I became a Mac convert (from Windows XP) in the mid 2000s, especially since I use several Linux machines throughout the day also. I did a lot of video editing on my MacBook Pro but by 2013 it was a bit sluggish so I thought I would pay the large chunk of money and get a nice machine to edit video on. Lo and behold what did they have?...a stupid cylinder that I couldn't put my five hard drives of video files into.
Yes it looked cool and sleek, unless you actually wanted to use the thing. The last thing I wanted on my desk was a rat's nest of external enclosures for hard drives, cables, and power supplies. I had enough of that in dealing with my laptop setup. Bump a cable, oops, there goes the whole chain.
The most obnoxious part was people actually defending this "radical new design" and that people like me who didn't like it were "afraid of change". Or even, "Who needs so many hard drives, just use the cloud, that is the future!" (yeah, try and edit HD video files that are being served off the cloud, heh).
So for about $1500 I bought a PC with Windows 7 and haven't looked back. Bye bye Apple.
My wife and I were driving across the USA in late 2006 (the last day of 2006 even). I accidentally/intentionally routed us about 400 miles out of our way to pay a visit to the landfill. I had found the address on the net. We got there and I couldn't quite find it, then realized all the suburban build up was probably blocking it. Sure enough, behind the Sonic was the remains of the landfill. My (patient) wife stayed at the Sonic while I spent a couple hours wandering around the landfill site. She didn't have the same level of excitement about it that I did.
I found bits of trash, but no Atari cartridges. I took a lot of photos and video that I need to get online. (now 7 years later). I have one there though: http://www.humanclock.com/news...
After we got back home to Portland I put up a blurb about it on my website. The very next day I received an email from a guy in Brazil who excitedly wrote: "WOW! YOU ACTUALLY WENT THERE!" I showed the email to my wife and said: "Look honey, I am not alone!"
In its time the ET Landfill was an urban legend simply because the Internet wasn't commonplace. The "abundance of documentation" was hard to come by for a kid in rural Washington in the late 80s. Because of this, I had to stick to my sources that were available to me, that being the cousin of a friend of a best friend's older cousin who lived in the southwest somewhere a few years ago.
I second this! I can't believe it took this long in the comments for someone to mention it. This is what many of the AP photographers use. It is very well thought out and it is amazing how much you can customize it with their "code replacement" feature. It is well worth the $150, not just for the program but for the level of support. Their support forums are really good and the camerabits.com staff are very active in them, plus you can call them up on the phone and talk with one of the programmers or someone very close to the development of the program. I've seen a lot of comments from them where they say "no...it won't do that, but that is a really good idea and we will put it into the next release".
Not math/maths and legos/lego, that is worth arguing about.
If you live on the West Coast of the USA (good point @Korbeau, I thought of that after I posted), news reports are incredibly annoying to listen to when they say things like "A major fire occurred today in Washington". You have to listen to the report for awhile to figure out that they are not talking about something in Seattle, but something on the other side of the USA. The national news will freely interchange things like "Today Washington Governor Chris Gregoire enacted...", then a few minutes later, "Debate in Washington erupted over..."
Really? I mean, when was the last time something labeled as a "killer" actually was? It is about as exciting as calling the next singer "The Next Hannah Montana". I'm tired of companies and media calling things "The iPod Killer, The Facebook Killer". It makes the product sound like more work was put into PR than actual product development.
Yeah, was just gonna post the exact same thing. I saw it in about 1985/1986 on Ripley's Believe it Or Not. Anyway, not a new idea....then again maybe this is the same company that was doing it 20+ years ago.
I find it really funny how all the news media (especially NPR) goes out of their way to pronounce things correctly, yet they freely interchange the use of "Washington" and "Washington, DC". These are not the same place!
I liked how on NPR they were pointing out a factual error in Obama's speech, yet the host kept jumping between "Washington DC" and "Washington"
It isn't just the US where people have to think of public liability lawsuits...
When I was in Australia a few years ago, talk of the cost of public liability insurance was big. I don't know if they sorted it out but many common events were being canceled because they couldn't afford liability insurance.
This reflects what I would hear on the radio: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/stories/s484976.htm
Back in 2001 when I built humanclock.com, I threw this in as a joke:
http://www.humanclock.com/webserver.php
It caused quite a tizzy on Slashdot though. Funny how a lot of the Slashdot comments revolved around a page that I spent an hour on, while the rest of the site (something I spent a few hundred hours building) was ignored.
