My Personal Infocloud
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92 More Must See Creative Photographs
While many of these are digital images (aka Photoslop creations) rather than photographs (actual image captures), there is definitely loads of creative thought going into most of them.
Technorati Tags: creativity, digitalimaging, fun, photography
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Like you need another reason to buy and consume chocolate — now you can have your photos printed onto M&Ms. Strictly for medicinal purposes, mind you.
Technorati Tags: candy, fun, M&M, photography, printers
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Or so the famously non-oil and electricity consuming Amish in Ohio are discovering.
It is also notable that they are reluctant to pass the increased costs onto their customers.
“I feel embarrassed to raise prices,” he said.
Bread at his market just went up 25 cents a loaf.
But the price of flour – based on increasingly expensive wheat and raised, harvested and milled by gas-guzzling machines – has nearly doubled.
“I can't justify raising it more than a quarter,” Miller said. “We'll just have to get by.”
Getting by goes hand-in-hand with the legendary self-sufficiency of the Amish.
You're doing a great job, Georgie.
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After talking about it for over a year, I finally bought a scooter to commute to work and run errands around town whilst leaving the car at home. I have never ridden before, so I am in the process of practicing and studying to get my motorcycle endorsement. I am absolutely focused on safety first; hell, I bought my helmet before I bought the scooter. Now that I am studying up on safe driving, it is hard not to cringe watching people on full size motorcycles driving too fast, with no helmet or protective gear weaving in and out of traffic.
With gas prices hovering around $4USD a gallon I am noticing motorcycle ridership going up and have seen probably a dozen or more stories in the national and local press about scooter dealers selling out of their inventory. I think this is going to mean two things: 1) there are unfortunately going to be more accidents with inexperienced riders getting into trouble with less than attentive car drivers and 2) a buyers market for scooters in the autumn when those scooter purchasers realize that they can't drive down the road with their radio blasting, texting/talking on a cellphone on a scooter (not and live).
If you are considering making the jump to scootering, make sure you read up on the safety and proper handling aspects of motor cycling first. This will help you understand the requirements (maybe even the 'dedication') it takes to become a successful rider. If you are the reading sort, I highly recommend David Hough's book Proficient Motorcycling and the resources at msf-org.
Technorati Tags: scootering, safety, peakoil
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I find the rampant speculation over the presumed announcement of a new iPhone at WWDC tomorrow to be a bit much. Particularly since most of the 'new' features have existed in Nokia phones (like the N95) for years. GPS? 3G? HSDPA? Video conferencing? New? No, available on the Nokia N95 for a while now.
I think the iPhone is largely fueled by the 'me to' set. The ones who couldn't understand why I bought one of the first iPods ('why would you need to carry around that much music?') but slowly succumbed when the iPod became 'cool'. Brilliant marketing by Apple. Now they have a captive market waiting for the iPhone so that they don't miss out on 'the next cool thing'.
Don't get me wrong, I have been a fan (and user) of Apple products for a long time. It's just that the iPhone isn't really compelling for me largely because I got used to the robust features of the Nokia like of smart phones. When my trusty 6620 was stolen, I replaced it with an N75. This was about 6 months before the iPhone launched. I loved to point out that (outside of the gimmicky iPhone interface) my N75 did everything that the iPhone did (and in many ways better). Plus I could download and use a rich set of Symbian and Java based applications. I could pair the N75 with a tiny Bluetooth-based GPS to get better location info in Google and Nokia Maps applications.
After a year I had an opportunity to buy a fully unlocked and warranted N95 8GB on Amazon for a great price. I jumped on it. One of the first comments I got from my iPhone toting friends were 'I see you got a new phone and why isn't it an iPhone?' and 'you know there is a new iPhone coming out, why didn't you wait to buy one of those?' Because I wanted a real smartphone; heck with the N95 its more like a mobile multimedia computer. I could move all the apps over from my N95, download a few that take advantage of the accelerometer in the N95 and upgrade to take advantage of the more powerful capabilities of the N95.
Sorry, Apple. When it comes to mobile computing, I am more about function and flexibility rather than fashion.
