Actually, all things considered, right now is pretty awesome. You can buy a device for about $200 which has more floating point computing power than a Cray did in 1972 and carry it around in your pocket. Its battery can store energy equivalent to a small hand grenade and can run the device for hours without plugging into the wall. And you can use it to communicate with virtually anybody on the planet, sometimes by bouncing radio signals off of aluminum canisters we’ve flung into outer space.

That’s pretty cool.

I totally concur.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
After thoroughly enjoying the HBO series True Blood for two seasons I decieded to give the Sookie Stackhouse books a try. (This worked well for me in reading Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan books after watching Bones.)

The first season of the show is incredibly faithful to the book so most of the major plot points were not the surprises they could have been. However, lots of little details are just different enough to add to the experience of both the show and the books.

You follow the story of Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, LA. A Vampire named Bill moves into town in the process of mainstreaming. Sookie is taken with Bill since she can’t read him. Then, women who seem to be assocated with vampires start dying around town. Was it Bill? Is it Sookie’s brother? And the mystery is on…

It seem to fall somewhere between a mystery with supernatural elements and a bodice ripper. At times it almost felt “too girly” but the supernatural characters and happenings allow me to accept the material where usually only Fabio dares to tread.

The writing style and my interest made it an incredibly quick read. All in all, if you liked the shows, you’ll like the books. If you haven’t seen the show, you’ll still like the books if you’re looking for what I’d venture to call “a girly Harry Dresden.”

View all my reviews >>

Last week the 3.0 software update for the AppleTV came out.  On-line there was a lot of grousing about it, and that has inspired this post.

The Roku SoundBridge that we had in the family room was taken out by Thor.  We didn’t realize how much we liked having a digital music player there until it was gone.  We let it go for a few months, but it felt like something was missing.  In the meantime, my buddy JD was talking about how much he liked his AppleTV and was going as far as dropping cable due to it.  While out visiting, I got to see Evo and Sheila’s AppleTV playing music with the photo montage screensaver gliding by as we chatted.  All that together, plus some reading up, planted the seeds for my purchase of an AppleTV with the 160GB drive earlier in the year.

Upfront I should make it very clear, what I was looking for initially was a replacement digital music player, and the AppleTV provided that.  I considered it a bonus that it had the ability to show photos, youtube, and video content on a screen more conducive to group watching that any of our laptops or monitors, our 42″ DLP HDTV.  Overall, we’ve been extremely happy with it.

Maybe its because we came into it with the proper expectations.  It is in a really weird product space that not many consumers understand.  Many companies have entered it with similar (and even less featureful) products and left the space.  An example would be my once beloved Turtle Beach Audiotron.  Others keep plugging along like Logitech’s Squeezebox line.  Apple has called it their hobby, and I think that may be because its difficult to tell consumers why they might want one.  Or it could be I’m just the weird person who wants it and consumers in general don’t want one.  I do think its poorly named, though.  The name implies, to me, you can watch TV on it, instead of purchased/downloaded/sycned content.  I can see people thinking its a DVR based on the name.

A lot of the bitching I’ve seen about the AppleTV has been about what its not.  Its not a Media Center PC, it isn’t a DVR, it can’t play every format under the sun, its underpowered, it can’t play DVDs, it can’t do better than 720p, it has to be slaved to iTunes, etc.  Except for the format issue, I don’t care about any of the rest of them.  In fact, the fact it syncs to iTunes like any other device is one thing I like about it.  When I’m modifying playlists, etc, for my iPhone and other iPods, its reflected in the home media player.  Anyway, how it is now, works for me and my family, and we get a lot of use and enjoyment out of it¹.

99% of the time we’re playing music and enjoying the mosaic of photos that goes by.  Actually, the photo montage screensaver has increased the enjoyment we get out of our digital photos.  Every once in while we see a photo we’ve almost forgotten about and its a pleasant surprise. The other 1% of our usage time is playing back video that I’m slowing ripping from our DVDs library for the kids. Having whatever they might want to watch without switching DVDs or getting them scratched or forgetting them in the car, etc, is pretty nice. I ripped all the Disney Classic Cartoon Favorites we have so far, and the kids can easily watch any one of those in any order.  Its playback is good enough for what I’ll use it to play back, despite people’s wanting of more.  Maybe in the future we’ll want more, but it does what we need, again.

