Odds and Ends

My son sent this today

The Scale of the Universe

Really really cool.

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Every few months I think I want to try the new Reminders list on my iphone. Then I realize that not only do I not have Siri, but the app doesn't let me use landscape to type (seriously? WTF apple?) And the location based reminders are so not ready for prime time yet.

I figure in about 5 years it will be fantastic. Right now it's just meh. Oh well.

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One of my friends sent me this link. I really need at least one of these, if not an entire army of them for my garden...

Combat Garden Gnomes.

Awesomeness. Sheer awesomeness.

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My husband found that some web sites he visits have video ads that run whenever you hit the site, a feature that is downright irritating. He is using ad block plus on Firefox and the ads still run. (even more irritating).

After a bit of investigating I found that under tools in the browser bar, there is an entry for Ad Block Plus. One can open a window of "blockable items" and you can scroll down through the list and look for links with swf. Then you can block their happy little asses.

I hate those wankers. I don't mind unobtrusive print ads but I loathe blinking ads or videos that run without my okay. They must all be stopped.

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And last but not least in news you need to know...

Mating call of an extinct bush-cricket rings out again after 165m years

Why?  Well, because they can. Or maybe they find crickets sexy. Hard to say.

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I Wonder If I Could Break The Machine Just by Thinking Hard

I saw a link to this story today:

Mind-Reading May Be Reality Soon

By looking only at maps of electrical activity in the human brain, scientists were able to tell which words a person was listening to. The discovery is a major step toward being able to "hear” the thoughts of people who can’t speak.

Okay so this is something they are working on for a good cause.  Really I could see this being a wonderful thing for many people.

Then my brain veers off into.... what if land. 

What if they finally get a workable machine then install them in airports.  I mean they already do the strip scan because anyone traveling is considered totally bonkers.  (well really, don't you HAVE to be totally bonkers to want to fly anywhere these days with airports being like humongous cattle ranches... you can hear TSA now "Line 'em up boys, time for branding!")

Anyhow, where was I... oh yeah.  They install these things in airports and damn if that wouldn't cut down on the crowds.  They'd be hauling people out of line right and left.  Jails would overflow.

Come to think of it... might make air travel nice again.

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End of the Week

So I've been doing quite a lot of backend system cleanup on my Mac.  When one does an upgrade there are bound to be things that don't work quite right. 

I've had the Console open for the last few days and I've been chasing down error messages in the log files and fixing as much stuff as I can.  So far I haven't broken anything... I guess that's good.

In the meantime, out in the real world there have been some interesting developments.

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Like over in Germany where Babette hit "Reply All" and brought the German Parliament email system to a halt. Nice little Denial of Service.

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Facebook is planning an IPO.  Can't wait to see what happens once they have to start disclosing information about themselves instead of us.

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Supposedly there is going to be a Twitter boycott.  I'm trying to figure out how they'll do it without using twitter to communicate about the boycott...

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Face it - there is no such thing as "privacy" out there anymore.  Privacy on the net is an illusion.  I've seen people who wouldn't touch Facebook ever, turn around an use Google for all their stuff.  Someone tell me what the difference is because I must be missing something.

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So there you go. Have a great weekend!  You are now up to date on almost nothing.

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A Couple of Random Thoughts

There are a couple of headlines on the Mac Rumors site I just couldn't pass up.

Apple Retail Stores Coming to India?

Will they have American help desk people serving them? 

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'Absinthe A5' Brings First Untethered Jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2

What will your device remember afterward?

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Have a great weekend!

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Awesomeness

Looks like yesterday's animated GIF from The Oatmeal has garnered him far more attention than he ever thought possible.  Really cool indeed!  Go read the post protest fun.

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The Internet... Clinging to Life by a Thread

Before the SOPA and PIPA bills shut down the internet for good... hurry up and check this out.

Monumental Paper Architecture

or these

Incredible Photographs of Jellyfish

Cool stuff.  I found these on Flipboard for iPad which is really quite amazing.  They find some of the most awesome photos.  Of course this brings home to me exactly how uninspired my own forays into photography have been.  Oh well. 

So, go read them now before you can't any more.  Soon apps like flipboard, not to mention social networking of every kind, may be shut down with a single complaint.  What a sucky way for such a tremendous thing like the internet to slowly lurch to a halt. *sigh*

Posted by: Teresa in FUN at 11:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Are We Past the Holidays?

