January 20, 2010

Short Updates

Posted by Scott at 09:53 PM

Good morning all! Our kids' four day weekend is over. Time to get 'em to school. I'm bringing Michelle and I some breakfast from Donut Fresh Express to celebrate. The usual Kennedy style campaign tactics did not sway MA voters this time. In my MA office 2 things seemed to P.O. the staff: a) exempting unions from the "Cadillac health plan" tax and b) giving Nebraska a huge Medicare break. 6:30am

After dropping the girls off at school, I shoveled the driveway. We had what I like to call an "annoyance storm". It left us about 2" of fluffy powder. You just shovel it. Using a snowblower is like using a semi truck to get milk from the local convenient store. Afterwards I took Michelle for breakfast to celebrate the Brown win. I had a Jambalaya omelette, pan fries, and toast. I ♥ downtown Milford food. 10:19am

Updated ~2000 static HTML files at my web host in about a minute. Have I mentioned I love fastmail.fm? My permalink and email links now use Unicode symbols. ⚓ and ✉. 10:50am

Since I've been using Google Chrome on the Mac for a while and liking it over Safari, I'm trying out the bleeding edge developer version (Chromium) since it allows extensions like Firefox. Extension first up: AdBlock+, a staple of my PC Firefox sanity. 8:35pm

Watching season one, episode four of "Chuck" [Chuck Versus the Wookiee] with Michelle & the girls. 8:43pm

Took a brief look at all the cr*p one has to do to natively run Ubuntu v9.10 smoothly on my MacBook (dual boot): (related link) Man! It almost reminds me of the old days with Linux. Way too many driver mods required. For now I'll continue to just use VirtualBox and run it as a guest OS. 9:33pm

Good night all! I should get some rest. Tomorrow is a chemo day for Michelle... 9:52pm

Bookmarks I made today:

Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Won Massachusetts Senate Seat
Comment: It's borderline Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, but I found it funny. [Hat tip: Patrick Madrid] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

Bejeweled Twist
Comment: The UPS man came to drop off what I had pre-ordered some weeks back. I'm bettin' Michelle is going to want to hold this until the twins' birthday this weekend. She loves to torture me that way...

BumpTop for Mac 1.0!
Comment: Have any of my Mac friends played with BumpTop? It looks like some decent GUI eye candy (iCandy?).
Excerpt: BumpTop is a brand new way to look at your mac desktop. A fun and productive approach with 3D and Physics.

'Babies' Trailer
Comment: I don't know that we would go see this at the theater, but I could definitely see us renting the DVD. [Thanks Sarah White Rolanti for the pointer.]
Excerpt: Simultaneously follows four babies around the world from birth to first steps. The children are from Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo and San Francisco.

Stay Under 7 Megapixels to Avoid Photo Noise and Diffraction
Comment: This is why one of the first things I did last year on Abby's camera http://amazon.com/dp/B001SER48I/ was dial it down from 12 megapixels to its 5megapixel setting. While I think it's an awesome little point 'n shoot, the optics and the sensor don't justify a 12 megapixel resolution. It just makes for bloated and noisy JPEGs.
Excerpt: We've mentioned the arbitrary nature of the megapixel war before, but only in general analogies. Ross at the Petravoxel blog gets precise, and provides proof, on why going over 7 megapixels in a point-and-shoot makes absolutely no sense.

Local Students, Doctor, Nurses Head To Dominican
Comment: One of the students is my neighbor Kristin Doucette Lusczyk, whose daughters I drive to school every morning. While there was some concern for their safety because of the quake, we're proud of the work they did. They distributed a ton of medical supplies last week.
Excerpt: Boxes and suitcases at Manchester Community College are getting stuffed with much-needed medication for people in the Dominican Republic. A group of students, local nurses and doctors will leave Saturday for a weeklong trip to the Dominican Republic to provide medical care for the rural poor.

Comments