Anything could be better, so what could be better for me?

• Mostly supporting a wider array of formats.  It plays MP3s and AACs fine, so I’m good on audio, but the video is kinda limiting.  However, I can rip right to the MP4/M4V/h.264 format it wants but random longer non-youtube things off the web require conversion.
• Maybe some better cooling.  That box runs hotter than hell when its playing back video.

Just a couple of general thoughts on the 3.0 upgrade:

• The 2.x software had some quirks and slowness, and I’ve noticed in the past 5 days a lot of that are cleared up.  It still stutters when iTunes connects to it, but the going catatonic while you sync when is playing has gone away.  Overall, syncing is more pleasant.
• The menus seem to be MUCH faster
• The menu placement of “My Music/Movies/Etc” being first is much better. I’ve got the AppleTV to play my stuff, not always rent stuff.
• I’ve been loving the Genius Mixes on my iPhone and iTunes, I’m so glad to have them on the AppleTV

The Remote app that Apple released for the iPhone and iPod Touch is also a great addition.  You can use it to follow control the AppleTV with an interface similar to the iPod app on the iPhone/Touch.  It also will pop up a keyboard for when you want to enter text into things like the YouTube search box.  This is really useful when using it with the next thing I talk about…

There is one other feature I’ve set up, but I haven’t had a chance to fully use is the fact that the AppleTV can act as an AirTunes host.  When paired with my Airport Express (and it is in turn paired with some speakers) we can have the start of whole house music.  Next party we have I’m going to put this to a practical test.  Walking around controlling the tunes from my phone through the whole house… It doesn’t take much to excite me these days.

In any case, my main point here was to address that the AppleTV does work as it is for some people.  It’s not a media center, and that was okay for me as I wasn’t looking for one.

[1] And…because of my nature, I have hacked it to run boxee, but I didn’t use that all that often. So there is some under the cover upgradability that isn’t too bad.

206 Bones by Kathy Reichs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kathy Reichs’s Temperance Brennan is back again. This time starting out in a well described Chicago. She ends up back in Canada, but I did appreciate how well represented Chicago geography was represented.

I ripped through the book in a few days, due to Reichs’s writing which gels well with me as a reader. There were a few things I didn’t see coming, or at least not in the form they did, which is what I want in a mystery. That said, the only weakness to Reichs’s books is that many of them feel formulaic. Many of these motions I felt like I had gone through with Tempe before.

All in all I still largely enjoyed the book.

View all my reviews >>

Since we used a lot of open source libraries to save us time, I need to have those built super-universal as well.  The first one I tackled was curl, which had some issues due to configure, so I had to write a shell script to do the hardwork for me.  It needs to run configure three times, and I got a lot of the information for it from http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2009-05/0000.html.

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#!/bin/sh
export CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/encap/curl-7.19.6 --with-ssl=/usr --without-ca-bundle --disable-dependency-tracking
 
cp include/curl/curlbuild.h include/curl/curlbuild32.h
 
make distclean
 
export CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc64"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/encap/curl-7.19.6 --with-ssl=/usr --without-ca-bundle --disable-dependency-tracking
 
cp include/curl/curlbuild.h include/curl/curlbuild64.h
 
make distclean
 
export CFLAGS="-O -g -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -arch i386 -arch ppc -arch x86_64 -arch ppc64"
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/encap/curl-7.19.6 --with-ssl=/usr --without-ca-bundle --disable-dependency-tracking
 
cat > include/curl/curlbuild.h <<EOF
#ifdef __LP64__
#include "curlbuild64.h"
#else
#include "curlbuild32.h"
#endif 
EOF
 
make

There will be more of these as I build the other dependencies.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Some of the reviews I read of this book lead me to believe it would be more focused on the business side than the technology side. I was presently surprised that I felt it was 70% or greater about the technology. Having had a C=128 and using the heck out of it and having admired Amigas and their uses (but never having owned one,) my look at this book may be a bit biased.

