Cluster

Remember my plaintive post about how nobody reads my blog? Yeah, I know, what a freakin' whiner.

Well, I found a tool that will show me the geographical location of my visitors(if any).
It's from ClustrMaps and it's on the right sidebar..a little ways down.
On my site it's pretty pathetic...not too many visitors right now, but what I find intriguing is trying to guess who I know in that part of the world that might be visiting.

I know the dot in the SF Bay Area is large because I access this site to add posts, etc. But, what re those dots in the Mid-West? I already know the East Coast(Thanks Paracelsus) and Florida( Hi elf)....but not the others. At any rate, as ridiculous as it sounds, it's pretty fun. Kind of like throwing a message in a bottle out to sea. Good, clean, lonlely fun.

Car of the Future

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney or Jerry Seinfeld: What is the deal with these Gull Wing doors?
As long as I can remember, every auto show has a prototype "car of the Future" which invariably is equipped with the futuristic Gull Wing Door. But have you ever seen a production car with these doors?? Outside of the DeLorean and a Mclaren SLR, they don't really exist.
And why is that? Why is it that almost every other cool car gadget has come to fruition, like GPS on your dash, integrated phones, heated seats, etc., but the Gull Wing Door? Nope.
Is it a safety issue? I mean, if you flip the car, you're pretty much screwed and it's not like these things are going on station wagons(Well,the Ford Airstream pictured here is breaking the mold, but trust me...).
Is it a convenience issue? Maybe they are impractical in cramped parking garages? And what if your battery dies?
They always seem to open with a whooshing Star Trek door kind of efficiency.Hardly worthy of someone manhandling the thing to get it open.

I think the real answer is this: Designers use the Gull Wing Door as an easy out. It's got to be tough coming up with daring new designs every year..what's a designer to do? I bet they just get to a point where they tell the intern,"Put some damn gull wing doors on that design" and then they go out for beers while the hapless intern slaves away.

Fair and Balanced

Wait, that's Fox News...
If you live in the Bay Area, you may be familiar with KSFO Talk Radio. It's the home of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura. You get the idea. A real bastion of Progressive thinking.
Anyway, Spocko has apparently run afoul of these guys...See, he had this great idea of sending sound clips of some of the shows aired to the advertisers. Now, KSFO is owned by Disney, so they have a lot of clout....They can attract big name advertisers(and hence big bucks) based on that affiliation, and they can also unleash their lawyers on whomever they do not like. Guess what? Goliath is trying to smash David again. Only this time, David might get stomped. Disney issued a cease and desist order to Spocko, who does NOT have their clout, and promptly was effectivley shut up.(He removed the sound clips from his site).

Luckily, you can listen to them HERE

Free Speech is an integral part of our society and KSFO has every right to spew its venoumous, hate-filled, slanted idiocy all it wants. But I think it's also OK to inform the advertisers just what they are being associated with..It's not Mickey and the Mouseketeers guys, it's more like Adolf and Brown Shirts.

Other Links:
CrooksandLiars

MediaMatters

DailyKos. Eh, way better written than mine!

Happy New Year

Here's a good resolution: This year, I'm going to BUY a country. I mean, if Madonna and Angelina Jolie can buy kids and some warped sense of...something, then I can buy a country.
It just so happens one is available!
Yeah, I'm pretty good at CIV III, so I figure I could run this place. After all, it's just an old anti-aircraft gun platform. Of course, I have big plans...BIG plans for that place my friends.

Oh, I know Slashdot and Boing Boing beat me to it, but who cares...We'll see what they say to me when I'm KING.

God Bless us, everyone

Happy Happy Joy Joy Christmas!!

There's a Spectre...

The narrartor's voice is not the best, but this is CLASSIC!

Wild Tangent

Try to follow this... Why am I posting a link to the Great Lakes Real Time Vessel Location site?You can track ships up and down the St. Lawrence river and the Great Lakes(Kinda like Paracelsus' link to Real time flight tracking)

I went to Tower Records over the weekend and bought Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions CD, cuz it was half off! (In your face Amazon!!!) Anyhow, listened to it with my kids and my daughter was singing along with Erie Canal, which was funny, because I remember learning that song as a kid.

So that whole Erie Canal thing was in my mind, when I saw This!

Yow! So I had to find out what that was all about, which led me to the Boatnerd site's account of it, and from there I just went nuts.

There are a lot of cool things on the boatnerd site(including its great name).How about a charity auction to win a "cruise"on a freighter?? Good times. No, seriously..I was Google-Earthing the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes...What a crazy place...Being from out West, we don't get to enjoy all of that industro-maritime coolness. Unless you live in Long Beach maybe. Feh!

