2008 - June - menga

Archive for June, 2008

geohashing

6/7/2008

The webcomic xkcd is really, really nerdy. But it just got injected with a major dose of cool due to the introduction of geohashing. And yes it’s a GPS thing, hence the reason I dig it.

Geohashing is when a random set of coordinates is picked for a longitude/latitude zone utilizing Google Maps. The zones are called “graticules”. All you have to do is pick the spot on the map where you live and the graticule appears along with the randomly picked spot for that graticule. You get the spot via GPS.

The coordinate changes daily and it’s completely random. On Saturday afternoons if the random spot picked for your graticule on that day can be reached (because sometimes the spot could be in the middle of a lake or other area that can’t be reached), people will get together and meet up. This really happens and it’s fucking awesome.

Lo and behold there’s one I could have gone to today but couldn’t because it’s 50 miles away and that’s too expensive on gas.

If you can see the purple route line (sorry if it’s hard to see), I’m on the bottom and the geohash is on top. It’s right off US-98 and very accessible.

(sigh..) Win some, lose some. One of these days one will be close by and I’ll drive on over. Who knows, I might meet some completely random people that do the exact same thing (a distinct possibility!)

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stomping grounds celebrates its 300th

6/7/2008

The latest blog post from the Finest one is spot-on as usual. You wanna see it, right? Of course you do. Here you go (and in case the page goes away as things disappear often on the internet or the page doesn’t load, here’s a PDF). Come back here when you’re done.

Yes, that is my home town. Well.. to be technical it is all Killingly but people still consider Danielson and its boroughs “towns” even though they’re not. According to the townies I would be considered “one town over” in Dayville.. but it’s still all Killingly. Whatever.

My ramblings and thoughts on the event

The only reason Frito-Lay even bothered to make a presence is to put on the appearance they actually give a shit about the people they employ. Trust me, they don’t. Yes, they are still the #1 employer in the area but it doesn’t mean they give a shit about anybody. And no, I never worked there. I can say with 100% honesty that not only did I not work there but never even entered the building. Heck, I never even drove on the property. I say all this with pride.

That extra-long line of fire trucks has been a long-standing bone of contention with the locals. Why? Because the “cellar savers” as the townies call them spent WAY too much money on those trucks. Wasted cash? Yes.

Yes, it’s true, you will see characters in any local parade that have absolutely nothing to do with anything - hence the reason for Vader, a pirate and a gorilla.. together.

This is what small town living is like. This is where I come from.

It reminds me once again how much Florida kicks ass in all the right places.

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92 here, 95 there

6/9/2008

This to me makes no sense.

I started to write this at 3:45pm. It’s 92° F here in Tampa Florida and back at the stomping grounds it’s 95° F - with an obvious heat advisory in effect.

Generally speaking, 10 degrees hotter is the Florida equivalent of any New England day in the summer months. What this means is that it the thermometer may say 95 there, but it feels like 105 - easily. Granted, the heat will drop off fast after 7pm-ish, but still.. wow that’s hot.

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a product of today’s society

6/10/2008

I got a knock on my door. I answered and standing there was a little girl probably around 11 to 13 years old and with her a small dog on a pink leash.

“Can I use your phone?”

This is what went thru my mind in 2 seconds:

Is she trying to return the dog to someone? Yeah, maybe.. possibly. But is that the real reason? Why would a little girl be walking a dog here? Maybe she’s just trying to look innocent so I will let her in to call someone for God knows what reason. Hang on.. why didn’t she go to her mother or nearest parent to use their phone? Well, that’s it - I’m not letting her in; she’s not using my phone.

“No, sorry.”

[slam]

[lock door]

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Picasa vs. Flickr

6/11/2008

Part of the reason I haven’t been posting more photos is because it is a PAIN IN THE ASS to manage them.

I was (and still am technically) using Picasa. Why? Because the Picasa application kicks ass.

HOWEVER..

If you put too many photos in a single album, when you view it online it doesn’t paginate. In other words, so much stuff is loaded in your browser it could crash it.

I don’t use Flickr because there is no application like Picasa for it.

Or is there?

I was shocked to find out that Windows Live Photo Gallery DOES have the ability to publish to Flickr. YES YES YES! Now I have an actual true-blue good ol’ app to manage my photos and publish to Flickr.

I had thought the WL-Photo app only posted to Spaces. Windows Live Spaces isn’t that good because it’s just too frickin’ slow and hard to share with. Flickr is definitely better.

