I'm All Over The Map

You know how it is, you’re clicking through some web pages, doing some research, and BAM!  Something hits you right up aside the head.

In this case, following a link about AOL layoffs after reading a comment about the AOL buyout of Huffington Post, I wound up at the blog of an ex-AOL e-mail administrator who left the good old US of A for the Netherlands.  Actually, she’s been there since October of last year.

Why should this be noteworthy you ask?

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So, here we are, two days out from Superbowl XLV. It’s been an incredibly arctic 15° F, on average, for the last three days, and while sitting at home, due to work being canceled yet again due to “inclement weather”, I ran across a article on the stadium over at IT World.

 

Affectionately known in these parts as “Jerry’s World” (in honor of the owner, Jerry Jones);  I’d not known much about this local landmark, outside of the apparent abuse of eminent domain that allowed it to be built, and the fact that its architecture reminds me of a massive Decepticon® Transformer®, waiting to sprout legs from its flanks, stride forth, and flatten the nearby Wet and Wild ®and Six Flags® theme parks.

Apocalyptic imagery aside, the article at IT World made my geek-flesh pimple.  Because the tours they give the faithful don’t include statistics like these:

“…884 Cisco wireless access points (AP) scattered around, and more than 70 different wiring closets containing more than 40,000 wired ports. There are several different wireless networks for staff, press, guests and attendees that segregate their traffic. There is more than 8 million feet of Ethernet cabling, and 260 miles of fiber to support all the connections, and more than 100T-bytes of data storage too. Everything operates on a single network, including the point-of-sale terminals at the concession stands, 185 security cameras and access control doors, entrance ticketing stations, the scoreboards, and the public Wifi network as well as the more prosaic business computing needs of the staff.”

Kind of makes me weak in the knees, knowing all that.

Check out the rest of the story, and be prepared come game day to share your new found geek-trivia with all your buds.

Goodwill® is cool, I’ve bought some pretty groovy stuff there over the years.

So I serendipitously find out that  our local Goodwill® has a pretty modern website, which includes a page devoted to their most interesting donations, one of which is shown here on the right.

Yep, Fertility Idol, NSFW, politically corrected.

If you’d like to see more, head on over to Goodwill® and scroll down through the gallery, you’ll be glad you did.

Some idi…uh…”Congressman” slid a bill into committee last month that would reinstitute the draft and provide for compulsory civilian service by any member of the population of these United States, aged 18 to 42.

That’s right, HR5741 is in committee as you read this, having been introduced on July 15th of this year.

Now, this isn’t the first time this type of stupi… err… legislation has been introduced, courtesy of NY Congresscritter Charles Rangel.  Like his previous bills it will have little chance of either garnering support or having more than the proverbial snowballs chance of passing.

Which begs the question:  Why?

Why would someone who is under scrutiny for ethics improprieties, including improper use of his office to solicit donations for a City University of New York center to be named in his honor; failure to report rental income from his villa in the Dominican Republic and to pay taxes on it; omission of some $600,000 in assets on his House financial disclosure forms; and acceptance from a Manhattan developer of four rent-stabilized apartments, one of which he used as a campaign office, waste time reintroducing a bill that amounts to little more than legalized slavery on the part of the government?

If this is an indication of how incumbents take care of the needs of their constituency, come November maybe we should show them all the door.

You may not have noticed it, but Kodak announced a little over a year ago that it would cease production of its flagship product for the last 74 years, Kodachrome® film, due to declining sales.

At the time that really saddened me.  I’d had a love affair with cameras and photography from age 18, and while it never progressed further than the avid hobbyist / occasional supplemental income stage, I came to appreciate the quality and consistency that the Kodak brand gave me.

Which is why I have to share with you an item from the Wichita Eagle, chronicling the fate of the last 36 exposure roll of Kodachrome® Kodak produced, when it was finally processed in Parsons, Kansas:

“PARSONS — Freelance photojournalist Steve McCurry, whose work has graced the pages of National Geographic, laid 36 slides representing the last frames of Kodachrome film on the light board sitting on a counter…”  The rest of the story is here

If you ever held a camera in your hands and shot slides, it’s more than worth the read.

Damn if I don’t feel like holding an Irish wake.

So, this morning, the BoobToob is filled with the clamor and commotion of MELSANADRAMA!  Did he?  Did she?  Expert opinion! Voice analysis! In DEPTH talking head analysis!!  More, following this commercial break!!!

All of which leads me to ask:
Why on  Gods green earth are we devoting so much time and attention to them and their issues?

They are broken.  They have personal problems.  So do a lot of other people.

Aren’t there more pressing issues that we should be concerned with?  Issues which might be brought to the public’s attention, let alone discussed and demystified, if we only stopped wasting precious media minutes obsessing over the train wreck of the latest celebrity meltdown?

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So, Paula goes to the local Farmer’s Market last weekend, brings home a load of goodies, and a bouquet of flowers.  Lilies to be exact.  They looked amazing, and smelled divine.  However, on close inspection I saw that we had a hitchhiker who’d taken a shine to our floral largess.  You can see him below:

He appeared to be a member of the family Thomisidae, either the genus Mecaphesa or Misumenops, otherwise known as a green crab spider.  There’s a wonderful web site for bugs and arachnids that has other examples of the genus here.

As much as I enjoyed him, I had to gather him (her?) up in cupped hands, take him/her outside, charge her/him with watching over our basil plants and release him/her.  Cool, eh?

The Mozilla Organization, the nice folks that bring you Firefox and Thunderbird, have released Firefox 4 Beta 1 and are touting it as “almost ready for prime time”.

They are soliciting your feedback via a button in the main bar of the browser, as well as the Test Pilot Program.  If you’re interested in playing around with the next iteration of this popular internet tool head over here and download it.

So far it’s faster, and more responsive than v. 3.6.6, which is my daily bread & butter browser.

Coincidences, we’ve all see them, some so timely that we wonder if they’re not the Hand of Providence in action.

When it comes to the world of Business and Politics though, I question if there is any such thing.

Consider.  Good timing, or prior knowledge?

Goldman Sachs dumps over half it’s holdings in BP stock just before the April blowout in the Gulf, on the advice of it’s International Chairman who had stepped down as BP’s Chairman just a year earlier.¹

Halliburton, just two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, bought out the conveniently Gulf based², premiere oil well firefighting firm of

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