I took one of these van-shares (not that some aren't by car, but the ones I saw were mostly vans; maybe just because cars are harder to spot, and don't gather quite the same way) from San Juan to Vieques. (Well, to the ferry terminal to *reach* Vieques, that is...) While I never rode in these publicos between SJ and other cities, the service definitely exists, and I wish I'd gotten around the island more with them. As it is, I took only two trips (so, 4 legs) in them. Yes, there were a lot of stops, but not as many as I'd feared, and it was an interesting experience. Besides general sight-seeing (as well as one can from the road), it also went to distinctly *non*-tourist areas for some of the pickups. It was also nicely cheap -- cheaper to make town-to-town trips than it was the few times I got regular taxi service within SJ.
The publicos tend to wait for enough of a critical mass of passengers in town squares and similar places in smaller towns; in SJ, as I recall, it was more like "Be on this corner, at this time," for the trip to Vieques. On the Vieques side, the vans waited in a parking garage near a bus depot, which makes a lot of sense: taxis, buses, ferries, publicos are all going where there's a cluster of people who want to travel someplace besides where they are;)
Largely shut down now (maybe completely), but there was for a time a thriving, aboveboard business for air couriers to ship some things (important documents, that sort of thing) by air. This was when checked bags were routinely included in air travel prices, the internet was less prevalent and capable, online signatures were a pie-in-the-sky theory, etc. You'd sign up, and in exhange for payment (mostly or fully in the form of free travel), you'd get to visit New York from Los Angeles (for instance) in exchange for the use of your checked-luggage space. Plane ticket prices have plummeted thanks to deregulation, and so have the prices of alternatives (online, but also the reach and cost of other quick mailing options, for things that absolutely, positively have to be there overnight), and checked baggage is no longer a built-in cost.
So when you say "dodge mail costs," I just take issue with the connotation:) It's like the old and true saw about taxes: "Avoid," perfectly fine; "Evade," and you might go to jail. Doing favors for friends, cooperating to accomplish tasks is more on the "cooperate" side of the scale than the (criminally) "conspire" side.
And this is the 666th comment on the thread, just to drive that point home.
Maybe one thing that Steve Jobs gave to Tim Cook is a bit of the old Reality Distortion Field Elixer, from which he's serving himself something like Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters.
It might be wrong, but it's not a *typo* -- that figure is from the PC Mag article -- "(though the screen itself is a mere 1928-by-1080-pixel resolution)."...
Unfortunately, the comments attached to stories in the firehose don't stick when it's promoted / converted into a story on the Slashdot page. So, no nuking required (or intended), just a bit of a crufty system.
In the larger world of 3-D printing, obviously there are manufactures who have never been particularly maker-friendly. You started off, though, with very affordable kits, and a connection to the RepRap foundation, which emphasized open source code, reproduceability, openness, etc.
(Wikipedia's a bit out of date on this front, but as of this moment, the entry there says "MakerBot Industries' products are designed to be built by anyone with basic technical skills and are described as about as complicated as assembling IKEA furniture.[8] The printers are sold as do it yourself kits, requiring only minor soldering.")
A lot of the excitement that I had when I first saw MakerBots (at Seattle's Metrix CreateSpace) derived from the fact that one of the Maker Bots they had was built with pieces printed by the other, RepRap style. It seems like a lot of the innovation in the earlier models was based on shared enthusiasm and tinkering. The company has since moved away from the open source hardware model. Do you have any regrets about this? Are there open source contributions that the company is making but that just aren't well known?
Perhaps something's happened in the meantime, but I've seen Bre demonstrate Makerbots at a couple different conventions over the last few years -- printing away...
I interpreted this to mean "because it covers more horizontal distance per second, it suffers less drop in the period of time it takes to reach point B from point A, making a flatter trajectory." Just like w/ faster, flatter bullets from a conventional gun...
You've had the chance to travel (sometimes in extraordinary circumstances!) through some very interesting places, and I'm wondering if you have as a result any concrete advice or suggestions to give about intelligent traveling.
- Do you have anything you'd consider unusual or otherwise notably every-day carry gear? - How do you keep documents safe / backed up / safe from prying eyes and fingers? - Are there places that, however adventurous you are, you avoid because you consider them too dangerous?
