Archive for the ' General' Category

Americas Baby Bust [WSJ]

Posted by Tom on February 6th, 2013

WSJ: “Americas Baby Bust”: The nation’s falling fertility rate is the root cause of many of our problems. And it’s only getting worse. … The replacement rate is 2.1. If the average woman has more children than that, population grows. Fewer, and it contracts. Today, America’s total fertility rate is 1.93, … it hasn’t been [...]

Kickstarter: “War for the Overworld”

Posted by Tom on December 18th, 2012

Consider being a Kickstarter backer for

PHP mail() method fix

Posted by Tom on November 1st, 2012

After being away from programming for a while, I was working on a throw-away PHP script to email out grade notifications. Half-way through, I remembered the mail() function has never worked properly on my development machine. Sure, I could upload my script to a server, but it was too much hassle. It was only about [...]

Comcast Humanitarianism

Posted by Tom on November 1st, 2012

Seth Clifford writes a frustrating story of his parents’ interaction with Comcast. Though never (yet) to the extreme level Seth describes, this always seems like the end game whenever I need to interact with Comcast or AT&T. Update: Seth has written an even better follow-up. H/T Jim Dalrypmple.

Hacking Stripe’s Capture the Flag

Posted by Tom on November 1st, 2012

Note: I wrote this at the end of August, but never posted it. There are some excellent walkthroughs of the levels online. I finished the “Capture the Flag” hacking event put on by Stripe, an online credit card processor. (It’s not a hugely impressive ranking, but finishing was not a trivial task! About seven thousand [...]

Programmers are arrogant

Posted by Tom on October 10th, 2011

I was visiting a marketing software company with a renowned professor when he said something that both startled and intrigued me: “Programmers,” he said, “are arrogant.” He’s right. We are. My mind flashed back to earlier this morning when I was reading comments on Hacker News about a supposed fork to a popular programming language. [...]

Dear Netflix

Posted by Tom on September 21st, 2011

Dear Netflix, It’s not me it’s you. I cancelled my account just before the 60% price increase kicked in. I took the exit survey because I wanted to let you know why. You didn’t give me that chance. The closest item to my answer was “I want to cut costs.” While that’s somewhat true, it’s [...]

First solo publish

Posted by Tom on April 20th, 2011

I’m nearly a month late in posting this, but my first solo-authored article has been published. Gregory, T. A. (2011). Transactional Cost Economics and Directions for Relational Governance Research. Paper presented at the 14th Southern Association for Information Systems Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. http://sais.aisnet.org/2011/Gregory.pdf SAIS isn’t the most prestigious conference, but it’s a start. (This [...]

EndNote “COM Exception”

Posted by Tom on June 10th, 2009

I’m working in a research paper we hope to get submitted to an Information Systems conference. I was going through the references when EndNote X2 stopped working together with Word 2008. Every attempt to change a citation resulted in the error “COM Exception: Command not found.” (I’m running OS X 10.5) A quick Google showed [...]

Don’t use Frontier Airlines, Priceline.com

Posted by Tom on March 17th, 2009

I’m stuck in Atlanta. I booked on Priceline.com. I needed to be in Atlanta for a day, so flew in late last night via Frontier Airlines. On the first leg of the trip (with Frontier partner, United), the flight left 20 minutes late because a computer failure required all baggage to be processed manually. Fortunately, [...]