Mission Impossible: make a brand new recipe from leftovers, clean up the prep dishes, set up the photo booth, snap a photo and eat the food within 20 minutes. The dish was pretty simple: leftover vegetarian tacos become Veggie Taco Burgers!
What did I learn? Everyone knows what peas look like (whether they’re blurry or not), focus exclusively on the sandwich. It’s dumb to focus up the middle. Also, plastic wrapped store bread looks like plastic wrapped store bread. Yep. All the time. Lastly, I didn’t go for much style, but the proportions on the plate would be nicer if the tomatoes had more mass and the plate was larger. Failure is good!
I wasn’t born in time to see or meet Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I say, with more than a little irony, that I am very happy of this fact. I’m happy because I never had to live in a world that did not know him and did not learn from him. I never had to live in a world where I doubted the equality of any wo/man. I never lived in that same world that saw him killed in 1968 by a foolish man who chose to express hatred instead of love.
I came from a very Swedish/Norwegian/German community in Northern Minnesota. Diversity up there is usually shown in the varietals of sauerkraut, but that doesn’t change the fact that I felt deeply about Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and how he changed the face of this world through the support of fellow civil rights activists. In my recollection of 7-year-old me, the good people of the world were listed chronologically as follows: Jesus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s how it went for all the years I was in school, and I’ll never shake that list now.
Every time I look back at his final speech I imagine an impossible conversation. I imagine a dark room where a figure sits with Dr. King hours before his final address (below). The figure tells him in hushed tones what’s about to happen. And I imagine Dr. King saying “Well, thanks for sharing, Friend, but I’ve got to be at the Mason Temple in a few hours. Have a safe trip back to wherever you came from.”
I would give a lot to be able to meet Dr. King today, but I realize he’d be 83 and wouldn’t have much time for me. I hope his family enjoys remembering him on this day as much as I do, and I hope they’re as proud as possible to know that without him our world would be a much emptier place. Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Every year at New Years my family has a tradition: reflect on the year with a series of preposterously invasive questions about the ending year that only my mother enjoys asking or answering. At least, that’s what I used to tell her. My mother has always been a good sport with her children’s irrational reaction to family traditions and discussion. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for her poisoned genes to take root in my warped brain. It’s been her plan for the last 25 years to weave targeted pathways in my cerebrum with her genetically engineering Trojan horse of a chromosome set. All so that she had somebody else to derive pleasure from these twisted games. And I love the evil genius all the more for having succeeded.
Honestly, I’ve found that I’m already forgetting more about the past than I care to admit. People, places, experiences and conversations seem to slip by more and more every year. At this point my brain is so filled with technical gobbledigook that it’s a wonder anything else sticks. So when I look at the tradition now it seems like an amazing way to capture just a small slice of each year. Everyone is so focused on the new year that no one seems to bother putting the entire last year in perspective, or comparing your experiences to those of previous years.
I strongly encourage you to try these questions out for yourself. Be honest, be thoughtful, and be clear in your responses. If you feel bold enough to post them in a comment or on your own blog, I encourage you to do so. Otherwise, please email me if you’d like to share your answers with someone else. Until then, I hope you enjoy a snapshot of my year.
The most beautiful place I saw this year :
I walked out on a dock on the end of Tilghman Island, in Black Walnut Cove, absolutely beautiful.
Yesterday, while walking around DC we decided to stop in and see what was happening with OccupyDC at Freedom Plaza. We thought the place was dead until we wandered around the tents to find an “assembly”. It was sort of like watching an interpretive form of Lord of the Flies: a bunch of children trying to figure out how to structure a government to just stay afloat.
Notably, one extremely, extremely drunk man approached me and asked if I wanted my picture taken with my camera. I ignored him, shot a few more and slowly moved away. Much to my amusement, the same man grabbed the microphone (see photos) and mumbled until members of the audience flashed the /\ sign.
The group was fairly harmless, and seemed to already be bogged down in the bureaucracy of making sure everyone has an equal voice. I’d like to go back and observe again. All I got out of this visit was further confirmation that these are just a bunch of hippies out of their own decade who don’t really have anything to protest about except that their persistent personification of “alternative” prevents them from ever getting a job outside of record and drug paraphernalia shops. I’m not bitter; I’m just not cool enough to sleep in a tent.