From the technology side: for those who think they know how the personal computer space started, this book provides a different point a view from the very Apple and MS-centric stories you normally here. Commodore definitely deserves our praise every time we use cheap PCs at home, as they were the progenitor of “computers for the masses.” I was really entertained learning about the personalities that come up and developed the technology behind commodore and in the amazing amount of time they did it. Because I am the geek I am, I did easily identify with many of the people and I fondly remember using the technology they came up with.

From the business side: Its really illustrative of what someone with a vision can drive people towards. It also clearly illustrates how when the vision goes away how the waters get muddied quickly. There’s also lessons to be learned in not screwing people you need to succeed and maintaining a good relationship with them.

View all my reviews >>

It turns out the problems were broken id3 tags.  Now, if you ask me how they were broken, I honestly have no idea.  What I ended up doing is for mp3s that still had v1 tags, I removed the v1 tags.  My first thought was it was mp3s where v1 tags didn’t match v2 tags.  I used the excellent command line tool id3v2 to strip off the v1 tags, and then revisited the songs in iTunes information panel to make sure iTunes’s database matched what the songs now looked like.  Sync the iPhone, disconnect the iPhone, reconnect the iPhone, sync again, and boom, those files weren’t synced again.  Rinse and repeat until all were fixed until…

I ended up finding that a few of the 44 only had v2 tags, so it wasn’t the v1 tags alone.  On a whim I tried this fix which seemed to work: In iTunes I converted the v2 tags from say, version 2.3 to 2.2 and back, do the sync, rinse and repeat dance from above and that seemed to fix it.

On a related note, I found an excellent OS X only iTunes utility that does two very cool things I had been doing by hand: adding album art and lyrics.  Actually, I hadn’t been adding lyrics, but I’m considering it now that there is an easy way to do it.  The cool it called GimmieSomeTune.  What makes its album art gathering go above and beyond the iTunes’s native searching of the iTunes store is that if its not in the iTunes store, it’ll try to gather the album art from Amazon.  Amazon’s art has been hit and miss in terms of quality, but I prefer to have something there rather than the empty music symbol.  (You can also create your own default that will be put in place if iTunes can’t find it in either place.)  It also has some interesting features like last.fm integration, but I haven’t had a chance to play with that yet.

So, in brief, the permissions and WP_TEMP_DIR settings from the older article still stand.  However, you no longer need to edit wp-admin/includes/file.php. Now you just need to edit your wp-config.php and add the following towards the bottom:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

In looking at how little I blog at times, those bookmarks were often the only thing making my feed grow. I also can’t get much feedback on those links in how it works. So in thinking about how I want to present myself and my site online, I’ve decided to separate the tags back out.

For all zero of you who want to follow my bookmarks just follow the feed from my delicious feed.

One of the turning points for me was an observation a friend of mine made “What’s centrally located in everyone’s cube?  What’s the one thing they use more than anything else?  Now tell me, what’s the one thing they know the least about.”  People who are knowledge workers in the year 2009 should be able to do a few basic computer tasks.  If you cannot do those tasks, well…  “There are many exciting career opportunities in the fast food industry.”

So, I’ve decided to build a test…  I’ve got a few items for the test, but I think I’ll need some more.

1. Can you locate a file and copy it to a flash drive?
2. … burn it on a CD?
3. … attach it to e-mail?
4. … post it on the web (in any form)?
5. Can you create a simple PowerPoint/OpenOffice Presents/Keynote presentation?  (Prettiness not required.)
6. Can you sort data in Excel/OpenOffice Spreadseet/Numbers?
7. Can you navigate to a webpage (without getting the link in e-mail?)
8. Can you plug in a mouse/monitor/keyboard?
9. Can you add an entry to your cell phone address book? (No answer is okay if you don’t have one.)
10. Can you take the photos off your digital camera? (No answer is okay if you don’t have one.)
11. Set the screen saver to be password protected?

Okay, I do need more questions, but I’m off to another meeting at the conference I’m at.  More later…

And his first tweet appears to be “Comics are for children.”  He IS my evil twin.

It also makes me want to link to Anne’s idea of the best to learn Linux.

