The Tom Blog

More Pictures I Want to Save

2009-03-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

Apparently I had posted this to my "Yahoo! Briefcase" back in 2004. Who even knew I had such a thing?

Funny, but in a 2004 sort of way.

And then there's this picture of Batman Boners which also has to be preserved.

Stewardess Turns Pilot

2008-11-21T22:31:00.000-08:00

I have posted anything in a bit, and I'm kinda wandering the tubes tonight, so I thought I'd share this little tidbit.

It seems that last January, on an Air Canada flight over the Atlantic the co-pilot went crazy and one of the stewardesses with a commercial pilots license had to step in and help the pilot land the plane. Now, I imagine the pilot was able to do all the real work, but having an extra set of hands would be the norm, and with a bunch of people on board you can't be to careful.

Fully story here http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/72078/Stewardess-turns-pilot-in-jet-drama/

Giant Spider

2008-10-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

This is not the spider that I have recently tweeted about, but Genevieve is sending me links like this one so I thought I'd post some old pictures from when I visited Papua New Guinea. It's hard to tell, but this guy's (or girl's) body is like 2 inches long. I didn't actually want to stick my thumb close enough to get a really good reference shot.

From Giant Spider

Bo Burnham

2008-10-19T10:39:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised I haven't done a post about this guy before back when I first saw him on the Internets. He's an up and coming young comedian (i.e. he's all of barely 18) that I just saw last night with Genevieve, Quinton, and some other friend of Quinton's that I don't know.

Here's his early signature song, with horrible horrible sound

And then here is a much more recent video with much better non-blown out sound.

And then for the record, his real actual website http://www.boburnham.com/

Brains! Must eat brains!

2008-10-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

This photo really doesn't need a caption. For the record, it is right after the last 2008 presidential debate when McCain was trying to walk around the desk to shake hands with the moderator. Note to self, keep tongue in month at all times when on a presidential debate stage.

Voter Guide the Second Coming: City Stuff

2008-10-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

Finally got my official City and County of San Francisco voter "pamphlet". Why I get a "guide" from the state that is like 30 pages long and a "pamphlet" from the city that is 200 pages long is a little bit of a mystery, but whatever. The biggest difference is that the city pamphlet also includes "paid arguments" that are not in the state guide.

But enough about that, on to the picks:

President & Vice President: Barack Obama & Joe Biden - not a surprise considering I've actually given these guys money and even went door to door for them.

U.S. Representative (District 8): Nancy Pelosi - I'm not super happy with her but I know nothing about the other people. I guess this is how incumbents keep their offices.

State Senator (District 3): Mark Leno - Again the incumbent. Really the challengers have a burden of proof to make themselves known to me that these people have not met.

State Assembly (District 13): Tom Ammiano - As a current city supervisor my impression is that he is generally respected, so sure, let's have him move up. He's also the Democrat for what that's worth.

Judge (Seat #12): Gerardo Sandoval - Here's an example of a challenger getting an ad in front of me, criticizing the incumbent, and then the incumbents statement being basically "just keep me". Nope, you gotta answer better than that. You're outtie buddy!

School Board: OMG, this is a bunch of people that I have almost no info about so I've done my best to pick people based on instinct after reading their statements. These are my picks, but I do not have strong defensible reasons. Marigrace Cohen, Emily Murase, Alexander Lee, Barbara Lopez

Community College Board: Same deal as School Board, these are gut picks. Milton Marks, Mary Hernandez, Steve Ngo, Natalie Berg

Bart Director (District 7): Lynette Sweet - Another incumbent without a challenger that has done anything to get in front of me. I hate this, but it's a reality. She gets to stay.

Now for the local propositions. These are pretty fascinating because the Mayor can put anything he wants out as a proposition just because he feels like it. He clearly uses this power to fuck with the Board of Supervisors. This is a dynamic of city politics I wasn't aware of before, and which honestly seems to result in pettiness. Now, on to it...

A - Yes - Bonds for earthquake retro-fit stuff at General Hospital. No one opposes, not a bad idea.

B - No - A set aside of property taxes for affordable housing that doesn't appear to be needed. Seems like the same results can come from other places with the set aside. Set asides are bad bad bad.