I just got the Blue Yeti Microphone, and after two hours of playing around I already love it. It’s a solid piece of equipment (4 lbs, I think), no hassle install woes, and great sound out of the box. I had a fan running in the room the whole time with almost no carry over. It’ll be fun to try to push it to its limits. For now, it’s a couple of spins with the penny whistle and Skype conversations.
I like to use Frere Jacques as a test case. See what it sounds like on my Logitech Pro 9000.
Keep in mind that calling me a trained professional is like calling Michelle Bachmann a viable presidential candidate. I try hard, but it’s really laughable by those with any sense at all. In that same vein, I’m having a blast pretending to know what I’m doing. I’m not comfortable uploading my lack of singing talent to the interwebs, but it’s been interesting to see what I can make in 20 minutes or so. I really need to get back to some music theory to create some fun little experiments.
The biggest problem with the Blue Yeti + Blue Pop [Filter] is a common one among internet users. However, all of their innovative, costly, or dangerous solutions seem to be way harder than something I came up with in about 4 minutes.
MacGyver is an amateur
Yes, that’s styrofoam. The grip is solid; I can pick up the Yeti at a 45-degree angle from that clamp. I wouldn’t carry it through the desert like that, but it’s a fantastic desktop solution. The best part is where I got the styrofoam from*:
kplaxmaster is a good friend and a bit of a rival blogger in the technology space. He wrote an article expanding his position from a recent argument on Twitter. I encourage you to go read it and formulate your own opinions before reading my response. Did you go? Great. So can you agree with me that the article starts with “cloud sucks” and ends with “WHERE ARE MY ELECTRIC CARS?!?”, effectively emulating the maniacal rantings of a backwater technomage stuck on dial-up. Just teasing, of course.
Lets start with the definition, which I believe hits the core of my disagreement. It seems that accuracy gets lost in reducing the cloud offering to “multiple computers act as one“. I’d much prefer that the community agrees to “cloud computing means (1)accessing/consuming/manipulating data on (2)any device (3)regardless of origin“. And I can provide examples of these interactions:
(1)I access my email through Gmail, I consume films from Netflix, and I make changes to documents in Google Docs.
(2) I do all of these things from my Android phone as I ride to work on the train for mobility. I do all of these things from either of my two personal laptops or my work pc (except Netflix) if I’m on the road or in the office. I do all of these things from my 8-Core, 3 Monitor home computer to get high-speed and simultaneous processing. I consume data on my Roku (connected to my TV).
(3)I can create a document and type an outline on my phone, when I get home I finish typing each of the devices. When I start watching an episode of Star Trek TNG on my PC and have to jump on the train to see friends I just open Netflix on my way out of the door and resume playing the same episode right where Q left off.
I think his statment about computation power costing more is extremely dubious: “This will drive down cost of PCs, yes, but also put even more trust into the cloud—and most likely raise the price of computers with actual CPU power such as a quad core 3.0 GHz computer as demand will go down.” This assumes that entire swaths of the CPU market is content to slow their inventive nature in favor of ‘churning out’ CPUs with minor improvements. It also assumes that server-side CPU developments will not impact costs to the end user. The market can centralize CPU processing, but that doesn’t reduce peak-performance requirements as processing is still taking place. I would even hypothesize that centralization drives computing requirements UP as server owners will be looking for any efficiencies they can find to reduce server footprint and compute costs during computation cycles that surpass.
I completely agree with the assessment that processing and bandwidth should be considered like natural resources just like electricity. I argue that such pricing has been grossly absent from the entire discussion, just look at the fact that American consumer pays for “bandwidth” instead of “throughput”. Even though I hate to say it, the wireless market is on the right track…just with the wrong pricing models in mind. They view 1GB of data as a fixed price when the reality is far more like the electricity delivery model: peak usage translates to peak pricing. If I’m trying to download a video in the evenings, during peak hours, it should cost more and I (and the service provider) should make decisions based on hard figures. Fixed lines (e.g. FIOS) have high up-front costs and limited channel sharing so consumers get truly dedicated lines, but we all dump into the same “distribution system”, to borrow a power term. Unfortunately, the similarities only go so-far as throughput isn’t something you can save up like electricity to be expended by another consumer. Regardless, we need to decide what we’re selling to users.