In 2002-2003 I rode my bicycle trip around the circumference of Australia. I had an IBM Thinkpad 600e. I can't speak for the other models, but this one survived a 13,000 mile ride on the back of a bicycle (including a few hundred miles of washboarded/corrugated dirt roads on the Gulf Track across to top end).
Only take the laptop if you cannot live without it. It is one more thing to worry about and one more thing to cause you headaches.
I took a laptop because I like to take a lot of photos. I was filling up a 128 meg flashcard every other day. (this was the 2.1megapixel days). Plus the http://www.lunky.com/ and http://www.humanclock.com/ websites needed constant coding so I really couldn't do without a laptop. I also needed to keep my 128meg MP3 player stocked with music for biking.
Photos: I took about 35,000 photos during my trip. (check it out http://www.lunky.com/ I had to have a laptop primarily for this reason, to get the photos off my flashcards and onto CDs to mail home.
First and foremost, do not plan to FTP your photos home! Internet access isn't easy and fast like it is here in the USA. Uploading even several megs worth of original/fullsized photos home is impractical. Connections are dreadfully slow (due to being overloaded) and internet cafe's can be REALLY picky about how you use their machines. Their bandwidth (at least at that time) was metered so they would frown upon you transferring large amounts of files. I was kicked out of a cafe for plugging in my USB drive/mp3 player. I nearly got kicked out of another cafe in Broome because I simply had my laptop turned on and sitting next to one of their computers. A lot of hostels have those god-forsaken kiosks that don't even have a CD drive. This was all in Australia too, a first world country.
Blogs/journals: If you find that you can get wifi easily and/or get things off of your laptop and onto a computer at a net cafe...compose a lot of your emails on a text editor. This way you can write whether or not you have net access and best of all, you don't have to shell out $5.00/hr for the privilege of typing. My laptop easily paid for itself this way. I could type up 10 hours worth of letters, website updates, etc...copy it to a disk, then load up the files, copy/paste into my webmail program and be done in 10 minutes. There was $50.00 saved right there.
Setup/Backups: Always plan that your laptop is gonna get stolen next week, so keep stuff backed up and the backups away from the laptop. Set things up on your laptop so it is easy to back things up that can't be replaced. (photos, writings etc). If you have special software you need, stash it somewhere on a webserver or make burn copies that a friend can mail to you should you get your laptop stolen/etc. (I had to once do a new PHP/Apache/Mysql setup and could only get it off the net cafe's computer and onto mine via 1.44meg floppy discs. That sucked.) Since I was in Australia I could bank on a good postal system, but I still would burn two copies of my photo CDs and mail them to different destinations at different times.
On a side note, take a lot of photos of the stuff people don't normally take photos of. Years later you will be glad you did. Sunsets are a dime a dozen, but photos of a grocery store shelf or a power outlet are the little things that take you back to your day to day life traveling.
I circled Australia on my bicycle during 2002-2003. I had a lot of gadgets and they were a pain at times, but I really couldn't picture the trip without them. The digital camera setup let me take an excessive amount of photos (which after 5 years, I'm glad the photos remind me of things I'd forgotten about). The laptop made it easy to keep a long journal and do more complex tasks for my websites. Loudly (horribly) singing along at the top of my lungs with The Saints' (I'm) Stranded while riding my bike under a full moon at 1am in the outback was one of my best memories.
It all basically comes down to how often you are going to be around civilization and what your needs are. A lot of people are going to tell you to leave everything at home, to not bother with it. This is fine advice if you are leaving for two weeks, but you are going to be gone a year. That is a long time. Not every single moment will be action-packed, something to see, something to do, there will be downtime.
That said, nearly one whole saddlebag on my bicycle was dedicated to tech things! IBM Thinkpad 600e with Linux/Windows, 5 laptop batteries, digital camera, 24 AA NiMH batteries, AA charger, 512mb of flash cards, Diva MP3 player (that ran on compact flashcards!), and a GPS. I used all of this stuff daily. One reason I had all of this stuff was because it was 2002. The MP3 player wouldn't hold much music and the flashcards would only hold a couple days worth of photos. A lot of times I would also be a week between power sources, hence all the batteries.
laptop: I would leave this at home unless your hands will be tied otherwise. Keep in mind that outside of the USA, I've found public internet access to be a lot more common. All over Australia in the smallest towns without any paved roads, I could find somewhere to get on the net for a few dollars an hour. Blog postings and email can be done from these sorts of places.
