Fotoshop by Adobé
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Tag Archives: IT
The Google master plan
Great article on the direction Google is taking with their products, and why those who aren’t currently using Google+, should.
River naming in US
Link
This is a great peice of cartography I thought I’d share.
This map charts the rich variety of waterflow toponyms in the US, which reflects the climatological and geographical diversity of the country, but also its linguistic and historical heritage. River names seem extremely resistant to change, and indeed often are echoes of earlier dominant cultures.
The colours on the map, which is based on the place names in the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, correspond to the generic toponyms for waterflows, excluding the two commonest ones (river and creek, rendered in grey).
Facebook Slacktivism
OK, here we go:
Shhhhhh!!!! Ok pretty ladies, it’s that time of year again, in support of breast cancer awareness!! So we all remember last years game of writing your bra color as your status?…..or the way we like to have our handbag handy? Remember last year so many people took part that it made national news and, the constant updating of status reminded everyone why we’re doing this and helped raise awareness!! Do NOT tell any males what the status’ mean, keep them guessing!! And please copy and paste (in a message )this to all your female friends to see if we can make a bigger fuss this year than last year!!! I did my part… now YOUR turn ! Go on ladies…and let’s have all the males guessing! .. It’s time to confuse the men again (not that its really that hard to do
) Everyone knows it makes their brains work wonders on what we’re talkin about!! The idea is to choose the month you were born and the day you were born. Pass this on to the GIRLS ONLY and lets see how far it reaches around. The last one about the bra went round all over the world.
So you’ll write… I’m (your birth month) weeks and I’m craving (your birth date)!!! as your status. Example: Feb 14th: I’m 2 weeks and craving Chocolate mints!!January-1week, Febuary-2 weeks, March-3 weeks, April-4 weeks, May-8 weeks, June-9 weeks, July-10 weeks, August-12 weeks, September-13 weeks, October-14 weeks, November-16 weeks, December-18 weeks.
Days of the month: 1-Skittles, 2-Starburst, 3-Kit-Kat, 4-M&M’s, 5-Galaxy, 6-Crunchie, 7-Dairy Milk, 8-Lollipop, 9-Peanut Butter Cups, 10-Meat Balls, 11-Twizzlers, 12-Bubble Gum, 13-Hershey’s Kisses, 14-Chocolate Mints, 15-Twix, 16-Resse’s Fastbreak, 17-Fudge, 18-Cherry Jello, 19-Milkyway, 20-Pickels, 21-Creme Eggs, 22-Skittles, 23-Gummy Bears, 24-Gummy Worms, 25-Strawberry Pop Tarts, 26-Starburst, 27-Mini Eggs, 28-Kit-Kat Chunky, 29-Double Chocolate Chip Crunchy Cookies, 30-Smarties, 31-Chocolate Cake
Let’s raise Breast Cancer awareness, girls!!!
But don’t let people know what you want them to be aware of or even that they’re supposed to be aware of anything at all. I mean how do they expect this to work? At best a guy will see the status and go “What the hell are you on about?” and the girl will say “It’s a secret!” At that point the guy will cease giving a shit, trust me.
But I know the answer already. It’s not supposed to work. It’s just an excuse for some people to act dumb by pretending to do something important. No, they don’t really do any “harm”. But these people do it so they can give themselves a pat on the back because “Hey I just raised awareness of <disease that everyone knows about anyway>, good for me. Donate actual money? Screw that. Did you see my Facebook? I posted my shoe size and bra color. I did my part.”
These campaigns bug me because they are inadvertently sexualizing cancer. To get attention or “raise awareness” they’re posting comments that are meant to be taken as innuendo. Because of where the cancer occurs, there’s this inability to disconnect between a potentially fatal disease and “LOL Boobs“.
And really, what the hell does “raising awareness” do at this point? Is there anyone left who doesn’t know how widespread and dangerous breast cancer is? Are they suddenly going to donate because they read a status from a Facebook friend where she implied she was pregnant? What do pregnancy cravings and birthdays have to do with breast cancer?
It’s kind of a sore spot with me.
WordPress upgrade status: SUCCESS!
