I’m currently planning a 31 day Amtrak trip to WWDC and back. In a circuitous fashion. I’m going to test out TravelPod.com when I take my trip. From the little work I’ve done with it so far, the only benefit it has over WordPress is its location awareness. It’s much harder to edit.
I’ll likely cross-post to both it and this location. But if you want to check it out, click the link above.
Some students in NYC produce an homage to the Preamble of the United States Constitution:
(HD) A More Perfect Union from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo.
And you’ll have to make your own connection to how this ended up in my head…
“I have to admit,” he said, “that I’m one of those people that still thinks the dishwasher is a miracle. What a device! And I have to admit that because I think that way, I like to load it. I like to look in and see how the dishes were magically cleaned.” -Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as quoted by the New York Times
I’m not going to mention the words in text (the spiders will find them and send more people here), but I have daily visitors looking for the word in the image below. It leads them to an “in the news” post I made five years ago.
I’m not sure if it’s weird or it’s reassuring that so many people are interested in one of nature’s oddities.
I was recently reminded that because I was so busy this year and didn’t make it to SXSW, that I had forgotten about the SXSW Bit Torrent. I went looking and it didn’t take long to find that some had indeed put one together for 2009.
I was quickly reminded that the AirPort Extreme Base Station by default protects me from the wilds of the Internet and to get the torrent running you have to bypass the ports and directly map them to your inside computer.
I found an old write-up to tell me how to do it, but it’s very out of date. I figured it out from there, but anyone who’s non-technical likely couldn’t.
I’m not going to take the time right now to explain the details again. But you should be able to follow his text and my screen shots to get the gritty work done and allow you to bypass your default firewall with the current 5.4.1 Airport Utility.
A few days from now I’ll have more music than I need and it will likely take me months to sift through it all. But I do have a new, big media drive just waiting.
So, here are the screen shots, if you have any questions, let me know! Continue reading
Center Point Energy’s web site is stupid for not providing me the ability to schedule a payment. They send me the bill two weeks in advance and I can either “pay now” or try to remember to pay closer to the date, forget about it, pay late, get reported for late payments, get dinged on my credit score …
One thing they do have is this nifty histogram of my natural gas usage. I lost my water heater in June, and that was the only thing using gas. I didn’t much notice it at the time, but I was paying something for a small leak that bloomed into a massive leak one friday night in August.
My very leaky house peaks at heater usage in December and January obviously.
Gas Usage Histogram
And if you’d like to see what that costs me, here in Houston, here’s that data… Continue reading
The juxtaposition of two videos I saw today is eerily representative of the current state of American affairs.
The national hero, Buzz Aldrin, speaking on the future of space travel. It all sounds great, unless you listen to more that five contiguous words and try to make a coherent concept out of them.
Obviously Xeni Jardin had a great opportunity to interview such an important man, and couldn’t let the footage go to waste. The inanity is somewhat like a bus wreck. A bus full of parakeets juggling crystal goblets. Shiny.
The other interview was Bill Moyers talking to Andrew J. Bacevich (includes transcript). I actually only heard the audio to this one, though the video snips I did watch made it that much more revealing.
This almost hour of discussion is one that every American should be required to listen to and ruminate on. But we’re much more likely to watch the first one and yell “Go, Buzz!” (Hey, despite the incoherence, I did.)
Such is America’s attention span, and such will be its downfall.
I think I may have to go back and listen to Bacevich again. He did such a good job of relating his points, and the discussion was thick with content.
[Edit: a few days later SciAm had a cogent interview with Buzz. Seems like Xeni just had the bad luck of catching him when he had brain overload – apparently he’s been on a publicity tour of late for several things.]