I think all the Christmas commercials are finally finished. I've never understood why car companies play them into the ground through the beginning of January... we're already sick of them by November 1.  No it won't make me buy someone a car for Christmas. Geeze.

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Heard that some girl bungee jumped and the chord broke. Someone explain to me why one jumps off a perfectly good bridge.

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The sports world is in meltdown because Tim Tebow played a competent game and has moved his team along in the finals. Here's a tip for everyone who is having issues with this... stop listening to sports talk while this is going on. If you don't listen you don't have to hear Tim talk about his religion. I'm pretty sure the Patriots will take out Denver this coming weekend. We'll see.

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Headline of the day:

Extinct Giant Tortoise May Still Be Alive in Galapagos

Ummm... so is it extinct or alive... it can't be both.  They need a new headline writer. Let me do the job an editor should have done:

Galapagos Giant Tortoise May Not Be Extinct

How's that?

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Last of all, if you exercise, please pay attention to what your body is telling you.  Although they specifically pick on yoga this time, this could be any type of exercise.  Unless you are an Olympic athlete, it's not a contest... really it's not.  So stop trying to outdo everyone around you and pay attention.

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Okay that's it for now. 

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My Current Favorite Commercial

I'm not sure if they play these commercials other than during hockey games.  So if you aren't a hockey fan, you might not have seen Tim Thomas in his acting debut trying to get "Peggy" to help him with his credit card.



It cracks me up because it's so very Boston.  The cabbie is played by a local DJ Alicia Love, here's a bit about her. 

If we have to watch commercials about 1000 times per event, at least they should make us laugh.

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Out With the Old and In With the New

As always I'm ready to move on to a new year.  Not that this particular year was bad, but I like to look ahead and not back.

So Happy New Year to all of you and may 2012 bring you many wonderful things indeed! 

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News You Can Use

Tim Thomas is the best goalie in the NHL.  He's also a really fantastic guy.  AND he's 37 years old!  I don't endorse athletes as role models, but many kids could benefit from knowing how he got where he is today.  My favorite quote:

"Sometimes it seemed like they would have rather had goalies in the NHL who looked good getting scored on than ones who looked bad stopping the puck,” he remembers.

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Stop brain shrink?  Well that's what these people are touting to keep you from losing your memory as you get older.  Does it work?  Who knows.  It's about as good as anything else out there I guess.

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A couple of scientists are proposing SETI be used to look for alien footprints on the moon.  I think they should look for human ones first and if they find them, then go on to the alien type. 

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So there you go.  Have fun. 

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Tweetings That Make me Laugh

One of the things I like about Twitter is the humor factor whether intentional or not.  If you follow the right people you will see some very funny things. 

Unintentionally funny:

DON'T DRIVE DRUNK. From 6pm-6am on New Year's Eve/Day AAA will take your drunk self and your car home for FREE, member or not: 800-222-4357

This was a retweet and I don't follow the original person who posted, but the first thing I thought was "so any other time it's okay to drive drunk... alrighty then".

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Here's another retweet from a person I don't follow but maybe I should....

BROS-DO NOT HIRE A MÖBIUS STRIPPER 4 A BACHELOR PARTY.OURS TOOK OFF ALL HER CLOTHES AND YET END UP FULLY DRESSED.FEELING PERPLEXED+RIPPD OFF

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And here's one from @deathstarPR who I do follow. It's all in how you look at it:

You say, "Force choke", we say, "thoughtful long-distance throat massage". #StarWars

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Do be careful though and don't look at twitter's public timeline - you'll need to bleach your eyes if you do.  Just sayin'...

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More Meanderings

Saw a headline today that said...

Will Nelson's Exit Cost Dems Senate?

And I thought - I had no idea Willie Nelson was a Senator... um...oh okay... nevermind. heh.

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Apparently someone threw a dead duck onto the ice near the end of the San Jose (Sharks) / Annaheim (Ducks) game. I think that tops the dead squid they throw at the Detroit games.

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The guys at Bagel Tech Foto found Missy MWAC last week on youtube. This week they had her on the show. She is hilarious.

Here's her first vid where you will find out all about "the camera".