Now that I have the ability to post photos direct to Flickr using an app I may switch to it.

Maybe. :-) It depends if Flickr and I “get along” or not.

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test flickr post

6/11/2008

This is just a test to see if this works or not.

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switching to flickr, possible musician hook-up

6/11/2008

switching to flickr

I have been messing around with Windows Live Photo Gallery, and what I’ve discovered is that while it doesn’t have all the whiz-bang features of Picasa, there are several things I really dig about it.

You can easily tag photos, including mass tagging (very, very frickin’ convenient). In Picasa it is a pain in the ass to tag anything.
You can easily put descriptions in photos, including mass-selecting and putting the same description for a set of photos.
You can easily reset the date of any photo taken. Sometimes when you copy images from one place to another the file date rewrites. You can “unwrite” it back. Very cool.
The uploader to Flickr is flawless. It connects and posts either to a new set, existing set or no set. It’s frickin’ EASY. Easy is good.

This software convinced me to switch over to Flickr. It is the app I was looking for to take advantage of what Flickr has to offer.

Now comes the long arduous process of posting all the photos (groan…), but once done it’ll be okey-dokey. Afterwards I will be deleting everything off Picasa for good and won’t look back.

possible musician hook-up

I posted an ad on CL looking for musicians to jam with and got a few responses. I spoke with one of the guys who responded on the phone today. He’s a studio nerd which is exactly what I was looking for.

Hopefully we’ll hook up next week and hash out some tunes. If it works out this will make for a very happy Richard.

My previous experience with advertising for people to play with went all wrong. The reason was because I was not specific enough - but this time I was and it seems to have worked so far. My ad was totally rude and totally brash but totally honest which is what counts. :-)

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internet boys and girls are both screwed and other stuff

6/14/2008

I had a discussion with an ex-girlfriend last nite. Before continuing I’ll say that for whatever reason, blogging about ex’s is “safe” and doesn’t bring on any bad luck. It’s only when I blog about a girl I’m dating that it causes bad shit to happen. Weird? Yes. Go figure.

So anyway, she’s been checking out the ‘net personals and I peruse them from time to time.

Here’s how it fares out:

If I post an ad I’ll usually get a few responses. They’re usually from fat chicks, white trash single moms and girls older than me. All of them are the same: Terrible. I have even gotten to the point of blocking certain e-mail addresses (which I normally don’t do) because the same idiot girls respond each time I post an ad.

If she posts an ad she’ll receive a flood of e-mails containing pictures of dicks. One can only hope she doesn’t open her inbox right after she eats. For the ones that don’t it’s more or less guaranteed these guys put on “the face”, i.e. they’ll be nice until they get laid and then move on.

Neither gender has any advantage over the other in the online dating world. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

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Slowly but surely I’ve been getting my photos over to my Flickr account. This is a long, long, long annoying process. But I believe the end result will be for the best. Flickr is a good service, it’s easy to use and better than Picasa in my opinion.

My only fear is that Yahoo is in trouble right now concerning their stockholders. It would totally FUCKING SUCK if Yahoo went under because that means Flickr would go under very quickly after that. Or it will be bought out by another company and turned into a complete piece of shit.

For those wondering why I would even bother switching over to Flickr, the answer is because that site can do things with my photos that I cannot do on my own, such as adding “notes” and other stuff. You’d have to use it to know what I’m talking about. In addition, my photos stand a better chance of being seen, and that’s good because they are kinda buried on my site (not by design, it just happened to end up that way).

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Per my music I’ve been messing around with my old Ensoniq SQ-1 Plus. I’ve been doing something I’ve never done before - program sounds. While it’s true my Alesis Fusion 6HD has full ability to do this, it’s a bit complicated compared to the Ensoniq. The SQ-1 is just so unbelievably easy to use which is why I own one to begin with. And the sequencer kicks ass too.

EVENTUALLY… I will have some new tunes posted soon. Now that I’ve been able to harness some of the pseudo-analog goodness of the SQ I’ll be able to compose some more stuff. Watch for it.

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Florida has no green options for motorists

6/15/2008

When one is faced with the ridiculously high prices of gasoline, one looks into other options for fueling a car.

These are the options:

Hybrid-electric

Too expensive, too slow and still relies primarily on gasoline for fuel. And you have to buy a new car to get it.

