Archives for August, 2005
The Resonate Journal is now online
How Jedi are you?
Scott may be a Jedi but I am a Jedi Master.
Deja Vu
Jeb and I are chatting right now via IM and we are setting up our Yahoo! Fantasy Hockey League for Hockey Pundits. Anyways, all of a sudden we both realized that I had set up the league wrong, just like I had for the last two times. New CBA, same old dumb mistakes.
Flickr: Photos tagged with hurricanekatrina
User submitted photos of the damage on flickr.
All about lawns: The Natural Way
From a nursery north of Saskatoon. Some excellent stuff here. The only thing I would disagree with is that I do think a mulching blade makes a difference. It cuts the grass finer which makes it look better. We don’t have a mulching designed mower, only a mulching blade and he is correct in that it doesn’t not lay down perfectly even, especially when a little wet. Like I said earlier, you just need to mow it (and mulch it again) in two days. By leaving the mulch lay on the grass, you eliminate a lot of the need to water which for me (small house, huge double corner lot), is a big deal. Again, for us Saskatchewanites, it is great to find a resource written for us and not for somewhere in the American mid-west that tend to have a little longer summers and a lot less snow.
Ten Things Congress Could Demand from Bush on Iraq
A balanced list of a way out of the War of Iraq.
New Orleans’ shelter refugees to be evacuated
Pray for New Orleans. It looks as bad as predicted.
Tempest brews over quotes on Starbucks cups
Do we have nothing better to do with ones time than attack a quote on a coffee cup? Good for Starbucks for not backing down to pressure.
Time to switch to Linux?
As Boing, Boing puts it
Microsoft is cutting its throat here. There isn’t a single Windows user who wants a version of Windows that lets her do less with her music and movies.Microsoft is also subverting copyright. Fair use and other public rights in copyright hinge on factors that can’t be modelled in software. For example, people engaged in parody have a lot more flexibility in terms of how they use copyrighted works than people who are engaged in satire. The difference between parody and satire is pretty fine — it’s the kind of thing courts rule on, not the kind of thing that you get a computer to detect.
DRM apologists claim that DRM can be used to model the preponderance of fair uses, but this is completely untrue. Fair use almost always hinges on intention — there isn’t any software that is capable of reading a user’s mind and determining intention.
So here come Microsoft, the great defenders of copyright, selling out both their business and copyright: creating devices that no one wants that models a copyright law that doesn’t exist.
What’s the use of having a swaggering bully of a monopolist if it can’t muster the intestinal fortitude that Sony displayed from 1976-1984 when it battled in Congress and all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to manufacture VCRs despite Hollywood’s insistence that these were tools of piracy?
From News.com
In short, the company is bending over backward–and investing considerable technological resources–to make sure Hollywood studios are happy with the next version of Windows, which is expected to ship on new PCs by late 2006. Microsoft believes it has to make nice with the entertainment industry if the PC is going to form the center of new digital home networks, which could allow such new features as streaming high-definition movies around the home.PCs won’t be the only ones with reinforced pirate-proofing. Other new consumer electronics devices will have to play by a similar set of rules in order to play back the studios’ most valuable content, Microsoft executives say. Indeed, assuring studios that content will have extremely strong protection is the only way any device will be able to support the studios’ planned high-definition content, the software company says.
The front lawn
It’s the end of August, the leaves finally started to change last night and hit my lawn. The lawn looks the best it has ever looked this year. We do have a little clover in the front yard but I will take care of that next year.
For those of you who remember, our yard was disgusting when we moved into our house. Wendy and I have said that if our lawn had not been covered by snow when we moved in, we may not have bought the house. The only grass we had was wild grass and the rest was hard packed clay. It has been seven years now and I think it is looking good. I don’t know how much difference it makes but this year our bag on our lawnmower broke and instead of replacing it, I wanted it fixed. Our lawn needed to be mowed so I went out and bought a mulching blade to see if that would make a difference. The thing with a mulching blade is that you have to mow the lawn more often or else it leave too much on the top and it looks bad. The solution of course is to mow it two days later which remulches everything.
