Newly formed: an opinion on Mars exploration
Posted on June 4, 2008
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I have to admit, until this week, I had not had strong opinions one way or the other on the exploration of Mars.
After reading Warren Ellis’s mini-essay on the subject, Bending Mars, my opinon has been formed. Prior to this, I was intrigued by the robot exploration of Mars, but really just did not see what all teh fuss was about. Yes, it was an amazing job of planning and engineering. Yes, it was a interesting to see what they were finding up there. But it had no impact on me.
Now though, I see getting to Mars and getting there as fast as possible is critical for the long term future of humanity.
You may find Ellis’ predictions about our “meat hook future” to be grim or cynical, but ultimatly, isn’t his please to let our mad species’s creation live by spreading them off worl all about hope?
Memories are made of music
Posted on May 23, 2008
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Listening to World Party I just downloaded from eMusic (finally jumped onboard after watching Bryce).
Brings back memories of the hot, sticky summer of 95 and Yo Mamma, a girl that I totally fell for. In retrospect, was probably mostly in love with her lifestyle (downtown bohemian in Pittsburgh/Oakland) and in lust with her long legs and very open mind. Not that that prevented me from leaving some long rambling late night messages on her voicemail.
Still great music though. Perfect for summer without AC.
People talk about smells as the great “reminders”. That has never been true for me. No doubt this is partiually caused by my terrible sense of smell, but music has always played that role for me. Certain songs, artists, albums, bring me straight back to periods of my life or even certain days, hours, or minutes.
Makes me wonder if in the soundtrack of my life, each friend has a song. Great friends must have multiple songs, depending on the period of the friendship or certain moods/moments with that friend. I can’t imagine boiling Mike, Ben, Cory, Ali, Charlie, Mark, or Kelly down to a single song. It is odd to me then that people do that with relationships. Is it because it takes longer to become friends than to fall in love?
Thank you for talking to me like an adult
Posted on April 16, 2008
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Look, I am not going to be bashful about this. I am a supporter of Senator Obama’s.
I like him. He’s smart; he is articulate; he is sincere; he is incredibly well spoken; he is focused on the issues. These are all fantastic characteristics.
But the reason I like him is that he talks to me like I am adult.
I’m smart; I am, despite all of Georgia Tech’s best efforts, reasonable well educated; I am
well read, I am responsible for a large group of people that I work with.
In short, I am a mature adult.
Thank you for speaking to me like one.
The gorgeous hubris of the young or the wacked out craziness of the millenial?
Posted on April 9, 2008
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want to start by saying that I am really not a Dilbert fan. Dilbert’s cube farm cynicism gets me down; it tastes a little too much of bitter, washed up programmers and the hordes of Christmas sweater wearing older ladies that surround them.
There is something sad to me about the people that read it religoiusly on a daily basis and find deep insight into their lives because of it. Its funny, but it it is not deep.
That said, I read it daily and today’s was left me on the fence.
Am i for their gorgeous, “I am youth, hear me roar”, hubris of the millenial or am I sick of them, their frequent inability to focus, and their lack of ability to deal with the real?
Not sure, but think that I will learn a lot by watching them deal with a market downturn.
Who tests the old red wine
Posted on April 9, 2008
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People go on and on about how all relationships have one person who kills the bugs and one person who doesn’t. I think that they are missing the real divisions of labour:
Who tests the old red wine to see if it is still drinkable?
Who check the milk to see if it chunky?
Who cleans the garbage can?
Along those same lines, is there a difference between three person relationships in which two people kill bugs and one person screams vs. the ones in which two people scream and one person kills the bugs?
Crypto Produce Placement on Top Chef
Posted on April 3, 2008
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I have been watching Top Chef’s season 4. I don’t watch reality shows. I never quite saw the point. Top Chef though has always resonated with me. Partially because I like the collision of craft, art, theory, spectacle, and business that the chefs have to deal with.
Sounds familiar?
My reality TV guilt justification out of the way, I have noticed something strange on Top Chef season. I think that there is some sort of produce product placement going on. We are 4 episodes into the season and certain vegetables keep popping up. Sure, these are specialized guys and gals, with more advanced palettes than your average bear, but how many times should jichima and other weird veggies show up in one season?
I haven’t been keeping exact count, but I think it has been featured in the recipes in at least in 2 episodes
so far. Weirdly enough, it is hard to get an easy to read list of dishes per episode. The Bravo site is very nice looking, but you can’t just get a list. You have to read through it recipe by recipe and the recipes from different episodes are all mixed together.
Fifty percent seems like a lot.
Is there a secret crypto-produce lobby that is paying Bravo, Whole Foods, and Top Chef’s producers to include these vegetables in the show?
Posted on March 16, 2008
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Testing Google’s new “publish to blog feature”.
Saw that Google has connected their docs application to the various blog APIs, allowing you to publish from Google Apps to your blog, and figured I should check it out.
It was pretty east. I started by logging into Google Docs. Honestly that was the hardest part. I had to remember how to get there and not go the Google Apps document site. My company, Apogee Search, has been playing with Google Apps and although it looks the same, it uses different log-ins and has a different trust network.
