The past week of concentrated insanity is reaching a climax this weekend as we finally engage in the big move to the new house. Tomorrow we close on both houses, and Saturday we move.
So, I’ll be offline from Friday evening until sometime next week. I should have ‘net connectivity restored by Thursday, so look for me around the 4th.
Jack over at The Peoples Republic of Seabrook made me his site of the day today. Jack explains the election:
This really is a fun read, and Doug seemed to be have such a crappy day, I just had to do something nice for him. So, be a sport, check it out….
That was a nice thing to do, Jack, thanks! TPRS is such a funny and irreverent site, and Jack strikes me as such a down-to-earth, grounded, fun guy that I consider being selected as site of the day there a signal honor.
So, I’m having a crappy day today. I mean a king-size, extra-jumbo, economy size, buggered by a elephant bad day; the worst day, in fact, I’ve had since October of last year. The worst part is I know it’ll get worse before getting better, and there isn’t too damn much I can do about it.
Then I pop over to blivet, and read about the bullshit Hal is dealing with regarding that poseur and charlatan John Edwards, and I start to get even more angry in sympathy and disgust (You can tell how pissed I was, I used French words to describe Edwards).
Then I read further, and get to the bit Hal links to from Matt. He carries on a bit about his disdain for the aforementioned Mr. Edwards, and then he drops this gem:
Plus I hate it because he’s such a smug fucker that I’d like to see some of the dead show up and kick his ass for lying about talking to them. Imagine if Uncle Earl’s shambling, rotten corpse smashed in the door during a taping and ate Edward. That would be worth watching.
Okay, I’ll admit it’s sick, but I just lost it at this! This gave me my first laugh of the day, and it was a good one. I felt better immediately.
See, I’d been thinking impalement. This was so much more creative.
Dave has been playing with Tinderbox and has some ideas:
If the folks at Eastgate are listening: Enable Tinderbox as a Service in OS X. When I’m reading my e-mail, I’d like to be able to send a selected e-mail to Tinderbox as a note without having to cut and paste. WebArranger had a little background application that you included in your startup folder called Grabber. You could assign it a hotkey combination, and whatever text you selected would be “grabbed.” WebArranger didn’t have to be open, but when it did open, it looked in whatever folder the Grabber stored its snippets of information and imported them as unfiled text notes. I think some similar functionality could be added to Tinderbox, perhaps a Service isn’t the best implementation, but I think the idea has merit.
I heartily concur. Beyond even this, it’d be cool to have OS X services for Tinderbox that did things like grab the URL of a page and automagically create a bookmark note for that page in Tinderbox. Actually, a general implementation of a service that allowed you to highlight text, and send the higlighted text to a note with you choice of note prototype would do the trick. This would be amazingly useful to me, especially on the iBook, where I use utilities to hide applications I’m not currently working in because screen real-estate is limited. Having to switch to Tinderbox from, say, a web browser and go through the actions of creating a new note isn’t really onerous, but being able to do it through a service would be a nice work flow enhancement.
I also agree with Dave’s assertion that Tinderbox acts like a Knowledge Management application. Yes, it does content management, but the way I use it is in service of KM, both personally and at an organizational level. That integration of KM and content management is one of the things that makes it so damn valuable.
You may remember the gauss rifle instructions so many bloggers linked to a couple of weeks ago. I too was intrigued with the device, and having a robotics and manufacturing consulting facility at my disposal, I passed on the link to our engineers, with the comment “I expect you can scale this up to something more impressive.”
My merry mad men took me at my word. Our gauss rifle uses 12 magnets rather than the recommended four, with a corresponding increasing in penetrating power. I’ve documented our experiments in smashing things with it here. The Quicktime movies are particularly fun to watch.
We just had an earthquake. I know 5.0 is no big deal to West Coast folks, but any earthquake is big news here.
I didn’t actually feel it, though some guys in the shop did, and so did Terri. I had just gone out for lunch, and noticed the geese on a nearby pond having a fit. I thought I’d tell the guys when I got back to get prepared for an earthquake, since the animals were going nuts. Little did I realize I was right!
No damage here in Indianapolis, though they are reporting fallen chimneys and broken windows in Evansville.
Damn. I guess this means I have to polish up my katana and buy some ammunition for the shotgun.
I tend to take things from FOX News with a grain of salt, but if this article really indicates what’s going on in Saudi Arabia, I think it’s time to recognize that we may very well end up with something every bit as horrible as WWII before this whole mess is over. When you have a government cynically manipulating a population already inclined toward irrational, magical thinking, you always end up with trouble. Even worse, there’s about zero chance of turning any of the major Arab countries into a liberal democracy short of using armed force; they just don’t understand how to do it, and their religion is dead set against it. Radical Islam is headed for a holocaust the likes of which we haven’t seen for sixty years. Unfortunately, it looks like we get to play too, whether we want to or not.
Most of all, we need realize that the Saudis are not our friends.
Happy Father’s Day to all of you out there who are dads. I’m hoping that Hal, Alwin, Eric, Doc and Dave are all getting to spend some time relaxing with their families, enjoying this time set aside for recognizing that most important of roles a man can be, a father.
I wish my dad a Happy Father’s Day as well. As I’ve told him more than once, when I was 18, he was the dumbest man in the world. Somehow, about by the time I reached 22, he became one of the smartest. I’m not sure how he became so smart in so short a time, but I hope that one day I can be as smart and wise as he ended up. Certainly, being a father has turned out to be one of the few things that I’ve done that’s really important.
Thus far today, I’ve had some nice cards and brunch at our favorite brunch restaurant, Le Peep, as well as a nice Frank Lloyd Wright table clock as a gift from the kids. Just now everyone is headed out to a nearby park for a walk in the woods. Unfortunately, I’ve somehow managed to hurt my ankle, so I won’t be walking with them.
Jason Kottke has much the same reaction to his new iBook and Airport as I did back in January. Meanwhile, Doc waxes orgasmic about a revolutionary moment with public access Wi-Fi in London.
Sitting here on the couch, posting, I have to agree with both of them. A laptop with wireless access does change how people interact with computers. As Wi-Fi “hotspots” proliferate, and access is more ubiqutious, I think some incredible things are going to happen. One change will be an extension of how people interact socially, as the power of Internetworking becomes omnipresent. The other significant change has to do with the augmentation of human intelligence and capabilities, as we increasingly rely on always-on, wireless, networked computers not only to communicate with each other, but to extend our memories and our reach.
The tools are starting to get really good. I can’t wait to see what the next five years will bring.
Twitter invisible republic blipprBlog at WordPress.com
Prologue theme by Automattic
