personal

As seen at at the Meteor last night with my friend Saibu.

A quick update. After years on Wordpress I took the time, with some code assistant tools, to migrate the site out into a static hosting. I only bothered to migrate posts that had seen some reasonable traffic in the last…

For the last decade I've been an avid bike rider. When I was still working in an office a co-worker started riding his bike in, and I figured out there was a 9 mile route I could take that larger avoided busy roads. The…

A makeshift new barrier built with shipping containers is being illegally erected along part of the US-Mexico border by Arizona’s Republican governor – before he has to hand over the keys of his office to his Democratic…

Having lived in the Hudson Valley for over 20 years, I now get to be one of those folks that says things like: "have you been to that new icecream place? It's across from where that dumpling place used to be, that…

Quitting Facebook is often an act of the privileged. (Note that lower income teens are about twice as likely to use Facebook as teens from richer families.) It’s fine for white men like me to get pissy and leave because…

It turns out that one of the solutions to get us all to talk to each other is to stop simplifying the narratives we use: After the conversation ends and the participants are separated, they each listen to audio of their…

A clock designed to ring once a year, for the next 10,000 years has begun installation in the mountains of west Texas. This is a project of the Long Now Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting long term thinking.…

Yawp! YAWP! Yawp! YAWP! Don't fall in the creek. Hudson Valley Tech Ashokan Community. Yawp! YAWP! Yawp! YAWP! Don't fall in the creek. Be as open and present as you can be. That was the chorus of the theme song for…

They are right when they say there is nothing quite like a total solar eclipse. I had seen an annular eclipse in my senior year of high school as it cross over Vermont. Wandering out there with our physics teacher,…

Having a toddler definitely makes you realize how fluid our brains are for mapping and adapting to language changes. And, how quickly those language changes can become a dialect that breaks up understanding. Things I…

I once had a college class where the instructor was in the process of writing a text book for the class. So we were being taught out of photocopies of the draft textbook. It wasn't a very good class. It wasn't that he…

Thing is: There is no someone else. No one is coming to save us from Trump and his merry band of egregious nincompoops. If there is saving to be done, it comes from us, or not at all. Be the “someone else” you want to…

As we round up 2016, I figured it's useful to share what's in my podcast rotation, and why you might want to add them to yours. Skeptics Guide to the Universe This is a weekly science and critical thinking podcast that's…

Every Olympic medalist in the 100-meter sprint – on the same track. Source: Usain Bolt and the Fastest Men in the World Since 1896 – on the Same Track Lots of fun with visualization. NYTimes puts all the medal winners of…

Here’s a suggestion for NBC, though: How about celebrating this group of American gymnasts, perhaps the greatest ever, by explaining to Americans exactly what makes them so great? I’m not a lifelong gymnastics fan—true…

What’s the connection between the Beatles’ George Harrison, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and Chrysler cars? The Highway Hi-Fi: a vinyl record player that just happened to be the world’s first in-car music system. It…

In addition to the tripping hazard, this one features a roaring fire waiting at the bottom, as well as a heavy piece of metal suspended directly overhead. I'm not saying there will definitely be an accident, but if there…

Today, reportedly, is the 45th anniversary of the famous exploding whale. The event was documented in this KATU television report, in 1970: The announcer summarized, firsthand, the fallout: "However, everyone on the…

Embedded in the story of Hōkūle’a and the culture that created her is the story of a 2000-year-old relationship with special islands and the sea. It is a story that was almost lost, and was close to extinction. But…

“Stories,” Gaiman said, “teach us how the world is put together and the rules of living in the world, and they come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and want to help them propagate.”…

I can't tell you how excited I am that Jesse and Kaia's kickstarter launched yesterday, and met their funding goal in the first 12 hours. A couple of years ago I caught up with Jesse at reunion and heard about the…

This is why we can't have the internet of nice things. Benjamin Walker - Theory of Everything - New York After Rent Part 1 I am going to find a way to use this phrase as much as possible. I encourage you to do the same.…

A Tiny Radio Show About Design with Roman MarsSource: 99% Invisible at TED | 99% Invisible Roman Mars did a remix of his 99% Invisible podcast episode on flags as a TED talk. As with all of 99% Invisible, it's pretty…

If you're like most people, you feel like a baby when it comes to visual design. You sometimes have a vague sense of what you want, but can't articulate it or make it come about. All you can do is point and cry. This…

As the Supreme Court considers extending same-sex marriage rights to all Americans, we look at the patterns of social change that have transformed the nation. Source: This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind | Bloomberg…

Early in January I found out that the SyFy channel has a new TV series coming this year, called The Expanse. It's a story that takes place 200 years in the future. Humanity has colonized Mars, which has become…

If you want to be disappointed by anything in our real 2015 compared to what’s imagined in the Back to the Future movies, don’t be disappointed because we haven’t yet been given flying cars or hoverboards. Instead, be…

