A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

American Football by Harold Pinter

john — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:24:31 +0000

Season kicks off tomorrow, so let’s class up the joint:

American Football by Harold Pinter

Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

Awesome on so many levels. From HaroldPinter.org, worth reading the discussion there.

Share/Bookmark

Why didn’t I buy VMWare stock when Paul Maritz stepped into leadership role?

john — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:18:18 +0000

Kicking myself totally on this one, VMWare has been on a tear. Paul is a great guy, he has been hiring great guys (who wouldn’t want to work with Paul?), they’ve been acquiring lots of interesting assets.

And fundamentally they are on the right side of history. Paul has always been insightful and articulate on strategy and he says it well in this techcrunch piece : “The innovation in how hardware is coordinated today and the innovation in how services are provided to applications is no longer happening inside the operating system.”

This is dead on. You can debate whether VMWare will be the primary beneficiary of this trend versus other cloud providers, but the shift is undeniable.

Share/Bookmark

Recent software trials — Camino, Shuffler, GIT, Wisestamp, Microsoft Windows Live Sync

john — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:45:28 +0000

Firefox is feeling increasingly bloated, maybe because I’ve got a bunch of plugins jammed in. But trying out Camino(TidBITS%3A+Mac+News+for+the+Rest+of+Us)&utm_content=Google+Reader on the Mac, seems cleaner and lighter.
Shuffler.FM. Eh, streaming music just doesn’t work for me. My primary listening time is while driving and I need music that I can put on an ipod or cd. When I am at an actual computer I am too busy doing other things. But I like music discovery tools and guides, I just don’t want them bound into streaming.
GIT for the lazy. Perfect for me.
Terminal tips and tricks for OSX and in general SuperUser seems helpful.
I want to love WiseStamp but I don’t get email addins that assume you are only sending email from a browser. iPhone? iPad? OSX Mail? How can I commit to this thing if I can’t use it consistently? Sigh.
I’m super late to Windows Live Sync but it is very useful. I do have a quibble with the naming, once upon a time MSFT was confident enough in its products to give them simple iconic names — Word, Excel, Windows. The company seems to have lost its confidence in products and jams these crazy names on them to try to ride on the coattails of other products. Mistake.

Share/Bookmark

RIch, you asked, Gelaskins is the answer

john — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:32:08 +0000

Gelaskins. No idea if they are effective on antenna woes, but the artwork is way cooler than many of the skins out there.

Share/Bookmark

Servicing my college football addiction

john — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:29:07 +0000

Finally, the first week of college football. And the first week of servicing my addiction. Here is the plan for this year:

In person attendance at games: We’ll make the November Penn State and Michigan games at Ohio Stadium. 4 tickets to each game at $70/pop comes to $560, we are able to easily sell the unused portion of our season ticket books. Oh of course to get the rights to buy 4 tickets and a parking pass, we had to join the Buckeye Club at the appropriate level, and make ongoing scholarship donations which qualify us to join the President’s Club. But we will pretend those aren’t related — in fact we would donate the scholarship money anyway, to help Marion County students with demonstrated need make it through Ohio State. Oh and we will ignore the travel expense to Ohio as well, since we are going to be there primarily to visit family. Oh and I may sneak to a USC or UW game in addition but we will see. And depending on how the Buckeyes do, we may go the bowl game, count on another $2500 for tickets/travel/accommodations in Glendale (hey, go big or go home!).

Watching all other weekends on TV: Sports, and particularly college football, are at least 50% of the driver for our cable/dish subscriptions. We subscribe to enough of a tier on cable to get ESPN, Fox Sports, and the Big-10 network in HD. And since we are splitting time between Seattle and Ohio this fall, we have to maintain subscriptions in both locations since cable and dish subscriptions are not portable. We’ve tried a variety of ways to get around this, but there are no quality solutions — ESPN3 is low quality, the various pirated feeds are even worse, slingbox doesn’t really work for HD content. So say half a cable bill monthly in two locations is attributable to football, that is $50/month * 2 locations * 6 months == $600.

Tracking on the PC/iPad. When I’m at home watching game A, I want to track other games on a medium sized screen. ESPN, ESPN3, and SI are the best of a bad lot — all crammed with ads, tend to have load issues on Saturdays, tend to lag the real action, etc etc. I used to use Sportsline but investment in that site seems to be trending down. I’m not going to allocate any of our internet costs to sports, we would have the same connection if sports didn’t exist.

