How to move rocks for landscaping?

I still need to buy and move several tons of rocks to my backyard to complete some landscaping. I thought a wheelbarrow and lots of gatorade would suffice but I think this may help...or at least a scaled up version. Trebuchet.com

FARK.com

Digg-like aggregator? FARK.com Not sure I get it, but did enjoy the trip. Afraid I've come back feeling a bit lost. These branded aggregators and social networks of the month have me feeling old.

Tools: T-N-T Multi-Tool

...helps Firefighters Kick Ass and Break Stuff. I want one too. Maybe two. [ Gizmodo ]

Bluetooth headset? Bahhh!

Who needs em?


via [Gizmodo]

Now that's a hardcore tat!

This dude gets a BSOD message tat'd to his inner arm.
Windows: The Blue Screen of Death Tattoo on Gizmodo.

Gadget fetish

I'm more than a little attracted to this thing. Crypto Hardware 4GB USB drive called the
IronKey

Steven R Kutcher - Bug Art - Gallery

PVR's let you sample some wierd shit you wouldnt normally waste your time on. In this case I'm still not sure what I've got.

I use BeyondTV, a splendid PC based PVR (think Tivo in your PC). Every once in a while I get frustrated with my apathy to TV and decide there must be something worthwhile if only I was paying attention to what's on. I am a recovering History Channel burnout. At 500+ channels and a personal avoidance of most pop culture and all network TV it's tough to wade through the archaic TV Guide style listings of all that crap...but BeyondTV (like most PVRs) at least offers some decent searching and surfing options via the fast scrolling and ad free in-program listing guide. The web interface is handy too for scheduling remote recordings or taking a minute out of the day at the mill to do a quick search for something random to grab that might be worth a peek.

Yesterday I perused the guide for documentaries and made 2 quick selections. Random and Riveting on something called the Current TV network. And some George Stephanopoulos talk show I vaguely remember as passable for news.


I've only had it on in the background while while working but, Random & Riveting seems to be a collection of viewer contributed video pod casts with G4-esque hosts...(possibly backed by Google? Odd stuff. Some of it felt after school safe, but one random and local gem poped up.

A piece, hopefully self produced, on Steven R Kutcher's Bug Art

I think the Cat painting thing was sold out as the sham that it obviously was, but this is indisputable genius at work! He even has the PETA rebuttal planned!

Sadly, Current TV decided this is availble "only on TV". So much for convergence, eh?

I want my MP3 and Apple has me by the balls

This DRM debacle is still annoying. I've resisted replacing my long defunct Creative Zen (circa 2000!) with a modern mp3 player for too long. It's an itch i havent scratched mostly due to a stubborn sense of principle and other questionable motives...but the itch persists and I'm in agony!

It should be an easy choice, right? Market and mind share leader is clearly the iPod. The upcoming iPhone (aka. jesus phone )is riding the shockwave of the market making and beloved iPod. So why not?

At a gut and possibly anti-social level, maybe I'm just plain freaked out by the popularity of the iPod. The consumerization of technology in the last ~10-15 years has really dumbed things down and we're not getting nearly what we could in just about any product area where there is such dominance. Add to this the hegemony and heritage of Apple's tight grip on their proprietary stuff and it adds up to a bad smell I'd rather avoid.

I call it practical, some say paranoid, but a feature I cant believe Apple hasnt bothered with yet is a simple FM tuner. It bugs me that all that comes out is what I put in. As my pal Tess says, it should be called a mePod...a cocoon you close around yourself and nothing comes in, except what you select. Sure, I like to hear my stuff...but if this is my personal media device and it's all I've got, how will I catch breaking news of the impending apocalypse? Radio, particularly public radio, connects me to so much local and contemporary stuff that my audio world would seem a hollow echoing space without it.

So, that brings me to the Zune, or some of Creative's new offerings? I'm close.

The bad news is, I've limped along with iTunes on my laptop long enough that I've succumbed to the impulse to grab a song here or an album there to the tune of some 300 songs. Currently there is no way to play these on anything without an Apple logo. The only way to move them is to burn them to an audio CD and rip them back in....oh, and somehow recreating all of the tag info. Bastards!