Now, your guess is as good as mine about why he starts freaking out about not having MS Kinect hooked to traffic lights or computers in refridgerators. But the question about why we need everything connected to te cloud is easy: because machine-to-machine management is hard. The average end user doesn’t want to have to understand client-server architectures, install UPSs in their homes for server PCs and reset devices to get them to resync. They also don’t want to debug misconfigurations, diagnose problems, or defend the contents of their refridgerator against cyber attacks from the server they forgot to power cycle after the last Microsoft patch.
But back to the core idea of trade off’s, it’s important to remember that a technology user is balancing three costs:
[re]education – How do I do this again? I’ve never heard of that before!
time – After I brush my teeth, it’s going to take me 5 minutes to hook my device to my PC and find the album I wanted to download before I hop on the bus.
stress – The service is down?! Do I have to reset the server in the basement? Am I going to miss that call with Jane tonight because of some problem with MY stuff?
money – Derived from the North American ‘evilroot’
The fact is that cloud offerings (right now), offer about as close to an “on-off” switch as you can get for education, 6 second buffering times for Netflix on 3G, no system maintenence stress, and for a price that’s well below most of the traditional service offerings (often free, once you assume connectivity). Now, you can claim that connectivity has to factor into the pricing, which I’m okay with. I personally pay $70 a month for connectivity ($30 cell data + $40 home internet). Add $17 for media and now I’m streaming years of content (video and music), communicating on every social network and through commercial channels for $97 dollars per month.
You can argue that those 6 seconds of buffering and $30 dollars per month would be justified by having to sync all my devices at home on my PC before I leave for work, but the time to download ALL of my media plus not having the ability to choose on the fly means I’m not ever going that way. And neither are the data providers: it’s simply TOO HARD to manage DRM in a distributed computing system. So if I don’t want to move and they don’t want to move…why resist?
At 1:51 pm yesterday, August 23rd, a earthquake registering 5.8 struck .5 below the surface in Mineral, VA. I was over 100 miles away, on the 6th story of my office building when the quake shook our conference room. For those who are seeing the joke about the “earthquake devastation”, you would appreciate all of us who freaked out for 10 minutes only to realize nothing was really wrong. But don’t underestimate 5.8, I was more than “shaken”.
I was concerned about riding the metro home, so when a friend offered to drive me home I seized the opportunity (3:30pm). At 4:20pm (2.5 hours after the earthquake) we opened the door to the apartment; the forehead-smacking dissatisfaction on my face was probably visible from space as I watched gallons of water seeping through my ceiling. Please see following clip.
I talked with the management office and they said they had been turning off water valves in individual apartments, and were going to check to make sure my upstairs neighbor had his turned off after I reported the damage. As in many other apartments in the complex, the neighbor’s hot water unit had been shaken off balance and the pipes blew, shooting water into the living room. Response crews had to unlock the water unit doors and shut off the system in order to stop further damage. I believe this was done before I returned, but I can’t verify.
My roommate returned home and we began to survey the damage, walking from room to room with my cell phone “video camera” trying to account for what had been destroyed. The living room was decimated, but both bedrooms were only partially damaged and my bathroom had been drenched. Most of my clothing, books, computers and bed seemed uneffected in the bedroom. The largest loss was my couch (a favorite of mine and my guests). Early estimates put losses around $2-3k (really great news).
We packed emergency supplies up and loaded my roommate’s car before heading back to the front desk. At 5:15pm the office staff emailed everyone that the entire building’s water main had been shut down to prevent further damage at this time, effecting all residents. The insurance company (Assurant) was largely unhelpful as no adjusters were in the office after 5, but ‘Anthony’ walked me through filing a claim with early damage reports. They’re supposed to get back to me in the next 3 days to start the claims process. He said that if we grabbed a hotel that we should save our receipts for reimbursement later. We took the opportunity to call friends and family to update them on the status. We also went to grab a bite to eat at a Pho place down the street. Boba tea is a great calming force, if you ever have the need.
I talked with the front desk people a few times, the last at 8:45, trying to get estimates on recovery efforts. They told us that damage repairs had been started in our unit, but when we inspected the apartment we found no evidence of any visitors. I returned to the office with angry words about how this clearly demonstrates my concerns with their “overly optimistic” reactions of “3 or 4 days” to recover the apartment. I told them we were grabbing a hotel room, and they offered no assistance in locating a hotel, offering to subsidize the cost of a hotel, or anything further. They advised us to simply get in contact with our insurance provider. I became gravely concerned that my patience and trust had been misplaced and misused.