My own feeling is that we had to water a lot less this year and despite only fertilizing in the spring, we had a really green and lush lawn all summer. We never fertilized in the back at all and it is a lot thicker this year than it was last year. People that talk about thatch buildup but we aerate every second year so I can’t see it being a big problem but we will see next spring.
The only bad thing was a mouse in our compost bin. I assume by the bazillions of magots that recently appeared that the mouse poison worked it’s wonders.
Anyone see the bus that hit me
The neurologist wanted me off the one of a couple medications I am taking for pain. From what I read, it is addictive and I talked to my doctor about it who said that it was addictive but I still had a lot of pain so that was why he was prescribing it and he didn’t think that my other medication would control the pain for me.
I haven’t been that thrilled with the idea of being addicted to anything and I wondered what the impact on my body would be if I didn’t take the pain killer last night. My body hurt so bad last night. I described the pain last night as it felt like someone was drilling into my toes, moving through my foot, into my ankles and then slowly into my shins. Same thing with my hands and my face. A slow moving drill bit rolling through my body.
My ankles feel broken today. Every step hurts.
There is some good news. I mentioned purchasing my pedometer and working towards 10,000 steps a day. I have had some fun with it. Saturday I lended to Wendy while she worked and she does about 3500 steps while working an office shift at Safeway (When Wendy works an office shift, she is in charge of customer service, making sure tills have just enough cash, and a plethora of other tasks in addition to counting money and also working as a cashier.
I have been averaging about 6000 steps a day but yesterday was a little pathetic taking 2200 steps yesterday. The best part of it has been that Mark has been my walking partner most days. That leads us to a plethora of parks in the neighborhood. He is also working as my navigator as I am trying to ensure he doesn’t get lost exploring once school starts. I figure it is cheaper than buying him a GPS or hiring him a Secret Service detail.
podcasting :: jordoncooper.com: August 29th, 2005
A new rambling podcast went live today. Nothing spectacular but optimized for Yahoo! Media and Apple iTunes. I talked a little bit about health, Audacity, and the Resonate Journal.
ESV Bible Blog
The English Standard Version has a blog that covers everything from some marketing of Bibles to the struggles they had in translating some of the passages. It also has a RSS feed.
Has Google Peaked?
But what if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google’s corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn’t supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are? I hear a lot of talk about Google doing deals for video and music distribution, but where are those deals? So far it is all just talk.
I hope Google does pull off a couple more spectacular product feats, but I won’t be all that surprised if they don’t. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have.
So it could be that Google isn’t the Microsoft-killer many people — including Gates and Ballmer — fear the company is. Going a step further, it is even possible that Gates’s conviction that he’ll eventually be taken down by a startup is wrong, too.
Here’s where I go out on a limb, but I think Microsoft’s clearest threat still comes from Apple, though not the way most people expect. Yes, Apple is about to take Microsoft to the woodshed when it comes to Internet movie distribution. Yes, Apple already super-dominates the music player market where Microsoft doesn’t even really exist. But the real jewel is one Microsoft has to lose, not gain — the PC platform, itself.
What could Apple do to take down Windows, with or without the help of Intel?
What seems to me to be the answer came to me this week from a reader who had a disruptive idea that I gleefully embellished.
Here are the clues. Microsoft is woefully late with its next Windows upgrade, while Apple is far ahead with even the current version of OS X. Apple is moving to Intel processors and hackers have already shown that OS X can run fine on non-Apple hardware. But Apple doesn’t want to give up its profitable hardware business to compete head-to-head with Microsoft. And remember, Apple totally dominates the portable music player market and will probably sell 25 million iPods or more this year.
Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version — OS 10.4 — on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?
US to build emergency supplies warehouse in Guyana
Wendy blogs about a great deed that the United States government is doing for Guyana. No strings attached. As she points out, people are quick to attack the US when they do dumb things but here is a case where some kudos is due.
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Messy Faith: Daring to Live by Grace by A. J. Gregory October 28, 2008
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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