1. Thanking people for following you. Stop it, right now, everyone.  Just freaking stop it.  If over 1% of your tweets are thanking people for following you, I will smack you when next I see you.  Maybe I’m bucking the etiquette, but this annoys me more than anything else.
2. Feeling that you need to follow the people that follow you. No, you don’t.  Its a broadcast medium, and while it can be used for chat, it doesn’t mean you have to.  The closer your following:follower ratio is to 1:1 the less I think you actually have to say and thought you put into Twitter.  If you’re reading the whole world, how to you have time to create your own thoughts?
3. Changing your avatar more often then you change underwear. You’re not that pretty nor witty, knock it off.
4. Tweeting only that you have a new blog post. Stop it! I already have an RSS reader, kthx.

That’s my top four.  I’m sure I’m guilty of some from time to time, but damn it, stop it! I try to.  And I’m sure I’ll come up with more, maybe I’ll make this a series.

But I am always up for a game of strip specifications.

Thanks to David Harris for pointing out my doppelganger on twitter.

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great read, worth reading for anyone who likes to get their science geek. Gets as deep as it needs to into what it covers, but not deeper. Light fun science reading

Princeps’ Fury: Book Five of the Codex Alera by Jim Butcher

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
My favorite of the books so far. Sarah argues that it doesn’t advance the story far enough for her, but the characters are well fleshed out including Tavi growing into his own. The bad part is now I have to wait a month for the next book.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
A great breakdown and examination of how comics work and their place among other works of art. It gave me a much deeper appreciation for the language of comics that I had subconsciously learned.


View all my reviews.

As with any iPhone app not made by Apple, when you leave it, it will shut down and that won’t be much good until the notification API is up and around, and even then, it’d need IRC servers to support doing the notification and keeping some sort of connection/client information.  That’s right out as I don’t see any IRC servers really wanting to take on that additional tasks.  Reading the Colloquy FAQ, it suggested that one use an IRC bouncer/proxy.

On and off I always have considered making a middle wear irc server to persist connections and so I could use multiple clients.  However, I’ve never been motivated enough to really do something about it.  In general, gnu screen and ircII/irssi have filled my needs.  With the mobile Colloquy, I’ll want to be able to keep a persistent connections coming in and out of the app.  So I get the happy circumstance of where I go “I’d like something like this” and the Internet provides and saves me a bunch of time and gives me a working solution.  (The downside is a lot of cool coding I could have done, but probably never have gotten around to.)

After doing some quick web searching, I’ve decided to give ZNC a go as that middlewear layer.  It seems to do everything I want, including the ability to have multiple irc clients hook into the instances its running for me.  It also works with any standard IRC client, which is a huge plus.  I didn’t have to retrain myself at all.  It doesn’t matter if I’m using irssi from Linux, Colloquy from my MacBook or iPhone, or xChat from wherever, its all the same irc instance with the same messages AT the same time.  Each client hooks into ZNC which has already hooked into the servers and channels that I frequent.  I can hook into ZNC over ssl from any standard IRC client and it just works.  I can also see writing a module for ZNC that will take advantage of the iPhone notification API should it ever arrive.

About 6 hours in, and I’m loving it.  IRC session ubiquity and I’m happy.  I can pop it up on my phone and IRC on the go, or just use a local client on my mac instead of sshing back home and using irssi.  I’ll probably still use irssi 99% of the time, but having options and being able to jump on from my phone will help.  IRC, how like crack you are and how I can’t quit you.  I did run into one problem with irssi and it not being able to do multiple connections to what it thinks is the same host, but I found a way around it after reading this.

Also, in rereading this post before I put it out on the web, I realize it doesn’t take much to amuse me these days.

First, the games I’ve spent the most time playing:

Buzz Quiz TV – The name pretty much sums up what it is, a multi-player trivia quiz show for your PS3 and a very welcome addition to our house.  There are numerous versions of this game for the PS2 and PSP with different question slants and this is the series first entrance onto the PS3.  It comes with 4 wireless “buzz” controllers for the players.  Its a nice little interface that works well with the game.  A common complaint online, and one that I have as well, is that for a game called “Buzz” you hardly ever use the big red buzzer at the top, most of the time you’re using the multi-color answer buttons.  We’re enjoying it a lot, especially when you have more than 2 people playing.  At least two of the multi-player rounds work better when you have more than one competitor to pick on.  If you don’t have any friends with you, you can also play ’sofa vs sofa’ online.  The game is also easily expanded through additional categories purchased via the Playstation Store or via user-content quizzes created at MyBuzzQuiz.com.