photos: Since it was 2002, those handy photo storage devices that were basically a hard disk with a compact flash reader on them didn't really exist or weren't that good. Thus every other day I had to copy off my 128 meg flashcards to the laptop, then every couple of weeks burn a couple cds of photos and mail them to places holding mail for me in Australia and the USA. If you do copy your photos from your camera to your laptop, don't expect to be able to FTP them home as a backup. Getting your laptop online and/or finding a fast enough connection to do it can be a chore (free WiFi is hit or miss in various countries). A lot of places will transfer your photos from your flashcards to a CD too. Be sure to shop around when doing this, the price for this service varies a great deal. If going this route, get two CDs made, keep one with you and mail another one home. Also, verify the CD contents before erasing the flashcard. I met a couple in New Zealand who were bummed that only their photos were transferred, the automated software the photo lab used ignored all their movie files. A lot of the Internet Cafes have cd burners and flash card readers and you can do it there also.
As I kid in the early 80's I remember seeing on TV a movie where they were trying to float an iceberg, via rocket engine, to (I think) Los Angeles. They start the rocket engine and the stakes holding the engine in place start to come loose and fly into the windshield of the helicopter.
I've looked around the net and can't figure out what this movie is. Anyone know?
When I was traveling around Australia in 2002-2003, I would never even *think* of plugging my laptop into a power outlet. (or power point as they are known there). The only time where it was ok is if I had paid for a hostel room or a powered site at a caravan park. There were a few trendy coffeeshops in Sydney where this was ok though.
A few times initially I just plugged in and it was made *very* clear to me that I should have asked first and no, it wasn't ok even if I had asked....and this was in a library. A lot of times it will be ok, but if you are traveling in a foreign country, always ask first.
Eventually when traveling around the top end when I needed to do some power-intensive operation (copying mp3 CD's to my mp3 player), I would just offer the restaurant $2-3 for use of their power for an hour or so. No worries then.
Traveling by bike around Australia with 5 thinkpad batteries was a bit of science. I would have to wake up at 3am in a hostel just to swap the batteries in my laptop and then go back to sleep. Sometimes instead of camping out I'd have to get a motel room just so I could spend the night charging batteries.
I still don't take power for granted anymore, at least not after 1.5 years of planning my life around the need for a power outlet.
One of my favorite family photos was taken by my Dad in Yakima, Washington sometime after the eruption. You can still see ash in this photo though:
http://www.12xu.com/
I do remember on May 19th the ash being deep enough to write my name in it, only to be scolded by Mommy for going outside.
A guy my Dad worked with left his 1975 Corvette parked outside on May 18th....with the T-tops off. Soon the black interior was a very deep and dusty grey!
When I was biking around Australia in 2002-2003, I was having to shell out $5-12 AUD per hour for net access ($24 AUD an hour at the WA/SA border on the Nullabor!). I found myself to be insanely productive when it came to programming, answering email, etc when it was costing me by the minute. No Slashdot, random looks at IMDB.com for a movie I saw 15 years ago, etc.
So I've half joked with billing myself for time on the internet, with the money going into a jar or some thing like that...now that I'm back and messing around on the net when I should be working. I would be more productive, and be quite rich at the end of the year!
Why is it that when someone comes up with an idea/goal, the Slashdot crowd has to belittle the idea as insignificant? This reminds me of high school when anyone who acted a bit different was made fun of because they didn't go along with the status quo. Yawn.
People, you are hackers/nerds! You are supposed to encourage each other to set goals and follow through on them.
Yes, I am biased. I visited five confluences when I was in Australia. Because I had to change my travel plans for the first confulence visit, I ended up meeting a girl which I dated for a year.
Life is short, go do something with your lives, don't tear down anyone who chooses to follow through on an idea, rather than just sit around and watch reruns of Friends.
Re:Dot come failure pros and cons
on
SNES Portable
·
· Score: 1
One of the downsides is it also gives them the time to come up with odd presentations of their cool ideas.
What is so wrong with this? It amazes me how when someone has a unique idea and gets up off their butt and does it, people say that the person has "too much time on their hands." Yet a person can play Quake or sit in front of the TV watching Channel Zero for hours and nobody will ever accuse them of having "too much time on their hands."