One of my moves out of here (there are several, long story;)) was partly spurred because the owner of the company where I worked was urging me with what sounded like sadistic glee (sure it wasn't, but Hey) to "just do what my husband does ever year, and get a big ol' shot! It looks like it's for a horse! Seriously, that is ONE GIANT NEEDLE!" In other words, she wasn't exactly selling it. "So I moved" isn't *quite* the whole story, but I sure wasn't exactly hoping for a big ol' horse-shot, and still am not, unless it prevents zombification and gives me nice dreams.
As I understand it, the crazy ones don't sting, at least.
I had an ant invasion within the last year that led to some chemical warfare with the little bug(ger)s, and I was wondering whether they were crazy ants or not -- certainly some of them were streaming out of electrical sockets. But then, Hey, it's Texas and they're ants, so many they weren't; I didn't see enough behavior to really tell.
There are some private buses I've seen that (from signage on them, no deep knowledge) I believe are full of tech commuters. But Austin doesn't have the same tight bottleneck that a place like SF does, where owning a car is an amazingly expensive thing to do, and the Google / FB / etc. buses are a major factor in where people live, etc. In Texas, generally, and even in relatively-speaking expensive Austin, car ownership is the norm among adults, and at least *a* norm among students (dunno percentages -- I wonder whether most UT students have cars).
Cap Metro is better than nothing, but doesn't impress me much or often. Some drivers are great, and I don't envy the job -- but the management does not impress me. (I don't mean how they act at meetings -- no idea -- but management in the sense that routes seem poorly chosen, the route-finding website is poor, esp. compared to the kinds of cities to which Austin likes to be compared (SF, Seattle, Portland), signage is terrible, and schedules are often more in the breach than the observance. And quite a few of the Austin bus drivers -- the ones that I think of as the norm here -- would be correctly viewed as rude, unfriendly, unhelpful, misinformed, and poor drivers, compared to the ones I've seen in the three cities just named. Maybe it's just the PacNoWest air that blessed that part of the country;)
They may look like sugar ants, but they are from a different, crueler planet. Fire ants are amazing little things, but choicer words spring to mind when they're actually doing their evil. They are the devil's own. That are like the IRS in more concentrated and honest form.
Claritin and friends do help, but something (pride? Eh, not quite the right word... stubbornness? A little closer) makes me prefer to bear through it, generally. (Another factor being that "non-drowsy" claims sometimes seem like lies... maybe I'm extra prone to those effects; one Benadryl -- different chemically, I know, but just an example -- will knock me out for hours, while some people I know seem unaffected.)
I am one of the people who used to laugh at cedar fever. "So you sneeze a bit -- so what? Sneezing's not so bad, it's even kind of fun!" I lived here, on and off, for 6 years before it hit me, and it was even one of the reasons I had for moving away again, for quite a few years before the current back-to-Austin phase.
It's like a sledgehammer. Knocked me down for most of a week, and now I understand why people dread it. I'd figured I was immune, for having been here several springs without symptoms, but that was just a cruel trick of nature. This year's been a particularly bad one for it, too, though slightly mitigated by the greater-than-usual precipitation; it's hard for it to be drizzly *and* pollen-heavy on the same day.
Err... "parking" spot. A paring spot is easy, if you have a knife and some apples... it might even help you get a parking spot, if you can maintain a nice serial killer eye-lock when a parking spot fight comes up, and you can menacingly peel that apple.
There may be some -- as I put in another reply here, but anonymously (sorry about that, it's a stupid bug) -- but I have no idea. If there are any, which seems likely given the nature of it, they haven't called, they haven't written;)
I hope to get to some SXSW stuff, since it's down the street from me, but it also falls on a weekend that I'm sitting here posting instead. And it's a mixed bag -- to see the cool things on display, you have to elbow though some dense crowds; this is a city that doesn't handle the traffic or extra people very gracefully. Some people enjoy the crowding for being exciting, but just try getting a paring spot;) (Last year I got to spend more time at SXSW, and it's nice to be in biking distance.)
I've been reading Soylent, too, and like a lot of the stories they've selected. Running a site with reader-driven news and comments gets tricky, even with all the options out there meant to make it easier. Don't envy anyone leaping into it!