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe – One day the people at Midway’s video game division said “Keith Garner does not own enough of our stuff, how can we make a game JUST FOR HIM.  Let’s see, he’s a big DC comics dork and he’s always been fond of Mortal Kombat, while not always being that good at it.  Hey!  Let’s make him a video game peanut butter cup.”  Honestly, I like this game too much so I don’t know if I can honestly say if its a good game or not.  The gameplay has gone back to more classic Mortal Kombat mostly 2D fighting compared to the last two PS2 games, which is good for me as a player.  (You can still move in a 3rd dimension usefully, but its not a huge requirement.)  The characters from both universes look really good (thanks, Unreal engine!) and the DC characters special moves are pretty good and in-line with what they should be.  For example, Captain Marvel does have the awesome Shazam lightening attack that’s been popular post-Kingdom Come.  It just makes me giddy as a school girl to hear things like “Kitana vs. Green Lantern…FIGHT!”  This game sets the fan-boy in me to 11.  Even if you don’t like DC comics, its a pretty good fighter.  You can also go online to get embarrassed with how bad you are.

The games I’ve played a bit, but not enough:

Fallout 3 – I’ve always been a big fan of the Fallout series, despite not completing the first two.  Come to think of it, I was a fan of Wastland way back in the day, which was done by a lot of the same people.  I think I’ll be firing up Parallels just to play those first two again and actually try to finish them.  I’ve played about an hour of Fallout 3, which means I’ve just barely scratched the surface.  To be fair, I played the first hour twice as I was working to understand the UI and combat the first time.  Its not that its bad, I’m just rusty with these games.  In fact, I find the interface really nice now that I’ve gotten the hang of it.  I do find myself being a little too goody-too-shoes, but that’s my nature, I guess.  In any case, the feel, the voice acting, and the concepts so far are stellar.  I just need to find time to lock the kids away and play it.  Looks like lots of late nights coming up.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – I downloaded the demo on the PS3 and liked it enough to request it as a potential Christmas gift.  So far, I’ve only played the first mission.  You get to play a Jedi in full control of his powers in a 3D environment, how can you go wrong?  So far, I’m liking it.  Again, I’m still getting the hang of the interface and powers, but I’ve done the first mission (or 2 if you consider the prologue) and am looking forward to playing more.  My only complaint with this game is load time.  Despite loading 2.5 gig of stuff onto the hard drive, it seems to take forever to leave the game environment and go to the options screens and then to move around in the options screens.  I’m not sure if that’s a bug in the current version of the game, or if its just being hampered by the PS3’s “measly” 256MB of RAM.  In either case, that’s been an annoyance.  As long as you stay in the game, its a non-issue though.  I just had too much Evan messing with the remote, jumping on my lap, etc when last I played so I really noticed it then.

I should also mention I got the Sony PS3 Wireless Keypad.  For the PS3’s browser, Sony Home, or any game that has some text input/chat, this keypad isn’t too bad.  It can snap onto a sixaxis controller or you can use it separately, as it has its own battery.  It reminded me of typing on a Hiptop/Sidekick so I was right into it.  Not sure if its a good value at $50, but its been a good accessory to have.

This meme requires me to share seven facts about myself.  The hard part about this will be coming up with 7 facts that will be interesting to people not me.