C - Yes - No opposition. Prohibiting city employees from sitting on most boards. Not a bad idea.

D - Yes - Develop Pier 70 by my house and make sure some of the historical buildings are preserved. This will help my property values :) Oh, and there is no opposition.

E - No - There is no need to change the rules for recall petitions from just 10% of voters in a district to a higher 15% or 20%. Let's keep the officials a little more afeared of recall. Apparently it doesn't happen anyway so there's no need to change this stuff.

F - No - This would shift mayorial elections to coincide with presidential ones. I don't think we need that. I understand the argument to save money and that not so many people turn out, but I am more worried that the presidential politics will overshadow the local politics.

G - Yes - Let's allow city employees to purchase their way into a new retirement benefit that was added a few years ago. The best argument against it is that it is a dangerous precedent, which I think is valid but weak.

H - Yes - This is probably the biggest issue on the ballot, or at least the one with the biggest ad campaign. After reading the actual text, I find the arguments against it to be fear-mongering. The arguments claim that this will somehow cost taxpayers, but the bonds that it authorizes the board to issue without further votes would be revenue bonds, not general obligation ones. Revenue bonds pay for themselves. This could lead to San Francisco having a publicly owned electrical supply that is hugely based on clean energy. I think this is good plan. I will not be surprised if this fails though because the opposition campaign is so large. Doesn't mean I'll give in easily though.

I - Yes - This is actually included in H as well, but it is un-opposed separately. Creates an independent ratepayer advocate office for utility rates.

J - Yes - Let's bring on a historic preservation committee with professional members to figure out what to be doing in this area.

K - Yes - Not enforcing laws against prostitution sounds good, and overall probably is, but this is a shaky yes for me. I'd prefer there be some regulation and testing required, but I marginally agree with the notion that brothel style laws don't fit our current situation very well. Definitely a very shaky yes.

L - Yes - This is mayor versus board politics, but I think that they shouldn't let this program be a pawn. These community justice center things are way way good and get a bunch of stupid stuff out of courts.

M - No - A shaky no to not add additional renter protections. They seem unnecessary to me and I'm more in favor of not making laws unless we really need them.

N - Yes - Increasing taxes on larger (i.e. commercial) real estate transactions seems like it will provide a new good revenue stream. Need some of these in order to balance the budget I would say.

O - Yes - Replacing the 911 "fees" with actual "taxes" preserves 911 funding. I see no reason to cut that. I'm not entirely happy with the way this proposition explicitly adds VoIP service as taxable, but I figure it's probably a little irrational to think that VoIP really is any different, and thus it should probably have the same taxes on it.

P - No - Changing the way the Transportation Authority Board works is just stupid mayor versus board power play crap. Stop this!

Q - Yes - The payroll tax might as well cover lawyers, doctors, and other professionals the same as other small businesses.

R - Yes - Sure, why not, let's rename the sewage plant after Bush. It's harmless and fun.

S - Yes - I really want to vote No because this stupidly worded and forces the city policy to be one of influencing voters in a particular direction, however, I feel the direction is correct and think it might help decrease voters adding more of these stupid budget set-asides. Set asides are bad bad bad.

T - Yes - Providing more substance abuse services saves money in the long term in health care and other service costs.

U - Yes - Again a "city policy shall be ..." thing that I dislike, but it does send a message to our federal representatives that they should not continue to fund Iraq without it being for withdrawal. This is probably a shaky yes because I don't like the policy shall be stuff, but I probably agree with the policy.

V - Yes - Shall we tell the school board to bring back JROTC - hells yeah! Military recruiting is not bad, and JROTC is way more than that. Stop demonizing the military.

Whew! This has literally taken me hours to come up with these opinions. For everyone reading I hope this helps you some, but please post comments to let me know how I'm wrong.

California Voter Guide - Part the First, State Propositions

2008-10-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

I always like to actually read our propositions here in California and make up my own opinions about them as much as possible. Often I don't seem to have the time, but this year with all the focus on the politics of the presidential election it has made me actually remember to do this. Thus, here are my picks for the statewide propositions. There are a bunch of San Francisco propositions that I have not yet received the voter guide for, so those will have to come in a later post.

