise.  Actually, I wouldn’t mind an Ed Hardy branded two-part watch, I might actually wear something like that.  Or perhaps a nice Nokia watch that doubles as a phone, I’ve already seen some idea sketches for a watch-phone with a separate earpiece.

Am I totally off base here? Anybody else think this might be a good idea?

Whoever’s making commercials for Bacardi is a genius.  I usually don’t even drink rum, but this new commercial certainly has me thirsty for a mojito.  The music is by “Matt and Kim”, the song is called “Daylight”.  They’re on Green Label Sound (who seem to be some sort of musical offspring of PepsiCo/Mountain Dew – and also have some sort of relationship to an artist I’ve heard of before – Flosstradamus). Matt and Kim have an official website too!  You can download an honest to goodness MP3 of the song from the label’s site.  And finally there’s full access to a video of the commercial on YouTube!  Unbelievable, I guess after all those years of having to search out your favorite commercial’s songs, lyrics, videos, etc. are over and done with.  Now all this media is at our fingertips and I’m pretty sure the folks running the show at the companies that come up with the commercials, that make the products and that create the music … finally get it!  Thank you social media!

Here are the lyrics for anybody who’s trying to decypher the words:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night on NY1 I heard about some new stats released by the NYPD. This morning I read the full story on NY1.  But by far the best source of information about this record number of stop-and-frisks is the NYCLU report. Here are some choice quotes:

According to an NYPD report obtained by the NYCLU and released today, police stopped and interrogated New Yorkers 171,094 times between January and March – a record for total stops. Nearly nine out of 10 of these stops resulted in no charges or citations. This record number of stops fell disproportionately on the city’s communities of color – 89,000 of those stopped were black and 56,000 were Latino, while only 16,000 were white.

To get a better sense of the magnitude of this problem, that’s about 1900 people a day that NYPD stopped, and of those about 1710 people a day were innocent and were released.  Additionally this is a 22% increase from the same time period last year.

What’s even more disturbing is that the names and addresses of everyone stopped are being recorded. I can’t really say it better than Donna Lieberman – the NYCLU’s executive director:

“Every year hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers are stopped, searched and interrogated by the police for doing nothing more than walking down the street,” Lieberman said. “We are deeply concerned about this practice and about racial profiling by the police, and we believe the department must take aggressive measures to address this problem.”

And some more from the NYCLU’s Associate Legal Director:

“The NYPD is, in effect, building a massive database of black and brown New Yorkers,” said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn. “Innocent New Yorkers who are the victims of unjustified police stops should not suffer the further harm of having their personal information kept in an NYPD database, which simply makes them a target for future investigations.”

Take a look at the actual report from the NYPD (PDF) – really a fascinating document to browse through.  It even breaks down the incidents by reason for stop, including some really choice reasons like “suspicious bulge”, “hard object” (lmao, those two I had to include just for laughs), “area has high crime incidence”, “time of day fits crime incidence”, “wearing clothes commonly used in a crime”, “inappropriate attire for season”, etc.  So if you’re a guy leaving a strip club at night, in a shady part of town, with a huge bulge of dollar bills in the pocket, and happen to be wearing a rain coat and a boa scarf you just got as a gift – you’re quite likely to be stopped. I would imagine if you’re black or hispanic and fit that set of circumstances, you might as well not even go into the street.

Granted that hypothetical joke of a scenario is just comic relief.  The situation is quite serious and its pretty obvious that racial profiling is going on.  And check this out:

In the summer of 2007, the NYCLU served the NYPD with a formal legal request to turn over the complete stop-and-frisk database under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. The Department resisted transparency and so, in November 2007, the NYCLU filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court challenging the NYPD. In May of 2008, the NYCLU won that case and received the database in October, 2008. The NYCLU is currently analyzing that database and will publish its findings this year.

I’m not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but this kind of thing makes you think twice.  We’ll see what the NYCLU finds after they’re done with their analysis of this DB. If you live in NY, join the NYCLU, membership is only $20/year and only $5/year for students, or join the ACLU or your local *CLU. And if you’re already a member, donate, the NYCLU is a non-profit and the donations are fully tax-deductible.

I’m currently working on a project that happens to need a JavaScript and a PHP implementation of the Excel PMT function.  I won’t bore you with the details (but ask if you’re intrigued), but it has to do with Loan Modifications that are all the rage nowadays thanks to Obama Administration initiatives that will hopefully help Americans save their mortgages, prevent foreclosures, support real estate prices and generally speaking save the world from sure doom.

So after being handed an Excel spreadsheet that made heavy use of the PMT Excel function (and never having used said function), I proceeded to research this beast.  Let me tell you, there are lots of very confused people searching for solutions on how to implement it in various languages, trying to figure out how the function works, etc, etc, etc. I even came across some folks that think Excel / Microsoft is behind a sinister plot to undermine the world’s economy via a wrong implementation of the function.  Rest assured, I think Microsoft understands the Time Value of Money – TMV for those who still remember anything from their Finance class in college.  So I figured I’d do a little writeup of what I figured out to save somebody else the headache.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just got pointed to @elliottkember’s page about a challenge he calls “The Kember Identity” – basically a search for a 32-character string which, when passed through the MD5 function, returns a 128 bit value – which when converted to its hexadecimal string representation, is identical to the original string.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around exactly WHY Elliott Kember is trying to find such a value, except perhaps for the lucrative naming rights to such a weird trivia bit.

The funny thing, is that the 32 character input string, as input to the MD5 function, is a 256 bit input.  The output, before its encoded as a hexadecimal string, is 128 bits.  So while the effort being throw by various people at this challenge is admirable, its not really a search for a true MD5 identity value.

Additionally, if I remember my Applied Cryptography correctly (and if I don’t and by some chance Bruce Schneier happens upon this blog post, I am sure I’ll be turning red even if I never find out about it)… the MD5 function processes its input in 512 bit chunks.  So any input that’s less than 512 bits, essentially gets padded to 512 bits to make all the gears spin.  If I think about it this way, then there’s really no such thing as a possible MD5 function “identity value” given that in a strict interpretation, the domain and the range can’t overlap.

Elliott states that the exercise is a “proof of concept” on the front page of his site.  I suppose its an interesting exercise – perhaps in seeing how quickly a problem can be implemented in as many languages as possible with the help of twitter, the web, etc, etc.  I applaud Elliott for thinking of it.  I just hope it doesn’t land him an entry in Urban Dictionary that defines a Kember Identity as a case of mistaken identity.  Oh, and let me know if any geniuses out there introduce similar challenges for SHA, RIPE-MD, etc, etc.  Also I haven’t considered the possibility that this might all be British humor of some weird variety.  Clue me in if it is.