1. I too often accept things the way they are. This description will be mostly slanted in looking at myself as a pogrammer, but this is where I can identify it best.  On a day to day basis this acceptance often makes me feel stifiled in creativity due to my lack of skill in identifying problems.  I can come up with great and creative solutions, but actually finding the interesting problems to solve if difficult because I accept that’s how things are, and don’t find shortcuts/solutions/whatever to make them better.  Eric Raymond described that as the “itch” that drives programmers to create…  As a programmer, I’m not itchy enough.
2. Beer snob: I iz one. To anyone who’s been reading this blog or watching my twitter feed this is not news.  Part of the blame lies with Jon Roma who introduced me to the good stuff first when I started drinking.  I never went down the good old fashion macrobrew route.  I’ve learned to tolerate the macrobrews so I can drink beer at ball games or social events when something better isn’t available, but its rough going.  I’m no Charlie the Beer Guy, but I’m working on being on his level.  I’m just too lazy right now to take up my own brewing.  Maybe once the kids are older.  In any case, give me a Duvel, something from Stone, Goose Island, etc.  Don’t offer me anything named Bud, Miller, etc.
   Bonus fact 2.5:  I didn’t start drinking until I was in my junior year of college at age 20.  Given that when most people think of me they think of beer, this is probably a surprising fact.
3. At heart, I’m a Geek’s geek and I’ve come to accept it. A few months ago, I finally accepted If there is a stereotype for being a geek, I probably fit it.  Again, not news for those who have been playing along at home for awhile.  There are exceptions, but all in all, I’m a geek.  I full embrace the geekiness and let it wash over me.  There are much worse ways to view yourself so it works for me.  (Notable exception: I have never played any desktop roleplaying type games such as D&D.  Not sure why that never happened, but it didn’t.)
4. Needles piercing my skin send me into panic attacks. Its weird, I don’t mind blood, I don’t mind seeing myself cut, and I don’t mind looking at needles, but knowing one is about to pierce my skin turns me into a sweaty little girl.  It doesn’t matter if its the dentist, a lab tech taking blood, or whatever, I get tense and sweaty.  When having blood drawn I’ve learned to mitigate the effects by getting them to take it while I’m lying down, but that’s about it.  If I’m sitting up, I’ll pass out.  Its probably an anticipating thing, but I’m okay when I get cut when doing yard work or making dinner or something like that, but know I’m about to get a needle stuck in just puts me over.  I’m not sure what the deal is.  I guess the good news is that this is yet another sign that I’ll never get addicted to heroin.
5. I hate small talk. I just can’t stand it.  It could be that I’m just not very good at it and that’s why I don’t like it, but the whole idle chit chat thing does nothing for me.  I’m good and I look forward to actually connecting with people and having deeper discussions, but if I have nothing in common with someone, its very painful for me to try to force the small talk.  I am faced with the slight challenge of how do you know if you have something in common with someone without having the small talk, but there are ways around that and I get by okay so I don’t worry too much about it.
6. I love presenting and educating if I know the material and/or have a story to tell with it.  One of the great things about my old job and my still-employeer was that on a more than monthly basis I was giving presentations to our members on subject matter I had down cold.  Once I know the “story” I want to tell to educate others I love putting the presentations together, guiding discussions around the material, and generally helping people see the light.  Nothing made me feel better than to see the look of realization and/or understanding on someone’s face.  Or the look of horror once someone realized that they’d have to change their ways to make something work for them, but that’s a different story…  Either way, it means the message got across.  Someone would say this somewhat contradicts #3, as geeks aren’t well known for being showman, but I’ve always had a bit of an extroverted streak in me.  I guess I’m only extroverted in the right circumstances…
7. I watch way too much TV and my reading and video game playing suffer due to it.  Part of it is the young kids and the job that just leave me energyless at the end of the day, some of it is I just really like good TV.  Heck, I probably like shitty TV too, but I try to keep it on the good side with things Battlestar Galactica, CSI, and Lost.  But I do have the mindless popcorn like Eureka and How I Met Your Mother.  I’m not sure where to put Heroes on the scale these days, but I think its falling in mindless popcorn.  I still love to read, but I manage to only really do it on the commuter train or just before bed as long as Sarah is okay with me leaving the light on.  The video games, those have really suffered, but I’m trying to make up for it now.

Bonus fact so that I cannot be accused of ignoring my wife: I was asking Sarah for some ideas for this post, and she gave me “I like to uphold family traditions.“  I don’t really see that in my indentity when I think about myself, but looking at past actions and what I like to do with the kids, I can agree with this.  From eating under the tree at Field’s Macy’s at Christmas time to vacations in the same spots I went as a kid, this certainly appears to be true.