This morning I woke up, made a cup of coffee, picked up my tablet, and took a quick look at Twitter. The following was in my twitter feed via retweet: Huh, that's interesting. We do often see media blowing things out of…

On Muppets & Merchandise: How Jim Henson Turned His Art into a Business | Longreads Blog . Honestly, I can never quite read enough about Jim Henson. It's kind of amazing that he both did IBM corporate meeting videos,…

In the better late than never camp, I just finished off the new cold frame (an unheated green house). This is a project that started this summer, and I needed to finish it before first snow so that we can get the cars…

Two weeks ago today our daughter Arwen was born, and I started 3 weeks of leave to focus on family and help us all get into the rhythms as a new family. It's been going pretty great so far. The whole family: Susan,…

A moment of humility for a weekend day. The world is big and complicated. If everything was as simple as it seems on the surface, we'd all be bored, lounging around in our flying cars.

Last night we took in Tanglewood as lawn ticket holders for the first time. I'm always properly amazed at the complex picnicking that people do for these events. The image below is a panorama of last night, which you can…

via PowerPoint in higher education is ruining teaching. That best sums up my feeling on presentations. Slides are one prop in a presentation, they are not the presentation themselves. Unfortunately, it's really easy to…

How distorting are map projections? Here's what four commonly used systems of projection do to a human head. via This is how map projections warp your understanding of geography . Mercator really is that terrible. It's a…

Friday will be my last day at IBM. It's been an incredible run here, but, as they say, all good things.... I've had a pretty amazing run at IBM. From the Sydney Olympics to OpenStack, with tons of really cool projects in…

The most memorable sign from our vacation, presented without additional comment.

[Eyefi](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002UT42UI/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002UT42UI&linkCode=as2&tag=seasmenwal-20"><img border="0"…

It's hard to sum up a long and varied vacation, but a map is probably a good place to start. Below is where we stayed, in order, over the course of this epic summer vacation... By the numbers: Length: 17 days Driving…

Note: everything else about the vacation is going to be positive, but I needed to mini rant about this one. One of the unfortunate things about leaving the country is returning. Not because it's not great to come home,…

I learned something interesting over these last two weeks, which is how to disconnect from work on vacation without loosing the connection to home and friends. In a connected age, it's hard to get one without the other,…

Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially…

Last night a friend complained about a curry recipe gone wrong, so I decided to offer up the one I used to make with a certain amount of frequency. It's from a 1970s Time Life cookbook that I vaguely remember swiping…

It's good to step back some times and look at the really long view. Charlie Stross just did this with his new blog post on 2512 , which provides a plausible look at what that world might be. I especially like the…

* personally guilty of this one

xkcd today takes the actually Hurricane Center Advisories from 2005 (when we ran out of letters) and draws the narrative. The results are hilarious .

As I clock in on my 36th birthday, I finally have started doing something I've wanted to for a decade: ride my bicycle to work. It took another friend at work to start riding as inspiration, and it took planning a route…

The London games have swept me up in an Olympic Fever that I haven't had since Sydney (when I was there). The live extra streams (even with all there problems) take me back to being in the command center, with a bank of…

I realized yesterday that for $5 more per month (< 10% increase), I could upgrade our Fios connection to 50 / 25 and get a whole bunch of other features on the home phone line, so I did. I'm now glad I upgraded my…

More as I actually figure out how to make any of this actually work.

As I was packing up my telescope at midnight last night, calling it a night from our Star Party , I decided to take a short walk. And I did so looking up. The milky way was rising, and as civilization was shutting down,…

New research points that the bell curve isn't really a natural distribution , but what happens when you put humans under constraints: Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what…

It took me a little while to warm up to Kickstarter, but I'm totally in love now, and it was this project that turned me: This is a totally awesome clock made of 180 RGB leds. It's running off an Arduino, and the source…

From the Harvard Business Review : Recent research hammers this home, showing that our performance drops when we try to perform both encoding tasks (experiencing what's around you) and response selection tasks (capturing…

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. -commonly attributed to Antoine de Saint Exupéry I saw this…

Late today I worked out a Thunderbird RSS issue I'd been having for years (at least 5). It's the kind of problem that I come back to every six months or so, and this time it got triggered because someone closed the bug I…

During a late afternoon bathroom break on Feb 27th, I came across this: As the sun was setting it nearly aligned with the hallway on our building, creating this column of light almost all the way across the building (the…

I had an interesting conversation earlier this week with a co-worker about our local paper, the Poughkeepsie Journal , having thrown up a paywall on their website. He's a good decade plus older than I am, and we're…

The Electronic Frontier Foundation just won the most important legal case you didn't know about this year, and protected the existence of the Olson Time Zone Database . San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation…

I was headed over to a friend's house the other night, so looking them up on google maps to make sure I knew the way. In the process I stumbled upon something that totally threw me. This is a map of Poughkeepsie, NY,…

Update (3/22/2012): This American Life has pulled the episode because Mike Daisey's story contained a lot of fabrications. The facts of FoxConn weren't fabricated, but a lot of his personal stories and encounters were.…

Yesterday was not a good day. The reasons (plural) aren't really important for the sake of this discussion. But at 7pm, with the day behind me, and an hour and a half before my wife was scheduled to get home from yoga, I…

For years I've been searching for the actual link to this comic. Today Google final rewarded me. Hope you enjoy.

