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Staple of the Millionaire’s Holiday and still a regular in my daily listening, Fortyone combines off-the-wall samples with an exquisite sense of rhythm to produce delectable party treats. Perfect for an afternoon frolic or a late night mind bender, Fortyone’s audio efforts are truly worth your time. And now, it would appear, he has a site on teh intartubes.
There’s free stuff there, yo!
Buried in a MeFi thread was a link to Peter Schiff‘s latest essay on the US economy. If what he writes is true, then we are quite possibly way more fscked than previously believed.
Yes, Mr. Schiff is notorious for his bearish views on the US economy. However, he lays out how the government is fudging GDP in order to amplify any positive trends coming out of 3Q data. Basically, they’re acting as if there is no inflation (where commodity prices would strongly indicate the opposite). For 2Q they used an annualized inflation rate of 3.6% which is pretty league average while they used 0.8% for 3Q. This despite the fed cranking out dollars as fast as they can print them, the problems with credit, and the tanking dollar relative to other currencies.
I think this is another data point in the call for a new Constitutional Convention and revamping of the US government. You should note, Mr. / Mrs. Government Agent, that I did not call for an armed insurrection. Merely for a peaceful rethinking of our system of government. IOW, please do not lock me up for thinking critically.
Probably my favorite day of the year…the day we get the extra hour moving from Daylight Saving to Standard time. Oh yeah!
So I spent the extra hour revamping the blog a bit. While I was high on the blue background with wacky box thingers and on involving the dogs for some reason, I like this theme a bit better. I think I’ll mute it a bit more—the background color on the posts kind of screw with the Zen I had in mind. Still, I think we’re in a place where we’re mostly open for business. There’s still the per-category stuff to go over and translating the whole look and feel of The Millionaire’s Holiday site into the WordPress universe.
Pastabagel always seems to come up with some interesting angles on economic issues. His comment here: And yes, the band did play on. | MetaFilter is scary when considered in that light.
When I was a much younger man, I went on a family vacation to Worlds of Fun. It was maybe the first or second time I’d been there and it was mostly as advertised. Then again, I was 15 going on 16 at the time—an age more or less squarely in their target demographic. The important thing, however, is that I was a skeeball aficionado. I parlayed a few dollars in tokens into a stuffed dolphin which, being a boy without a girl, I gave to my sister.
On the 4 hour car ride home I fell asleep resting my head on the dolphin which was perched on my shoulder. My sister fell asleep leaning again me (small car). And thus the dolphin was christened “Tired.”
After closing the desk down at midnight last night and returning to open this morning at 6:30 I am in need of some Tired therapy.
So I’m sitting at the desk whiling away the hours until midnight by reading blogs from back when I first discovered the activity. Hats off to LukeLog and Meg (who used to be NotSoSoft back in the day). Reading as these kids / folks / people really invested a lot of effort in exploring the form. I certainly won’t get in to who discovered what when, but for me these folks were pioneering. It was through them that I discovered MeFi which actually was side linked from the Underground IIRC.
What really strikes me now is how conversant they were with the form. Not necessarily the most technically / design / content incline but definitely the best at reviving the vanity site of yore. For me they hit the right balance between geek, personal life, and connections. It was all quite inspiring as I was just starting to rediscover the web myself after years of no computer and no connection. I was testing the waters with graduate school and information science and I saw how I could integrate what they’re doing with my own ideas about information presentation and retrieval.
At the same time I was also working with/for a guy who was strictly old school in the technology department. Not that he didn’t have nice toys or shunned new technology (although he does the latter somewhat) but he was rigid about the least tool necessary for a task. We did not use a graphical IDE for development. We definitely shunned the use of flash and minimized the images. We were on the edge w/r/t implementing CSS driven sites. Server-side scripting? Rriiiiigggghhht.