Re: interviews -- Nah. Robert (Samzenpus), who's organized the vast bulk of our interviews recently (and at this point, maybe bulk of them in the site's history) managed to get three we've been after for a while, and sometimes that happens in a cluster. Theo turned down my interview overtures a few years back, so I'm especially glad that he's now going to answer questions!
(Who else would you like to see interviewed? Always taking suggestions!)
No idea about availability, though I suspect that "available on Linux" is a distant pipedream. (Which is kind of a mixed metaphor, but hey.) The only game I play much of is Scrabble;)
Re: South Park, though: I used to hate it; for years, my only exposure was what I'd read about it and a few seconds at a time of the actual show. "Pfui!," I thought -- "vulgarity, crudity, profanity, childishness!"
It took me a long time to figure out that they have a lot of really clever satire in there. The intentionally flat animation doesn't do all that much for, still, but I've come to like it *on South Park* because it just seems to match up well with the words. If I had kids, I don't think I'd want them watching it at a young age, but I think I *would* want them questioning authority and stupidity in the way it encourages.
I know the sound varies from OK to less OK on here; that's because I somehow flubbed the audio recorded separately. Robin (Roblimo) Miller in editing the footage together did a great job of patching over some of the crazy industrial noises from the adjoining shop (which makes, of all things, electric motorcyles; the places are not related). I didn't realize I'd have a chance to shoot this video, so the footage is all from a point-and-shoot Canon camera that I bought via Craigslist for $80 a few weeks before; I think it did a credible job of focus, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I took one of these van-shares (not that some aren't by car, but the ones I saw were mostly vans; maybe just because cars are harder to spot, and don't gather quite the same way) from San Juan to Vieques. (Well, to the ferry terminal to *reach* Vieques, that is ...) While I never rode in these publicos between SJ and other cities, the service definitely exists, and I wish I'd gotten around the island more with them. As it is, I took only two trips (so, 4 legs) in them. Yes, there were a lot of stops, but not as many as I'd feared, and it was an interesting experience. Besides general sight-seeing (as well as one can from the road), it also went to distinctly *non*-tourist areas for some of the pickups. It was also nicely cheap -- cheaper to make town-to-town trips than it was the few times I got regular taxi service within SJ.
The publicos tend to wait for enough of a critical mass of passengers in town squares and similar places in smaller towns; in SJ, as I recall, it was more like "Be on this corner, at this time," for the trip to Vieques. On the Vieques side, the vans waited in a parking garage near a bus depot, which makes a lot of sense: taxis, buses, ferries, publicos are all going where there's a cluster of people who want to travel someplace besides where they are ;)
Largely shut down now (maybe completely), but there was for a time a thriving, aboveboard business for air couriers to ship some things (important documents, that sort of thing) by air. This was when checked bags were routinely included in air travel prices, the internet was less prevalent and capable, online signatures were a pie-in-the-sky theory, etc. You'd sign up, and in exhange for payment (mostly or fully in the form of free travel), you'd get to visit New York from Los Angeles (for instance) in exchange for the use of your checked-luggage space. Plane ticket prices have plummeted thanks to deregulation, and so have the prices of alternatives (online, but also the reach and cost of other quick mailing options, for things that absolutely, positively have to be there overnight), and checked baggage is no longer a built-in cost.
So when you say "dodge mail costs," I just take issue with the connotation :) It's like the old and true saw about taxes: "Avoid," perfectly fine; "Evade," and you might go to jail. Doing favors for friends, cooperating to accomplish tasks is more on the "cooperate" side of the scale than the (criminally) "conspire" side.
You're right; I've fixed the headline to read DMV instead.
And this is the 666th comment on the thread, just to drive that point home.
Maybe one thing that Steve Jobs gave to Tim Cook is a bit of the old Reality Distortion Field Elixer, from which he's serving himself something like Pan-Galactic Gargle-Blasters.
Your own line, or a running gag?
That would be the basis of a funny T-shirt design to sell at security conventions, or for speakers to weave casually into their talks about crypto ;)
Maybe under a nice image of Washington crossing the Delaware, or a Jefferson Wheel ...
It might be wrong, but it's not a *typo* -- that figure is from the PC Mag article -- "(though the screen itself is a mere 1928-by-1080-pixel resolution)." ...
A slightly unusual resolution number, but by no means crazy: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/...
If that number is wrong, would be happy to update!
timothy
Could it make magic boots, purses, and car trim? I don't know whether python skin is suitable for that, but I know some snakeskin is.
