Okay, this thing is pretty neat. It's a tubular frame for parking your laptop in the passenger seat of the car. It was reviewed on NewsForge, with a generally positive bent on it, but I have to admit it seems awfully expensive for a couple aluminum tubes and a plexiglass tray. On the other hand, it sure would be nice to be able to use my new real-battery-equipped laptop as my MP3 host while driving about.
Wonder if I can build my own? Hmmm.
In the world of blogging, and increasingly on other sites with dynamic content, a mechanism has been developed to allow a person to review all or part of a site without actually logging into it. Article headlines and content is delivered via a 'Syndicated Feed' to a news aggregator which, as the name implies, collects the feeds and displays them in an easy to review fashion. I've been looking for a good aggregator for a while, but haven't found anything I liked... until now.
I'm not even going to post it here, ya'll have to click for it...
This is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time....
Enter article available on Fafblog, link ourtesy of boingboing.
I'm pretty tired of hearing constant yammerings from the right about how 'liberal' the media is and that 'the new york times is just the mouthpiece of the Democratic party'. What utter crap.
In a brilliant show about just how lopsided the media is, I refer my happy readers to this article from Reuters wherein it is reported that a 'a new web worm spreads'. In the entirety of the article, where the writer talks to McAfee, Google, and Symantec, nowhere is it mentioned that this virus can ONLY infect MICROSOFT platforms. The only reason this is happening is because of Microsoft's crap security model.
This is the 'liberal media'? Gosh, we dont want to upset BIG BAD MICROSOFT now do we? Better plug the virus scanner companies though, they're making money off this!
I like finding cutesy little games that are fun to noodle around with. It's particularly nice to find something you can play in a few minutes that doesn't require a half hour of loading CD's and selecting playing options.
I keep an eye on Happy Penguin to see what's new in the Linux gaming world, and saw a few references to Spout, so decided to give it a go.
It's a hyper-simplistic game. You fly an abstract little 'ship' that has a vicious exhaust. You're trying to gain a maximum altitude by navigating up through simple obstacles. At any time, you can spin your ship around and use the exhaust to blast through things in your way.
The game was originally written for a small LCD display, so the resolution is gritty at best, not to mention black and white. Nonetheless, I find myself playing it a bunch. The animation of the exhaust is outstanding, and watching all the little particles flying around is just a load of fun.
For something to noodle with while on the phone or just to kill some time, give it a whirl.
Spout was originally written by Kuni. It was ported to Linux and is now hosted on mizzencode.
Boy, that's how I feel. I think that business stuff hit bottom about a month ago, when I wasn't sure if I could continue with things, or how we'd move ahead. Then a some good things started happening, and some of the stuff that has been annoying me and really making it hard to be positive began to change.
It sounds like a little thing, but aquiring new batteries for my laptop was a huge win. My laptop batteries were totally shot, holding onto charge for only about 20 minutes. Considering it takes 7-10 minutes from power on to get to a workable desktop, that doesnt' leave much room for dillydallying.
My business partner found a set of batteries from one of his old laptops, and sent them up, and Lo! I now have 4 1/2 hours of battery time. Yippee! No more -requiring- a power supply to do anything. This, combined with setting up my wireless modem on my Kyocera, should make me Mighty Mobile Power Geek!
Course, last night, I did find out that my laptop 'low power' notification settings were out of wonk, as, in mid-type, the laptop just up and powered itself off, blinking the orange "LOW BATTERY!" light at me accusingly. "Nitwit, didn't you SEE me blinking?"
Anyway, all is well, recharged, and ready to go.
Ain't technology grand?
[Edit: 1:17pm - changed a few words to actually make sense. Sheesh :) ]
A few weeks ago, I finally upgraded my old AT&T Wireless cell phone, and got a Kyocera 7135 Smartphone. I was looking for high speed data access, Palm applications, wireless modem access, and flat rate usage. Verizon was the only one to give all of that with very good coverage.
I got nailed 3 times in the last 24 hours with blogspam to Planet Geek Now, normally spam doesn't bug me that much, It's there, its' a part of dealing with life on the net. A minor annoyance. But the way we had the LJ feed set up, anytime someone posted a comment, even in an old archive, the posting will show up on LiveJournal, because the RSS feed content changed (the 'Comments (4)' went to 'Comments (5)').
This is why folks are seeing old postings from me in their friends list. This drives me absolutely nuts, because I know it really annoys you all as well.
I've just altered the feed to take the 'count' portion of the comments out of the feed, so that even if someone adds a comment on the blog, it won't update the feed (proper). The problem there is you never see if there are comments available, and there's no way to avoid this using the mechanism that Livejournal provides.
