So it’s time to don the Obama shirt and make some lines on a ballot.

VOTE

So, let’s say that crab costs $3.50 per pound in San Francisco and $13.00 per pound in Cleveland. How much crab would you have to eat in order to make cost of living comparable?

Let’s just look at rent. Our rent in SF is a very reasonable $2920 per month. Admittedly, we have a nice place, so let’s say a comparable place in Cleveland would go for $1100.

So we’re paying $1820 more in rent than we would in CLE.

So let’s run the numbers:

We’re looking at a $9.50 difference in price between crab, so for every pound we eat in SF, we’re *saving* $9.50. That comes to 191.58 pounds per month or 6.39 pounds per day (for a 30 day month). Admittedly, that sounds like a lot of crab to eat every day, but most of the weight comes from shell and inedible junk (damn those exoskeletons). Let’s say that 1/3 of a crab’s weight goes into the meat yield, then we’re looking at a somewhat reasonable 2.13 pounds of crab per day.
Ten crab cakes require about a pound and a half of crab meat, so a typical day would include crab cakes for dinner and around a half-pound of crab salad or something for lunch. Or, if you would like to spice it up a bit, you could throw some crab in your breakfast eggs.

There you have it, if your diet includes more than 2.12 pounds of crab per day it’s actually cheaper to live in SF than in Cleveland.

And I didn’t even factor in avocado.

Come on Google, get with the program already.

However, until today, Google has been letting me down. jUploadr has consistently been on the second page of Google searches for both ‘flickr uploader’ and ‘Linux flickr uploader’. One problem was that very few of jUploadr’s pages had ‘Linux’ on them. I mostly referred to it as a cross-platform uploader. With the latest version, I’ve fixed that problem. However, the other reason is more interesting.

It seems I have an Indian counterpart. A very eager and resourceful Indian counterpart. He’s written an uploader for Linux which –and I’m being generous here– is lacking features and polish. However, it seems that the energy he’s saved in adding features to his program has been expended in promoting it. He’s commented on every blog that deals with uploaders, often begging the blog owners to include his program in their reviews –even though it’s pretty much a proof of concept. He also has two sites (one of them a blogger blog) that keep his page rank high. Now I have done a bit of self-promotion with jUploadr, but it’s probably one of the most complete uploaders out there (I have yet to see the windows client).

What irks me is that he’s a huge Linux fan, but in effect, he’s doing Linux users a great disservice by prematurely and artificially promoting his project. I waited until I had a version that was at least somewhat usable and useful to end-users until I announced it. It was certainly alpha-quality, but it allowed users to complete a task (uploading multiple photos while setting all parameters). Vardhman’s uploader only allows you to upload a single file at a time, and then you have to use a file dialog to pick another, which is a very painful process. Additionally, there is absolutely no error checking on input fields. You can specify a photo to be both public and viewable by friends, which is impossible. One only hopes Flickr makes sense out of this. He’s also overlooked some important details of uploading photos. In effect, he always tells Flickr that you’re uploading a jpeg, even if you’re uploading a PNG or a GIF.

I’m not saying he’s done all this with malicious intent. From reading his blog, it appears that he’s just very enthusiatic and excited. I genuinely think he wants to make something cool and help people out. It’s kind of sad that his actions have the opposite effect.