It's good, but I have to say her appearance on Bagel Tech Foto was awesomely hilarious.

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Ah lovely, GoDaddy supports SOPA - this makes them even sleazier than I though they could ever be and I thought they were at the bottom of the barrel.

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The security analysis firm Stratfor was hacked. Anonymous got lots of emails and passwords. Long long ago I subscribed to Stratfor. They started out free then went to a paid subscription. They were good, but sadly (in my view) a presidential election came along. They decided they had to make their very own "Presidential endorsement". *sigh* That's when they started touting their own political stance in their newsletters AND that's when I dropped them.

Politics of any stripe tend to make people into idiots of the highest order. Not good at all when you are trying to run an information business. At that point one has to question the quality of the information they are presenting in other areas. Best to not say anything at all.

Still... I wonder if any of my old info was still on their servers. Interesting.

As for the people throwing out innuendo about a security firm being hacked and "how good can they be"... well, it all depends on how they got hacked. Even then it's difficult for me to get too critical. Any web presence can be hacked if the people behind the attack are determined enough. They only need one way in - the site has to try and protect against everything. It's a losing battle.

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That's it for now. Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend and are resting up in preparation for the New Year.

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Merry Christmas!

Have a lovely day!  I've been a little bit busy and forgot to post something until now. Ha! 

Hope Santa was good to all of you.

Let me add... I just saw this post by Charles and of course I had to go find a Topo Gigio vid. Then I saw Señor Wences.  So for all of you who remember Sunday nights with Ed Sullivan... enjoy!

Topo:


Señor:

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Social Media

Saw a tweet today from Chris Selland:

@cselland You know which bloggers are my absolute faves? Those who can take ANY topic and turn it into a post about themselves.

I thought this was the definition of blogging. All else is online media. heh.

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This story from the Telegraph was tweeted out by someone else - I forget who so it was probably a retweet.

Airline offers chance to pick who you sit next to using Facebook

Honestly I think I'd rather take my chances with whoever ends up next to me.  Except in cases of extreme weather and such, I won't have to sit next to the person for longer than a few hours.  The thought of someone looking me up on facebook to decide whether to sit next to me or not creeps me out for some reason.  No idea why, but it does.

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Evernote tells me Skitch for ipad is now available.   I may have to look it up and see if I can play with it.  Didn't have much interest in using it on my desktop mac, but it might be lots of fun on the ipad. We shall see.

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And last of all - this new service being offered by Rhode Island's TF Green airport.  I love this airport.  Really I do. 

That's it for now.

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YooHoo

For some reason I have a ton of emails that I subscribed to voluntarily.  I guess it's easy enough to hit the delete key so I don't really read most of them.  Today's headline caught my eye though and I looked at it for quite a while.

"WSJ TECHNOLOGY ALERT: Microsoft, Nokia Flirted With Idea of Making Joint Bid for RIM"

I'm wondering how companies flirt... Do they send chocolates?  Pen little notes they pass around the board tables beneath the noses of the person running the meeting (oh yes - definitely folded into that cute little football shape)?  Text them late night notes that say "I'm thinking of you..."?   Take them on dates to exclusive restaurants? 

Oh the story itself?  Who cares about that when we can speculate about the sex lives of companies...

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Wandering Stuff

There are headlines all over the net... sometimes 2 or 3 in the same feed telling me that Kim Jong Il is dead.  Okay - I get it already.  He has assumed room temperature.  Can we go onto the next story now?

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Google has an "Easter egg" going. If you go to their search bar and type in "let it snow" it starts to snow on your browser and then frosts up.  Not sure whether this is cool or not, but it got them lots of tweets and even a few headlines.

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Young son is headed this way for Christmas.  I hope the big snow storm which is now causing issues in the SW part of the US doesn't cause problems with his flight out. 

He got straight A's again this semester and I got him a good Christmas present.  It would be pretty much of a let down if he couldn't get here.

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There's a headline on one of my feeds that says something about a "British sprinter" raising money on ebay.  I keep reading it as "British spinster".  heh

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That's all I've got for now. 

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A Little Dog Christmas

I love Border Collies and Papillons (there was a Papillon in the training class where I trained our dog years ago - small but very smart) also German Shepherds, Aussie Shepherds... well I like dogs. 