Propane

Green motorists have been running hybrid gasoline/propane cars and trucks for years. My grandfather used to fuel an old van via a system like this years ago. The advantage is that your engine will run at least twice as long on propane. The disadvantage is that the cost is similar to gasoline and burns quicker.

You don’t have to buy a new car to get this, but as said above the savings really don’t add up.

Ethanol

This is available right now. Many GM vehicles have “Flex Fuel” badges on them indicating that yes, the car can run on ethanol easily. As a matter of fact, it’s more or less a guarantee that the fuel you use to put in your car now has 10% ethanol in it already.

Check out how many ethanol stations Florida has. Yeah, very disappointing, eh?

Even if you have the option there’s nowhere to buy ethanol.

Compressed Natural Gas

This is the fuel option that will save us all and I’m not kidding. It is available just about anywhere. The problem is that not enough cars are made that run on it.

Honda makes a Civic right now that runs on CNG. And - God bless them - they even provide a kit with the car that will hook up TO YOUR HOUSE so you can fuel the car AT HOME using your existing natural gas service (many Floridians use natural gas already for heat). If I had the cash I would buy this car RIGHT NOW.

The answer IS ALREADY HERE. Many cars can be converted to CNG easily using a kit. The cost is about $1000 to $2000 to have it done properly. If you have a truck or a large car, you can use the same tank that’s used in forklifts.

Who the frig wants to invest in hydrogen cell when CNG is already here, is used every day and has a proven track record of working flawlessly?

Where can you find a CNG station in Florida?

Heh. Good luck finding one. Yeah, if you have the tank conversion you can exchange tanks once you run out - and it’s cheap - but what a pain in the ass that is to do. It’s extremely inconvenient to say the least.

There is nowhere where you can pull up in a CNG-powered car, put the nozzle to the tank and fill up. It basically doesn’t exist.

If 7-Eleven put just 20 CNG or ethanol pumps in the Tampa Bay area, they’d have cars lined around the corner waiting to fill up

7-Eleven is a staple of Tampa Bay; they’re everywhere. And the fuel they use is from CITGO.

If 7-Eleven as a test bed put just one pump at 20 different locations they’d have so much business they couldn’t keep up. It doesn’t matter if it’s CNG or ethanol, because when people see a per-gallon price of under 2 dollars they’d flock to it like geese.

People want green. They want the lower prices that green can offer. BUT THE FUEL STATIONS ARE NOT GIVING US OPTIONS.

The crazy part about the whole thing is that they would make BOATLOADS of cash doing this while giving savings to the consumer at the same time. It’s a win-win situation. Yet nothing is happening.

Hybrid-electric is a complete waste of time

This is not the godsend we were looking for. The cars are too expensive and don’t bring any significant benefit over time.

The answer is alternative fuel.

We’ve got ethanol (E-85). We’ve got CNG.

The automakers are making cars now that run on either.

But we can’t fuel up.

Who’s fault is that?

Not ours.

Hey, TECO People’s Gas!

Are you ready to make some serious cash? E-Mail me. I will happily have my 2005 GMC Canyon converted over to CNG and use your natural gas exclusively just to prove to people that CNG is the way to go. You guys should seriously invest in some property, build some filler stations and OFFER SERVICES to convert cars over to CNG and be the fuel provider. You will make MILLIONS in record time.

And yes I’m serious. You guys got the goods to do it with. It’s a goldmine just waiting to be harvested. Be the company that shows America that CNG really works. I’ll be your first customer.

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an example of why i did not pursue to be a camera operator

6/16/2008

The cam in the video above is $94,700 and does not include the viewfinder or the lens.

To this day, field cameras are ridiculously expensive. Yeah, they do amazing things and yeah, they’re worth the money, but notice the cardboard he had to attach just to get rid of sun glare. Also notice the tape to use just to feel his way around it while operating.

It really pisses me off when things like that are not taken into consideration by the manufacturer. It’s like they weren’t even thinking of the operator when they built it.

Could I do the job this guy does? Probably. But I don’t pretend for a second that it’s easy. It is very difficult. You’ve got a director barking in your ear constantly and every shot you make must be perfect. Miss just one shot and you’ll be hearing about it for weeks.

An idiot would think “Ha! I could do that job no problem!” No, you couldn’t. You’d be fired after the first day.

Back in college I operated a stand-up camera on a large mount in a controlled studio environment, and even that was difficult. This guy is battling all the elements outside and getting an earful every 5 seconds. Easy? You call that easy?

I think not. :-)

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