Hobbled as it is by Roku's inability to strike a deal with Apple to license DRM playback from a shared iTunes source, I still love my SoundBridge.

It'll play my Napster/Limewire era library and the stuff I've ripped but it only plays a fraction of the pod casts and none of the AAC protected files in my iTunes library.

Not being able to play my music/audio on devices not made by Apple annoys the hell out of me.

I thought there was some hope in the new iTunes Plus offering for DRM free music, but after upgrading to iTunes 7.20.35 and checking to see what it would cost to convert my library to DRM free I was horrified to note that only 5 songs were eligible for the $0.30 per song upgrade. Pitiful.

A few minutes hunting around in the FAQs to find out what the story was...Apple only says it's "because they have not been provided in iTunes Plus format from the music label." Lip service, if you ask me. I can see the mock sincerity in Jobs' shrugging shoulders as he approved this line.

My prediction is that Apple will sit on their DRM fortress until the iPhone takes off, and then likely announce an iPhone only streaming service or compression scheme...leaving the spoils of the static player to others to pick clean.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to find a virtual CDR driver to be able to pragmatically rip back what Apple forces me to burn while I scrape the tag info from whatever export nonsense iTunes might provide.

S3 Standby Done Right

Good article at www.exoid.com on how to use S3 low power standby AND still keep file server /upnp access alive. The trick seems to be to use static IP, set BIOS to wake on LAN, and look for power management options on the net adapter config properties.

I'll have to try this on the HTPC vista rig I built recently. I have S3 standby running but do notice that the Roku SoundBridge and the Xbox 360 loose connection after sleep. Also, I havent yet tested to see if BeyondTV causes wake up before scheduled recordings.

Farecast | Airfare Predictions, Find Cheap Flights, Airline Tickets

Very sweet analytics and visualizations of cheap airfare...bye bye Orbitz!

Many Eyes : Browsing Visualizations

Many Eyes : Browsing Visualizations

Ted Sladowski's Voyageur Art

I just finished a site for my uncle at Voyageur Art. Set him up with yahoo hosting and showed him a bit how to manage it.

I was confined to pure html/js and felt uncomfortable without some server side environment. I decided to stretch away from old and mostly bad habit of client side dev and commit to using pure CSS driven layout, no tables, no imagemaps, barely anything layout in the html.

I usually dont like client side development but this was something fun and a good excercise in learning more about CSS and some sane ways to use it. I spent a lot of time meditating over at CSS Zen Garden and brushed up on my photoshop skills a bit.

I found a really elegant little Firefox plug-in for debugging and tweaking client side code in Firebug. Wish I had found it earlier in the project!

Conservative Doubt?

NPR's All things considered today had a sobering essay from Rod Dreher who I know nothing about but who's words captured well the horror and bewilderment I hope many convservatives are feeling today.

I wanted to email it to friends and family but couldnt find it published anywhere except as a paid transcript from NPR or audio at their site. It's worth a listen for free or a read, if you want to pay...


NPR Transcript: Bush, Iraq Lead a Conservative to Question: "Commentator Rod Dreher has been a conservative ever since he was a teenager. He came of age in the 1980s. A Generation X’er who never understood the Baby Boomer protest generation. Well, now on the cusp of turning 40, he's still a conservative, but he’s so dismayed at the way President Bush is handling the Iraq war, many of his prior beliefs have come into question,..."

2006 Rally X Cards - a photoset on Flickr

moo.com, in affinity with Flickr, provides a unique photo printing twist. They let you print sleek, tiny, glossy, little cards (about half a biz card) from your flickr photostream. The genius part is you get 100 cards for ~$20 and its the same price whether you have them print 1 image 100 times or 100 images 1 time each. As many imgs as you like (2006 Rally X Cards - a photoset on Flickr

More Pummers

I finished 5 pummers as gifts for co-workers and friends this xmas. Definately an evolution from the first to the last. I learned a lot and my soldering skills improved quite a bit. The first were done on printed circuit boards and then I managed to create a couple in the air and then the final one uses no wires connecting the IC but rod to bridge the pins. Very clean!