Loved this post : To get started on one of your lingering interests, you probably don’t need to read about it as much as you think. Go. Do it. And learn from there. Learning is not a passive experience, it's an active…

This is a great story, with a great moral in it. Tip of the hat to [@mmazur](https://twitter.com/#!/mmazur) for sticking this on his twitter feed.

THAT IS ALL from John Hodgman John Hodgman is one of my favorite creators. His final book of complete world knowledge is out in stores , and definitely worth picking up.

You'd think by that headline this was a zombie invasion, and not a snow storm. Then again, Samhain is only 7 hours away, so maybe they are on to something.

From Dar.fm's FAQ : **Q:**Wait - is it $39.95/year or $40/year? **A:**Officially it's $39.95 because some MBA student showed us a spreadsheet explaining how there are people out there who if they see "$40" will…

In the future, you will take a picture of a wedding announcement with your phone, which will automatically scan and transcribe the text, which you can click on to search for the location of the event, and then…

When faced with a problem you don’t understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again. -Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress I see a lot of folks that have lofty ideas, and never get…

After an interesting conversation last weekend about sitting vs. standing while doing computer work, I decided to jerry-rig a standing setup at my desk at work to see if it would work for me. I'm now at the end of the…

This was a very solid top item on Hacker News today: Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It’s written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don’t have a…

Oh Amazon, thanks for letting me know there are lots of geeks at home that watched too many episodes of mythbusters. I really wonder how many emergency room visits this led to. I'm sure the stories all start with…

No matter how many times you've seen a Shuttle launch on TV, you are not prepared for the event in person. This was made even better by being surrounded by fans and enthusiasts of the US Space program. The only other…

So many of my adventures over the last 10 years have been because I met and made such a good and diverse pool of friends while I was at Wesleyan University. These adventures have taken me visiting to Puerto Rico, India,…

A couple years ago I briefly got back into table top gaming, building up a Blood Bowl collection, and gathering up all my old RPG books and games from attic storage up in Vermont. It was a fun summer/fall, but less…

Recently at work I got a question about tools that our project uses. I get these sorts of questions at various times somewhat regularly for a number of reasons. As a responsible answering party I asked what the context…

After both of our Astronomy outreach events at Vassar I've gotten comments from folks that we should have a sign out at the main street to direct people into the event (which also might bring in folks that didn't know…

All bundled up at the Saturn Watch event (flannel lined jeans are excellent for star gazing) showing people the views through my telescope.

Wired magazine has not been know for women on their covers, and when they are, they were somewhat problematic . At least this month, things are different, and they chose a really spectacular female engineer for their…

I broke down and bought myself a Kindle this past week. I will say that I am definitely in like with the device, but not really in love with it yet. The major reason for that is because in the kindle I can see so much…

It turns out that I actually own the Doonesbury book with that comic in it, so here is a higher quality scan because the online version is so unreadable. It's not in color, because it was part of a plot, so was printed…

Last night I spent nearly 2 hours in the Doonesbury archive looking for a strip which I remember reading when I was just working at IBM. This morning I figured I'd keep going back through the archive on the off chance…

I was amusing myself with the androidify app on my evo on the way back from JFK on my day of failed flying. Enjoy!

From Tom Gauld . I'd love to get a print of this.

Things only get done because people do them. That is all.

I will hide the vendor's name to protect the innocent. However I have a recurring order with a vendor, which is great, up until they got rid of a few items. I tried to modify my order online, and I got an error that said…

Some quite good points from Physicist/Feminist: The “What” vs. the “So What”: Doumont stressed the idea of getting across your message . He differentiated the message from the information. The information can be thought…

From the Wikipedia entry on Familiars : In European folklore and folk-belief of the Mediaeval and Early Modern periods, familiar spirits , sometimes referred to simply as familiars , were supernatural entities that were…

Of all the things my parents gave me, one of the things I most appreciate is the love of x-country skiing. When I tell people I grew up in Vermont, I'm often asked if I ski. I have to give a qualified yes by saying only…

Seth Godin had a post on better ways to organize a retreat that had these as good points: Create a dossier on each attendee in advance, with a photo and a non-humble CV of who they are and what they do and what their…

About a year ago, Susan and I went out to our old stomping grounds of Wesleyan University and saw the premier of Noah Baerman's "Know Thyself". Susan and Noah met back in grad school, and Susan was renting an…

Over the past few weeks I've been redoing the Mid Hudson Astronomical Association website. It looks like this: Yes, it's dark, but that's when astronomy happens. The site is built on Drupal, as I've gotten some…

Radio Paradise, my online listening addiction, now has a Google TV optimized version of their site which includes displaying cool images in a slide show. This makes me very happy, and I'm thinking about posting up a few…

A lot of people are upset about the TSA scanners, and I'm with them. It's ridiculous how burdensome flying is becoming for no appreciable safety increase. The most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport. We…

Seriously funny.

