Over 749,504 furballs coughed up since March, 2003- 130 today alone! | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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I watched this video today, and am once again amazed at what “ordinary” humans can do if they put their minds to it: I particularly liked the “open the Pringles can, bounce the lid off two corners of the room while eating a chip from the container, and catch the lid when it bounces back” bit. 
Years ago, shortly before the turn of the century, I had a pretty good backup solution. I had a 20 Gigabyte tape drive that I used to back up all of my storage. That was a decade ago. Somewhere along the line, the combined increases in total storage I had to back up plus the slowness/cost/general hassle of maintaining tapes mean that my backup strategy broke down. I tried various things in the interim, including network attached storage in 2006, and the Time Capsule for backing up my Macintoshes. The Time Capsule works great, but even with a terabyte of disk storage I am rapidly running out of room- and it does nothing to back up my Windows or Linux machines. I needed something expandable, multi-platform, fast, and inexpensive. Well, three out of four isn’t bad, I guess… Continue reading Network attached storage- ReadyNAS NV+ and NVX 
I was doing some work on my server today and noticed some errors in my logs of the following form:
The problem appears to relate to an upgrade I performed several months ago in the Atahualpa Wordpress theme I use. The result was that any attempt to open a gallery page (i.e.: to look at my photos while visiting my blog) would result in a blank page… and the above error appearing in my server logs. I’ve corrected the problem, but am disappointed that I didn’t even notice an issue that has probably existed since at least January. Ah well, ignorance is bliss I guess…
I was watching a demonstration video of a robotic vibraphone today on Gizmodo. It plays “Flight of the Bumblebee”, which is already a pretty fast piece, but does it a bit faster than normal. Impressive, but when you realize that it accomplishes this with independent actuators for each note (effectively having dozens of “hammers” where a human would be limited to a couple) it really becomes less amazing. And then I came across absolutely staggeringly fast rendition of Flight of the Bumblebee by an honest to goodness human being. It is a Guinness book of World Records performance on the guitar by Tiago della Vega, and completely, utterly, and resoundingly trounces the robotic performance. Note that he actually performs the piece three times: at 170, 260, and 320 beats per minute: you have to watch to the end to see the fastest rendition. Even if a machine ever exceeds this rate, I am left speechless by what the human machine can accomplish. 
Risen is an old-school role playing game that does very little to make itself appealing to the more “casual” gamer. In terms of overall characteristics, Risen is similar to games like Oblivion- but whereas Oblivion tries to make it easy to progress and overcome your mistakes, Risen makes no such allowances. Interestingly enough, although I generally like “easier” games, I’m actually really enjoying Risen… on the PC. From what I’ve seen and heard, the XBox version should be avoided.
Apple ended months (for some people years) of speculation today by finally announcing the upcoming release of a tablet computer, the iPad. Like pretty much everything Apple releases, there is an overwhelming amount of hype surrounding the device, and many “true believers” are disappointed by what the device offers. Even so, I plan on buying one when it becomes available. I thought it would be appropriate to explain my rational on the theory that my friends and family may doubt my sanity more than usual as a result.
I own the following T-shirt from Shirt.Woot!:
It accurately describes one major aspect of why I don’t regularly exercise. Lack of motivation… and there is an unfortunate dearth of gigantic prehistoric predators around to provide such motivation. Continue reading Exercise: some motivation required… lots of motivation, actually
Action games are a genre that I really didn’t understand until I played Bayonetta. I could therefore say that the $60 I spent on this game was educational: I have been taught that I should not buy this kind of game. The kindest things I can really say about Bayonetta from my perspective are that the graphics are impressive, and the main character has one of the finest digital rumps in computer history.
If you generally agree with everything I say, you have no need to read further. Continue reading Bayonetta: Everything that is wrong with this type of game My most recent clock family member arrived on Thursday. It is one that I plan on keeping: a mid-19th century (sometime before 1853) “ogee” style clock made by the Chauncey Jerome factory in New Haven, Connecticut:
Continue reading My “new” old clock- circa 1850’s Chauncey Jerome 8 day ogee 
The U.S. Defence advanced research guys are worried that not enough young Americans are pursuing the sciences or engineering. They are looking for ways to encourage more young people to pursue degrees in these areas. There is a problem here, and I can tell you exactly what it is. For years, the largest American employers of scientists and engineers have been pursuing a policy that clearly identifies technical skills as pure commodities. As commodities, they are trying to fill positions in these areas with the cheapest resources possible: that is, they are finding their geeks and scientists in India, China, Russia, and Brazil. The basic premise: they can get four or five guys with science degrees “over there” for the price of one in North America. The big U.S. companies been doing this for a decade. The numbers are staggering: millions of technical jobs have gone “off shore” since the late 90’s. North American technologists wanting a continued career are increasingly being forced to lead a team, manage projects, provide “business analysis” services, or consult. None of these roles really require a technical degree, and they certainly don’t emphasize geek skills. As a young person just going in to university/college, it isn’t very hard to see the trends. If you want a job in North America, you want business skills: a B.Comm, an MBA, or similar. Oh sure, you might pick up a science degree as well, but you’d be best off eliminating any geek-like tendencies from your personality early on. If you truly like programming, there is some hungry guy in China with a PhD who’ll do it for what would be starvation wages here: and the vast majority of Canadian and U.S. companies are more than willing to hire him rather than you. The long term result of this “offshoring” of originality and creativity is, to me at least, obvious. In several decades, the United States will no longer be a significant innovator, creator or manufacturer. All of the skills necessary to do these things will exist somewhere else. The U.S. will be a nation of managers, with no one to manage: and I’m pretty sure that the Chinese and Indians can figure out how to manage people pretty well. I hope I’m wrong. But my guess is that the trend is irreversible- as long as sending skilled technical work elsewhere is cheaper, companies will continue doing it regardless of the consequences. The one hopeful factor is that salaries in “developing” nations are gradually catching up. Maybe it will become less appealing to send a job overseas when it costs nearly as much as it does here. Time will tell… |
Lady Washington
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