After about 6 server reboots and one kernel rebuild (thanks Myke) the server seems to be holding steady. I had to go downtown and babysit the server. I kind of felt like a husband helping his wife go though labor. Anyway, I was a bit suprised about all the/. chatter over the "webserver". Good thing I never built an Atari 2600 webserver. (Wanted to, but I didn't have the keypad controllers for i/o, just that damn Star Raiders one).
If you remember the days of Atari and Vectrex, be sure and check out 2:12pm-2:18pm.
I'll try and get a FAQ written tomorrow, but in short:
- the webserver is in fact real, if you want it to be. (isn't this from a movie or something?)
- the girl at 11:11am is in fact single (and knows what interrupt vector table is).
- humanclock.com isn't some website with a mega-corporation lurking behind it, it is just created/ran by me.
- the analog clock should be done this weekend
- 7:39am is the best / most creative clock photo I've received so far.
Well, it looks like it only took three weeks from putting the site up until it got Slashdotted. I've been building the site and taking pictures for the last two months. I haven't had time to write a FAQ for the site yet. But the reason the picture filenames are MD5 hashes is so you can't easily see other times. A lot of people want to just be able to clickity click their way through the entire set of pictures as if it were a p0rn site...and I didn't want that. If you want to see a certain time, you have to wait.
There are some interesting photos on the site. Jimi Hendrix's grave is at 8:15pm, Richard Buckner is at 8:14pm, and there is an entire hours worth of pictures from 1am - 2am that were taken at a Goth party in Pittsburgh. (thanks D33!)
Now I gotta go downtown and reboot the server... (on -> off -> on)
Artist X now gets our dollars while Artist Y goes back to working as a waitress.
I doubt that X actaully receives our dollars these days, Billy Zoom left after the fourth album in the mid-80's and the albums weren't as good after that. Heck, they even wrote:
"we're the last american band...to get played on the radio"
Slashdot Mirror
I became a Mac convert (from Windows XP) in the mid 2000s, especially since I use several Linux machines throughout the day also. I did a lot of video editing on my MacBook Pro but by 2013 it was a bit sluggish so I thought I would pay the large chunk of money and get a nice machine to edit video on. Lo and behold what did they have?...a stupid cylinder that I couldn't put my five hard drives of video files into.
Yes it looked cool and sleek, unless you actually wanted to use the thing. The last thing I wanted on my desk was a rat's nest of external enclosures for hard drives, cables, and power supplies. I had enough of that in dealing with my laptop setup. Bump a cable, oops, there goes the whole chain.
The most obnoxious part was people actually defending this "radical new design" and that people like me who didn't like it were "afraid of change". Or even, "Who needs so many hard drives, just use the cloud, that is the future!" (yeah, try and edit HD video files that are being served off the cloud, heh).
So for about $1500 I bought a PC with Windows 7 and haven't looked back. Bye bye Apple.
My wife and I were driving across the USA in late 2006 (the last day of 2006 even). I accidentally/intentionally routed us about 400 miles out of our way to pay a visit to the landfill. I had found the address on the net. We got there and I couldn't quite find it, then realized all the suburban build up was probably blocking it. Sure enough, behind the Sonic was the remains of the landfill. My (patient) wife stayed at the Sonic while I spent a couple hours wandering around the landfill site. She didn't have the same level of excitement about it that I did.
I found bits of trash, but no Atari cartridges. I took a lot of photos and video that I need to get online. (now 7 years later). I have one there though:
http://www.humanclock.com/news...
After we got back home to Portland I put up a blurb about it on my website. The very next day I received an email from a guy in Brazil who excitedly wrote: "WOW! YOU ACTUALLY WENT THERE!" I showed the email to my wife and said: "Look honey, I am not alone!"
In its time the ET Landfill was an urban legend simply because the Internet wasn't commonplace. The "abundance of documentation" was hard to come by for a kid in rural Washington in the late 80s. Because of this, I had to stick to my sources that were available to me, that being the cousin of a friend of a best friend's older cousin who lived in the southwest somewhere a few years ago.
I second this! I can't believe it took this long in the comments for someone to mention it. This is what many of the AP photographers use. It is very well thought out and it is amazing how much you can customize it with their "code replacement" feature. It is well worth the $150, not just for the program but for the level of support. Their support forums are really good and the camerabits.com staff are very active in them, plus you can call them up on the phone and talk with one of the programmers or someone very close to the development of the program. I've seen a lot of comments from them where they say "no...it won't do that, but that is a really good idea and we will put it into the next release".