Marketplace Money this weekend was all about health care, with lots of great info in it. They did a puppet skit on The Too Informed Patient which was a quite funny take on the challenges presented by the WebMDification…

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Missile: Impossible www.thedailyshow.com 🔗💀 Comedy Central video embed Having learned nothing from Balloon Boy, apparently cable news was all over turning contrails…

A floating stage, resembled a giant book on Lake Constance in Bregenz, Austria can be considered as the biggest book on earth. However, the giant book of Lake Constance can only be seen during Quantum of Solace festival…

This is a really fun romp, and well worth watching. I'm with Fry and Pinker on this front, language is an ever evolving, imperfect, and lossy protocol for humans to transmit symbols in their brain to one another. The…

"A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes." Howard Hawks Having just gotten back from CPOSC, filled with some very good presentations, I realized the old adage about movies applies to presentations…

I enjoy speaking in public. I think I got the bug for it by doing theater in high school. When I took the job in the Linux Technology Center back in 2001 a big first part was to get known in the community, so I submitted…

Cool graphic, I love things like this.

Just awesome.

Randall has finally posted his update to the online communities map, which is quite awesome. This time it's scaled by conversation activity not be member size. And it's available as a poster as well! Going to have to get…

Tickets went on sale today for W00tstock 2.7 , wherein w00tstock comes to the big apple. We bought our tickets this afternoon, and am very happy with our seats. Can't wait!

Now that google instant search has be released on the world I was curious what my internet alphabet is, so I typed each letter one at a time to see what came up. Here are the results. A is for Amazon B is for Best Buy C…

* Godwin's Law was an observation from 1989 that the longer an internet argument goes on, eventually hitler or nazis will be invoked. 20 years later it gets invoked in meat space quite often.

It's an oldie but goodie, and good as a mantra when things like Galileowaswrong.com pop up on the internet (no, I'm not making that a hot link, that level of ignorance shouldn't get the google rankings). If after 400…

The Commonwealth Club of California has become one of my new favorite sources of audio, with some really great speakers over the last month. Here are my favorites, all are worth listening to. Investigating Cults David…

NY Times: Technology Leads More Park Visitors Into Trouble The national parks’ history is full of examples of misguided visitors feeding bears, putting children on buffalos for photos and dipping into geysers despite…

This is the Kindle Screen at 400x magnification, taken by Keith Peters with his USB microscope . He also has some pictures of the iPad, Newspaper, Magazines, and Books at similar magnification. Pretty cool.

I love info graphics, and cool data analysis, so this is just brilliant: Click for full size version.

I started following Wil Wheaton on twitter a few months ago. He's a very funny guy, and a great writer, and now showing up in all manner of TV shows as the evil villain. As a late comer to his minions I didn't…

Today (well really yesterday) I learned that I really should have replaced our house iron filter some time ago. It was on my list of things to do over the last 6 months, and I finally got around to it on Saturday. It was…

You know you are rusty at camping when the list of things you forgot, which you are just now remembering in your head as you are driving away from home, gets long enough that you actually turn around. It has been at…

Notice, the warmest city tonight is New York. Hotter than Houston, hotter than Vegas, hotter than anything in Florida. Oooof.

The last thing you want to hear at midnight is "the icecream has turned to soup" when your wife wanders to the downstairs chest freezer to get some home made icecream out. Granted, because it was boozy…

That pretty much wraps it up.

I finally have the answer as to whether I would pay for news on the web, and the answer is yes. Last night after reading the 5th zero content vapid gadget news story that was front page content on wired.com, I realized…

Yes, there are 25 more where that came from .

Pre-TED, I used to be able to sit through a boring lecture or presentation -- diligently taking notes while being sufficiently nourished by whatever small sliver of new insights or information the speaker could provide.…

Pandemic is a really amazing game. Instead of players playing against each other, you are playing against the game mechanics to try to cure the world of 4 diseases that are breaking out in different geographies.…

Back of the envelope math is good to do. I'm currently working to upgrade my raid array, but due to a lack of ports on the home server, I'm using a second box to build and initialize the new array. 1.2 Terrabytes / 100…

Want!

This past year I finally got a set of Blizzack snow tires for my 2007 Honda Civic, and was blown away by how well it performed in the snow and ice. I actually made a point to go out in the nasty weather just to test it…

Last week I started using Read It Later again, which I really like. It occurred to me what I also really wanted was a Listen to it Later, which would automatically get things onto my Android phone so that it would come…

The guys at The Onion nail it again .

For all the gripe people gave to NBC on their coverage, I have to say I was pretty happy with it overall. When you look at the coverage across NBC, USA, CNBC, and MS-NBC it really seemed like they air more hours of…

For folks in Dutchess County in NY, or Western Connecticut, that have been enjoying Curling, you should know that the Norfolk Curling Club is running an Open House this weekend. Today's events are over, but tomorrow…

Brought to you special for the Olympics is the Google Ski View...

