So
Tweeted about Granada Doaba earlier in the week, but thought it definitely worth another shout out because the more I listen to this album, the more I like it. Here is the NPR piece that introduced me to the music. One of the cool things about this album is that I have been lucky enough to have been to Granada and appreciate the music and vibe of the place first hand. But the coolest thing of all is that the entire album is available as a legal, free download. And no, I don't benefit from this in any way, just happy to share some creativity at the right price.
Kids have been playing with the word-creating possibilities of calculators since they started to appear in the 1970s. It didn’t take long to discover that 0.7734 upside down made hEllO. One of the earliest attested examples from this period is 5318008, which when turned over spells boobies. If your display is big enough, you can enter 53177187714, which makes hillbillies; mine has only ten digits so I get illbillies (sick goats?) and the longest word I can make is 378193771 (appropriately, illegible).
And, in my case, there is no denying the conclusion of the post:
To be 37819173 to play this game in the 1970s, you had to be young, geekish and slightly bored.
So
Yet another effortless upgrade from Wordpress 2.8 to 2.8.3 (yes, I have been lazy about upgrading) courtesy of dreamhost's one click installer/updater. If you are interested in establishing your own blog or site on dreamhost, use my promo code of MREC50 and save $50 off your first year of hosting (or just follow this link and the discount will be applied without the promo code).
All I can say is that I am into my third year of hosting with dreamhost and have no complaints.
So
Looks like twitter is still either actively being hammered by a DDOS attack or is suffering a hangover from the same. Direct access to twitter.com is reasonably fast, but API access seems to still be wonky. For example, Twitterfox is updating my tweet counts, but I can't actually get to the postings via Twitterfox.
Update: for whatever reason, I can't post or reply on twitter at all this morning. Others seems to be getting through. Oh, well...
So What a brilliant article. Someone is finally pointing out that, in America, the rich are more wealthy that they have ever been, and paying less taxes on top of it. And all of this over the top spin that the richest one percent are unduly having to support health care is just a load of bollocks — the figure in question is not even nine tenths of one percent of the Bush tax cuts. And we have all witnessed the job (mythical) job creation that goes on when you give more money to the ultra wealthy during the Bush regime (ie NONE).
According to government figures, 1-percenters’ share of America’s total income is the highest it’s been since 1929, and their tax rates are the lowest they’ve faced in two decades. Through bonuses, many 1-percenters will profit from the $23 trillion in bailout largesse the Treasury Department now says could be headed to financial firms. And, most of them benefit from IRS decisions to reduce millionaire audits and collect zero taxes from the majority of major corporations.
[Emphasis added]
The article concludes with a simple message that I have found is completely lost on the right (particularly those who profess to be very religious):
For his part, Obama has responded with characteristic coolness — and a powerful counterstrike. “No, it’s not punishing the rich,” he said. “If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that’s part of being a community.”
So Interesting research and demos of wearable computing and speculation that it might 'blow mobile phones away'. While the demos are cool, I think the practicality of it remains to be seen. It seems that just like voice recognition was going to make it so much easier to interact with desktop computers (it didn't) that a lot is being invested in these gesture-based systems that probably will struggle to work outside the lab in 'real world' conditions (variable light, no fixed background, uncontrolled contrast, etc).
It will be fun to see how this develops over time but I am not anticipating anything useful in the next few years.
So
I guess with tattoos and piercings becoming increasingly common, you have to look elsewhere for a new way to disfigure yourself. In Japan, this can be achieved through saline injections. Warning: the photos can be quite disturbing to some.
Picture the scene: five people, each with hideously distorted heads, tubes sticking into their faces. Reminiscent of a medical experiment gone hideously wrong, you’d be forgiven for thinking they had a gross infection or disease. They look like alien abductees, fresh from invasive research by their interplanetary masters. But these are Japanese club kids, otherwise known as bagelheads, deliberately disfiguring themselves by experimenting with saline inflations.
So
Here is a creative use of Twitter: creating a visualization of air travel by tracking tweets with the text 'Just landed'. The original idea for this came out over beers as an alternative way to create transmission models to track things like H1N1 flu virus spread.
So
Last Thursday night/Friday morning we had some pretty powerful storm cells come through the area. I heard the next morning that at one point 85,000 people were without power overnight and that only 10,000 of them had been restored. I woke up around 1AM when one of the cells was passing and there was so much lightning back-to-back that it looked like fireworks going off or a paparazzi mob surrounding my house (as they often do).
The next morning the Internet/DSL connection appeared to be down. My best (quick) efforts to revive it were fruitless. Then I got a call from my wife a few hours later with some interesting news — she was noticing that only some of the computers couldn't connect – not all of them. When I got home from work I started tracing through the system and discovered that the main hub/switch had gotten toasted, but a smaller secondary one was fine (which accounted for the small population of working systems). The Airport base station that serves as the router between DSL and home network was also flaky (periodically dropping connections). A quick trip to Best Buy after dinner got us re-switched and a new Airport Extreme in place.
The next outage uncovered was the strangest of all. The front speaker channels in the AV amplifier had gotten toasted — so a Dolby 5.1 DVD would only play out of the center, sub-woofer and back speaker channels. Fortunately, the AV unit allowed for 4 front speakers, so we were able to move over to the other speaker outputs without having to buy an entirely new unit.
This morning I discovered one of the iMacs shutting down spontaneously. After combing through the log files I unearthed this message: AppleSMU — shutdown cause = -122 . After some forensic work on the apple support site I found a note that indicated that a shutdown -122 is typically power related (source is fluctuation too much so the unit shuts down defensively). So, it looks like the UPS that the iMac is plugged into took the brunt of the surge, but is now unstable as a result and in need of replacement. It's been an expensive weekend and I haven't even bought anything new :)
I guess the good news out of this is that the relatively inexpensive hubs took the hit, rather than the considerably more expensive computers and PVRs. I'll count myself lucky.