Okay, so next up I have to call out seven people:

• Jason Lindquist, because I know Linky will have something good
• Dan Woolley, if only because he’s been neglicting Tzetze Fly while in start up mode
• Saul Pwanson, again due to blog neglect
• Byron Faber, because I’m really curious as to what he’ll come up with
• Jon Roma, because he was named in this post
• Heather Norton, cuz she’s a meme magnet
• Mark Notarus, if only because this will annoy him

To quote Evo who tagged me: “I subscribe to all of your blogs, so I’ll know if you didn’t do it…”

Oh yeah, the rules part:  Do not talk about meme club…er.. wait

1. Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The episode I was on clocks in at about 25 minutes and I didn’t make too much of an ass of myself.  A lot of random talk, and a heck of a good time.

After the podcast we went to Sheila and Evo’s place to continue the conversation and drink a bit more.  Awesome people, awesome hospitality.  Whenever I’m in AZ again, I’ll definately try to visit them.  Hopefully they do the same when they are out this way.

photo credit: CC Chapman

I ended up picking Hurrican Reef Raspberry Wheat Ale form the Florida Beer Company.  Its pretty good, I’d drink more of it especially in warmer weather.  It reminded me a bit of Sam Adam’s Cherry Wheat, but less sweet and Raspberry and not Cherry of course.  I think it had to do with the finish pronouncing the flavor of the fruit.

The beer was excellent and I highly recommend a visit.  Just don’t be too scared off by the exterier and neighborhood.

One of the parts of the beer that really warmed my heart was the handle on one of the urinals.  It really showed what I feel to be the true hard of good old American macrobrew light beer…  See for yourself…

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If you look at this image closely, you’ll see the size for this costume is for 8 to 10 year olds.  And maybe I’m just become a grumpy old man, but should an 8 to 10 year old really be dressing as a pimp?  Don’t get me wrong, my pimp hand is strong, but I am not 8 to 10 years old.

A smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.

The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.

The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

I could survive for 1 minute, 13 seconds chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I became interested in the book after hearing an interview with the author on Slice of SciFi. Its an easy read and goes into just enough depth on the physics you need to know to discuss why certain science fiction stables are possible and why others are impossible.



Fun and educational read.


View all my reviews.

Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
I started with the Podcast but ended with the paper edition that was just printed. A fun read playing with the superhero genre. The creativity of the “useless” powers and their use in the story by the author made this an enjoyable read.


View all my reviews.

“If you haven’t been bookmarked, retweeted and blogged, you might as well not have existed.” – Will be part of the next Found Things.

Which, for some reason inspired me to parody Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything:

I don’t want to blog anything, tweet anything, or podcast anything as a career. I don’t want to blog anything tweeted or podcasted, or tweet anything blogged or podcasted, or podcast anything blogged, tweeted, or podcasted, or retweet anything blogged, tweeted, or podcasted. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

[Update: Evo explains the origin of his comment.]

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 146 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 240 people with Sarah’s name in the U.S.A.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 3 people with Dinah’s name in the U.S.A.

Dinah’s the clear winner here. However, I was suprised to learn that there are 10,677 people in the U.S. with the first name Dinah. The last name is what makes her stand out.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 21 people with Evan’s name in the U.S.A.

I was really shocked that Evan clocked in so low.

During the time I was waiting with the hood up two other commuter trains stopped, people unloaded, got in their cars and drove off. Not one stopped to ask me if I needed some help. I probably would have decline as Sarah was on the way, but I was still a bit suprised.

Anyway, after having lots of trouble trying to jump the car (the Odyssey didn’t give enough juice to turn over the Vue?) the kids were starting to freak out, so Sarah and the kids bailed to go get dinner.  I called my mom and she was coming over to help me, or at least schlep me off to buy a new battery.  I left the hood up while waiting for my mom because I wanted to give it one more ago.

While waiting another train stopped.  Again, no one stopped.

Anyway, mom showed up, car got started, NTB replaced the battery, all is good.  Car started again this morning, crisis completed.  But its got me thinking…

I understand the desire just to go home, how many times have I not stopped to ask someone if they need help?  I’m not running off to do a transplant surgery or something else time sensitive like that, it’ll only cost a small bit of time to be a non-crappy human being.  Today, I’ve mentally committeed to not being that guy anymore.