We grabbed two hotel rooms up the street and requested time off from my work to deal with this today. Luckily, I’ve more than enough time off accrued to let me handle this without too much extra stress. We returned today at 11:00 to survey the scene and better understand the effect of the damage. The crews had completely dismantled our apartment, pulling up carpet in all the rooms (but leaving it in place). They had a dehumidifier draining water into the kitchen sink from the middle of the room, and we could tell that much of the water had been removed (althought the place still reeked of water damage). We grabbed a few more essentials and packed up.
At 12:30, I received a call from ‘Karine’ at my insurance company stating that they were not liable for any damages as “direct or indirect damage as a result of earthquake” is not covered in the insurance company. I went to the housing office, and informed them of the situation. I’m waiting to hear back from the general manager on what action she is taking. I let them know that I would likely hold them responsible for all damages done as a result of improper water heater installation. I’ll keep you up to date on that situation as it continues.
Overall, I’m extremely happy that I am secure in finances and am supported by friends and family. I’m alive for a couple more years at the least, and my stuff is just a little more wet than it was last week. This “catastrophe” was really easy to weather, especially in comparison to the events going around the world. I’d much rather have have a moisture problem in DC than a political problem in Libya.
EDIT – Update AUG 25 7:30 (Taken from conversation with GM)
Tomorrow, the apartment is bringing in a dry wall expert to review the apartment and provide an estimate on the amount of work required. The general manager will provide to us this information along with the effect on
the following repair schedule tomorrow. Currently, the drying crew
provided an estimate of Saturday for the drying to be completed. Dry
wall and carpet replacement will begin on Monday, meaning the earliest
possible move-in would be Tuesday (30 Aug). More likely, the work will
take several days. I offered a Friday deadline, but the general manager believed that
until more assessment is completed, any deadline wouldn’t be
meaningful.
The apartment insurance team or adjusters will also be
contacting us tomorrow to begin the claims process. I informed the general manager
that our requested reimbursements/credits cover fairly minor personal
property damages ($2,000-$3,000 by early estimates) and approximately
5 nights of housing costs under the GSA established numbers for the
region (a reasonable estimate in lieu of any other guidance).
EDIT – Update AUG 27 5:30 PM
No significant updates. The manager never got back to me with the update she promised, nor did she ever acknowledge my email. I’ll try calling the office tomorrow and get an update directly.
I’ve closed out at the hotel ($450 later), and I’m now living with a very gracious friend. It’s likely that I’ll be here until the end of the week. I’m very glad to have a place to sleep while this hurricane blows over.
EDIT – Update SEP 2 6:30 PM
I called the property today after not hearing anything. They were supposed to notify me if something changed the schedule of “Drying done by Thursday, Carpet install on Friday.” I talked to “Mercy” on the phone and she said they were doing an “assessment” and would come down and give her information on the status shortly. I got extremely angry, proclaiming exuberantly that according to the estimates given to me by Jennifer there should be no ‘assessments’, just installations. She assured me that they were doing a carpet install, and just coming down to report on the status of the apartment.
She called me back as I went to lunch at 2:20 with one of my hosts, the carpet hadn’t been installed and now wasn’t going to be until Tuesday. Tuesday!! She said “but it’s okay, they’re going to clean it and you can stay in it over the weekend” I was blown away. Two hours earlier she had either lied or made a serious, serious error about the fact that carpet was being installed.
Returned to the apartment at 5:00pm to find a bunch of people in my apartment tearing stuff out, green padding from under the carpet? They hadn’t started cleaning the apartment, despite saying that it was going to be completed by COB today. I talked with a contract lead they brought in from South Carolina. He said he started drying out the apartment on Monday or Tuesday after they found that the other company wasn’t doing their job right. He said there was still concern about water between floors, and there’s a hole in my ceiling they want to run drying through over night.
The manager doesn’t want to see me, Mercy has been brought in from Orlando to handle the cases and make my problems seem insignificant. I wish this were a joke; but in all reality I find Mercy to be much better equipped at talking to humans than the other people here. She has been all but useless to me, but at least she’s giving me more information than anyone else. I informed her that she is the first person from my apartment that called me instead of me calling them (even if I did call her two hours before). The whole staff has been disgustingly poor at communication and has all but destroyed my confidence in this company.