I know some varieties of snake are quite tasty; perhaps python soup with pearls of barley could be served at a programming convention ...
timothy
Unfortunately, the comments attached to stories in the firehose don't stick when it's promoted / converted into a story on the Slashdot page. So, no nuking required (or intended), just a bit of a crufty system.
timothy
Where was this conference? What was it called? Do they have a website? :)
Sounds like an interesting event!
Deadliest school masacre yet in the U.S. featured only one gun, and that was incidental:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Which is no defense of anything in particular except perhaps caution about what laws can actually prevent in the face of determined malice.
Bre:
In the larger world of 3-D printing, obviously there are manufactures who have never been particularly maker-friendly. You started off, though, with very affordable kits, and a connection to the RepRap foundation, which emphasized open source code, reproduceability, openness, etc.
(Wikipedia's a bit out of date on this front, but as of this moment, the entry there says "MakerBot Industries' products are designed to be built by anyone with basic technical skills and are described as about as complicated as assembling IKEA furniture.[8] The printers are sold as do it yourself kits, requiring only minor soldering.")
A lot of the excitement that I had when I first saw MakerBots (at Seattle's Metrix CreateSpace) derived from the fact that one of the Maker Bots they had was built with pieces printed by the other, RepRap style. It seems like a lot of the innovation in the earlier models was based on shared enthusiasm and tinkering. The company has since moved away from the open source hardware model. Do you have any regrets about this? Are there open source contributions that the company is making but that just aren't well known?
Perhaps something's happened in the meantime, but I've seen Bre demonstrate Makerbots at a couple different conventions over the last few years -- printing away ...
I interpreted this to mean "because it covers more horizontal distance per second, it suffers less drop in the period of time it takes to reach point B from point A, making a flatter trajectory." Just like w/ faster, flatter bullets from a conventional gun ...
John:
You've had the chance to travel (sometimes in extraordinary circumstances!) through some very interesting places, and I'm wondering if you have as a result any concrete advice or suggestions to give about intelligent traveling.
- Do you have anything you'd consider unusual or otherwise notably every-day carry gear?
- How do you keep documents safe / backed up / safe from prying eyes and fingers?
- Are there places that, however adventurous you are, you avoid because you consider them too dangerous?
Reminds me of the courtroom scene in Idiocracy ;)
JUDGE What're you objectifying on?
Dizz looks unsure for a moment.
JOE (whispering to Dizz) C'mon, just put me on the stand!
DIZZ Okay. Yeah. Okay, your honor?.. I object that this guy also broke my apartment!
JOE What??
DIZZ Yeah, your honor! And I object he's not gonna have any money to pay me after he pays for all the money he stole from the hospital.
One of my moves out of here (there are several, long story ;)) was partly spurred because the owner of the company where I worked was urging me with what sounded like sadistic glee (sure it wasn't, but Hey) to "just do what my husband does ever year, and get a big ol' shot! It looks like it's for a horse! Seriously, that is ONE GIANT NEEDLE!" In other words, she wasn't exactly selling it. "So I moved" isn't *quite* the whole story, but I sure wasn't exactly hoping for a big ol' horse-shot, and still am not, unless it prevents zombification and gives me nice dreams.
As I understand it, the crazy ones don't sting, at least.
I had an ant invasion within the last year that led to some chemical warfare with the little bug(ger)s, and I was wondering whether they were crazy ants or not -- certainly some of them were streaming out of electrical sockets. But then, Hey, it's Texas and they're ants, so many they weren't; I didn't see enough behavior to really tell.
Your article beats either of the ones we linked to last year: http://news.slashdot.org/story... -- thanks.
There are some private buses I've seen that (from signage on them, no deep knowledge) I believe are full of tech commuters. But Austin doesn't have the same tight bottleneck that a place like SF does, where owning a car is an amazingly expensive thing to do, and the Google / FB / etc. buses are a major factor in where people live, etc. In Texas, generally, and even in relatively-speaking expensive Austin, car ownership is the norm among adults, and at least *a* norm among students (dunno percentages -- I wonder whether most UT students have cars).