Prop 1A - Yes - High speed rail is a good thing. I would love to be able to actually take the train to LA

Prop 2 - No - I realize that being nice to farm animals seems like a humanitarian thing to do, but I agree that this is ill-conceived and would most likely cause more harm than good in the way of increased samonella and other issues since it would probably stop all in-state egg production.

Prop 3 - No - In general I'm opposed to additional bonds without really good reasons. This appears to be mostly a "it's for the children" plea for money that I doubt really has a good ROI.

Prop 4 - No - Oh hell no to any sort of "girls have to tell their parents before getting an abortion" type bill. This is government trying to enforce morality in a really stupid and dangerous way.

Prop 5 - Yes - I'm not happy about the cost and allocation of money here, but the concept of replacing incarceration with rehab for drug offenders would have a hugely positive effect on prison overcrowding and overall on the budget issues. Plus, the war on drugs is stupid.

Prop 6 - No - The cops want guaranteed funding. I philosophically oppose mandated funding levels. I'd prefer the government have the freedom to vary budget according to demand.

Prop 7 - No - This is a reasonably complication proposition that uses words that sound good, but in reality appears to be a way for the non-public utilities to squeeze out the public utilities and to setup a situation where they would have no incentive to actually implement renewable energy properly. This stinks of corporations trying to influence public policy to increase their profit margins.

Prop 8 - No - VERY IMPORTANT : This is the stupid gay marriage ban. Retarded. Enough said.

Prop 9 - No - So called "victim's rights" actually means more expense and complication to operating our prisons while being a poorly written proposition to begin with. This is silly.

Prop 10 - No - Screw T. Boone Pickens and his convoluted attempts to turn energy policy into his own natural gas windfall. Plus, $5 billion in bonds - are you fucking kidding me? Notice how I've already voted against less than a billion for so called children's hospitals? (Although I did agree to $10 billion for trains. Trains are cool, kids suck I guess is what I'm saying :) )

Prop 11 - Yes - Another complicated proposition where I feel at least one side is misrepresenting who they are and what their motives are. If you read the actual proposition I think this is a reasonable law for taking the redistricting out of the hands of the officials who have an interest in screwing it up and putting it in an otherwise non-interested parties hands. I think it is actually a big strength that not only are the redistricting commissioners not elected (they are chosen by random draw from all qualified applicants) - but they also can't BE elected for the length of time that the district maps they drew are in effect. That's only going to attract pretty non-partisan people I would say. Yes, there is room for abuse, but I feel it's less room than the current system.

Prop 12 - Yes - Another $1 billion for a program that helps veterans, no one opposes, and that is setup to pay back the money. This is really just the state co-signing veterans loans. It would be silly to oppose this.

Rafting on the American River

2008-08-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

Once again we returned to Mariah Wilderness Adventures for the 2-day Middle and South Fork trip. Jessica, Jen, and I got pawned off to ride in a boat from a different company for the first day, which is what this picture is from. This is going in to Tunnel Chute with our guide Jose. Apparently Jessica is the only one who fits in the bottom of the boat, but that oar I'm holding sure isn't going to go anywhere!

Reality Box Labs Has Launched

2008-08-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

The latest and greatest thing since sliced bread is now publicly available to the world.

View the press release on Yahoo!

But don't forget to signup at www.realityboxlabs.com

More Batman

2008-08-01T23:57:00.000-07:00

Once again, preserving the silliness from the web.

Have I ever mentioned that I totally love Batman? And not just because they are so GAY, but because they are so gay AND they kick ass. :P

New Monitor is The Big

2008-07-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

My old monitor decided to take more than 5 minutes to turn on. This had been gradually building. So what's a boy to do? Buy a new monitor of course!

At least this made me clean off my desk.

Of course, i don't really know what I'm going to do with the stuff from the desk.

Hipsip.com is now dead!

2008-07-07T17:31:00.001-07:00

Well that didn't last long ...

It's actually been dead for at least a month. You get basically a 500 error if you go there now. I left Sipcall at the beginning of May, so don't blame me.

My new deal is Reality Box Labs. It is the cool. More info later as I'm currently trying to convince a herd of servers to agree on what time it is, and then after that, to send all their handy log files over to one main logging server. It's always the "simple" things that take awhile.