Anyway, this change will most likely cause my entire feed to update, and everyone may get a pile of rehashed postings. My apologies, this should be the last time.
This evening I had dinner in Davis Square with Rosa. Before heading out, I had a bunch of work to do, so we decided to hang out in the Diesel Cafe for 2 hours or so beforehand. Even though I knew it was a planned social night there, the sheer volume of people we ran into that we didn't expect to see (and just happened to be noodling along) really blew me away. That doesn't happen out in the sticks where we live.
Even better, after we left, we decided to take the T into town to have dinner at the Cambridge Brewing Company over in Kendall Square. While walking to the T station, I bumped into Steve Revilak who I worked with at my old employer. Interesting, I hadn't seen him in 6+ months.
Ah well, onwards. Took the T to Kendall, then wandered into the restaurant. First person I see is Ben Hyde, also of former employer, having dinner with a friend. A casual "hey guy!" exchange ensued, and Rosa and I sat down to dinner. Not 10 minutes later, Avi wanders in to have dinner as well, and we do the "Fancy meeting you here!" hallos. Sheesh :)
An excellent dinner and much wonderful conversation followed, after which we headed back to Davis. In the Davis T-stop, I heard some music playing - not unusual in the T station, but this wasn't a guitar, or harmonica, or someone singing. It was a clarinet. And occasional orchestral accompaniment. We tracked down the player, a middle aged fellow happily playing orchestral music on his clarinet, with a small stereo next to him. He was reading from sheet music, and was playing BEAUTIFULLY - a piece obviously arranged for a solo clarinet. There were 3-4 people around listening appreciatively, and he had the obligatory sheet laid out with a small pile of cash on it. This was not some bozo with an amp trying to panhandle. This was a guy who had talent and skill, who was obviously classically trained, who was just out playing beautiful music, to anyone who would listen, and might score some beer money in the process.
Rosa had to actively pull me away from listening, i was so moved hearing his beautiful playing. Gosh, isn't that what music is for? Just expressing yourself with your music to whomever wants to listen, sharing with appreciative strangers.
I need to purchase several Shuttle-size PCs, of the 1.5gig or faster variety. I'll need to customize the configuration a bit. I'd like to work with a company that I can trust to handle returns, warranties, etc, so no garage assemblers, please.
Suggestions?
Not only did this fellow buy Zach a new bicycle.
Not only did he buy me a new trail bike.
But tonight he finished aquiring the parts for, and together we installed, a new rack system on top of my car so I can carry my recumbent and Zach's bike whenever we want to go somewhere.
All free of charge.
Today I picked up a SanDisk 256meg Flash pen drive at Costco for a measely $51. I had been wrestling with the concepts of how to easily back up data at conventions without the hassle of a CDROm burner. I've been copying data back to my laptop, but that requires the laptop be online and ready to go.
Now, I know these things are passe now. Heck, you can even get flash drives built into watches, but it's always struck me as too expensive for not enough storage.
256meg seems like the most useable size, so since the price was so low, I picked it up.
Getting it working on the Linux laptop really was a matter of plugging it in and typing 'mount /dev/sda1 /mnt', and voila, I had a 256meg drive available. I decided to basically just copy my critical information I need onto it, as my own personal backup.
SO, my documents and text files directory tree. My source code trees for my products. A backup of my mailbox directory (which has years of email stored in it). And my addressbook and calendar from Evolution.
All that combined copied to the drive (very very quickly), took up about half of it. Yes, I still have half the drive empty.
I could learn to like this techy geeky stuff.
Criminy, what a day.
Yay - I received notification that another event is going to sign with me.
Boo - A very rough series of conversations emotion-wise, still not really resolved.
Yay - An investor has re-opened negotiations, with luck we'll sign papers on Thursday to back my business' expansion.
Boo - A fiber cable cut in Boston tossed us and many other folks off the net for 6+ hours today.
Yay - A presentation to a client went really well, signing off a fast, paying, complete project. Client is happy, I'm happy, they're paying reasonably well, they may want to do some more work. Good stuff.
(the hero, Torg, talking to a freshy-aquired talking demon-killing sword)...
"Sword, can you kill a demon lord?"
"With you wielding me? I think the odds are best described as 'yikes!'"
From Sluggy Freelance
I need to ship a bunch of equipment all over the country in the next 6 months, going to a couple different places. I need a pointer to a shipping company that's dependable and has good rates (or experiences from folks who have done this).