Cap Metro is better than nothing, but doesn't impress me much or often. Some drivers are great, and I don't envy the job -- but the management does not impress me. (I don't mean how they act at meetings -- no idea -- but management in the sense that routes seem poorly chosen, the route-finding website is poor, esp. compared to the kinds of cities to which Austin likes to be compared (SF, Seattle, Portland), signage is terrible, and schedules are often more in the breach than the observance. And quite a few of the Austin bus drivers -- the ones that I think of as the norm here -- would be correctly viewed as rude, unfriendly, unhelpful, misinformed, and poor drivers, compared to the ones I've seen in the three cities just named. Maybe it's just the PacNoWest air that blessed that part of the country ;)
Tim
They may look like sugar ants, but they are from a different, crueler planet. Fire ants are amazing little things, but choicer words spring to mind when they're actually doing their evil. They are the devil's own. That are like the IRS in more concentrated and honest form.
Claritin and friends do help, but something (pride? Eh, not quite the right word ... stubbornness? A little closer) makes me prefer to bear through it, generally. (Another factor being that "non-drowsy" claims sometimes seem like lies ... maybe I'm extra prone to those effects; one Benadryl -- different chemically, I know, but just an example -- will knock me out for hours, while some people I know seem unaffected.)
I am one of the people who used to laugh at cedar fever. "So you sneeze a bit -- so what? Sneezing's not so bad, it's even kind of fun!" I lived here, on and off, for 6 years before it hit me, and it was even one of the reasons I had for moving away again, for quite a few years before the current back-to-Austin phase.
It's like a sledgehammer. Knocked me down for most of a week, and now I understand why people dread it. I'd figured I was immune, for having been here several springs without symptoms, but that was just a cruel trick of nature. This year's been a particularly bad one for it, too, though slightly mitigated by the greater-than-usual precipitation; it's hard for it to be drizzly *and* pollen-heavy on the same day.
Err ... "parking" spot. A paring spot is easy, if you have a knife and some apples ... it might even help you get a parking spot, if you can maintain a nice serial killer eye-lock when a parking spot fight comes up, and you can menacingly peel that apple.
There may be some -- as I put in another reply here, but anonymously (sorry about that, it's a stupid bug) -- but I have no idea. If there are any, which seems likely given the nature of it, they haven't called, they haven't written ;)
I hope to get to some SXSW stuff, since it's down the street from me, but it also falls on a weekend that I'm sitting here posting instead. And it's a mixed bag -- to see the cool things on display, you have to elbow though some dense crowds; this is a city that doesn't handle the traffic or extra people very gracefully. Some people enjoy the crowding for being exciting, but just try getting a paring spot ;) (Last year I got to spend more time at SXSW, and it's nice to be in biking distance.)
I've been reading Soylent, too, and like a lot of the stories they've selected. Running a site with reader-driven news and comments gets tricky, even with all the options out there meant to make it easier. Don't envy anyone leaping into it!
Re: interviews -- Nah. Robert (Samzenpus), who's organized the vast bulk of our interviews recently (and at this point, maybe bulk of them in the site's history) managed to get three we've been after for a while, and sometimes that happens in a cluster. Theo turned down my interview overtures a few years back, so I'm especially glad that he's now going to answer questions!
(Who else would you like to see interviewed? Always taking suggestions!)
Cheers,
timothy
No idea about availability, though I suspect that "available on Linux" is a distant pipedream. (Which is kind of a mixed metaphor, but hey.) The only game I play much of is Scrabble ;)
Re: South Park, though: I used to hate it; for years, my only exposure was what I'd read about it and a few seconds at a time of the actual show. "Pfui!," I thought -- "vulgarity, crudity, profanity, childishness!"
It took me a long time to figure out that they have a lot of really clever satire in there. The intentionally flat animation doesn't do all that much for, still, but I've come to like it *on South Park* because it just seems to match up well with the words. If I had kids, I don't think I'd want them watching it at a young age, but I think I *would* want them questioning authority and stupidity in the way it encourages.
I know the sound varies from OK to less OK on here; that's because I somehow flubbed the audio recorded separately. Robin (Roblimo) Miller in editing the footage together did a great job of patching over some of the crazy industrial noises from the adjoining shop (which makes, of all things, electric motorcyles; the places are not related). I didn't realize I'd have a chance to shoot this video, so the footage is all from a point-and-shoot Canon camera that I bought via Craigslist for $80 a few weeks before; I think it did a credible job of focus, etc.
timothy