Since rent is due (or late fee) by Labor Day (when they’re closed), I requested an extension on the rent until we resolved the issue of crediting the rent. On Tuesday it will be two weeks since the earthquake, so I told them that I was expecting no less than 14 days credit on my rent. They only authorized 10 and asked that I pay for that amount “to avoid a late fee”. They wouldn’t even let me wait until Tuesday to close out and pay rent. These people are a$$holes.
Mercy refused to offer anything, only asking for me to make requests that they would “check on”. My biggest problem is that she’s already learned their lingo “You know, it takes how long it’s going to take, I can tell you what you want to hear, but it will still take more time.” They have done nothing to offer assistance during all of this, they’ve only been trying to cover their assets and fix their property so they can start charging again. Mercy says things like “Jennifer has authorized a carpet replacement and replacement of your vinyl ‘wood’ floors”. Yeah, because it’s all DESTROYED. They pretend like they’re doing me a favor by fixing the place back up.
Just to add the last layer of comedy to this fiasco, the contractor returned after our conversation and said “I got to the guys too late, and now they’re going to clean the whole carpet, meaning it’s going to take more time than we thought. We’ll have it done in a few hours. Sorry about that!” This place sucks.
I believe these messages must have been sent by someone in a…strange…state. I have taken the name off to protect the innocent, and made some guesses on the references (not all make sense to me, let me know if you get one). I can’t help but find them amusing…especially noting the time stamps. Total time: 12 minutes and 23 seconds.
[2:24:55 AM] Do you know the difference between Love and Hate? Love is a Battlefield. Hate is a boxing match.
[2:26:01 AM] Sometimes the best thing about dreaming, is living without consequences. Other times it’s having 8 clones of Mr. Roper building pinewood derby cars in your den.
[2:26:15 AM] If sex were a rocket, it’d be pretty awesome.
[2:26:37 AM] If Mr. Ed were a talking anteater, the TV show wouldn’t have made as much money.
[2:33:18 AM] Maybe pickels really *are* a fruit. Nobody ever told me they couldn’t. I’m worried that I may have a prejudice against brined veggies. Don’t tell McCarthy.
[2:34:02 AM] Sometimes I mix up el with le. I just wanted to say something. I know, I know, to littel to eatl.
[2:34:21 AM] Have you ever wondered where pancakes come from? Me neither.
[2:35:34 AM] I worry that my dreams are getting erratic and psychadelic. I mean, I’m okay with it, it’s just the rest of the audience that I’m worried about.
For those who don’t know, I have a Google Chat Badge on my home page. It goes largely unused, but occasionally I get a fun gem.
Guest has joined. Raymond: Greetings Guest: Hallo
Spreekt u Nederlands? Raymond: No, I am sorry.
English only
Un poquito espanol Guest: Ok. I was looking for a Dutch Raymond Berg. Thank you anyway. Raymond:
I’m happy to help
Good luck on your search. Guest: Have a nice day!
Thank you Raymond: You too! Guest: bye Raymond: Goodbye. Guest has left.
This may be a little too emotionally revealing for some, but those who know me well know that I have no trouble exposing myself. (And yes, I did look up the Google Chart Api’s to write the url by hand just for that joke). The other thing you have to know is that I don’t blog about things in the pop timeline; I usually play video games, watch movies, and listen to music approximately 4-7, 10-31, and 3-5 years behind the average human, respectively.
The song “Human” by the Killers has an amazing set of lyrics that you have to hear:
I did my best to notice
When the call came down the line
Up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
And sometimes I get nervous
When I see an open door
Close your eyes, clear your heart
Cut the cord
Are we human or are we dancer?
My sign is vital, my hands are cold
And I’m on my knees looking for the answer
Are we human or are we dancer?
This is hands-down one of the most nonsensical and beautiful line of lyric I’ve heard in pop music lately. I don’t listen to the Killers very much, but the songs that I hear turn out to be some of the most evocative things I can pick up over radio waves. It took me 2 years (2005 and 2006, for those playing along at home) to be able to listen to “Mr. Brightside” without becoming deeply saddened.
That said, I wish it wasn’t repeated 30 times in the song. When I heard the lyric the first time, I thought “Sweet Baby Moses! Genius lyrics these guys are slinging. This song is blowing my mi-ohhhhh wait, recapitulated already—-in the chorus????—–every chorus????……” I’d call them musical gods if they just let the words swell and die in that third stanza.
