Ramblings Archives - Page 8 of 17

Now Hiring

I discovered today that NBC is running some sort of online game/competition for The Office this fall, called Dunder Mifflin Infinity.

I signed up to manage the Dothan branch. I need 15 employees to cement my manager status. Anybody want to work for me? I promise to provide punch and pie in the breakroom, and a generous benefits package.

It is important that you select that branch along with the code. Sign up here: http://www.dundermifflininfinity.com

I don’t know know what the game is yet, other than that it involves schrutebucks. And that’s good enough for me.

(I love this show, if you couldn’t tell)

Year in Pictures 2007 – Halfway there

I’m now halfway through my project of taking a photo every day for a year! I’ve kept up with it, and am pretty pleased with the results. I think I had more genuinely good pictures by this point last time I did the project, but I’ve still got some gems this time around. Here’s some of my favorites from the first half of 2007:

200 miles down…

Today was a big deal for me: I hit 200 miles of cumulative running distance! The Nike+iPod pedometer kit has been a huge motivator for me, and takes all the annoyance out of stat tracking. I just sync the ipod with my computer after each run, and the stats are added!

I got the kit the day after Thanksgiving – just about seven months ago. An average of .96 miles per day, 25,595 calories burned, and I took 90 seconds off my overall average for a mile in the process – not too shabby. When I started, I set a goal to run 200 miles by my birthday. I met that objective with 29.5 hours to spare.

Prior to getting this kit, I was a sporadic runner at best. I couldn’t make it a half mile without wanting to keel over. Now I’m in the best shape of my life and routinely run over two miles at a go. Sometimes all you need is an upticking counter to follow.

Books I’m reading soon(ish)

While I’m enjoying George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, it is long. 800 pages of small print long. I haven’t had a ton of free time for leisure reading lately, and after two months I’m only halfway through. Here’s the top of my queue at the moment:

–Where’s My Jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived, by Daniel H. Wilson

–The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks

–Tesla: Master of Lightning, by Margaret Cheney

–Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

I’m getting really antsy to read these, and may have to give A Game of Thrones a break soon.

The dark side of the community

As I write this, Digg.com is out of service. Slashdot has a bit of info on the situation.

Digg built its brand as a site where users get to pick the top tech news stories, vote, and the leaders get posted on the front page. It’s been very popular, with a user base growing by leaps and bounds.

Earlier today, someone released a string of hexadecimal code online that enables decryption of HD-DVDs. This opens the door for widespread piracy of the films, in the same way that CDs and DVDs are affected now. Naturally, a number of tech-focused sites posted about this, and many were served takedown notices from the MPAA on the grounds that this code violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Digg administrators complied, and removed a story or two about the code from their site.

Users instantly rioted, and the site descended into mob rule. New story submissions were spammed with links and jokes involving the code, reposting it as many times as possible. The site became unusable for casual readers like myself, with absolutely nothing else getting highlighted. Digg admins eventually gave in, saying they wouldn’t take down any more code references. But that didn’t placate the angry users, and now the whole site is down.

I’m not going to go into the right or wrong of Digg giving in to the takedown notice or the original release of the cracked code. That issue aside, I’m still very bothered by this whole scenario. Digg was built on radical trust of users, and today they tore the site apart. There is a fine line to walk when giving average people access to such power. At an earlier date I would have pointed to Digg as a pretty good (but admittedly not perfect) example of this trust in action. But suddenly the site serves equally well as an example of mob rule horribly exploiting this trust. Users could have handled the controversy in a much more civil fashion and had a fascinating discussion of the issues with admins. But instead of sitting down and figuring out where to go from here, the groupthink mob instinct kicked in.

I’m not yet sure what lesson can be taken from all this or what point I’m making, but I do know I certainly need to think about it a lot more.

Extraneous data

I have a an odd fascination with pointless data that will never be of real use to me in daily life. Here’s a few links in that spirit:

Enter in a tracking number from any service – UPS, USPS, FedEX, or DHL – to PackageMapping.com and this site does a whole suite of processing on the tracking information. You can view the raw timestamps just like on each carrier’s official site, as well as view a map of progress, an RSS feed or email notifications, a grand total transit time, and a calculated average speed of your delivery. My recent order from Barnes & Noble made it here in 48 hours and 45 minutes, with an average speed of 61.52mph. A lot of these features (especially the RSS feed) really should be provided by the shippers themselves. But until they do, this works nicely.

I recently received a “bag of crap” from woot.com. Periodically they sell a random pile of items for $1 under that name. My package included a Thermohawk 200 no touch thermometer. It measures the infrared radiation coming off an object, instead of the more traditional air or interior temperature. So, for example, my microwaved pizza was 118 degrees. My laptop’s screen is running at 86 degrees. By and large it seems pretty accurate compared to my more traditional thermometer, but I’m a bit concerned that my forehead measures as 91.5F… Of course, I have no practical use for the thing, but for $1? Not too shabby.

360voice.com has a fun gimmick – it monitors the progress of your Xbox Live gamer profile, and automatically updates a blog as if it was written by your console. You can see what my Xbox thinks of me here.