Why would anybody get upset about this?
Not math/maths and legos/lego, that is worth arguing about.
If you live on the West Coast of the USA (good point @Korbeau, I thought of that after I posted), news reports are incredibly annoying to listen to when they say things like "A major fire occurred today in Washington". You have to listen to the report for awhile to figure out that they are not talking about something in Seattle, but something on the other side of the USA. The national news will freely interchange things like "Today Washington Governor Chris Gregoire enacted...", then a few minutes later, "Debate in Washington erupted over..."
Argh! for the 8^56th time!
- "Washington" is a US State founded in 1889.
- "Washington D.C." is the Capital of the United States.
This article was obviously not written by anyone on the west coast.
Really? I mean, when was the last time something labeled as a "killer" actually was? It is about as exciting as calling the next singer "The Next Hannah Montana". I'm tired of companies and media calling things "The iPod Killer, The Facebook Killer". It makes the product sound like more work was put into PR than actual product development.
Yeah, was just gonna post the exact same thing. I saw it in about 1985/1986 on Ripley's Believe it Or Not. Anyway, not a new idea....then again maybe this is the same company that was doing it 20+ years ago.
I find it really funny how all the news media (especially NPR) goes out of their way to pronounce things correctly, yet they freely interchange the use of "Washington" and "Washington, DC". These are not the same place!
I liked how on NPR they were pointing out a factual error in Obama's speech, yet the host kept jumping between "Washington DC" and "Washington"
It isn't just the US where people have to think of public liability lawsuits...
When I was in Australia a few years ago, talk of the cost of public liability insurance was big. I don't know if they sorted it out but many common events were being canceled because they couldn't afford liability insurance.
This reflects what I would hear on the radio:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/stories/s484976.htm
Back in 2001 when I built humanclock.com, I threw this in as a joke:
http://www.humanclock.com/webserver.php
It caused quite a tizzy on Slashdot though. Funny how a lot of the Slashdot comments revolved around a page that I spent an hour on, while the rest of the site (something I spent a few hundred hours building) was ignored.
In 2002-2003 I rode my bicycle trip around the circumference of Australia. I had an IBM Thinkpad 600e. I can't speak for the other models, but this one survived a 13,000 mile ride on the back of a bicycle (including a few hundred miles of washboarded/corrugated dirt roads on the Gulf Track across to top end).
Only take the laptop if you cannot live without it. It is one more thing to worry about and one more thing to cause you headaches.
I took a laptop because I like to take a lot of photos. I was filling up a 128 meg flashcard every other day. (this was the 2.1megapixel days). Plus the http://www.lunky.com/ and http://www.humanclock.com/ websites needed constant coding so I really couldn't do without a laptop. I also needed to keep my 128meg MP3 player stocked with music for biking.
Photos:
I took about 35,000 photos during my trip. (check it out http://www.lunky.com/ I had to have a laptop primarily for this reason, to get the photos off my flashcards and onto CDs to mail home.
First and foremost, do not plan to FTP your photos home! Internet access isn't easy and fast like it is here in the USA. Uploading even several megs worth of original/fullsized photos home is impractical. Connections are dreadfully slow (due to being overloaded) and internet cafe's can be REALLY picky about how you use their machines. Their bandwidth (at least at that time) was metered so they would frown upon you transferring large amounts of files. I was kicked out of a cafe for plugging in my USB drive/mp3 player. I nearly got kicked out of another cafe in Broome because I simply had my laptop turned on and sitting next to one of their computers. A lot of hostels have those god-forsaken kiosks that don't even have a CD drive. This was all in Australia too, a first world country.
Blogs/journals:
If you find that you can get wifi easily and/or get things off of your laptop and onto a computer at a net cafe...compose a lot of your emails on a text editor. This way you can write whether or not you have net access and best of all, you don't have to shell out $5.00/hr for the privilege of typing. My laptop easily paid for itself this way. I could type up 10 hours worth of letters, website updates, etc...copy it to a disk, then load up the files, copy/paste into my webmail program and be done in 10 minutes. There was $50.00 saved right there.
