Archive for November, 2008

Quote of the Day: Someone should get fired for this.

November 26th, 2008

Um, isn’t gender one of the first boxes you complete on the form when documenting an animal?

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) — Puzzled zookeepers in northern Japan have discovered the reason why their attempts to mate two polar bears kept failing: Both are female.

Zoo solves mystery of celibate polar bears – CNN.com.

Quote of the Day: Truth or fiction?

November 25th, 2008

I’m totally unsure how to classify this headline.  The article is not a game review or some fan-boy slash.  Its actually talking about things that some government agents claim has happened.  So I’ll suspend judgement and just let you absorb the article as best you can

Mythical Female Snipers Stalk Russians

As the story had it, these stone-cold, blue eyed killers were said to be from the Baltics — or Ukraine. They were sometimes described as Olympic biathletes recruited as mercenary sharpshooters by Chechen commanders.

The Return of ‘White Tights’: Mythical Female Snipers Stalk Russians | Danger Room from Wired.com.

Quote of the Day: How data scales

November 24th, 2008

A great write up on the basic idea of how we use data and how those things change when the amount of data increases by a couple orders of magnitude.

If I were to convert the storage on my cellphone to floppy disks on my old Apple clone, it would require about 57,000 disks. That would be a stack of floppy disks almost 500 feet high.

…A gigabyte is a billion letters. What does that mean? We just don’t think about it.

Good Math, Bad Math : Scale: How Large Quantities of Information Change Everything.

Now here’s a guy we need on the economic team

November 24th, 2008

Peter Schiff is really smart.  See a better write up of why he is so smart.

Stay in School Part Deux

November 24th, 2008

This is getting a little silly on a couple of levels.  First, it appears that Subway’s credit card processing problems are spread all over the metro area.  Second, apparently they couldn’t get them resolved between Friday and Sunday which is an awfully long time for such a thing to persist.  Last and certainly not least, Subway appears to be incapable of hiring anyone who can exercise proper word choice.  See earlier example.

Please, read a book this weekend instread of watching the parade.  We will all thank you for it.

Trying something new

November 21st, 2008

So the last post was a fun little collaboration between my phone, the Nokia tablet, and some kind soul who had a wireless router within range of Planet Sub.

This raises a question for me. There is a nice app for the tablet that lets you update microblogs from Twitter and Jaiku. The Wordpress client I’m using now also has hooks into Flikr. So how many services do I need to use in order to feel like I am reaching my nerd potential?

Stay in school kids

November 21st, 2008

Word choice matters. Phoenetics only get you so far.

Quote of the Day: How to do things right

November 20th, 2008

A really splendid letter from an Eenigneer at Honda about why Honda works and what that says about how to be successful.  Makes me want to run out and start a business.  Please, take some time to read the whole thing.  Its well worth it.

Try and picture this. On my first day of work, no one told me what to do. On the second day, the same thing happened, and on the third. That’s as much as I could take. I decided to meet with everyone I was coming in contact with to find out more about their individual talents and personalities, and to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, I was developing a picture of how things really were, and who needed what, and I became creatively involved in defining my own participation in relation to the skills I could bring to the table.

Letter to a Young Engineer from a purported Honda employee – Boing Boing Gadgets.

A brief word of advice

November 16th, 2008

If you are unplugging your KVM switch from the desktop to try and reset it, and if you plug the USB back in without looking and if you are in a hurry and not paying much attention, then it is possible to shove a USB plug into an ethernet port in such a way that it feels like a pretty good fit.

If you do this, your KVM will not work.

That is all.  Thank you

The anti-social networking site

November 13th, 2008

After a recent URL typo I got to thinking.  Where is Farce Book?  Well, as always it was only one Google away and viola!

farcebook is an anti-social network for people looking to keep track of their enemies, remind their enemies that they’re still out there, and to generally annoy their “friends.” It has many features that you’d expect in a modern web application. We’ve whipped up this bad boy in just a handful of hours and can’t wait until we get our share of that $15 billion!

Even better for me is the fact that you can download the source and run your own anti-social site.  This may have to go on the home server tonight. In the meantime I am now going to invite all my foes to join the site.