I upgraded from 2.9.0 to 3.2.1, after deploying a couple test sites to try the procedure out on first, then making multiple backups of the core, the plugins, the themes the images and files, the scripts and static web pages.
I left nothing to chance.
Not that any of you will see anything different, but WordPress 3 provides some extra fancy stuff behind the scenes.
Bye, honey. I’m off to work
So today I thought I’d keep a track of the sites I visit during my working day. So far, I’ve been to 5 countries and it’s not even lunch time.
View Places I have worked in a larger map
Too bad I can’t collect any frequent flyer miles.
What’s the time in Boston?
You know, as much as I’ve derided Twitter over the last couple years, it really isn’t all that bad now that I’ve started using it.
Granted, since Twitter is the world’s largest intellectual toilet bowl, you do get a lot of shit. But you occasionally get gems like these:
Yep, that’s Mike Finke who, like any regular traveler at an airport, whipped out his device and Tweeted that he’d arrived (I can’t believe I just used that word…. “Tweeted”). Only this wasn’t from gate 17 after a 14 hour flight across the Pacific… it was from the Kennedy Space Center after a two week mission on the Space Shuttle! Astronauts are just like everyone else, I guess.
And this is Ron Garan, part of Expedition 27/28 on the International Space Station which STS134 was visiting. He watched the landing From Spaaaaaace!
Also, I’ve been retweeted twice in a row. Here’s my latest after watching the Canucks get humiliated in Boston:
Retweets certainly get around fast.
Too bad for Luongo, one of the heroes of Team Canada in the Vancouver Olympics. Series is now tied at 2-2 (at the time of writing this) as they head back to Vancouver. I hope they win. I need a new Vancouver jersey to replace my old one to commemorate. It’s the only current Canadian team I don’t have.
Disaster averted
It took all in my power, but I managed to stop Suzanne from being drawn to the Dumb Side. She’s had it in her mind to buy an iPhone for a few weeks, dropping hints that became less and less subtle as time wore gone on. I told her that if she can manage to fit it into our budget, then by all means she can get whatever phone she wants but please reconsider and choose Android. Hell, I’d even accept it if she went Windows Mobile, anything but Apple.
I mean if running multiple apps at the same time, configurable home screens, a better app market, more useful notifications, a choice of hardware, custom ROMs, and smoother social integration aren’t reason enough then you are a hopeless fanboi waste of oxygen.
So after a fair amount of reasoning, begging and pleading as well as some threats and intimidation I managed to convince Suzanne to settle on an HTC Incredible S, a far better and cheaper option than the Apple iPhone. I think she will enjoy it much more than the iPhone.
Yummy!
What am I writing about again?
I took all the text from all my public posts on my blog posted in 2011 and fed them into a Word Cloud generator. I’m not sure what I was expecting to see, and I’m not sure whether or not to be disappointed but I can’t really find any particular theme in there. It’s mostly a mish mash of non-descriptive, non-emotive words devoid of any real meaning.
It kinda makes me think about why I continue to write at all, since I don’t seem to be writing about anything in particular. What do you guys think? Should I mention family more? The family blogs I see where people put a whole new group of photos of their smiling child every single day are fine and all, but they’re not my thing. They certainly don’t have any attraction outside immediate family. Or pedos. Should I pick a subject or theme and stick to it. People certainly seem to respond well to my previous critiques of certain local retailers and restaurants. Maybe that’s something I should investigate?
Maybe the word cloud is showing I’m well balanced, and don’t have a preference for speaking or writing about one thing over the other. I’ve got a few other sites running with strictly defined subject matter, so I guess this personal blog is the “everything else” basket with a bias to personal experience.
Which is how it should be. It’s just me thinking aloud, really.
Dear Kids
This is something I’ve been doing for a couple years. Every so often I’ll email my kids. They don’t actually have email quite yet, but they do have email addresses. I plan on letting them read them either in their mid teens when they start hating me, or perhaps on their 18th or 21st birthdays. I haven’t decided which yet. It’ll be a treasure trove of thoughts and feelings I have for them and will hopefully bring them some joy later on. Below is a pretty sappy video showing the spirit of what I’m trying to do.