Setup/Backups:
Always plan that your laptop is gonna get stolen next week, so keep stuff backed up and the backups away from the laptop. Set things up on your laptop so it is easy to back things up that can't be replaced. (photos, writings etc). If you have special software you need, stash it somewhere on a webserver or make burn copies that a friend can mail to you should you get your laptop stolen/etc. (I had to once do a new PHP/Apache/Mysql setup and could only get it off the net cafe's computer and onto mine via 1.44meg floppy discs. That sucked.) Since I was in Australia I could bank on a good postal system, but I still would burn two copies of my photo CDs and mail them to different destinations at different times.
On a side note, take a lot of photos of the stuff people don't normally take photos of. Years later you will be glad you did. Sunsets are a dime a dozen, but photos of a grocery store shelf or a power outlet are the little things that take you back to your day to day life traveling.
I circled Australia on my bicycle during 2002-2003. I had a lot of gadgets and they were a pain at times, but I really couldn't picture the trip without them. The digital camera setup let me take an excessive amount of photos (which after 5 years, I'm glad the photos remind me of things I'd forgotten about). The laptop made it easy to keep a long journal and do more complex tasks for my websites. Loudly (horribly) singing along at the top of my lungs with The Saints' (I'm) Stranded while riding my bike under a full moon at 1am in the outback was one of my best memories.
It all basically comes down to how often you are going to be around civilization and what your needs are. A lot of people are going to tell you to leave everything at home, to not bother with it. This is fine advice if you are leaving for two weeks, but you are going to be gone a year. That is a long time. Not every single moment will be action-packed, something to see, something to do, there will be downtime.
That said, nearly one whole saddlebag on my bicycle was dedicated to tech things! IBM Thinkpad 600e with Linux/Windows, 5 laptop batteries, digital camera, 24 AA NiMH batteries, AA charger, 512mb of flash cards, Diva MP3 player (that ran on compact flashcards!), and a GPS. I used all of this stuff daily. One reason I had all of this stuff was because it was 2002. The MP3 player wouldn't hold much music and the flashcards would only hold a couple days worth of photos. A lot of times I would also be a week between power sources, hence all the batteries.
laptop:
I would leave this at home unless your hands will be tied otherwise. Keep in mind that outside of the USA, I've found public internet access to be a lot more common. All over Australia in the smallest towns without any paved roads, I could find somewhere to get on the net for a few dollars an hour. Blog postings and email can be done from these sorts of places.
photos:
Since it was 2002, those handy photo storage devices that were basically a hard disk with a compact flash reader on them didn't really exist or weren't that good. Thus every other day I had to copy off my 128 meg flashcards to the laptop, then every couple of weeks burn a couple cds of photos and mail them to places holding mail for me in Australia and the USA. If you do copy your photos from your camera to your laptop, don't expect to be able to FTP them home as a backup. Getting your laptop online and/or finding a fast enough connection to do it can be a chore (free WiFi is hit or miss in various countries). A lot of places will transfer your photos from your flashcards to a CD too. Be sure to shop around when doing this, the price for this service varies a great deal. If going this route, get two CDs made, keep one with you and mail another one home. Also, verify the CD contents before erasing the flashcard. I met a couple in New Zealand who were bummed that only their photos were transferred, the automated software the photo lab used ignored all their movie files. A lot of the Internet Cafes have cd burners and flash card readers and you can do it there also.
Slightly offtopic but it does involve an iceberg.
As I kid in the early 80's I remember seeing on TV a movie where they were trying to float an iceberg, via rocket engine, to (I think) Los Angeles. They start the rocket engine and the stakes holding the engine in place start to come loose and fly into the windshield of the helicopter.
I've looked around the net and can't figure out what this movie is. Anyone know?
thesmokinggun.com has a nice piece on this, http://www.thesmokinggun.com/louie/louie.html , and David Marsh wrote and entire book on the history of the song.
When I was traveling around Australia in 2002-2003, I would never even *think* of plugging my laptop into a power outlet. (or power point as they are known there). The only time where it was ok is if I had paid for a hostel room or a powered site at a caravan park. There were a few trendy coffeeshops in Sydney where this was ok though.
A few times initially I just plugged in and it was made *very* clear to me that I should have asked first and no, it wasn't ok even if I had asked....and this was in a library. A lot of times it will be ok, but if you are traveling in a foreign country, always ask first.
Eventually when traveling around the top end when I needed to do some power-intensive operation (copying mp3 CD's to my mp3 player), I would just offer the restaurant $2-3 for use of their power for an hour or so. No worries then.
