obtaining Dow Jones index in Google Spreadsheet

economy google

In order to obtain todays dow jones index (DJIA) in a google spreadsheet one can use:

=GOOGLEFINANCE(".DJI")

The quotes matter. Indexes would be for example:

.DJI Dow jones Index
.INX S&P 500
.IXIC Nasdaq Composite

Getting the dow for a specific date is a bit more involved. This worked for me, but there might be an easier way:

=index(GOOGLEFINANCE(".DJI", "price", to_date(DATEVALUE("11/26/2013"))),2,2)

The date (11/26/2013) was actually a cell reference.

Not related, yet interesting was this page that showed how relative popular search terms are.

Others yielded interesting insights. For instance it seems that Cars are a seasonal product. Even though people tend to use them every day, they care more for them in the months leading up to summer.

Other extremely seasonal terms include: Travel, Shopping, Real Estate, Jobs and Durable Goods.

Vesterby glasses: awesome

daily life

I really like my Vesterby frames.

When I needed spare parts I got in touch, and they sent them right away and to the address where I would be.

Awesome service. I can only recommend them: Vesterby

deleting all photos from iPhone

Apple misc

Somehow Apples cloud based photo system got enabled on my iPhone. Which also meant that the delete button in the OS X application “Image capture” got grayed out.

To re-enable it had to turn off iCloud Photo Library and My Photo stream via Settings -> Photos & Camera

And then I had to reboot the phone (running IOS 8.1.3)

I am old enough to remember that any change on a Windows machine last century also required a reboot.

robo phone phishing

daily life malware technology

3rd robo phishing call in as many days.
Today it spoofed my own number as it’s caller ID
and pretended to be AT&T. Telling me to enter
the last 4 of my social. Their scheme was that
my account had been “flagged”. Entering
false four digits prompted in a “flag has been removed”
message. So that people easier forget. I wonder what
people want to do with the combination of my
phone number and the last 4 of my social.

It is frightening to think that they might a have a success
rate in the double digit percentages with this scheme.

byzantine

internet media technology

byzantine

Sunday morning, and Breakfast will only be served in 15 minutes.

Not feeling to open a book I visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

A song comes up. Turns out I don’t have it, but I like it.

The iTunes music gave me grief before. So I use Amazon.
Or, let’s say I try to.

A song with a wikipedia page is obviously easy to find.
I can preview it. Yes, it is what I thought it would be.

No surprise that the purchase button is easy to.

They have a new player / app they like to push.
The old amazon downloader did not cause any troubles,
so I choose that one.
The file downloads in no time. That USED to be the problem:
Getting those large files to your computer.
Clicking on it, the mac tells me that this app is from an unidentified
developer.
In system preferences I tell it to open it anyway.
It does, but shows an empty screen.
In my downloads is still the amazon file. I click on that one.
Nothing happens. Well, not really nothing: The downloaded file
vanished.
Then I go in Amazon to my purchases music. The song is not there
either. The 0.89 USD I spent will probably the only memory of those
3:18 (the length of the song) that I spent to get this song.

Buying music should be easy in 2014. It turns out in my specific
way of trying this it totally is not. I don’t buy music often. So I don’t feel
like researching all that might be involved.

I rather ramble here about it. Also since it is quiet symptomatic:

The actual act of copying a couple of bits to my computer is such a
small part of the overal action. It used to be that DRM was part of
the problem. It no longer is. Still have I have to deal with interfaces
and software that changes / breaks every time I like to use it.

The background is that the people running and maintaining these
systems do not care for the “Alpha to Omega – Experience” enough.

The late Mr Jobs was really good at making sure that things ran
as smooth as possible for certain flows from start to finish. If you don’t
then with computers and systems lots of ‘stuff’ will creep into the flow.
And the system will start depending on this extra stuff of other parts of
the system.

If you think that Byzantine bureaucracy was horrible then you have
no idea how our digital future will be.

Lufthansa “NONSTOP messing with YOU”

daily life

Lufthansa is on their 8th strike in 2014. If you are affected this is how it looks like:

An email arrives that the final leg of flight got cancelled 24 hours before departure.
Logging in to the website suggests to get a train ticket.
Trying to do so results in a generic failure.
Phone lines are not being answered by Lufthansa in Germany or the US.
At 6am there is another email informs you that the outbound flight is also cancelled.
Phone lines still don't work.
The web interface says to contact phone numbers that have not been answered in the last 20 hours.
The phone numbers tell you to check the web.

the valley is behind us

communication history technology

The first realistic rendering of a human in a computer I even laid eyes on got created by Chris Jones in Australia. If Intel would have any sense then they would give him everything he needs so that he can make a super bowl spot.

It is much easier for a director to dial in some emotions on an “Eckman board” rather than trying to coax them out of a drugged up little twat being full of itself. CAA better get their sh*t and required legislation together.

It will take a little while, but this WILL be a big deal: Completely artificial movies that just look like reality.

careful what you touch …

misc

In this study two small (25) groups of (mostly female) students were ask to keep their hands in ice water.

Their averages were 40.12 and 42.03 seconds. Which gets to show the range of variance with a small sample of 25.

They were told that they would do a different experiment after that: evaluating product design. One group handled Noodles, the other a bottle of Ibuprofen for 2 minutes.
After that they did another ice water test and now the results were:

45.28 seconds (instead of 40.12) for the Ibuprofen group, while the Noodles people lasted for 41.83 second instead of 42.03.

I wonder what would happen if one would repeat this experiment. As much one would want to have that handling pain killers will reduce pain the actual difference is so small that it could easily be part of noise to be expected in a sampling size of 25.

hiperos ? whoa that sucks

technology

Big corporations have their own problems. And if they don’t have them, then they create them. Like hiperos.

Imagine people reading a couple of Franz Kafka novels, putting them down and then proclaiming: “Hey lets build this (badly) and slap a web interface over it”
Of course they were intrigued by all the horrifying concepts and scary details in those nightmarish (yet awesome books) of that bohemian insurance clerk.

I wonder how much productivity gets lost by people waiting for hiperos to load, or trying to decipher what those random popups mean, how to find what
is missing in which form, etc etc etc.

Amazing how bad some things look in light of the second decade of the 21st century.

Validate fonts cleans up error message

OSX technology

On OS X 10.9.2 I got a message in /var/log/system.log like

Google Chrome Helper[23799]: CoreText CopyFontsForRequest received mig IPC error (FFFFFECC) from font server

whenever I opened a new Chrome window. (running version 34.0.1847.131)

Fixing this was surprisingly easy:

1) open Font book

2) select-ALL

3) Validate Fonts from the file menu.

Once I cleared the problematic ones the messages no longer appeared.