People seemed to appreciate them and they were plenty fun to build and give away. The nest is empty now, time to make some more.

More photos on flickr!

Dreamy Electric Sheep

A co-worker turned me onto the nifty distributed rendering project called Electric Sheep which turns out really nice mpegs of wiggly screen savers.

Idle cycles on machines with the saver installed are used to render frames from submitted work. Renderings are stitched into mpegs and sent out to client machines.

Users can vote their favor which feeds back into the gene pool for alteration and future renders.

Very nifty stuff. It would be nice to see an infrastructure like this to do more useful computation of any time problems...like atmospheric modeling, attaching proteins to cancer cells, etc....but eye candy is good too.

My First Pummer

Been playing around with making some BEAM robots as xmas trinkets for the few friends and family that would appreciate such things. I was inspired by a nice article in Make magazine about these kind of non-ambulatory bots.

Made plenty of mistakes and still have some tweaking to do but it turned out ok. The pic here is a bit old and doesnt show the final LED placement on the stalk. Have some other aesthetic things to add still.



It's been may years since I played with electronics and I have to say, I'm glad Im in software where things are easy to change without the risk of burnt fingers or the acrid smell of burning plastic. A found a good electronics reference by Tim Surtell at Electronics in Meccano that helped me know what was heat sensitive and how to orient some of the components.

I have enough parts to make 2 more and have seen some really amazing pummers others have done here. Ho Ho Ho!

machine project » Edible Estates

machine project » Edible Estates. Great diatribe somewhat akin to reclaiming a kind of Victory garden.

I always thought cactus was a sensible and eco-responsible front lawn/easement design. Fried cactus anyone?

Good idea and I'm going to have to check out this Machine Project space.

About KrazyDad

I think I took a Mac toolkit programming class from this guy around 1993 or so? Solid guy...I had tons of fun in that class. Nice to see what he's been up to.
About KrazyDad



I think he may live near me as well, judging by the density of pics taken in my neighborhood!

(courtesy of fabulous geotagging feature @ flicker)

Treeline Rally - Treeline 2006

I volunteered as a timing control worker at the Treeline Rally - Treeline 2006 this past weekend. It was viciously hot but I was lucky to get an assignment on stage 1/6 which was mostly shaded and near a stream. The heat wasn’t so bad but the bugs sure were aggressive. Bug spray seemed to incite them more than repel them.



Worked with some cool people and got some great tips on co-driving and how to go about getting into that. I may try to take the training and get licensed sometime next year with a goal to do some co-driving by 2008.

Next rally cross race is July 29th at Glen Helen and then Volunteering again at the Gorman Ridge rally sometime in August.

Rally-X coverage in Press-Enterprise

Some minor press coverage of the Glen Helen Rally Cross Event including some quotes from yours truly here PE.com | Inland Southern California | Sports | Recreation

Also some video coverage here

Glen Helen Rally Cross & new CRS standing

Wooo Hoo! The Glen Helen rally cross event this past weekend was a fantastic time for me. I had put a lot of effort into preparring and made it out to some lake beds the weekends before to get some more seat time. It paid off nicely....3rd place finish in street stock class and 16th of 56 cars overall.

Good enough to earn me 100 points toward the California Rally Series championship in street stock and bump me up to first place in the standings.



One glitch in the organization at this event is that we never got to see our times until the next day. Four runs and no way to know if you were improving or how you were doing compared to the other drivers. Oddly, my morning runs were both the same time and my evening runs also the same, but 10+ secs better than the morning runs. Complete times for all classes are here: http://www.socalrallyx.com/

Next event is July 11th at Thunderhill in Willows. Going to be a loooong drive but I hear it's one of the best venues.

More photos up on my flickr site here http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjmeyer/

Rim of the World Rally 2006

I volunteered to work the Rim of the World Rally this past weekend in Antelope valley, CA. I worked the Service and Fueling areas, keeping cars on tarps, chasing fuel out of the public areas, and generally trying to do whatever I could to be helpful to the various ametuer and professional rally teams there to compete.