That’s all for now!

2007: A Year in Pictures – Kickoff!

Today I posted the first entry in my year long project of taking a photo every day:

I used the opportunity to play with my new Gorillapod tripod, which can be wrapped around anything (A pole lamp in this case).

New pictures will show up in this Flickr set. I may not upload them every day, but one will definitely be taken every day.

I’m especially excited because last time I did this project, I didn’t think of it in time to run an exact calendar year. Now I get to fix that mistake! Here’s the previous set if you’re interested.

Five Things You May Not Know about Me

I’ve been tagged!

Off the top of my head, and in no way do I promise they’re interesting:

Except for one visit to Hawaii, I’ve never been west of the Mississippi. I’m hoping to change that this year.
My favorite kareoke song is Monster Mash. But I prefer to handle the backup vocals.
I was one question short of making the second round of Jeopardy tryouts.
I share a few genes with Almanzo Wilder, husband of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I’ve been in a few musicals, even somehow scamming my way into a role of ‘featured dancer’ once. When almost no males try out for roles, times get desperate 🙂

Four people who should fill this out too: Todd, Harley/Mr. J, Eli, and Libraryman. My world is quickly running out of those who are untagged.

Cool things I’ve run across recently:

By no means is this an all-inclusive list.

http://www.pat2pdf.org/ – This site lets you download a whole U.S. patent in one pdf file, as opposed to the official registry’s method of one page at a time. I made a couple of our researching faculty members really happy with this link.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/scout.php – See which of your Flickr photos have been featured on the Explore page. Four of my year in photos project made the cut! (On a related note, I’m going to revive that project for 2007)

This primer/guide has been invaluable as I start to think about getting an HDTV. So many acronyms and numbers! Unlike a lot of more technical tv choice guides, this one is anchored with a dose of reality.

Beth of LibGaming invited me to iLike, a social recommendation engine for iTunes. It takes up a bit more of my screen real estate than I’d like, but otherwise seems pretty useful so far.

I got an iPod Nano! (Just the 2gb version, that’s still far more music than I can listen to while running.) Combined with the Nike pedometer sport kit and an armband, it has completely changed the way I exercise. The online stat tracking and comparisons with friends is really addicting. Plus, I run outdoors more now that I can keep reasonably accurate track of how far I’ve gone. I may write more about this at some point.

Lastly, I recently got to try the Nintendo Wii at a store. Now I’m going to have to buy one. Even a simple driving game is addictive!

Still Alive

A couple of people have asked me where I disappeared to since I last posted, and this summer in general. Nowhere exciting this month I’m afraid – I’ve just been extremely busy. My job turned one year old a few days ago, and I’m in the midst of experiencing my first start of the fall semester there. I wasn’t quite ready for the rush of professors wanting to bring their classes in. But I’m not complaining, it is definitely good to be useful. Oh, and I’m also officially Faculty now! The title change doesn’t affect what I do from day to day, but the recognition is very nice.

I also did a lot of traveling this summer. I visited:

-New Orleans
-Rochester
-Pittsburgh
-An unintended night in Atlanta
-Chicago
-Passed through Nashville

I feel like I’m leaving something off that list, hmm…

In what free time I’ve had, I’ve gotten a decent amount of reading done. I finally got to finishing the Chronicles of Narnia, I’m well into the Dresden Files series, and fit in a couple of random novels in between.

In gaming, I really didn’t get to it that much this summer. But I did play through Ultimate Spider-Man for the Xbox. It’s a very short game (I finished it in a total of about 6 hours), but also very well executed. The voice acting and plot are of a surprising caliber compared to most games, let alone comic book based ones. I paid $5 for it, which was more than fair. Oh, and of course my DS got a workout while traveling.

My Netflix subscription also atrophied a bit – just didn’t have time to watch much. But I’ve lately been catching up on HBO’s Entourage, and loving every episode. After I’m done with that, I plan on re-watching all the Star Trek movies. Today’s news that the original Kirk series will be re-released with updated special effects inspired me. It’s been years since I saw most of them. But my in-theater movie highlight of the summer? Snakes on a Plane. Great cheesy fun.

On the gadget front, I upgraded my phone to a Razr. The V3m specifically, and I absolutely love it. The 1.3 megapixel camera in it performs surprisingly well outside, although it has problems indoors.

One random highlight of the summer: A behind the scenes tour of the US Space & Rocket Center’s archives, as part of our work with them to digitize their collection. I’m more than a bit of a space geek at heart, so it was an especially amazing collection to me.

So yes, life is good. I’m mostly looking forward to this oppressive southern summer’s end. Maybe I’m a wimp, but I don’t know how anybody lived here before air conditioning arrived.

Next week my fall/winter travel set begins: Disney World (!), Buffalo for a wedding, Nashville for LITA Forum, various holiday travels, and who knows what else.

On a final technical note, I see that my category links aren’t working correctly. They miss all posts made since I switched from categories to tags. Whoops! I’ll try to get that fixed soon.