Personal Musings for Public Consumption

Europe vs. The US

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:00:00 -0800

EUROPE VS. THE US: WHICH HAS THE BETTER DEVELOPMENT MODEL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY?

Steven Hill makes a bunch of very interesting points regarding Europe's economic development and debunks a few rumors about socialist europe. His data didn't match my mindset. My mindset now more closely matches his data. Very nice. Click through the link below to give the talk a listen.

Europe vs. the US: Which Has the Better Development Model for the 21st Century? (mp3)

My Internet Went Away

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:01:48 -0800

Sweet.

Lady calls Leo Laporte's Tech Guy Show claiming her WI-FI access has "disappeared", come to find out that she doesn't even have a router! She's been stealing someones wi-fi for the past year! She even bought a wi-fi extender hoping to get it back. BEST Tech Guy caller EVER. PERIOD.

TEDTalks : Gary Lauder's new traffic sign: Take Turns

nospam@example.com (TEDTalks) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:39:00 -0800

Pretty cool to watch small numbers yield big numbers. Traffic wonks will enjoy this 6min video.

Fifty percent of traffic accidents happen at intersections. Gary Lauder shares a brilliant and cheap idea for helping drivers move along smoothly: a new traffic sign that combines the properties of "Stop" and "Yield" -- and asks drivers to be polite.

The Business of Climate Change Conference

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:05:00 -0800

From the The Business of Climate Change Conference. This guy is one of the more entertaining and interesting speakers. Certainly the ramifications of his talk should be of interest to most.

TEDTalks : The LXD: In the Internet age, dance evolves

nospam@example.com (TEDTalks) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:00:00 -0800

I've been waiting for this to come out. Excellent performance.

The LXD (the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers) electrify the TED2010 stage with an emerging global street-dance culture, revved up by the Internet. In a preview of Jon Chu’s upcoming Web series, this astonishing troupe show off their superpowers.

The Science News Cycle...

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:40:48 -0800

...and all this time, I thought local TV and blogs were trustworthy sources of information. Damn it.

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:34:02 -0800

Very clever and well done.

TEDTalks : Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

nospam@example.com (TEDTalks) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:00:00 -0800

If you're a data geek, you'll love this presentation. It's a blatent "we invented this at Microsoft" talk, but look past the corporate nod and you'll see a really interesting technology that lets you visualize information as a web. Very pleased to see information represented in some kind of multi-dimension interface.

Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.

I'm Sure Glad The Recession Ended

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:53:11 -0800

It's a good thing the recession ended. Otherwise, key economic charts might look something like this.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/03/im-sure-glad-recession-ended.html

Interesting data and I find the irony funny.

Last night I finally got to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in my Netflix queue and was left thinking about health care and insurance companies. The similarities between the two are uncanny.

Fixing up WordPress to work behind nginx

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:06:41 -0800

WordPress looks nice, but is a rats nest of code under the hood. If you configure nginx* to proxy back to Apache*, you may find yourself with a nifty pile of never ending 301 redirects. I've solved this before, but had long since forgotten. Below I've got my recipe for fixing.
Continue reading "Fixing up WordPress to work behind nginx"

Coffee Party

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:19:57 -0800

Here's a nugget from Facebook/Twitter than I'm keen on. The Vet in the second video does a pretty good job of summing up my present attitude. I'll be interested to see where this goes.

http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/

Flipped the switch...

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:35:11 -0800

I'll clean up my XML blog and post it someplace here as an example of how you can use XSLT, but, I'm keen enough on my new setup that I'm pushing this live.

Took my KSO Treks out for a twirl in the snow...

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:59:52 -0800

A few weeks ago I found myself in Tahoe with my VFF KSO Trek and decided to take 'em for a run in the snow. The snow was crunchy and had not been compacted. As a result, two out of every three steps you would plunge through the snow for 5-10". Probably some of the more dangerous running I've played around with because the ground was so unpredictable (sometimes your footing would hold, sometimes it wouldn't), but it was highly entertaining and exhausting (worse than running on a beach with dry sand). So if the VFF KSO feel very lightweight and like tiny wrappers around the pads of your feet, the VFF KSO Trek make you feel like you've got tank treads on that crush whatever you step on. A very different feel, but not a bad one. You can still "feel the ground," but the sensation is somewhat muted compared to running with VFF KSO. That said, it's still orders of magnitude better than traditional fail running shoes.

Here's my Run Keeper event for my run. Nothing fancy (certainly not fast), but I took a few pics along the way so you could see the terrain (click view details to see the actual photos).

Head Strong: Sorry, but for me, the party is over

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:27:29 -0800

Was going through my daily news troll and stumbled across a very well written OpEd in The Philadelphia Inquirer that had a few choice paragraphs that bear repeating, at which point you should dump over to the original: Head Strong: Sorry, but for me, the party is over.

Where political parties once existed to create coalitions and win elections, now they seek to advance strict ideological agendas. In today's terms, it's hard to imagine the GOP tent once housing such disparate figures as conservative Barry Goldwater and liberal New Yorker Jacob Javits, while John Stennis of Mississippi and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts coexisted as Democratic contemporaries.

Followed by:

Collegiality is nonexistent today, and any outreach across an aisle is castigated as weakness by the talking heads who constantly stir a pot of discontent. So vicious is the political climate that within two years, Sen. John McCain has gone from GOP standard-bearer to its endangered-species list. All of which leaves homeless those of us with views that don't stack up neatly in any ideological box the way we're told they should.

And:

I think President Obama is earnest, smart, and much more centrist than his tea party caricature suggests. He has never been given a fair chance to succeed by those who openly crow about their desire to see him fail (while somehow congratulating one another on their relative patriotism). I know he was born in America, isn't a socialist, and doesn't worship in a mosque. I get that he inherited a minefield. Still, the level of federal spending concerns me. And he never closed the deal with me that health insurance is a right, not a privilege. But I'm not folding the tent on him. Not now. Not with the nation fighting two wars while its economy still teeters on the brink of collapse.

Continue reading "Head Strong: Sorry, but for me, the party is over"

Video: The Facebook Economy

nospam@example.com (Sean Chittenden) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:34:36 -0800

If you wanted to get an idea of how the Facbeook economy works, or at least this concept of social games, this is a fantastic video that is both interesting, and a bit spooky in its implications (ps, if you're an educator, you need to at the very least watch starting around 19:30).

Continue reading "Video: The Facebook Economy"