The Burlington Freepress is a Gannett site (like our own Poughkeepsie Journal), so this link will probably be useless in a week. However, right now there is a 4 page article on the EC Fiber project , to bring Fiber to…

This is a really great blog post on Talent vs. Practice : I am sick of hearing people say, “Oh, I love your code, I wish I could do that .” You can . The only reason you can’t is because you don’t practice enough . I…

I've noticed an interesting behavior, recently, which is geek gadget validation syndrome. If you buy something as a geek, your purchase is validated if someone else buys the same thing after you've shown in / recommended…

2010 is still an odd year for me to write, much more so than 2000 was. 2010 is clearly the future in my head. If you had any doubt we are now living in the future here are things that will happen in 2010 (bits of this…

1999 was probably one of my worst years. It included lots of friends moving away, a rather awful breakup, and 2 funerals, one of which was for a friend from college. I was very happy to be done with that year. New Year's…

I cleaned up the alignment from a version of this I found online. Enjoy.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Our christmas tree this year. Everything on the tree (minus lights) is edible, as per tradition.

After I got my HTC Hero and purchased DoggCatcher 🔗💀 , I've now got this entirely seemless podcast experience as my phone grabs the newest stuff any time I'm on wireless. It caused me to do some trimming and tuning on…

I recently came across this study recently that really drove home how totally bogus multitasking in people is. It turns out that people that tell you they are good at multitasking, are actually worse at it then people…

This has filtered a number of places, but I figured I should post it out on my blog as well, which will hit the OpenSim planet in the process. I'm moving on from the OpenSim project, for now. I got involved a little over…

I love both the art and the message in sinfest , this sunday's strip was just awesome:

Here is some in progress shots of the minis I've managed to paint so far. My skill level is still low, but I'm learning quite a bit with each new model I tackle. Enjoy.

I was just following up on an android article, and got this instead: I laughed.

Last night Jim and I decided to take advantage of the evening and do the 7.5 mile stretch of wappingers creek that runs near my house. There is only one put in, and one take out, between water falls, and it's a one way…

John Hodgman was the headliner at the White House Correspondent's dinner last night, and the intertubes have his speech up already. It's classic Hodgman, both humorous and meaningful. Check it out on the 'tube .

Via rc3.org I came across this blog post : FAIL is over. Fail is dead. Because it marks a lack of human empathy, and signifies an absence of intellectual curiosity, it is an unacceptable response to creative efforts in…

When I was 12 my friend Travis introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons, which led to a 4 year romp through all manner of Role Playing Games and Table Top Games. The list is extensive, and I've honestly probably complete…

I've been thinking about this one for a while, but I've now disabled the daily link posting by postalicious. I also went back and purged all the link posts in the blog (which turned out to be about 50% of them). If you…

I'm curious if the couple of people that read this find the daily links valuable or not? I've been wondering if I should keep them here, or put up something like lifestream on a suburl with them, making the main blog…

I appreciate that even though Toshiba threw in the towel on the HD-DVD front over a year ago, their software team is still working on fixing issues with equipment out there. My wife got me an A3 before the war was lost,…

Via my old friend Jay on facebook, originally from WIRED: Frolleague - A work colleague friended on a social networking site and thus granted access to personal information that may be perceived as less that professional…

While not officially true until the 22nd, today I took my last final exam of my graduate degree. I'm now done. Not only that, I actually managed to finish the practical with 15 minutes to spare (it would have been more,…

Person A: "How much do you know about xen and xm commands?" Me: "Um... if you scroll down to the end of the xm man page, you'll see that I wrote it." I was amused. :)

"Trust me, if NYC gets nuked, NO ONE locally is driving to sterling forest to save a soup company" I'll leave the context and author as an exercise to the reader

Much like other facebook meme's I passed on the whole 25 things cycle around. But here is 1 thing you probably didn't know about me: for grades 1 - 5 I attended a one room school house, and had the same teacher for 5…

From toothpaste for dinner (click image to get to his site).

"Hitler...all he had to peddle was hate. Hate always sells well, but for repeat trade and the long pull happiness is sounder merchandise." Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land , by Robert Anson Heinlein…

originally from http://www.jfhopkin.karoo.net/tmp/StickInsectAv.jpg . I love it. :)

There has been some interesting and amazing "outrage" by a bunch of people today of the OpenSim April Fools joke, which was: non destructive change of avatar appearance (no data on disk changed) temporary never…

Susan and I finally watched Into the Wild Green Yonder last night. Typically I had watched these on release day, but after Bender's Game, it didn't feel like it had the same sense of urgency. I love Futurama, have bought…

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas…

I have to admit, some of my more enjoyable time wasting on facebook comes from the "you might know" whack-a-mole. Because if you decline people there it pops up new suggestions live. Most of the time these…

Leave it to Carter and Craig to not only invent the Bro Code for How I Met Your Mother , but to then go about an actually write a 200 page book with the whole thing in there and publish it. I am so tempted to get this.

