More gunstores than McDonalds.

Interesting statistic. But meaningful? Why would you compare an entire industry (gun sales) against a portion of another industry?

Wouldn't these comparisons make more sense?

Retail outlets

• Number of gunstores: 51,000
• Number of restaurants: 578,353

Deaths

• Guns: 31,000
• Obesity: 300,000

It's fine to have opinions on gun control. But supporting opinions with apples and oranges statistics makes it appear like advocates have to make stuff up rather than using valid data.

There's something wrong with this picture - bus monitor video

You've seen the headlines. Bus monitor mercilessly harassed by middle school boys; video goes viral, campaign to raise 5K for a vacation fund for her currently at 600K; boys under police protection due to death threats.

To any adult with a clue the fact that a group of middle school kids could be cruel is not news. The bigger question is: Why was she on the bus, and why was she sitting passively instead of taking control of the situation? It seems unlikely she had sufficient respect from the students to be able to effectively take charge in an emergency situation.

Either she wasn't up to the job, or she was powerless because the district wouldn't back her up if she disciplined the kids. On an ongoing basis it's not feasible to raise $150,000 per victim every time a middle school kid bullies someone. The taxpayers of school district ought to be demanding accountability from their school board. Either their hiring and supervision practices are substandard, or their disciplinary procedures aren't effective.

open source conundrum

I needed some code to perform a specific task (parse out a particular set of web pages). Obviously something someone has already done. A google search, a stackoverflow post and a couple candidates appear. High praise, both listed in the maven repo (a major plus), but low documentation. Try the first, jtidy -- mostly works but doesn't quite parse out the way I want. Take a look at the second -- javadoc hard to find and sparse.

I could do the basic task directly with regular expression matching -- but it always takes a bit longer than you think to work out regex kinks. On the other hand, I could fiddle with the open source for longer to find it doesn't quite do what I need or it's buggy.

Thus it often is with second tier open source. Never obvious what best route is.

In the end I've decided to go with a hybrid jtidy/roll my own solution -- I can use jtidy to find the right chunkis of the web page and then just String.substring to find what I need.

Amazing

The Journal Inquirer reports there's going to be a shortfall in the Connecticut budget because the political types assumed only 50% of state employees would choose lower cost insurance premiums in return for regular checkups, instead of the 96% that actually did. Amazing. It's like costs influence people's behavior or something.

Mixing

When  a recipe calls for both molasses and oil, measuring out the oil first and then using the same measuring cup for the molasses solves a lot of problems. (It's a science thing.)

Overplayed

Don't get me wrong. I loved Adele in January and February and March. But once again, commercial radio has sucked the life out of a really cool song by playing it to death. So I was thinking of other played to death songs:

• "Rolling in the Deep", Adele
• The all time worst: Near. Far. Wherever you went there was no escape. Nothing went on as long as this stayed on the radio. ("My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion.)
• "Breathe" Faith Hill. Crossed over from her usual country domain to pop rock, so there was no escape. 
• "Love Story" Taylor Swift. Her breakout hit highlighted an obvious talent, but its simple structure doesn't stand up to hearing it for the third thousand times. Where credit is due: the wife suggested this one.

So which songs have I missed?