Total weight is around 300lbs, probably in 5-6 shipping cases. I need transit time to Florida and New Mexico on the order of a couple days (like, a week would be great).
I have almost no experience with freight shippers. Can they drop stuff right off at hotels?
As reported on Slashdot, PC Magazine reviews Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 and Opera 7.51, noting: 'Security concerns aren't the only reason to seek an alternative [to Internet Explorer]. IE's slow rendering engine and dearth of privacy features may plant the thought in some iconoclastic minds that it may not be the best browser for everyone.' 4 stars for Firefox and 3.5 for Opera, so looks like a Firefox win, although the editors do point out FF's troubles with DHTML as well as Opera issues with JavaScript."
PC Magazine has traditionally been a staunch Windows-centric Microsoft advertising platform. This is nice to see.
This weekend Zach and I have been up in Maine with Tim, Morgan and Quinn. Cat was up until this morning, but left early for some social stuff at home. Today Zach and I went on a great ride, that had us going all the way around our lake. About 1/3rd of that is on regular roads, the rest is on back trails and gravel side roads. Fortunately, my brother in law had gotten me my first trail bike, so the going was easy.
This was the second day I've been our riding on a trail bike (well, at least since I was 13 or so),and gosh it's a lot of fun. We rode a total of about 6 miles, but a lot of over rocks and weeds and the like, so I'd say it was equivelent to a 15 mile road bike ride.
The weather was wonderful, the company was great, and when we got back, we all jumped in the lake for about 2 hours of swimming. Deeeelish.
It began innocently enough. Somewhere in the vast communications jungle that is my interaction with the net, someone pointed me to this swords and sorcery-ish game that ran on a website. "Fine", sez I, "I'll take a look". I didn't think much of it, other than the odd name, 'Kingdom of Loathing'. To me, web-based gaming, in particular RPG games, never really seemed to be worth getting into. I'd rather play something local.
A month later, I'm still playing the game daily. I work through my daily alottment of moves usually before noon, and I'm learning all the little tricks to get more Adventures so I can advance my character faster.
These guys definitely have something.
I, dbs, admit, here and for all to see, that when coding on my huge 21" Nokia monitor, at the screaming resolution of 1400x1050, I zoom my KVim editor window up to full screen, hiding everything else under a vast expanse of 8pt font.
I try to keep up on websites that publish regular columns or articles that help shine the light of reason into the cold dark void of societal logic. Two in particular are favorites. The first of course is Snopes.com, which I'm sure -everyone- who reads my blog knows about, has bookmarked, and visit every few days, right? Their 'Whats new' column is a great way to stay on top of the latest fad-like rumors flying around the net (Did you know that the reason Taco Bell stopped the little dog commercials was because the dog had been run over by a camera crane? (hint, FALSE).
The other site is James Randi's site, which has a weekly update on false mysticism, tv psychics, money scams and a slew of other examples of con artists bilking gullible people out of their hard earned cash.
Occasionally though they come up with some really fun ones. The July 2nd column includes a link to, are you ready for this? The site Our Hollow Earth in which they state " My study of gravity indicates that our earth as well as all planets are actually hollow. " But wait, there's more! They're mounting an expedition to the North Pole where there's an opening (there has to be, because the Voyager spacecraft found that all the outer planets "emit more energy than they receive from the sun. Radiation is emited from their polar openings from their inner suns to light up auroras over their poles just like our inner sun does here on earth.")
Well there you have it folks. Don't dig that garden too deep, you might slip right through.
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) is disliked by more Hungarian secondary school children than former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday.
Bush also topped the list of most-liked foreigners with eight percent of the vote, ahead of Pope John Paul (news - web sites) with six percent.
The survey of 34,000 students, aged 16-18, from 655 high schools showed Adolf Hitler was the most disliked foreign personality with 25 percent of the vote, followed by Bush with 23 percent and Bin Laden with 16 percent.
Bush was even more unpopular than former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, according to the poll.
The most unpopular Hungarian was Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy followed by Viktor Orban, the leader of the right of center Fidesz opposition.
Orban was also the most popular Hungarian followed by Arpad Goncz, the former dissident who became the country's first post-communist president.
*typitytype, clickytype, click click type...,* *RadioParadise playing in the background* *click typeitytype*
*pause*
"Hmm"
*more pause, music continues, sound of me thinking*
"Gosh, i wish Evolution's calendar had a quicker way to go to 'today' than clicking the [-> Go to...] button, and clicking 'today', that wo... hey... there's another button on the toolbar, looks like a little house or 'home' button. Hm. *click* hey! okay, scratch that feature request, they're ahead of me.