Traveling by bike around Australia with 5 thinkpad batteries was a bit of science. I would have to wake up at 3am in a hostel just to swap the batteries in my laptop and then go back to sleep. Sometimes instead of camping out I'd have to get a motel room just so I could spend the night charging batteries.
I still don't take power for granted anymore, at least not after 1.5 years of planning my life around the need for a power outlet.
One of my favorite family photos was taken by my Dad in Yakima, Washington sometime after the eruption. You can still see ash in this photo though:
http://www.12xu.com/
I do remember on May 19th the ash being deep enough to write my name in it, only to be scolded by Mommy for going outside.
A guy my Dad worked with left his 1975 Corvette parked outside on May 18th....with the T-tops off. Soon the black interior was a very deep and dusty grey!
When I was biking around Australia in 2002-2003, I was having to shell out $5-12 AUD per hour for net access ($24 AUD an hour at the WA/SA border on the Nullabor!). I found myself to be insanely productive when it came to programming, answering email, etc when it was costing me by the minute. No Slashdot, random looks at IMDB.com for a movie I saw 15 years ago, etc.
So I've half joked with billing myself for time on the internet, with the money going into a jar or some thing like that...now that I'm back and messing around on the net when I should be working. I would be more productive, and be quite rich at the end of the year!
ah yes, I meant "whom", not "which", my fault.
These are the five confluences I visited in Australia when I was biking around the continent. You'll have to look at the lunky.com site to find the girl pictures..
Why is it that when someone comes up with an idea/goal, the Slashdot crowd has to belittle the idea as insignificant? This reminds me of high school when anyone who acted a bit different was made fun of because they didn't go along with the status quo. Yawn.
People, you are hackers/nerds! You are supposed to encourage each other to set goals and follow through on them.
Yes, I am biased. I visited five confluences when I was in Australia. Because I had to change my travel plans for the first confulence visit, I ended up meeting a girl which I dated for a year.
Life is short, go do something with your lives, don't tear down anyone who chooses to follow through on an idea, rather than just sit around and watch reruns of Friends.
One of the downsides is it also gives them the time to come up with odd presentations of their cool ideas.
What is so wrong with this? It amazes me how when someone has a unique idea and gets up off their butt and does it, people say that the person has "too much time on their hands." Yet a person can play Quake or sit in front of the TV watching Channel Zero for hours and nobody will ever accuse them of having "too much time on their hands."
Here is a lot bigger picture of the album cover:
http://www.girlieaction.com/coup/coup-index.html
After about 6 server reboots and one kernel rebuild (thanks Myke) the server seems to be holding steady. I had to go downtown and babysit the server. I kind of felt like a husband helping his wife go though labor. Anyway, I was a bit suprised about all the /. chatter over the "webserver". Good thing I never built an Atari 2600 webserver. (Wanted to, but I didn't have the keypad controllers for i/o, just that damn Star Raiders one).
If you remember the days of Atari and Vectrex, be sure and check out 2:12pm-2:18pm.
I'll try and get a FAQ written tomorrow, but in short:
- the webserver is in fact real, if you want it to be. (isn't this from a movie or something?)
- the girl at 11:11am is in fact single (and knows what interrupt vector table is).
- humanclock.com isn't some website with a mega-corporation lurking behind it, it is just created/ran by me.
- the analog clock should be done this weekend
- 7:39am is the best / most creative clock photo I've received so far.
DCG
Well, it looks like it only took three weeks from putting the site up until it got Slashdotted. I've been building the site and taking pictures for the last two months. I haven't had time to write a FAQ for the site yet. But the reason the picture filenames are MD5 hashes is so you can't easily see other times. A lot of people want to just be able to clickity click their way through the entire set of pictures as if it were a p0rn site...and I didn't want that. If you want to see a certain time, you have to wait.
There are some interesting photos on the site. Jimi Hendrix's grave is at 8:15pm, Richard Buckner is at 8:14pm, and there is an entire hours worth of pictures from 1am - 2am that were taken at a Goth party in Pittsburgh. (thanks D33!)
Now I gotta go downtown and reboot the server... (on -> off -> on)
Artist X now gets our dollars while Artist Y goes back to working as a waitress.
I doubt that X actaully receives our dollars these days, Billy Zoom left after the fourth album in the mid-80's and the albums weren't as good after that. Heck, they even wrote:
"we're the last american band...to get played on the radio"