On sat I got to start cars on the Del Sur North stage and then man the stopwatch for the return run on the Del Sur south stage. We had 43 cars to start with 1 minute intervals and what a hoot it was to see them up close and be part of such a well organized event.

Functional vs. Unit tests

Excellent article on JavaRanch Journal about Evil Unit Tests: clarifying some similar thoughts we've been having about functional vs. unit tests.

Ridgecrest RallyCross & 2006 Points standings

Ran the Ridgecrest Rallycross this weekend. Being the first points event of the season the competition was a bit stiffer than the San Diego rallycross. Still, I ended up 4th and was very happy with my improvement in times.


I still need to push harder, left foot braking has improved quite a bit but I need to stay in the throttle more, look further down the track, and hang it out more.



Points standing for the California Rally Series Rallycross championship are here. I'm third right now and plan to stay in the street stock class for the season.

More pics

Final Results, #1 - Del Mar RallyX - January 20, 2006

Final Results, 1st annual - Del Mar Rally Cross - January 20, 2006

I did go...and decided to run...and met some really cool and vastly more experienced drivers who helped me a ton.

First run was pretty scary on street tires but I got the feel for it and the track got quite a bit faster by the last run of the day.

I didnt think I hit a cone on the last run, but must have missed that info at the gate. An experienced driver told me "if you dont hit at least 1 cone today, youre not pushing hard enough".

Judging by the results, it seems that not hitting cones was key to my success.

Ended up with a 2nd place finish in the street stock class!!! Recouped my entry fee and had enough left over for a coffee!

Some shots from the event on flickr by Christopher Keach

...and a slideshow which has some actual pics of my runs here!

Next event is the CRS rally school and competition Feb 11 & 12 in Ridgecrest. Going to need to get some better tires before hand. Word was the BFG KDWS are a good way to stay street.

Four Star Motorsports

Four Star Motorsports: "2002 Subaru group N Impreza STi Rally Car" for only $85K CDN...heh...only.

I think the build out is pretty reasonable. Not sure how the USDM 6 speed in the STi stacks up against the Spec "C" dogbox...but build vs. buy is an interesting puzzle.

Considering scrambling out to the San Diego Rally Cross event this weekend...might just spectate...limiting factors include:
- My helmet is expired! :-{
- rules seem to call for a 32mm restrictor on the STi!
- The RE070s are really going to suck in the dirt and even chasing some snow tires here in So Cal seems dicey.

Hmmm...maybe just grab a digicam and go spectate? Might go grab a helmet in case they have room for any fun runs!

Trestle Table

Been planning to make a trestle table for my dining room. Rockler seems to have some slides specifically designed to allow extention leaves to be used at the ends of a trestle table.

See also pdf spec sheet

Other design ideas:

10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris

Nice information visualization taken by montioring RSS feeds from various news sources and analyzing the content to find the top 100 words and representing them in a 10 x 10 grid of photos.



The www.tenbyten.org site has a nice flash control to render and navigate the content.

HubbleSite

Very nice galleries, vids, and other great Hubble shots at hubblesite.orgthat I ought to get onto my HTPC to compliment Celestia.

More extreme weather is predicted

Purdue University scientists say extreme weather events, such as floods and heat waves, may increase in frequency and severity during the next century.


"The more detail we look at with these models, the more dramatic the climate's response is." - Noah S. Diffenbaugh, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, Purdue Climate Change Research Center.

"Critics have complained that climate models lack sufficient spatial detail to be trusted. In terms of looking at the whole contiguous United States, we've quadrupled the spatial detail and, as a result, it appears that climate change is going to be even more dramatic than we previously thought. Of course, we can never be completely certain of the future, but it's clear that as we consider more and more detail, the picture of future climate change becomes more and more severe."

Getaway, in the city

James Irvine Garden, Little Tokyo

The James Irvine Garden in Little Tokyo tells a story that's worth hearing. But first you have to find the space, on a recessed plot at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo. Take the lobby elevator to the basement and walk through an institutional-looking hallway to the doors that open to the garden. The painstakingly landscaped Japanese-style sanctuary is hidden just enough so that it's often empty.