And there you have it...Why I'm posting a vessel tracking link here.
Maybe it's a Synchronicity. Or not.

Literally

I was literally rolling on the floor laughing when I saw this. Well,...no. But If I had, then that would have been the correct use of the term 'literally'.

A site devoted to the abuse of the word "literally".

And just because, Someone spent a lot of time researching "Further" versus "Farther".

How do you get your kicks?

I know I should be camping outside a Wal-Mart for a PSIII and enduring the unbelivable insanity, not to mention the cold, but I don't find that at all amusing.
What's got me all excited now is Windows Vista. There I said it. I know, pathetic....maybe pathetic is too mild a word, but it'll have to do.
Anyway, who cares, did you know there are some real cool feaure in MS Vista? And I don't mean "features", you know, like feeeeatures? No, some are actually PRACTICAL.

Like, Copying and Pasting from a remote computer

Or how about ReadyBoost which allows you to use a Flash Drive for virtual memory? Ok, maybe not that practical, but cool nonetheless.

Or my favorite,Dynamic Disk Resizing...I'm guessing the guys at Partition Magic are gonna be pissed.

Swords into Plowshares...or Giant Fire Extinguishers

Saw this on Gizmodo today (Check the link for more information.) Hungarian engineers cobbled together bits of old Soviet-Era weaponry to produce what can only be described as the Mother of all fire extinguishers.

Feh...The user disabled embedding the video, so you'll have to go to YouTube to see it.

Be Careful Out There

Tips on navigating the Internet.

Live to Ride

The yearly pilgrimage to the International Motorcycle Show is nearly upon us.(By us, I mean those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area, some of you have already had the pleasure).
This year I may try attending sans enfants mainly becasue I will actually be able to focus on the bikes rather than my 3 year old falling off a Suzuki RM85. On the other hand, my girls really like going to the show and climbing on the bikes....and what better way to get a majority opinion on motorcycle ownership around the house than that? Hmmmm...something to consider.
In the meantime, here's a sampling of what I'll be ogling:

Better Get Me A Bucket

Happy Halloween!
What better way to start the festivities than with a little Buckethead?


In case you don't know who he is, check out the Wikipedia entry

More

See ya in the Gulag

"Stay the course"
"Freedom's on the march"

Oh, and this one:

"The Bush Administration is replacing toilet paper with the Constitution"

I (Ride) The Line

First a warning: You may become addicted...painfully so.

OK, that's out of the way. Now, go to Line Rider and have fun. Just be careful you don't kill the little guy.

I manged a loop-the-loop and a 360 and some pretty killer near-wipeouts...and that was only after trying it for 136 hours!

NOTE:If you find it too difficult, try this slightly hacked version...less gnarly crashes. A bad thing, if that's what you're looking for.

Popularity Contest

So, all this time I've been thinking that this blog has just been a cyber version of me screaming into the void...I always wondered if anyone actually read it.
Well, my suspicions have been confirmed: No one reads this!
Oh, it's not so bad, it's not like I really expected anyone to(sniff)...
How do I know this? Why, I just went to The Blog Juice Calculator where I scored an impressive 0.0!! Woo Hoo! We're number 4,456,237,891!!!!Or something like that
Anyway, you too can go check your stats according to the number of RSS subscribers.

You can also confirm your own hipness buy checking the top ten blogs and note how many you subscribe to or have saved as Bookmarks. I always check out Gizmodo, and I'm not just saying that because they are number one either!

Yet another excellent feature is one where you can compare rankings between two blogs, for example, Me and Paracelsus Rambles.
Only problem is, it doesn't display the results in a tidy little table, no...you have to scroll down to see Paracelsus with an impressive 3.0 then keep scrolling....scroll some more...to see me...0.0! Just like High School!!

Engineers have all the fun dang it!

The guys at MIT spending some quality time with a wicked awesome whiteboard....

Greg Palast

I was reccomended a book called "Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast.
I checked it out on Amazon but they unfortunately had no "Search Inside" enabled on it. It looks like a great read thogh, so after work I'm off to the bookstore.
I had never heard of this guy, but I'm glad I know about him now. he's an investigative journalist who does a great job of exposing greed and incompetence, especially in the Bush Administrattion(Yeah, he has his hands full, but hey, job security!)
Check out his site for more of his writing.
Good stuff.

Yer Man

A voice like no other! Here's a young Shane MacGowan singing with the Dubliners.

Vat iz zis man do-ink here?

If there's ANYTHING I've learned from watching Hogan's Heroes, it's you never mess with the Geneva Convention