Off For A Much Needed Vacation

In Camping & Hiking, Miscellaneous on Jun-20-2009 with no comments

Heading out for almost two weeks of camping, hiking, and white water rafting in the Great Smokies National Park. No technology will be around me so no posts. But many pics and hopefully some good stories when I return on July 3.

Glad They’ve Thought This Through

In Politics on Jun-17-2009 with no comments

From Roll Call:

House Republicans presented a four-page outline of their health care reform plan Wednesday but said they didn’t know yet how much it would cost, how they would pay for it and how many of the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance would be covered by it.

If you don’t want a majority of Americans to think your party is a joke, then don’t treat an issue which a large percentage of voters believe is the most important issue we face like it is a joke.

Daily Totally Random Links

In Daily Totally Random Links on Jun-16-2009 with no comments

• The LSU Tigers routed Arkansas 9-1 in the College World Series (CWS) yesterday to improve to 2-0 and almost ensure they’ll advance to the next round. I am sensing another championship here.
• It wasn’t that long ago Nielsen highlighted that MySpace was the most popular social network in the world, by total number of users, in just about every nation. Well not in the United States. New comScore data for May indicates Facebook has just barely edged out MySpace in the US, 70.278M to 70.255M.
• In other MySpace related news, they announced today they are laying off 30% of their workforce, or around 480 of their 1,600 employess. Here is the entire memo from CEO Owen Van Natta’s.
• You know your Web application has hit the big-time when you postpone a major upgrade, that would have required the service to be taken off-line for a few hours, cause it is serving as a major communication tool for hundreds of thousands of people protesting their government in Iran. But that is just what Twitter announced yesterday.
• This makes for a pretty interesting and funny read. Talking Points Memo outlines the top seven conservative new media epic fails so far this year. What is scary for the Republican party is the list could easily be expanded to say 25 or more.

Norm Coleman Says F-You To Minnesota

In Politics on Jun-15-2009 with 1 comment

If there was any misconception left about why Norm Coleman continues the fight over the election he lost last November to Al Franken, where Norm has lost court case after court case and vote recount after vote recount, wonder no more:

“But winning isn’t about me. You know, it’s not about me or even us as Republicans. It really is about this country. And about the future of the country,” said Coleman. “The one vote in the United States Senate, the one vote is a difference between possibly people losing the right to a secret ballot in a union election, or not … One vote, one vote between the potentiality of a slippery slide into the path of government-controlled health care. If I am in the U.S. Senate, we’re not gonna have a government-controlled health care. It’s not gonna happen.

In other words, the hell with Minnesota and their right to full representation in the Senate. We’re just doing to hold of the process, spend hundreds of thousands, even millions, just so the Democrats don’t have a 60 vote majority.

Daily Totally Random Links

In Uncategorized on Jun-14-2009 with no comments

• Just in case this is something you care about, WordPress has released Version 2.8 which includes some major revamps to the themes and widget sections. You can see a three mintue video of the changes here. What I am most interested in is they have added syntax highlighting so working in the template editor is going to be much easier.
• Usually free Flash games take about 30-45 minutes to get through. Not BridgeCraft. It has almost 150 levels (70 each on easy and normal settings)! As I saw somebody else mention, in the time it would take to complete this game you could go outside and build an actual bridge.
• Filed under you learn something new everyday, Iran had thirty-two polling stations set-up in the United States for their Presidential election  last week.

Post-it Note Stop Motion Video

In Video on Jun-13-2009 with no comments

Swiss Kitchen Storage Unit

In Design, Food on Jun-12-2009 with no comments

[Found via Core77]

Gillette: How To Shave Your Balls

In Humor, Video on Jun-10-2009 with no comments

You’ve Got To Love The Swedes

In Politics on Jun-10-2009 with no comments

They’ve got pirates in their parliament:

Sweden’s Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament. The group—which campaigned on reformation of copyright and patent law—secured 7.1% of the Swedish vote. The result puts the Pirate Party in fifth place, behind the Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals and the Moderate Party.

The Pirate Party maintains that all non-commercial copying should be legal, and that copyrights should last for five years, that there should be no patents, and an end to excessive government surveillance.

Daily Totally Random Links

In Daily Totally Random Links on Jun-9-2009 with no comments

• Interesting Wall Street Journal interview with Sam Schillace, the co-founder of Writely, which was sold to Google way back in 2005 and became the core of what is now Google Docs.
• Just exactly what we need, vanity URLs are coming to Facebook. It is first-come, first-serve starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13. That won’t be a virtual stampede at all.
• If you need a “geek” fix here is a pretty neat 360-degree interactive panorama of the new Star Trek bridge. Looks a tad overdesigned to me, but what do I know.