Cross its perfectly manicured lawn, traverse two wooden bridges and you'll discover the fountainhead. The spring represents "the immigrants coming from Japan," says Robert Hori, director of board and donor relations at the center. Then the stream divides.

"One path is a turbulent, chilly path, and the other moves slowly, contains more placid waters," says Hori. "These are the two sides of the immigration experience: those who saw Japan as their homeland, and those who saw this as their own country." In the end, the two streams merge into a pond that symbolizes the great American melting pot.

What's Your Brand Mantra?: Brand as Ecosystem

What's Your Brand Mantra?: Brand as Ecosystem: "Right now we're focusing so much on the customer that we've lost sight of the big picture. When we focus on the customer, we see a person out there separate from us that we need to identify, label and categorize. "

"We need to move beyond a focus on a specific department (silo mentality) to a focus on the interconnections between individuals (system mentality). What are the most critical connections in your company? Why not have VPs over key connections instead of components?"

Teradata Magazine | IN THE BEGINNING: An RDBMS history

Teradata Magazine | IN THE BEGINNING: An RDBMS history: "'SQL is no longer a language for real users, if it ever was,' says Date. 'It has become a developer's language.' "

Nice retrospective of the massive research effort going on decades ago to bring us SQL.

newsmap

Nice tree map view of the Google News aggregations here: newsmap .

Sandia National Labs:: Nonlethal weaponry-Active Denial System for security applications

Sandia National Labs: News: Team investigates Active Denial System for security applications: Sandia researchers Willy Morse and James Pacheco fine-tune the small-sized Active Denial System.

Rumored to be ready for deployment in Iraq by 2006. What's that burning smell?

Disclaimer to view California's Registered Sex Offenders - Megan's Law - California Dept. of Justice - Office of the Attorney General

"Legal and Illegal Uses. The information on this web site is made available solely to protect the public. Anyone who uses this information to commit a crime or to harass an offender or his or her family is subject to criminal prosecution and civil liability.

Any person who is required to register pursuant to Penal Code section 290 who enters this web site is punishable by a fine not exceeding $1,000, imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding six months, or by both the fine and imprisonment. (Pen. Code, � 290.46, subd. (i).) "

A friend with limited internet access asked me to check their neighborhood. My first hits from Google were for PAID sites that give you a samle report for free but charge for a full report that puports to include photos! These are people who, while obviously convicted of the unthinkable, have been through the justice system...they served their time.

How does this help them, after hopefully being reformed by prision, return to try to become a functioning member of society?

What's the avergage rate of repeat offenses? Would the effort and money be better spent on treatment instead of simply incarceration?

Also spooky and confusing, the disclaimer for the CA offical site above seems to mean either:

A) that if youre on the registry, you are barred from using the web site ??

or

B) if youre supposed to be on the registry and, presumably, havent registered yet, you can go to jail for checking to see if you're already registered ???

Does this thing have an expiration, or are you forever to be listed?

A bizzare new flavor of FEAR.

Imagined conversations

The Huffington Post | The Blog: "HP EXCLUSIVE: An Intercepted IM Conversation Between Bush and Blair"

43 Things

43 Things.com: "What do you want to do with your life?" and who else is doing it. A global goal blog.

though...One thing is clear: The people posting their hopes, dreams and aspirations to 43 Things probably don't realize that they're effectively whispering them in the ear of the Web's biggest retailer, a multibillion-dollar, publicly
traded company.[Amazon]...from a Salon.com article archived here

PostSecret

See a Secret...Share a Secret
at
PostSecret
What Are Your Secrets?

Real-Time Forecast of Earthquake Hazard in the Next 24 Hours

USGS now provides Real-Time Forecast of Earthquake Hazards in the Next 24 Hours

Sharepoint blogging geeks

"100,000 lines of SharePoint configuration (lists, sitedefs, etc.) and 100,000 lines of C# code...I'm just full of stupid little SharePoint giblets that I'll be sharing over the next few weeks"

crap...I may not be able to escape needing resources like this.

Victory for Censorship Tech

RED HERRING | Victory for Censorship Tech

Hmmm...Censorship, eh? That's the boogeyman here. I kinda agree it's creepy in the artistic sense that ClearPlay (and others) will make a living "sanitizing" content for people who want to keep taking the blue pill.

