Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
I am a “knowledge worker”. I design multi-media “webcast” applications and services, and lead a small team of smart, engaged developers- I occasionally get to write some code, but most of my “real” work involves middleware and server maintenance activities to keep our applications operational. My work is largely intellectual, and this is after I spent several years altering my career path so I could work more directly with the technology.
There was a period when I was perilously close to slipping into management, and another time when I performed the role of a proposal solution architect, but fortunately I recognized that these roles were not satisfying for me. I like having a more direct connection with the technology, with actually making the solution work rather than philosophizing about how it might work. I’m willing to make sacrifices in order to keep that proximity to “reality”, and so it was intriguing to me to read an article describing why even more “physical” work might be the smart choice after all.
(more…)
I like new gadgets. This isn’t really a general desire for new things, but rather new technology. Sometimes this desire can be beneficial: as a direct result of my interest in technology that is desnew, I am arguably more aware of the current state of the computer, game console, and smart phone markets. Other times, though, my interest becomes a bizarre kind of fixation, one which I often can not logically justify.
(more…)
Irene and I went to see Star Trek today. It is her birthday (or as she says, “Birthday weekend”), so the movie was her choice. I wanted to see Star Trek, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in this “re-imagining” or “reboot” as it has been called. I left the theatre, however, feeling quite differently than I expected to.
(more…)
I am now the proud owner of a middling-quality Jaeger LeCoultre Atmos clock. I purchased it on eBay a few weeks ago, and it is the first thing I have actually received from my adventures there. You might reasonably ask “what the heck is an ‘Atmos’, and what’s the big deal?” In this post I’ll try to answer that question
(more…)
I have had a hard time wrapping my head around the Facebook/Twitter phenomenon. Does anyone really have a thousand “friends”? Do I really care when someone, even a close friend, drinks a coffee, eats a bagel, or scratches their armpits? Not really…
And yet I have been curious. I poked around MySpace back when it was “the new thing”, and created a Facebook account (which I’ve since forgotten) when they still had only a couple million subscribers. I’ve never really touched Twitter, though- I think mostly because the short-form, incredibly “noisy” form of communication to be difficult to imagine being useful. I haven’t really changed my opinion but, as with MySpace and Facebook before, I feel I should give the latest social network “it” thing a chance. Maybe “microblogging” can live alongside my “macroblogging”?
(more…)
I remember back in the foggy vastness of the past how valuable having a decent gaming surface was when playing Dungeons and Dragons. My friend Chris and I eventually hacked…
Once again the media is full of reports of the impending collapse of the internet. Apparently we users are to blame, as we are using too much bandwidth watching movies and so forth- thus says yet another study by “respected” think tank, Nemertes Research. They tried to push this line of bull on us in 2007, again in 2008, and now in 2009. Only the dates of the “impending” collapse have changed: always a year or two in the future. But anyone who knows much of about the internet and infrastructure behind it knows this “impending doom” is a fallacy. So why is Nemertes repeating it over and over and over?
(more…)
Recent NASA research suggests that warming trends in the Arctic during the past 40 years aren’t due to CO2 emission increases. Instead, the spike in Arctic temperatures during the past forty years appears to be due to reduced aerosol particulates, specifically to reduced sulfates in the atmosphere. The sulfate reduction is believed to be the result of improved emission standards that were implemented to, ironically, improve the environment through reductions in acid rain. Aerosol sulfates reflect heat back into space, reducing temperatures, whereas different aerosols, termed “black carbon aerosols” and produced largely by burning coal, have the opposite effect: holding heat in.
(more…)
I have been reading Looking For Group for several months now. It is a webcomic from the same minds that bring us Least I Could Do, Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza, and is an ongoing saga involving some rather unusual fantasy characters. Initially, these characters were loosely based on races and professions found in games such as World of Warcraft, but the connection is rather tenuous. Mostly it is about the “good” guy, Cale’Anon, and his twirl-your-mustache evil friend, the undead Warlock Richard.
(more…)
The cable content provider formerly known as the Sci Fi channel has renamed itself “SyFy”. Here is their reasoning for this rather bizarre change:
The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular. We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi. It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting. … (Changing the name to Syfy) gives us a unique word and it gives us the opportunities to imbue it with the values and the perception that we want it to have.
So in one giant leap, the SyFy channel has both insulted their entire existing client base and devised a new name that sounds like a sexually transmitted disease. It also means nasty things in Polish, apparently.
(more…)