Tracking on the iPhone. A real weak spot. The ESPN app is the best score tracker — customizable for just my teams, reasonable UI. But massive load issues on Saturdays, something has clearly been engineered poorly in the transaction model for this app, since it is way more load-sensitive than the web site which makes no sense at all. Backup are the websites for SI and ESPN. Twitter also critical since every major sportswriter/sportsblogger is active on twitter. Of course everyone of these data services fails totally when at a live game, as 100K people all try to hit the same cell tower at once. Google SMS is the fallback of last resort, it can sometimes work when the 3G/Edge networks are failing. You can certainly allocate half my cell phone data plan to sports for the 6 months of college football, so let’s say another $300. Yes I would look harder at a different data plan if I didn’t track sports. Overall the lack of a great app to track sports teams on the iPhone is a little surprising.

OK so $3100 in costs to attend games and bowl, $900 in telecom costs, so $4K in direct costs a year to watch college football. Plus the opportunity cost of time — at least 16 weekends, 8 hours of time, 128 hours. And I am probably not being honest with myself about that time commitment. But eternally hopeful that the Buckeyes will win the national championship, thereby justifying all of it!

Share/Bookmark

Things I need in my toolbox

john — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:46:56 +0000

Wire Bender is a genius little thing. Cheap, rarely used, but the exact right tool for certain jobs.
Air hose swivel is another simple little thing that is exactly the right solution.
Rollo Knife. Rolling utility knife, purportedly a knuckle saver.
Butt splicers. I am the suck at splicing wires so these might be useful.
Skoobawraps. Trying to decide if these are awesome cool, or kind of stupid.
Fab@Home 3d printers. Seems cool but honestly, the constraining factor on my manufacture of 3d items is not lack of a 3d printer, but is my complete inability to design/draw anything.

Share/Bookmark

The last empty Saturday of the year has passed…

john — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 16:57:50 +0000

…College football kicks off this week! Finally.

Getting ready for the season:

Live odds. Not that I bet, nor do I believe that odds have much to do with expected outcomes, but still interesting to peruse.
CFB stats — awesome site with comprehensive stats. For when you need to spew them at someone to prove your school is better.
Senator Tressel held in high regard by coaching ranks. Pretty awesome.
Blogpoll.

Share/Bookmark

Recent fiction — Banks, Ancestor, Ariel, Company

john — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:29:15 +0000

Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. Banks has a unique and entertaining voice, in his universe advanced technology is just a little perverse and contrary and darkly witty. Fun read although a little long. Amazon says 4.5 stars, Goodreads 3.8, I would definitely comtimnue to read more Banks.
Ancestor by Scott Sigler. 4.5 stars on Amazon, 4.1 on Goodreads, but utter crap. Derivative Crichtonesque garbage with 1D cartoon characters. Not finishable.
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett. Terribly inconsistent tale of a young man and a unicorn in a post-apocalyptic world, but something endearing about the protagonist and his trials. 4 stars on Amazon, 3.53 on Goodreads. 3-3.5 seems about right, a good tale wrapped up in a kind of a sloppy book.
The Company by K. J. Parker. Odd parable of a group of veterans in a vaguely Nordic country who come together years after a war. Their lives have come to be defined by their wartime experiences and their personal forms of cowardice and betrayal. Amazon says 3.5 stars, Goodreads says 3.2. I can’t highly recommend the book but it was interesting enough to finish.

Wow this is an underwhelming list to end the summer on.

Share/Bookmark

Halloween shopping list 2010

john — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 18:11:38 +0000

I don’t think I will be doing any substantial halloween setup this year, just too much going on in life. But if I were, here are some things I’d be looking at — and it is almost too late to order some of this stuff, but if you act fast:

Haunt Toys — Kurt’s first four posts are great items that I have used and loved. A webshooter and a good lightning controller are critical. The i-zombie lightning controllers have been rock-solid for me.
The Skull Shoppe via Grimvisions. Kind of pricey but great looking skulls.
Style Your Garage. OK none of these really have a great Halloween theme but the idea is awesome and maybe I could craft something up for Halloween.
Lightform sheet LED lighting. Has to be good for something.
Pumpkin Carving from Scott. Man these are impressive. My pumpkins suck.
Rear-lit Book. A nice idea that could look nice in a halloween scene.
LED eyeballs. Must have.

Share/Bookmark

Silk and Timber electronics

john — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:20:14 +0000

Paper and Lignin-based RFID tags. Silk electronic metamaterials.

Seems like we are not far away from having processing power embedded in damn near everything. Not lots of processing power, but enough to do identification and limited sensing. Interesting times.

Share/Bookmark