The industry's response seems to be that of Copyright infringement. Arguing that ClearPlay has no right to alter the content from what the creator/copyright holder intended. Seems reasonable...if I produce something I expect it to get seen intact, not redacted the way someone else deems appropriate.

The Bill presumably comes from the spirit that the consumer has a right to protect him/herself from indecent content. That smacks of the moral majority and feels like Censorship.

But maybe thats not a bad thing. I wonder..are the rights it's extending to media consumers limited to indecency? How do we agree on exactly what parts of the content are indecent? The content producers dont label each scene with an MPAA rating...so the choice of exactly what to edit ultimately would have to be up to the consumer's preference and ClearPlay gives them the best decision points it can. But this Bill ought to mean the consumer can use whatever technology available to chop up Copyrighted content and view/play it how ever it wants to.

I might give Baywatch another chance, sans Hasselhoff.

Could this bill possibly only apply to Film? To DVD? I doubt it.

What does this mean to Copyright in other mediums?

Can I get this on my Tivo so I never have to watch another Republican campaign ad?

What else could we do with this? What about software copyright? Can I use some parts of the executable, bypassing others according to my preference?

Hmmm...

Celestia: Home

I think Celestia will soon be installed on my HTPC!
... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

HTTPeep - an HTTP response inspector

HTTPeep - an HTTP inspector

Ummm....this is a slick tool....seems to even work with HttpSoap requests for web services.

Single-Screen Checkout addresses shopping cart abandonment

Single-Screen Checkout addresses shopping cart abandonment using xmlHttpRequest.

FlightView Product Family -- FlightView Access

In Knoxville, the smallest airport I passed through this weekend I noticed a well done and very useful system called FlightView running in the public terminal on a large LCD. It showed realtime status of incoming flights to the McGhee Tyson Airport (TYS).

Burbank, Atlanta, and Dayton had nothing like this. It seemed to be up to each individual carrier to list their status in their respective areas, or where there were public ones, they were nothing more than block letters on bulbous CRTs.



Nitfy business. Doesnt seem like there's a publicly accessible view, but it was neat to see a smallish airport buying this service rather than installing and maintaining their own. Nice bit of outsourcing content.

1,360 experts in 95 nations Report: Human Damage to Earth Worsening Fast

Yahoo! News: "More land was changed to cropland since 1945, for instance, than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined"

Stunning.

"A wetland in Canada was worth $6,000 a hectare (2.47 acres), as a habitat for animals and plants, a filter for pollution, a store for water and a site for human recreation, against $2,000 if converted to farmland, it said. A Thai mangrove was worth $1,000 a hectare against $200 as a shrimp farm."

Penny wise...

Film Article | Reuters.com

" it will be the first 'Star Wars' that's a PG-13"

....maturing with the audience that grew up with it? Seems more credible than pimping jar jar and ewoks.

AlterNet: War on Iraq: "Going to War with the Army You Have"

AlterNet: War on Iraq: "Going to War with the Army You Have": "If a product is not selling well, for example, an engineering organization might conclude that better engineering of the product was in order; a manufacturing firm, that more efficient production technology was needed; and a marketing company, that better advertising would do the trick. This sort of organizational idee fixe has led to some truly horrendous failures in business and military history."

Ummm....this is bleak

US urges Opec not to cut oil production in face of $60/barrel prices.

Energy Secretary Bodman has "...a lot of things on my plate".

Our Energy Secretary sounds like and utter buffoon here. Slanted? Perhaps. Though it is from a Reuters feed.
The Reuters article is not quite so stinging, but still embarassing.

IT Conversations

IT Conversations

Techinal talks & interviews

DigiBarn Screen Shots: Screenshots Funstuff

DigiBarn Screen Shots: Screenshots Funstuff

OMG...some of these are priceless. MS Offcie with EVERY toolbar showing is one of my favs.

DigiBarn Screen Shots: Screenshots Funstuff

DigiBarn Screen Shots: Screenshots Funstuff

deseretnews.com | Anti-U.S. feelings growing

deseretnews.com | Anti-U.S. feelings growing: "...Most people fear anarchy more than they crave freedom."