Technorati Tags: apple, cellphones, gadgets, iphone, mobile, n75, n95, nokia, nseries, symbian
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Someone wearing a scarf of middle eastern origin is support for terrorism? Someone had better tell the Israelis, US and other troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What next? People who wear hoodies are supporting the unabomber? People who don't wear lapel pins are unpatriotic? Oh, wait, this isn't the first time this has been made into a (non)issue.
Until this country can get back to reasoned discourse there is going to be trouble. Turn off Fox News and shout radio and get your news from a number of outlets. And think about it. And decide for yourself.
If the people of the US can be distracted by shrill hysterics about clothing items how will we ever focus on what is important?
Technorati Tags: crap, news, propaganda
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I am getting dizzy from constantly rolling my eyes at pundits who keep trying to spin high gas prices as a good thing. Well, good thing if you are raking in record profits as an oil company — not so much for everyone else not profiting from it.
For a different perspective on high gas, look at it through the lens of the US health care system. Has the high cost of health care in this country caused people to become more healthy to avoid having to pay for health care? No. It has just produced a widening gap of those who can afford care and those who can't.
The same is true for the recently bandied about factoid pointing to reduced miles driven since gas shot up. Great, seems like a positive thing, but it is probably comparable to the number of pills dispensed or office visits in the health care scenario. People aren't going to the doctor less because they are healthier, it's because they can't afford to. Just as people aren't driving less because they are suddenly eco-friendly, it's because they can't afford to drive. In either case, the economy ultimately suffers.
Then there is the rosy predictions about it forcing alternative fuels and/or electric cars. Right. I am old enough to have heard similar empty claims back in the 1970's. 'If oil ever reaches $50 a barrel, we're gonna...' liquefy coal, boost solar, improve battery technology, etc, etc, etc. Apparently a few efficient electric car was created, tested and proven, then collected an destroyed en masse in the desert. Yep, that's how serious we are about this problem. I can only imagine the efficiencies that we would have gained by actively tweaking that technology over the last decade or so.
Next myth is that this high gas prices will spur the development of mass transit. Uh-huh. In Cincinnati, they would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars building sport stadiums for losing teams than spend a dime on improving public transportation. I was floored when money was actually approved to put in the beginnings of a street car system, though with all the squabbling going on over that I have my doubts that it will be much more successful than Cincinnati's subway system. And don't get me started on how we could be spending the trillions of dollars not on a failed war to grab foreign oil resources, but on funding infrastructure development in the US.
Come on folks; wake up to the fact that when Bush was installed in office gas was selling at a quarter of the price it is right now. Cheney claimed that all of the USA's woes were due to not having an 'effective energy policy'. Apparently, the solution to that was to have closed door (illegal) sessions with the oil companies to drive the price at the pump as high as it will go. And while we are at it, lets do nothing to stop the dollar from going into a free fall; after all big oil and global corporations benefit from a weak dollar while the citizenry gets screwed. Let's maintain ridiculously lax CAFE standards for autos, especially SUVs. Let's provide no tax incentives to people to by hybrids or to use available public transportation. Lets encourage people to buy McMansions that they can't afford further and further away from where they work.
Let's recover money from the war profiteering that has been going on for the last eight years and channel it into improving public transportation and funding research for alternative fuels, etc. There is still time to return this country to a representative form of government where those being represented are the people and not select business interests.
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Not sure that I understand what is supposed to be so wonderful about flock. To me it seems to be taking users back to the days of the 'walled garden' days of the AOL application that lulled/forced users into using it for all of their email, browsing and content instead of just using a browser directly.
I also have a big problem with all of that personal data aggregation being tied to running the flock browser. Why not use one of the many (and growing) number of web-based tools to aggregate your 'personal infocloud' so that it is available everywhere you are (including from mobile devices).
Tom Friedman wrote “The World is Flat”, suggesting that globalization had leveled the playing field between industrial and emerging countries. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets suggests that this is perhaps changing because of the cost of fuel.
The cost of shipping a 40 foot container from Shanghai to the east coast of North America has gone from $3,000 in 2000 to $8,000 because of the cost of fuel, and for many products, the Asian cost advantage has virtually disappeared.
Maybe the end result of this will be foreign companies opening up plants in the US (much as the Japanese have done with auto manufacture) to largely escape the sea-based shipping costs altogether.
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This article about a Japanese woman living in a man's closet without his knowledge reminded me of the character Lazlo from the movie Real Genius.