New Year's resolutions are broken by Feb, and New Year's predictions always seem to be a lot of chest beating. However this year's edge question made me stop and think. What have you changed your mind about? It's a much…

Dear Amazon.com Customer, As someone who has shown an interest in magazines, you might like to know about the following offer: Serious Amazon, magazines aren't really an interest area. Time to flag that category as…

This comics comes timely as I attempted to figure out how to make Audible.com work on Linux this weekend, and gave up. I don't get why vendors don't switch from DRM to watermarking (like a lot of people doing eBooks…

I love this American Life. While not every episode is genius, the non genius episodes are good, and the genius ones are the most amazing radio you'll ever listen to. This past week they did an episode called Another…

Today's comic is available as a poster .

And you should read it every day , as it's been this awesome for weeks.

Radio Paradise played this late this afternoon, and I was hooked. You can even see it in clamation glory on youtube: Cows With Guns (music by Dana Lyons, www.cowswithguns.com)

...because I've seen this a couple of places now, and more people should realize that cutting taxes on > 90% of americans is being called raising taxes by the media. ...because expanded offshore drilling isn't going…

But as a preview for pictures to be uploaded once we get back, Yosemite is definitely spectacular.

For those interested, this is roughly the vacation path we're taking (we're currently at E).

I've been talking about it for years, and spending the last 2 weekends staring up at the stars with binoculars on our deck made me realize that I now had a place to use this that was only 25' from hot coffee. Not so…

One of the constant tensions that exist is the new media age is between preservation of culture and copyrights. Personally this doesn't get summed up any better for me than the fact that Schickele Mix is now lost to us.…

You can see Susan and I caught in the light on the top left of the picture at the Jonathon Coulton show in New York . Thanks to snipeyhead for posting a whole set of images to flickr . This was during one of the songs…

Here's what my delicious links look like via wordle: I'm amused, and love visualizations like this.

I'm still sorting out how I'm going to do photos in the future, as the old photo album is pretty much under decay, and my interest in the old workflow for publishing has waned. On the viable options from, Smugmug looks…

So, it's now been confirmed . We had a lightning strike on the dish at the house. That piece of cable was found by the tech while fixing our dish. He took the original home with him for an office souvenir, as I don't…

When I got home tonight, things seemed a bit off, and I couldn't figure it out to begin with. Pretty soon I realized that a lot of electronics were acting up. While a hard power reset fixed some of them, others (like our…

I found myself surprised to realize that we'd been doing our memorial day sunday party What started as our house warming party 4 years ago, has now turned into our big annual event. We had another good turn out year,…

For those that don't know Jonathan Coulton (the man that brought use Code Monkey , Re: Your Brains , and The Portal Song ) wrote a quite awesome song by that name. Listen to it here , though I'll warn you it's probably…

I think this definitely nails it. :)

This comment on twitter from RichWhite, one of the leaders of EduSim : @ sdague - you realize you Opensim developers will be raised to "saint" status in the k-12 distance education field some day. Man, what a…

I remember very vividly being introduced to D&D at the age of 12. A friend of mine from junior high, Travis Dudley, had all five 1st edition boxed sets. Our first coupld of days with them were mostly creating level…

With a living room full of people, and a kitched full of food, we had quite the Super Bowl Party last night. At least a few of it are paying for it with our voices this morning. There are many folks more eloquent than I…

Nick and I chatted the other night, catching up on all things life and work. Nick has kicked off his 4th semester as a professor at West Virginia Tech , adding a new class on open source software development to the…

I can't wait to see the blog post today that follows this one.

I recently made the switch from OS X to Ubuntu after realizing that all Steve Jobs wants is for you to shut up and buy a new iPod; don’t you dare criticize his taste or the way he treats third-party developers like dirt.…

XMPP4R is written in Ruby. If you don't know this language yet, continue to ignore it. Learning it will make you realize what you missed until now, and you might run into severe problems (depression, etc). -- XMPP/Jabber…

That line is used twice in Futurama (in two consecutive episodes), uttered by Professor Farnsworth. When Futurama was on Cartoon Network for the last 4 years, that line was blanked out on every airing of either episode.…

I'm finally overcoming the jet lag from our trip, and starting to feel like a normal person again. While I've been to a lot of other countries before, I've never had this kind of culture shock in returning to the states.…

The gas station that I use on the way to work underwent construction during December. When I stopped to get gas this morning, I noticed that they had posted a set of google map directions to St. Francis Hospital (one of…

or sometime over the last 12 months, in no particular order I'm one of those folks that has lucid dreams while taking malaria meds . The dreams are cool, though I could leave behind all the waking up in the middle of the…

Porkchop sent me this youtube video on Saturday. ++ for an hour of really good entertainment. My love for xkcd is even greater after this.

