Jen came upstairs as I was hunched over the computer to show me this. With the exception of the basket, everything in there came out of our garden, and there’s a lot more to come. We have a ton of corn coming in, the squirrels seem to have left the second wave of beans alone, and there are several eggplant growing larger. The green peppers are getting pretty big, too. Plus, we’ve already used a couple bushels of basil leaves.
!!! Holy CRAP, I want to buy this place and live in it! (via) update: I had no idea these were in Waldorf! Apparently, though, the gubmint wants someone to come and tear them down.
Date posted: July 26, 2007
| Filed under design, photo, shortlinks, travel | Comments Off on Abandoned Places
Tickets are being purchased for another business trip, this time to sunny Orlando, home of the Mouse. It’s been a few years since we were there (This child is now a part-time model and Harvard law professor), but we had lots of fun while we were there; instead of relying on CorporateAmerica to entertain us, I went looking for some alternatives. Jen has already been to Gatorland and Kennedy Space Center, but I’d like to see both, if possible. Any suggestions?
Saturday evening Jen treated her sister, her sister’s boyfriend and I to a crab feast on the picnic table out back. Happy Birthday to the twins, and thanks for the Old Bay, baby.
Date posted: July 24, 2007
| Filed under family | Comments Off on MMMMMM Beer and Crabs
So, let me break this down a little here. Our president, whose approval numbers are in the dumper, but who still controls the Senate, has a plan to make America love him again: He’s thinking about going into Pakistan to get Bin Laden because Musharraf hasn’t done so.
I can’t think of a more misguided foreign policy that that, other than, perhaps, just nuking Russia for the hell of it. Pakistan is already a pretty shaky ally, and Musharraf by all accounts is walking a thin line between secular progress and another Islamic state. (Remember, Pakistan and India have been lobbing ‘test nukes’ at each other for ten years, and Pakistan is also pretty cozy with China.) What our government still hasn’t grasped is the fact that things aren’t black and white like they insist on believing—and why their policy in Iraq has gone so badly. A thousand years of tribal, ethnic, and religious quarrels between hundreds of separate groups is not going to miraculously work itself out after the tanks enter town and everyone gets a Hershey bar.
The simple idea that the leadership of this country is even considering entering another country and destabilizing the government there—can anybody say Cambodia?—makes me shudder. I hope to god the commanding generals find their balls and talk some sense into the cowboys in the White House.
Also, why isn’t this the top headline in today’s news? Seriously, in about 30-point type?
This is the front end of a beautiful little Austin-Healey I spied in a parking garage where I’ve been doing some consulting this week. It took a herculean effort not to commit Grand Theft Convertible, so I opted for pictures instead.
Date posted: July 18, 2007
| Filed under photography | Comments Off on Sprite
What rock have I been living under that I missed Pandora? I mean, seriously, where the fuck have I been? Enter a couple of artists you like, start the playlist, and edit to your heart’s content. I’ve already found three albums I want to buy based on my love of drum & bass/trip hop/DJ mix, and other suggested artists I already like have come up in the mix. Plus, it works with a Squeezebox, another electronic gadget I lust after.
Or, maybe I should finally just subscribe to XM Radio.
Date posted: July 17, 2007
| Filed under music, shortlinks | Comments Off on Pandora
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