I’ve taken a lot of that forward with me. In my MIS program I was a bit snobbish about the HTML and code my classmates generated. I often let this snobbery get in the way of appreciating the larger lesson. Moving into my first real, bona fide professional position I made my life a great deal more difficult because of some zealous adherence to an amalgamation of XHTML Strict / CSS / 508c / Nielsen rules. Now at my most recent position I am still fighting my first boss’s battles.
And I’m really not sure it’s worth it. Either that or I’ve ended up in the wrong place professionally. Slowly but surely, the web design field is moving beyond my skill set. I’m very focused on programmatic solutions and automated text processing while the broader audience could care less about these things. I keep waiting for the vindication. Well, okay, the CSS / XHTML thing is starting to pay off. But I’ve got staff who think nothing of bundling instructional tutorials in Flash instead of interactive DHTML. I’m falling behind playing with AJAX because I continue to have to keep the bailing wire web site I inherited together. And I don’t have the opportunity to pursue this on my own time because I’ve elected to try having a social life and meaningful relationship outside of work.
Then there’s the whole missing out on ontologies and metadata angle which was the thing that most interested me in school. I just cannot seem to find an entry into the professional ranks and now I’m not even certain what’s left of my knowledge is even relevant.
And so I whine as I sit at the desk whiling away the hours until midnight…
The sort of thing that drives the folks at Mefi nuts.
It’s the Information R/Evolution movie thinger. Nice and catchy and slightly fluffy.
So I offered to help my pops throw together a poster that he is presenting at a conference in October. It’s his master’s thesis work and he’s noticeably nervous about the whole ordeal. I’ve put together an assfull of posters both for myself and for others at the previous jobby job so it’s not a huge deal. Bold yet neutral colors. Delineate segments without walling section off. No font smaller than 18pt (preferrably 24pt). Yadda yadda yadda.
And while I’m not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, I have always had a curiosity about typography and read about it in my spare time. So no skin off my back. After a few iterations, I’ve got something I’m okay with and the pops is pleased it would seem. Hopefully it’ll give the guy some added confidence.
But my bone to pick is as follows—and there is always a bone to pick, no? No bones makes for a saggy blog. Anyway, so he works for an unmentioned federal agency that deals with cereal grains and the like. This is fine and good. But WTF is up with their technical requirements? Seriously. I had no idea—and again, I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while, albeit in a one-off manner—that PowerPoint is the preferred poster file format. Seriously. Not Illustrator / Photoshop / whatever-the-heck Gimp uses / SVG / LaTeXT or even PDF. No. They require their posters be done in ppt.
They’re friggin’ scientists! They ought to know better. The file format isn’t designed for this kind of use. It generates big (not massive at least) files and is prone to corruption, freezes, crashing, raping your daughter. My work rendered as PPT == 14.7 MB. The same rendered in PDF == just over 900Kb.
Unbelievable. Which, when you get down to it, totally is believable. I hear about graduate students writing their thesis in Word. I’ve seen relational databases erected in Excel. I’ve seen web pages served as JPG or PDF. There is one project that I was forced into linking to the web site at work that was a set of HTML pages done as PPT. They were so excited because they could click text in one slide and it would flip to some other arbitrary slide in their presentation. Seriously.
I know, technology prima donna and all that. Yes. I am guilty. But, and I really hate to type this out…
what.the.fuck?
I don’t pull the boat with my Prius. I don’t use a spark plug as a standard blade screwdriver. I don’t mow the yard with a weed whacker. And I don’t mess around with Jim. There are tasks and there are tools that might get the task done as well as tools that are designed to complete that task. Use the designed tools and you will be a happier person.
That, and I won’t have to type this rant again.
TeckAmok calls attention to a post on MSDN’s Excel blog which indicates that Excel just might suffer from from severe rounding problems. 2^16 seems to take on some additional values depending on how you get there…
Posted to Metafilter.
I think I found out what my mother has been doing in her spare time lately. Honestly, she was a pretty authoritarian grassroots supporter. I stopped peeing at home because of her ruthless enforcement. Well, that and I started wiping up any stray bits after each violation of the rules.
Nothing better than a naughty pee!