I love mature opensource products.
Apparently the administration has, in the space of 3 years, made it flat out impossible to balance the budget. In fact, the GOP has succeeded in making their very own ideology unworkable.
A deep rift in the Republican Party has left Congress unable to pass a budget this year, raising the probability that, for the third time in three decades, lawmakers will not agree on a detailed blueprint for government spending and tax policy.
[...]
There are limits to the effectiveness of spending cuts. Even if Congress had eliminated every penny of the $438 billion in domestic discretionary spending this year, every education and health program, every homeland security effort, national park, interstate highway and federal prison, the government would still find itself in the red.
In her Livejournal, Lyonesse mentions that John Kerry has chosen a slogan, 'Let America be America Again' by Langston Hughes. I read through this poem, and it is quite intense, but only if read in the view Kerry wants it portrayed in: "This is about all that GW Bush has taken away from America". Moving, true, but perhaps unfair to the poems' roots.
Langston Hughes was a black poet during the great depression, writing during the time of Jim Crow and economic upheaval in the US. A reader should take into account the environment that Hughes found himself in, where the freedom and hope he longed for was simply not available to him in the US. Hughes was also active in the Communist movements, as many were during this time, though he never actually registered as such.
There are many scurrilous individuals who are taking full advantage of this link, yammering that "This proves that Kerry is a communist!" and other drivel. I'm certainly not in that camp, but I feel that any campaign slogan should be also understood in it's original context.
I think Kerry will do fine with this as his basis, but there's a lot of interesting details behind it. :)
At Intuit, I worked with a great guy named Brian Kane. About a week ago, he had a minor heart attack, and has had to have surgery. He's posting his story on his blog now about what happened. It's an amazing read.
I wonder if it's some sign that my blog has gotten more popular that it's getting more and more blog spam. Today I logged in to find 88 spam postings into various n sundry articles advertising a series of porn sites. Yee hah.
I finally updated my copy of MT-Blacklist, a tool designed to stop this sort of posting. I hadn't updated since December when Lisa helped install the first copy. This new version has smarter and easier-to-update filters in it, and hopefully this'll stop this crud from coming into my system.
Apparently something also twitched the LIvejournal RSS feed, so folks saw some postings from me from a long time ago. Sorry bout that, we're not sure what causes that to happen, we'll check into it.
I try to keep a wide perspective on the world, and I'm finding that with the current heated political environment, it pays to see what The Other Side is saying. Being honest with myself, I'd categorize myself as a moderate liberal. I don't fall into the neat categories that most would ascribe to 'liberal democrat'.
In keeping with my seeming category, one of my favorite folks around is Al Franken. He's a comedian turned outspoken left wing commentator, whose intelligence and depth astounds me everytime I read his works. He won't say anything without -really- understanding the issue, and researching it before making the comment. Seriously, read his books, he has a whole team of folks that make sure that if he says Rush Limbaugh ate peas for breakfast - in fact, yes, he did, and here's the cites!
I wish the right were this well informed. We have people like Anne Coulter "The Democrats want Saddam back.", Rush Limbaugh "Intellectual Left Pushes Bush Assassination Fantasies", and Bill O'Reilley "Hillary's true colors show through". (note: All these quotes were taken from the respective front pages of each site).
But, it makes sense to see what the right is actually saying or thinking, because in all things, Perspective: Use it or lose it (Richard Bach).
I've found that Jay Redings blog is a well written, well spoken, very good indicator of where the right is now. While I rarely agree with anything posted there, I find it important to read, and sometimes comment on things I see. Naturally I expect to get... responses to my comments, and do, but it's all part of the process. It makes me think harder about my replies and commentary, doing the research before speaking.
By the way. The left is not without it's own strong left wing voices " exposes Fox for what it is: partisan spin, not news.". Where I agree in spirit with much of what these folks are saying, I can't wholeheartedly support them and their rabid attacks on the right. Just because Karl Rove is a master of spin and takes the phrase "If it ain't illegal, it must be okay!" to new heights doesn't mean the other side has to adopt his tactics.
I still disagree with much of the right's way of thinking. I still stand in my strong disapproval of GW Bush and virtually all him and his administration has done during his presidency. However, I do see where the right is coming from in it's commentary, though I feel it is based in narrow thinking, selfish viewpoints, and potentially destructive planning, for now and future generations.
Perhaps much of this is backlash against the Clinton years, where many on the right saw the roles reversed. The hatred and viciousness directed at Clinton during that time was unparalleled, though, as in so many other issues, the sense of balance seems to have been lost, no matter who is putting the idea forward.