Now if only I could get them to decorate my house I'd be set.

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Jumping Forward 70 Years

And changing Navies... to the British side.  Here's a Christmas vid from the Aviation Department of the HMS Ocean. Heh.



They were supposed to be deployed for 7 weeks and that turned into 225 days.  Welcome home sailors!

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Happy Thanksgiving!

I know I've been AWOL from blogging for a bit.  Nothing to say really.  I should blog anyway, but sometimes it's better just to leave things be.

In about 10 minutes (or even by the time I finish writing this) it will officially be Thanksgiving day.  My favorite holiday of the year.  This year will entail little by way of cooking.  It's just my husband and I so there's no reason to cook for 50. On the menu will be crockpot Coq au Vin and cranberry pecan pie.  Easy to make and even better to eat. 

The boy is in SF with a friend for the long weekend.  The girl is in Chicago.   She's been busy working and her cell phone cut out when she called today so we'll talk to her tomorrow. I'm sure she'll be hanging out with friends for the day. 

Hope everyone has a most fantastic day. Eat, drink, and be merry.  There is much to be thankful for.

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Random Thoughts.

Here are a few things that have wandered through my mind today.  They may or may not be of interest. 

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I am apparently incapable of reading labels on cans. Twice this week I have bought the wrong type of tomato for different recipes. First diced tomatoes for a recipe that should have had whole tomatoes then whole tomatoes when it should have been diced.  Since I seem to be a just in time shopper nearly all the time now, I bought the cans on the day I was cooking.  I think someone else should do the cooking.
 
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Been tracking our walks with the free Runkeeper app. Once I got it working right, it appears we are very consistent when walking. Not sure if this is good or bad.  At least we know.  About 14.5 minutes per mile.

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BTW the app above is very finicky.  It's a phone only app since it's supposed to use the phone GPS. It took a bit of looking around and trying different stuff to make it work. First off you can't have the wi-fi on... if you have it on it will double your distance whenever you get near a wi-fi signal. A simple pop up when you go to start it would be very helpful... Sheesh!  Then I had it in a coat pocket that had a small magnet to close the pocket - threw off the distance enough to enter the realm of hilarity.  Instead of about 3/10 of a mile it said we had gone 8 miles.... pace of 37 seconds per mile!!! I love it!  We are suddenly the fasted walkers on the planet!   Then I tried it in the pocket of another coat. It doesn't like being a pocket, kept losing the signal.  I finally got an armband and now it works.  Once I get the routes mapped I won't need to run the app while walking.  I can save the routes. Thank heaven because it's a PITA to wear the armband over a coat - keeps slipping.
 
Also found from this app that one of our routes is an entire mile longer than we thought. I could swear I google mapped it and it said 4 miles. Today the app GPS says it's 5. Hmmm. Which one do I believe? Heh.
 
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Really want to move my stuff to iCloud from mobile me. However this means I have to upgrade my computer to the Lion OS. Since upgrades are fraught with issues I'm waiting for the Thanksgiving weekend.  Right now any calendar item I add to the iphone only syncs with the ipad... not the mobile me website or my desktop.  Weird. 

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I watch way too many episodes of House Hunters.  I find some of them hilarious others are pretty interesting.  A couple of things I wait for... shows where people say they want to "downsize".  As soon as I hear those words I just know they will walk into each place and the first words out of their mouths will be... "it's so small!"  Heh.

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Then I watch the House Hunters International shows.  Those are mostly people attempting to buy a "vacation house" somewhere.  Now people can spend their money however they want, but I wonder how many of them, who are on such "tight budgets" that they can barely afford a shack in the vacation locale, have ever taken a math class.  If they spend oh say... $150K on a place.  (we won't even include the amount they'll spend in interest over the years or the fees they pay for maintenance - that's fair right?)  And let's say they spend 14 days a year at the place.  That's 2 weeks total - most people don't have that kind of time for vacations but we'll be generous.  Now if you were to splurge on a hotel and food - say $500 per day when you're on vacation... it would take you 21.4 years to spend $150K... and you wouldn't be limited to one place, nor would you have to go on vacations and spend that money if you ran into some lean times. 

Yeah, I'm a kill joy.  Ha. 

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Okay I think that's enough random wandering for today. 

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