I was really hoping to avoid the whole facebook thing, but today someone that I haven't seen or heard from in 7 or 8 years found me on facebook... and I gave up resisting. The value of these networks for me is giving me…

Over the summer I moved my blog from livejournal to wordpress. There were a lot of reasons to do this, and overall my experience has been very good with wordpress. Once google indexed me, it came up with the following:…

With the writers strike on full bore, and the clock counting down on scripted television going off the air, I thought this morning's Ctrl Alt Delete comic was very apropos.

"We have so much... stuff. None of us really need any more of it this year. And yet all of the world there are people that don't have enough. Wouldn't it be better if we got someone a goat than giving each other…

The writers strike is going to start having an impact on scripted TV in about 4 weeks, when all the shows that were "in the can" end up being aired, and there are no more left. (Inspired by season pass by jwz…

Over the past couple of months I've started looking more at various new "web 2.0" sites, putting aside past prejudices, and seeing where the value in these applications might be. 🔗💀 Delicious is social book…

The Fonz jumped the shark . (well, actually it was yesterday, and I found out a day late. Thanks to Mike for pointing it out to me though.)

Click on the image to be taken to the artist's site. You need to have seen a lot of Dr Who for this to make any sense. If you haven't, trust me, it's brilliant.

The tickets are now booked for our trip to India over the holidays. Our friend Sourav is getting married in Calcutta on January 2nd, so it made a very good reason to make the trek over there. We'll be spending a good…

When this is the first thing you hear in your car on the way to work: Cote: the first rule of knife fighting is you are going to get cut Charles: yeh, it's true Cote: I don't know what it means Charles, but it sounds…

From our vacation last month. Something about the juxtaposition of muscle car vs. self propelled boat amuses me.

It's Monarch season. No, not the dreaded form of government , but those butterflies that manage to migrate from the north east to Mexico every year. Because Susan has both milkweed and butterfly bushes in or garden,…

After years on Livejournal , I've decided to migrate off to my own wordpress installation. This will hopefully help consolidate some of my content which has been spread out on a number of different sites recently. Expect…

This is how I spent my anniversary, with my wife Susan on the Otter Creek in Vermont. A nice 4.5 hour kayak trip, totally 9.5 miles. We stopped about half way through for a picnic lunch which included the last of our…

The greatest value of vacation is it snaps you out of your normal routine. In the absence of the standard trappings of the 21st (as we were in rural Wisconsin and Minnesota for the entire trip), I brought a stack of…

For those that had not previously heard, NYCCCP (aka "the space") is coming to an end. The space was the idea of Porkchop and Mike, based on hacker spaces that existed in Boston and Phili. The idea is…

Things you'd rather not hear your wife say first thing in the morning: We don't have any water in the house. None of the faucets work. 2 hours later, we have a new well pump, and we have water again, as the old one was…

Check jwz's blog for both the BC ads out there now . They are awesome.

A new rate and rules change is being pushed down by the RIAA at the moment, which will mean that most internet radio stations will be kicked off the air. Stations like RadioParadise would be required to pay 125% of their…

This past weekend Susan and I did something different, and took a trip down to Philadelphia for the annual flower show. The idea first surfaced a couple of weeks ago when Susan brought up the fact that it was coming up,…

After three years, the idea that "we should really look at our spices, consolidate, and throw out old ones", we finally began that project. What looked like an hours worth of work on Saturday, rapidly turned…

On the way back from Vermont, On the Media had a very good story on the reporting around the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing fiasco in Boston. What is most interesting is how much CNN and all the other cable…

Susan and I went up to Vermont for my father's 65th birthday this weekend, and actually got two 1.5 hr cross country skis in while we were there. During the ski I realized that while the skis I have now are quiet good…

While this played out a lot more in the job I had 6 years ago, I think there is some good wisdom here. :)

Doing a good job around here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit; you get a warm feeling, but no one notices. -- unknown As seen on the gtk-perl mailing list.

It's pretty pathetic that the 1/2" of snow that came down last night got everyone here excited, but it did. We've now broken the record for latest snowfall in a season in Poughkeepsie (previous record was Jan 14th).…

Listening to NPR's Weekend Edition this morning, and there was an interview with Jonathan Coulton who wrote and performed the song Code Monkey as part of his Thing-a-week blog this past year. had brought up Code Monkey…

I'm attempting to study for my Automata final, which is going slowly, and not something I'm able to keep enthusiasm up about. I only need a 51 on the final to get the requisite B in the class, and given that every exam…

8.5 years ago, I was about to graduate from Wesleyan University with my bachelors degrees in physics. I was starting at IBM a month later, and it was now finally time to get a car. As I had never owned a car before, I…

Earlier this week I ordered 25 calendars, and that, minus gifts for my wife, constitutes my Christmas shopping for the year. The calendars come from Shuttterfly, and are a series of pretty spectacular (if I do say so…

Last night Susan, Chris, and I headed up to Bard for a lecture / interview / show and tell with David Javerbaum, the head writer and supervising producer for The Daily Show. We did cast the net wider, trying to get other…

For the past 3.5 years, grad school has just been something that I do, and will be doing forever. I'm enrolled in the Computer Science Masters degree program at Marist College, taking 1 class a semester, part time, at…

Yes, it's been a picture heavy couple of days, but what can I say, there have been some great pictures out there.

