Summer temps
Friday, 6 June 2008
The summer heat has arrived with a vengeance. At 10:30 am, it was already 88°F.
Musings
Travel strategies
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
You’ve heard of soap-on-a-rope; here’s a flag on a cable!
The iPhone is a great travelers’ tool.
One thing I find particularly useful is the real-time traffic info displayed on a map. Today, however, for the first time, we had faulty data. The iPhone indicated poor conditions along our route in Cincinnati. We decided to chance it and found…traffic running 5–10 mph above the speed limit. Well, at least the error went in our favor.
37 feet/gallon
Thursday, 10 April 2008
Something to think about when you take your Geo Bush gov’t check aka economic stimulus bux to the store/online to buy consumer electronics made in Asia, as so many are predicting:
Any idea how far the largest container ships can go on a gallon of fuel? Try 37 feet. That adds up to 2 billion barrels of petroleum a year. “If the shipping industry were a country, it would be No. 7 in carbon emissions,” says Michael Hirshfield….
…—From Newsweek dated 5 April on web and 14 April on my dead-tree version….
Wikipedia’s article on container ships says the first container shipping was in 1956, the current containers are 40 feet/12 m long, and the larger container ships carry something like 7500 of them—if my math is right.
Control issues?
Monday, 17 March 2008
I was going to blog about the lovely chicken with mustard sauce that Mouse made, but we ate it all up before I got a picture taken, and who wants to see an empty cook-pot?
And I could blog about all the laughing we did with KW and GG, but then I’d have to explain too much.
So, I’ll settle for a photo of the U-Scan that KW mentions so often in her blahg (or used to).
Web trails
Monday, 10 March 2008
Today’s NYTimes has a series of stories and graphics that make me quite uneasy. I do wonder what They (meaning anybody out there, individual or corporate, private or government) can learn about me from my web activity, carried out from the safety of my own desk chair/couch/etc. I know They do want to know what I’m up to, so as to market Stuff to me more efficiently—highly targeted marketing is what They tell clients They provide.
Take the time to look at the graphics: 1) a simple bar graph of frequency of data collection at several domains at least several of which you probably visit regularly, including FOX, AOL, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, EBay, and Wikipedia (watch out!); 2) a table of the data behind the bar graph along with another pair of bar graphs that amplify all this; and 3) a blog discussion of the whole situation.
My conclusion: 1) make sure I have my doubleclick opt-out cookie in place; 2), regularly delete cookies; and, 3) assume strangers can see what I’m up to, maybe in considerable detail.
Which is what Eliot Spitzer apparently forgot. Well, maybe not about web tracking, but at least that a phone tap can reveal all. And that nobody’s immune to them in the good old US of A….
Aluminum air
Monday, 4 February 2008
Thinnovation they say on the Apple page…. Offset hinge….
The new Mac Air is without a doubt a cool machine. Superb design. Eye-catching. I didn’t even notice the built-in iSight camera, but then we weren’t at the store and in its august presence very long…. And I certainly didn’t dig beneath the surface to find the 37-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery*….
I see the Mac Air as a rather overgrown PDA, good for the high-end business-types. I suspect I’d need to lug around a separate hard drive for all my photos and miscellany, though.
And what the heck is a lithium-polymer battery anyway? Sounds like a gizmo from Star Trek!
Decisions, decisions…
Tuesday, 29 January 2008
The WashPost reports an amazing level of efficiency by some government agencies—using a secure wiki—that allows officials to swap information and ideas—amazing because such avenues are so often closed and unavailable, sadly—and expensively!
On Sunday, the Post also had an interesting editorial evaluating positions and experience of the major presidential candidates, making a series of excellent points. The editors note:
On some issues, the three leading Democrats are almost equally disappointing.
And, regarding the Republicans:
All three have stained themselves with their expedient transformations from immigration pragmatists to vengeful hard-liners.
Yet, they add:
The first year of campaigning has been clarifying, and not all the candidates have survived with stature intact. But this isn’t a year of seven dwarfs; there are capable people on both sides.
Note: Georgia votes with so many other states on Feb Five, and advance voting began yesterday….
Fire²
Friday, 25 January 2008
Big excitement in the neighborhood this afternoon: car fire. Looked like the battery went wonky.
…and we thought we smelled tires burning or tar being laid down…. Then, oops, the fire truck arrived!
But, I guess it’s not much compared to the hotel fire in Vegas….
Pick one…
Friday, 18 January 2008
Sorree, low light (and all that)….
Today we finally had the opportunity to watch a leetle kid spend some time with the XO, and she explored, particularly enjoying the Turtle drawing app. I have to admit that our test subject also switched back to a handy Mac laptop after a while….
Once again, great times in Lexington KY….
Scrivener! Hallelujah!
Sunday, 6 January 2008
The cold’s slacked off. I swear I took this before I saw RMJ’s gorgeous pictures….
Today the gods and saints and dustmotes smiled upon me and, some lyrical writing by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes pointed me to the fine text-generation program Scrivener. [Download it here for a 30-day free trial. Sorry you poor PC people, this is a Mac-only program….]
For years I’ve sought to escape the tyranny of Word, just like Heffernan. JCB got me to try Pages, but two things sent me back to The Evil Microsoft Product:
- 1) I love being able to type in something simple like “sp” and have the autocorrect function do the heavy lifting of making those two simple letters into a Big Word I type perhaps too often: “sociopolitical” (and a long list of other examples—“nv” becomes Nochixtlán Valley complete with accent, and “bofm” becomes Basin of Mexico—it’s particularly useful for place names!), and
- 2) Endnote. I use this program to keep track of references and store all my notes; it easily links to PDFs, too. From special entries you make in the [Word] text, it makes a bibliography that needs highly irritating but relatively minor editing (it is annoying, but still better than other software I’ve tried) to standardize into the proper format.
Then JCB figured out some way to make Pages do the autocorrect thing and I had to rethink (again) my Endnote addiction. But I still found myself in its grip.
Now in one simple sunny Sunday I’m a Scrivener convert. It’s superior for generating text while keeping assorted supporting materials in my visual field—if I want them! After the text is generated (late this spring, I hope; keep your fingers crossed!) I anticipate returning to Word to flex Endnote’s power, and then using Word or using Pages for the final layout, but I think Scrivener helps significantly with generating the kind of document I’m working on. I love Scrivener’s interactive outline & superoutline functions, which the program calls Outliner and Corkboard. In short, the program effectively uses the power of Cocoa to display multiple editable views simultaneously.
For now, I’m going to use Scrivener on this chapter that’s been confounding me, inserting Endnote-renderable asides when necessary, and utilizing the creative support of my New Friend to avoid the straight jacket effects of the other W.
BTW…
…wasn’t that a supremely special moment last night when all the Presidential candidates were on the stage together at Saint Anselm College between the two debates, mixing and chatting (picture or NYT story); I even saw a few hugs!