(Taken at Buena Vista. Click on the pic for more)
It’s my Mom’s 86th birthday today.
She lives in Regina and it’s the first time in a few years that I haven’t been there for her birthday. But I’m thinking of her.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Category: Uncategorized Page 31 of 76
I’ve always enjoyed panaromas, whether in real life or in photographs.
Maybe it’s from growing up on the prairies, where panaromas are all around you every day. All you have to do is look around. For example, here’s one that I’ve posted here before, taken off my front deck at the lake in Buena Vista:
So I couldn’t resist passing along a link to this website, which is simply a place where you can view panaromic shots of some pretty impressive places. Imagine standing on top of Mt Everest for example, and looking all around you. It’s quite a site.
Or maybe you’d like to see what it’s like to be on the red carpet at the Oscars.
Or perhaps you’d prefer para-gliding in France.
To use the site, you just push shift or Cntrl to zoom in or out, and right click and move your mouse to go from side to side. You can choose other places to visit with the menu at the top right.
Enjoy.
You’ve got to admire their “hutzpuh“! I found this on Boing Boing
The pranksters at Improv Everywhere describe their latest noble work thusly:
For our latest mission, 16 agents staged a spontaneous musical in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall. We used wireless microphones to amplify the vocal performances and mix them together with the music through the mall’s PA system. We filmed the mission with hidden cameras, mostly behind two-way mirrors. Apart from our performers, no one in the food court was aware of what was happening.
Link to their blog post with more details and pix.
(Via Boing Boing.)
Since Windows Vista started shipping just over a year ago, there have been persistent complaints from users that have been disappointed by the performance of this latest version of Microsoft’s PC operating system. Many users discovered that after they upgraded from Windows XP, their old printers and other peripherals didn’t work with the new Vista.
Although Microsoft played down those early complaints and says that most of the missing drivers for printers and other devices are now available, the early complaints did have the effect of slowing the migration of some existing XP users over to Vista. Whether deserved or not, Vista is suffering an image problem and according to this article from the New York Times, it’s going to get a lot worse, now that Microsoft’s own executives appeared to share users’ concerns prior to the office release.
Their remarks come from a stream of internal communications at Microsoft in February 2007, after Vista had been released as a supposedly finished product and customers were paying full retail price. Between the nonexistent drivers and PCs mislabeled as being ready for Vista when they really were not, Vista instantly acquired a reputation at birth: Does Not Play Well With Others.
We usually do not have the opportunity to overhear Microsoft’s most senior executives vent their personal frustrations with Windows. But a lawsuit filed against Microsoft in March 2007 in United States District Court in Seattle has pried loose a packet of internal company documents. The plaintiffs, Dianne Kelley and Kenneth Hansen, bought PCs in late 2006, before Vista’s release, and contend that Microsoft’s “Windows Vista Capable” stickers were misleading when affixed to machines that turned out to be incapable of running the versions of Vista that offered the features Microsoft was marketing as distinctive Vista benefits.
It’s a fascinating tale. And from a public relations point of view, this could become a case study for how not to launch a new product.
Here’s the link.
We’ve all heard about China’s efforts to censor what its citizens can find out by using the Internet. There have been plenty of reports about sites being inaccessible from within China and even how some large companies, like Yahoo and Google, might be working with the authorities there to cripple their own products.
Most of the stories I’ve read tend to convey the impression that China’s efforts to block Internet access are crude and ultimately not that effective.
But in a feature in Atlantic magazine, James Fallows paints a different picture of what is going on. And as this summer’s summer Olympics in Beijing draw closer – and the arrival of thousands of foreigners – he has a fascinating tale of how Chinese authorities are planning to control cyberspace. There is much, much more going on than is evident at first glance.
Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives.
James Fallows is a long-time contributor to the Atlantic who has a keen interest in technology and always makes the technical stuff interesting for the rest of us.
Here’s the link to the story.
Since it’s Friday, this seems like an appropriate workplace diversion.
I’ve worked with clients who had a problem with jargon, but I’ve never come across something like this.
Here’s the blurb from Google video, where it’s hosted:
This video was seen circulating the internet, author unknown. The Retro-Encabulator is a fictional device purportedly manufactured by “Rockwell Automation”, according to the video. The video has become popular with engineers due to its humurous use of technobabble.
Enjoy!
I’m sure most of you will know this, but I’ve just realized that there’s an extra day tacked on to the end of February this year. That’s because 2008 is a leap year. So we get an extra day of February this year.