That about sums it up. We havent exactly been the best of stewards in Iraq, despite our heroics and sacrifice. We broke it...we bought it.

Personal space / local environment

Recently working on a death march project where I'm having to do much more coding than has been the norm lately.
That by itself is a treat and is making me forget my normal outrage at these kinds of projects and the organizations that are prone to them.

With about a week into what smells like another 4, I'm realizing/remembering how much the local environment matters to focus and productivity.

In fact, I havent really curled up to bang out an implementation once in this new cube yet. It needs some optimizing.

This is the essence of what Bob is chiming about with observations about how noisy EP can be.

I realize there's a lot you have to do for yourself to make your cube comfy. Headphones are a first line of defense. Mgrs usually hate them, arguing that they get in the way of communication. I've succombed to some good noise cancelling ones.

Hmmm...this noise / distraction issue isnt just a nit from Bob. I didnt think it was when he raised it. Hmmm.

How to promte a relatively distraction free working environment without being hypocritical or militant?

I think there's some wisdom in a) advertising the value of quiet and focus to those in the dept. and b) enforcing respect of quiet from people outside the department.

That is, we dont scold or even point out noise and outburts from within the dept. but we will not shrink from consistiently asking staff from other depts. to respect focus and quiet.

AgileManagement

AgileManagement: "and 'perfectionists"

Mitsubishi blues?

Kansas City Star | 11/29/2004 | MIDDAY BUSINESS REPORT: Fed looking for signs: "Mitsubishi Motors Credit of America Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsubishi Motors North America Inc.
Mitsubishi Motors has been plagued by a series of defect-coverup scandals in Japan that have badly tarnished its image and sent sales plunging here.
But its sales and profits have also suffered in the United States, partly because it had sold too many cars to people with bad credit.
Mitsubishi Motors has previously said it would scrap the risky financing deals, cut jobs, trim production and reduce sales to rental and other fleets to make its U.S. business profitable."

Safari 1.2 now supports XMLHttpRequest!

Foisted by MS in IE 5, a variant picked up by Mozilla 1.0, and now finanlly I find its supported Safari 1.2!
Dynamic HTML and XML: The XMLHttpRequest Object

I notice that Google is also using it in their auto-complete/Google Request beta.

We'll make some good use of this, knowing it's supported widely now.

"the 'how-the-hell-do-I-roll-back-the-changes-i've-made-to-the-db' problem" vs. mock objects.

I changed my mind - Mock objects are wrong for database unit testing

Heh...we went lazy too and ended up putting together a nice ADO transaction layer around our DAO...turns out to be also useful in the large.

Terrorism & Security: why do they hate us?

"They hate our policies, not our freedom"

Pentagon report contains major criticisms of administration. Actually not quite the Pentagon's opinion, just an independant Defense Science Board. Pentagon must have been obligated to publish it...slipped it out quietly Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

I do wish we were hearing more clearly though the western media what the victory criteria were for the insurgents/terrorists. I'm too cynical to believe it's simple bloodlust. Did we ever wonder what the Black Panthers wanted, or the Palestinians, or the IRA?

Crap...I gues it doesnt matter anymore...it's their Red Dawn...Wolverines!

Yahoo! News - Families endure private war

Yahoo! News - Families endure private war

Really provking piece on the perspectives of our returning soldiers & the contrasts of war.

SketchUp 3D - Training - Video Tutorials

Really great example of using CBT and a smart marketing tool to show off features of what seems to be an amazingly powerful and yet simple new class of 3D drawing tools.

SketchUp 3D - Training - Video Tutorials

Smells like a really small shop...which is something I miss about the intimacy and clean slates of early dot com projects.

Ofoto Browse Photos

Sam & Jen's Ofoto Photos

eMachineShop - Online Machine Shop - with FREE CAD Software

Stumbled across this today. I remember seeing something like this back in the bitnet days at KU.
eMachineShop Downlod their CAD software, design your part, get quote, submit, ship. Coolness.

HP iPAQ h4355 Pocket PC,

HP iPAQ h4355 Pocket PC Cheap!