Below is a quick walkthrough:
Step 1. Log into Google Apps.
Step 2. Create a new document.
Step 3. Click on the “Publish” tab in the upper right hand corner.
Step 4. Click on the “change your blog settings” link at the bottom of the page.
Step 5. Click on the “Add to Blog” button at the bottom of the page.
Waylon, your food is ready!
Posted on February 18, 2008
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Was at the Fredericksburg Trade Day yesterday with my mum (who was visiting from Vancouver), my wife, and pataboy.
I stopped to get some a beer and some bbq at a shack on the grounds. They took my name so that they could let me know when my food was ready. I was standing there in my flip flops, Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival t-shirt, and shorts, checking out the guys in their actually used cowboy boots and hats thinking that I had finally seen someone in Texas who needed to wear a cowboy hat, waiting for my taco when they hollered at the guy in line in front that his food was ready.
I shit you not, his name was Waylon.
I also heard a couple of great stories from my mom when she lived in central Texas in the late 60/early 70s, including this one. When my dad moved down from Vancouver, he moved into a trailer. At some point, he arranged with the local Lone Star delivery guy to add my dad to his route and deliver beer directly to his trailer. My dad had built a small deck with a crawl space underneath it out front of his trailer. The system was simple. He would leave his empties under the deck. The delivery guy would and leave as many fresh cases as there were empties.
Free, Fresh business idea: Use WhatIsPlaying.rss to broadcast on Twitter
Posted on January 20, 2008
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How many times has this happened to you?
You are in a coffee shop/bar/store/restaurant and heard some great music and wanted to know the name of the song, the name of the band, or the album it is play on?
How many times have you stood in line or hung around long enough to get someone’s attention to ask? Of course even if you do, one of the following the bound to happen:
- The song is no longer playing
- The employee can’t (or won’t be bothered) to figure it out.
- They tell you the wrong thing. (This could be innocent or malicious depending on what the attitude factor in the store is and whether the employee deems you worthy of imparting this information to. A good rule of the thumb is the great the ratio of tattoos and piercings between you and the employee, the less likely you are to find out. I am not sure what the magic number is but I can guarantee this, if the party in question has 5x the number of tats and holes in their body that you do, you are not going to get the name of that song.).
- You will forget the name of the band or lose the scrap of paper you illegibly scribbled it down on by the time you get to someplace you can look up the band or buy the song on
iTunesAmazon.
This is a perfect application of a Twitter-based microblog.
I see Twitter get used for a lot of stupid stuff. This would be a great use. Compare the scenario above to this one:
You hear that a song come on the over the in-store sound system. You realize that this is the best thing that has happened to you since (insert your own scenario here. Mine involves several manhattan’s). You open another tab in Firefox and go to the website for the coffee shop you are working in. You go to their What is Playing RSS feed (CoffeeShopFoo.foo/rss/WhatIsPlaying) and subscribe or link to their Twitter feed. You look at the last 1-2 entries and make an intelligent guess about which one is playing. Worst case, you conduct a couple of quick Web searches to double-check the name of the song.
This would be easy pretty easy to implement and then charge stores a few dollars a month for the service.
It could be implemented using combination of MP3 software and Twitter connection. A lot of the MP3 applications either can be extended via plug-ins or can be connected to other software via client side scripting. Use these to connect to Twitter and then start posting.
Who knows, there may be people doing this already. If so - drop me a line.
If not, let me know in the comments if you try it.
What a tangled Web we weave
Posted on January 13, 2008
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Earlier this week, I spent some time reading this article, A Tangled Tale, about a study some mathematicians physicists have been conducting to determine the physics of random knot tying. They identified 14 one-loop tangles and at least 7 2 two-loop tangles. I ran across this over at o’Reilly Radar.
Little did I know that I would so quickly have need for this information.
Yesterday, I took my son, Pataboy, out for some kite flying. The wind was a little light, but we eventually got her up. Pataboy dubbed the kite the pirate octopus kite, in reference to its Joly Roger symbol and streamer. Technically there were 10, not 8 , streamers; which would make it more of a pirate squid kite, but I didn’t want to quibble. I got about 150 yards of string out and had her up about 100′ or so. The boy got bored eventually, leaving me to fly the kite and him to wander around on the track at the bottom of the hill we were on. I started pulling in the kite, but then started to run into problems. Before pulling the kite in, it was up high enough that she had constant wind. As I started to reel her in, I started to lose the wind, causing the kite to fall. When I started, this would have been OK, but now the kite was far enough out that if she fell, she would go over the track and fall into the middle of a soccer practice. To avoid this, I had to pull in the kite hand over hand, just dropping the string on the ground.
The more astute of you see where this is going.
Needless to say, after it was all reeled in, I had a huge tangle of kite string to undo. 45 minutes later, I still have one tangle left to undo. I didn’t bother counting how many different tangle-types I dealt with.
oh - as we left and headed back to our car, I saw something I had missed as we walked into the park - a scene straight from Charlie Brown, a kite caught in the tree. It made me realize one thing that is wrong with 4 year olds, they don’t have enough cultural knowledge to see why that was funny.
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