But what exactly is a leap year? I remember from my school days that it’s added to the calendar every four years because a solar year is actually 365.25 days long…so we need an extra day to compensate. But that seems so simple. Surely we can find a more detailed (and impressive) explanation. So I consulted Wikipedia which rarely lets me down. And it looks like I was right.
However, some exceptions to this rule are required since the duration of a solar year is slightly less than 365.25 days. Years which are divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also divisible by 400, in which case they are leap years. For example, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Going forward, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, 2600, 2700, 2900, and 3000 will not be leap years, but 2400 and 2800 will be. By this rule, the average number of days per year will be 365 + 1/4 − 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425, which is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Now that’s something that I want to have handy to be able to pull out at a moment’s notice, just to impress people. Wikipedia is good for stuff like that.
So what else of interest can we find out about a Leap Year?
Here are a few more items, also from the lengthy Wikipedia entry:
– In the English speaking a world, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only on leap years. While it has been argued that the tradition was initiated by Saint Patrick or Brigid of Kildare in 5th century Ireland, it is dubious as the tradition has not been attested before the 19th century. Supposedly, a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then age five and living in Norway), required that fines be levied if a marriage proposal was refused by the man; compensation ranged from a kiss to £1 to a silk gown, in order to soften the blow. Because men felt that put them at too great a risk, the tradition was in some places tightened to restricting female proposals to the modern leap day, 29 February, or to the medieval leap day, 24 February. According to Felten: “A play from the turn of the 17th century, ‘The Maydes Metamorphosis,’ has it that ‘this is leape year/women wear breeches.’ A few hundred years later, breeches wouldn’t do at all: Women looking to take advantage of their opportunity to pitch woo were expected to wear a scarlet petticoat — fair warning, if you will.”
– In Greece, it is believed that getting married in a leap year is bad luck for the couple. Thus, mainly in the middle of the past century, couples avoided setting a marriage date in a leap year.
– A person born on February 29 may be called a “leapling”. In common years they usually celebrate their birthdays on 28 February or 1 March.
– For legal purposes, their legal birthdays depend on how different laws count time intervals. In Taiwan, for example, the legal birthday of a leapling is 28 February in common years, so a Taiwanese leapling born on February 29, 1980 would have legally reached 18 years old on February 28, 1998.
– In some situations, March 1 is used as the birthday in a non-leap year since it then is the day just after February 28.
– There are many instances in children’s literature where a person’s claim to be only a quarter of their actual age turns out to be based on counting only their leap-year birthdays. A similar device is used in the plot of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance.
And finally, just to liven up this post a bit, I found an article from PatriotLedger.com in Boston that explains how to leap properly, including a video on the right way to leap presented by a member of the Boston Ballet.
Enjoy.
World’s most complete recorded music collection on eBay: “Bidding starts at $3,000,000 for this huge collection of LPs and CDs, currently stored in a 16,000 square foot climate-controlled warehouse.
From Thomas Edison to American Idol, this is the complete history of the music that shaped and defined five generations. 3 million records and 300,000 CDs containing more than 6 million song titles. It’s the undisputed largest collection of recorded music in the world.
Link to E-bay listing
If you click on the e-bay listing, here’s one part that I like:
Save $10 off your $3 million bid if you use the right credit card! (Via Boing Boing.)UPDATE — The collection was sold for US $3,002,150.00.
Glenn Wakefield’s single-handed voyage around the world passed the half-way point yesterday, 149 days after leaving Victoria.
Here’s the note he sent to his wife, Marylou:
– NEW – 2150 UTC (1:50 p.m. local time). Here’s the short and sweet message from Glenn letting me know that he has officially crossed the halfway point and is on his way home.”Hi Honey I am on my way HOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Open the champagne!”
Links here and here to previous posts about Glenn’s voyage.
Technorati Tags:
Glenn Wakefield, Kim Chow
When Barack Obama came second to Hilary Clinton in New Hampshire, he turned the defeat into a resounding victory speech, which has come to be known as the “Yes, We Can” speech. A lot of people were impressed, including Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas, who put Obama’s words to music in what has become a widely viewed video.
Of course, politics being politics, it wasn’t too long before others got into the act.
Below are a couple of take-offs, both poking fun at what the Republican response might be to the same words. Here’s what the world’s billionaires think of Obama’s ideas:
And here’s John McCain’s slightly less positive message (as interpreted by his non-supporters):