XPWeb | Introduction

A co-worker turned me on to XPWeb, an XP project management tool. Have to check it out soon.

Bulk Residue & Vesicles from Space, Press Release (1/30/01 PNAS)

"These droplets (~10 �m across) show structures reminiscent of cells (although they are not alive). They are from a chemically separated fraction of the bulk residue."

MeadCo's ScriptX

MeadCo's ScriptX may be a simple solution to the "why do I have to click "print" twice in a browser app?" befuddlement many users complain about.

Gwynne Dyer: Take Bin Laden's video message with a huge grain of salt

Gwynne Dyer: Take Bin Laden's video message with a huge grain of salt: "If the United States had not invaded Iraq last year (which Bin Laden could not have foreseen), 9/11 would have been a complete failure. Even with the horrifying images that Iraq generates and the fury and hatred that they engender among Muslims elsewhere, there has still not been a single revolution anywhere in the Arab world: The Islamists still cannot get the masses out in the streets to overthrow Arab regimes"

Error Logging Modules & Handlers (ELMAH): Workspace Home

Error Logging Modules & Handlers (ELMAH): Workspace Home May want to consider this for our portal apps.

CodeNotes� - Article Display

Decent article on XSLT -> comma delimited output.

Outputting Code

Outputting Code - friendly article Exploring Details of XSLT Code Generation.

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design Ahhh! Someday.

887459 - Programmatically check for canonicalization issues with ASP.NET

887459 - Programmatically check for canonicalization issues with ASP.NET as a defense to the incident announcement at MS http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/aspnet.mspx

DubyaSpeak.com : Dubya on...

DubyaSpeak.com That's Dubya as in George "W." A nasty collection of fumbles that boggle the mind.

After the debate tonight, commentators are indicating Bush seems to be a "down to earth" guy. Suggesting that people like him because he "sounds like them". Perfect!

Airaid

Airaid Intake for the recent fuel injection conversion on my '71 Blazer. Might fix the whistle I'm getting from the old Moroso intake I carried over from the Holley 750. Might also be a good starting point for a cowl induction / snorkle setup.

OnLoad versus Page_Load

OnLoad versus Page_Load

override protected OnLoad(System.EventArgs e)
{
base.OnLoad(e);
}

is faster than...

this.Load += new System.EventHandler(this.Page_Load);

private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{}

Java for .NET

IKVM.NET: is an implementation of Java for Mono and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

No AWT, Swing or security yet, but looks very promising. You dont get to jun jars directly, you have to use a tool to boil them down to a .dll.

CNN.com - The music of war - Aug 17%2C 2004

I dont remember if I get VH1, but this would be worth checking out: CNN.com - The music of war - Aug 17%2C 2004

Yet another Gartner analyst says BOTH to java vs. .Net

.NET vs. Java: No Easy Answers: "Choose Both
Despite any attempts to select either platform as a 'strategic' de facto choice, virtually all large development organizations will ultimately have both....It's entirely unrealistic to assume a large national or multinational company will have all Java or all Microsoft technology. For that matter, legacy platforms such as Cobol will also remain entrenched for many years to come.
In these cases the 'us vs. them' battle must be tempered with a higher-level integration strategy. Although there are no easy answers to this problem, technology such as Web services standards are beginning to emerge and will allow better integration and interoperability between the platforms in the future"

Visual MainWin offers best of .Net, Java - Computerworld

While reading this on CW I had to scroll back to top to make sure it wasnt published on Apr. 1! Emits java bytecode from .Net source, including API/framework translations (e.g. ADO)

Visual MainWin offers best of .Net, Java - Computerworld: "The word seamless has become nearly meaningless, but Visual MainWin's integration into Visual Studio deserves the label. Visual MainWin attaches itself to the output of the compilation process and translates the intermediate language (IL) code coming out of Visual Studio into the equivalent Java bytecode"

Gartner suggests Heterogeneous dev platforms the norm

.Net vs. Java - Computerworld: "Corporations will find it tough to settle on a single development architecture such as .Net or Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), 'unless they are the size of a dentist's office,' says Yefim Natis, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. "