I think has the best set of references here . It's been a week of weirdness elsewhere as well, so I guess doom does just come in torrents.

First pass through the honeymoon pictures, and I'm down to 220 out of 713, which can be seen at my album (no longer online). I'll end up doing a second culling later to get it down further, but there are actually…

(check out part 1 first) Day 6 (Sun) Got up reasonably early and started our trek from Butte to Yellowstone. 75 mph interstate highways make that trek a lot less than it could have been. The last 60 miles to yellowstone…

Sunday mornings always tend to be reasonably productive hacking time, as I tend to wake up early, and Susan likes to sleep in. I've gotten quite a bit of my exif tagging program put together now, using perl gtk2, and…

This is probably coming in 2 parts, though we'll see how the rest of the writing goes. I hope it's complete enough to get a flavor of, and once I get pictures up I'll link them in as well. Day 1 (Tues) Never went to…

Susan and I are in Butte, MT for the night, on our way to Yellowstone from Glacier. Butte gives us a chance to get some laundry done in the hotel, as all of our hiking clothes are quite solidly rank at this point.…

Courtesy of Mike Kershaw, we've got the first round of wedding photos online. They are linked from tveekrem.dague.org 🔗💀 as will all future photos going up, though it will probably be the end of the month until many…

We're at T minus 5 days and counting till our wedding 🔗💀 , and just about all the prep work before actually getting to Vermont that can be done, has been. So now it's just hold on tight, and deal with any unforeseens…

I love maps... especially geeky ones.

Last weekend Susan and I were in Home Despot, getting a new sink for our bathroom that is being remodelled. As Susan was off considering fixtures, I roamed through the appliances section and my eye was caught by a Cobalt…

Behold the glory of the interweb... I think I may need to order up a poster. ;)

From our friends at Ctrl+Alt+Del online (which Jimix turned me on to a couple months back): Hehehe.

Welcome to living in the Police State. To ensure your continued enjoyment of constant surveillance, might I suggest a few key products. First we have our ATT phone card . It has the advantage of routing all your calling…

Last night was the exam for my grad class. It went quite well. The 2 hour test took me about 45 minutes to finish, then I went over the test 3 times, mostly to kill time and not miff everyone else in the room for leaving…

Doesn't that look cool! Honda did a concept car for a 2005 motor show which is a cool evolution of the die hard civic. Unlike most concept cars, they actually decided to start making this one, and selling it in Europe.…

I was just watching How I Met Your Mother, and as the paramedics ran in for the first scene, I realized one of them looked freakily familiar. ... Damn, that's Carter! and, wait, the other one is Craig! Granted it is…

From a wired blog post : The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used "State Secrets Privilege" -- the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb -- in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action…

The last two days of work weren't actually work per say, they were the Leadership Excellence class here at IBM. I'd heard really good things about the class from people that I very much respect that have gone through it,…

The news is on Heather's Blog , so I think it's fair game to be on mine now. :) Nick and Heather are engaged! I got a call on Friday from Nick giving me the short version, and I need to get the long and juicy version out…

It was a good weekend. A lot of time spent outside, a lot of things accomplished. Apparently this was the weekend to get rid of the carpet on the porch, which I didn't realize until Susan said "come help me rip up…

Just read this article at Ars Technical : Consumer advocates cheered as New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer took music labels to task last year for allegedly bribing radio stations to play certain artists. The…

While Sunday I was off curling all day, Saturday managed to be a pretty reasonable day for getting things done for the wedding, shower, and other obligations. I put together the automatic gallery script for Mike Fogg's…

Today was the final day in the curling adventure for the year, and a lot of fun was had by all. The day was setup as a mini Bonspiel, with the 8 teams lined up into a series of matches. The rules: Each match is 3 Ends-…

I was too busy last week to give the blow by blow for Day 1 of curling, but Pyg did , so I don't feel too bad. The day started with brunch, with the normal crew (Mike, Porkchop, Pyg, Gargos, and myself). After a quick…

After a bit of hemming and hawing, it appears that the gang is all in for the $50, 4 day curling class at the Norfolk Curling Club . I have to say, I keep thinking about my last throw in the last game, which didn't have…

Sunday was a day of adventure. After a bit of cajoling from the local gang , I tagged along to the curling open house at the Norfolk Curling Club , which was about a 1.5 hour trek from Poughkeepsie. We arrived at 1:30, a…

One of the great things about going to school at a place like Wesleyan , is that your friends end up in very interesting, very different parts of the world. For instance, Jehan randomly IMed me this morning with news of…

Ben posted about this over the weekend, and it made me think a bit. When I was just graduating college, and was asked the question, I had a few answers I thought I could give to that. In 5 years I Would not be working…