Hipsip.com is now live!

2008-03-28T11:14:00.001-07:00

Actually we made it fully live to the public about 2 weeks ago. Surf to Hipsip.com to check it out.

This is the VoIP startup I'm involved it that lets you make Skype calls from your mobile without needing to install any additional software on your phone. It does currently require that you run our Hipsip Bridge application on your home machine though. This lets all the people who don't want to give us their Skype credentials use the service securely.

We support both Windows and Mac, so you have no excuse not to use it.

For the heck of it, here's a Mac screenshot of the status window. The bridge is meant to run in the background so normally you just see a little icon in the status area of the desktop (in the system tray on Windows or in the menu bar on Mac).

Catching up on some pictures

2008-03-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

I like pictures I find on the web, so since I haven't written any post type thing in a long time, how about some pictures!

First up, we have another Batman and Robin themed thing. This time showing their spectacular wall climbing effects.

And then one that was on reddit just today. This is important advice.

Because it had to be preserved

2008-01-23T15:24:00.000-08:00

I was cleaning off my old desktop machine and ran across this picture. I wanted to make sure it was preserved for prosperity.

What do these kitties have in common?

2007-07-03T00:37:00.000-07:00

They are all plotting world domination, but one group has an airforce - not to mention longer claws.

Lions from here and kitties from here.

These were the photos I couldn't cut and paste from my phone. I had to go upstairs and used a real computer :(

still grooving on the phone

2007-07-03T00:12:00.000-07:00

Well it's been a couple of days, but today was the first real use of the new shiny toy in public. I ran in to a friend I hadn't seen since prior to going to New Zealand and the phone worked super well to show off a few pjotos from the trip. That right there was one of the predictably cool uses foe the thing.

However, there are definitely some things that are not at all ideal.
1. NO CUT AND PASTE! Arrrrrghhh!this phone just begs you to find cool things on the web and share them with others via email, but alas no soup for you. The best I've done is to save some reddit links that I might remember to go back and send to someone later. Couldn't even copy them into a blog post :(
2. Safari crashes sometimes. Now admittedly it doesn't crash much but it does crash rather than throw an error and that is lame.
3. No flash. This was known and isn't a huge deal, but since the phone invites you to do regular style browsing this is more noticable than you might think.

All in all I think it's probably not quite ready for my sister yet but will probably teach that quality level soon. Oh yeah, for the record it looks like the battery is good for somewhere between about an hour and a half to two hours of WiFi browsing. Since it's botching at me now I guess that means I'm done for the night.

Haseman wants to have a "let's break the iPhone" hack-a-thin this Friday so hopefully some fun info can come out of that. Peace out.

New iPhone

2007-06-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

well I've got a brand new shiny iPhone. It apparently didn't want to capitalize the first Letter of this post so you know we'll see how well this works out. So far this is one of the longest things I have typed and it has been a little bit painful. I also have crashed Safari with the blogger WYSIWYG editor. There are definitely some rough edges in some places with Apple's graY new ideas about phones but we will just have to see what the overall result is. The keyboard is pretty good but I do want to type faster than it would like for me to.

The good news is of course that this is a lot of new software so I am sure that there will be a number of improvements as they get some more experience in the field and feedback from users.

Exciting times ahead my friends, exciting times ahead.

Indoor Model Airplane Contest Winner

2006-09-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

My dad would have loved this. He and I used to build model airplanes, although we were mostly of the outdoor variety. He had a friend, Dan Walton, who was HUGELY into models including all this crazy indoor stuff.

the show tonight

2006-09-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

Will explain more later

Hilarious Hippie-dom

2006-08-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

A lovely cover of Outkast's Hey Ya - including mixing the video together. Originally found on some blog I'm totally not going to credit. To bad for them! :P

Funny Monkey

2006-08-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

Dog no likee monkey. Monkey make funny.

Long time no blog

2006-08-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

I'm lame. I should blog more. I find it so annoying to get around to doing it. Oh well.

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

2006-05-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

Found it via BoingBoing, it's freakin' hilarial Link.

Otaku From USA

2006-05-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

Japanese media looking at geeks from the US who travel to Japan for Anime/Manga related tours and so forth. Interesting.

Jesus - google URL's are long!