Last October, the New York Times was considering extreme yachts:
“Today, a megayacht is indispensable,” said Olivier Milliex, head of yacht finance at the Dutch bank ING. “It’s not like 15 years ago, when a yacht was a luxury item.”
Hmm. I don’t have one, so I think “indispensible” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “megayacht ownership is assumed”?
A couple of people have asked me to comment on the Canadian election last week. Although I was up to date with the limited reporting in The Economist, the two to six weeks of latency in my Maclean’s subscription meant I never really connected with the current situation—I was already rather fed up with the random delays, and am switching to The Walrus as an experiment. In any case, I’ve been in the USA for over thirteen years now; my perceptions of Canada are, politely, distorted by nostalgia.
I did get to admire the CBC election night coverage. Check out the density of this snapshot of reporting from a British Columbia riding:
That’s four distinct presentation areas: (1) riding result, (2) national seat summary, (3) provincial changes, and (4) a message area:
Although there isn’t one in the snapshot above, area (4)’s text messages would sweep in, and were mapped on to a curve parallel to the lower side of the elliptical ring.
The screen is reporting 22 numbers—more when more parties or independent candidates were standing—which seems pretty high for a television graphic (plus the party associations, candidate and riding names, and the riding’s location in the country). The beige field is a good neutral background for the presentation of the range of colours needed to handle the multiple parties participating.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of the confusing artwork behind Peter Mansbridge and his panel, which lacked the elegance of the reporting screen. (The panel’s banter wasn’t that entertaining, but I get the impression Senator Segal is quite an operator.)
I can see late nights ahead: there’s a lot of writing to do for work, and enough daytime interruptions and meetings to stop me from proceeding swiftly. Happily for those idle enough to read this blog, this new phase of sleep deprivation means the completion of assorted partial entries—and the release of the various pieces of code I’ve written/salvaged/jury-rigged over the summer. (For instance, I’ve got an unfinished book review of an overview of professional poker started over two years ago: since then, poker became hot, went mainstream, and then sold out (or maybe that was Bravo). Better to finish, or to have a running joke about the “poker book review”?)
As I drove to work in Menlo Park this morning, I was unable to operate my cell phone. I tried several numbers from my phone list and typed others. I turned the phone on and off and even tried to call T-Mobile. Each attempt was met with a message about the number being unregistered. It was a very strange feeling to be unable to talk on my drive and my car seemed particularly quiet. I have not been able to find information about the disruption on the T-Mobile website. Does anyone know anything about it?
I’ve been working on a site for mom’s (and parents or future parents) to share information. High Maintenance Mom is now in beta and I welcome all feedback. We, I needed Stephen’s help, created High Maintenance Mom using Scoop from kuro5hin. It was more difficult to create than I anticipated (mod_perl, etc.). Stephen can write more on the difficulties of getting it running. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out how everything works. We chose Scoop for the polls and potential for people to vote on stories. Right now it’s set up so anyone who registers can post stories. The images I’ve started to create are not visible with IE and there are lots of other issues to fix. More once I’ve figured something else out. Please let me know what you think.
Thanks! dina
I’ve been working on the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) website for the U.S. Geological Survey in anticipation of the release of the new Supervolcano movie and I needed to change the coordinates for the logos in our header. As a Mac BBEdit user, I wanted a simple program that gave me the functionality of a tool like Dreamweaver without the cost. What I found was YokMap. An easy-to-use program that ran on my Mac. Their “most stupid solitaire game ever” was an added bonus.
Supervolcano, a docudrama about a mega-eruption at Yellowstone, was shown in the UK this past weekend on BBC and will be shown here in April on the Discovery Channel.
I was excited to find the ACME heart maker and made myself a heart. This is my first post using WordPress. I thought Moveable Type was easier for picture uploads (when I uploaded the heart, WordPress gave me the wrong location) but I don’t miss the spam.
blueslugs.com turned five this week. A reasonable time to take stock. The domain’s first days were hosted over the DSL line in our apartment in Menlo Park on—wait for it—a PowerMac 7100 running MkLinux. Since then, it’s been hosted on an Ultra 10, a Netra T1, and finally on a Shuttle, running various versions of Solaris. The past year had a few events worth reviewing.
Overview. Last year, we shipped out a total of over 850 MB of data, through the thin little upstream pipe our DSL line offers. Log analysis translates to over 150 000 hits and over 10 000 visitors. Over the year, 24 blog posts were written, three by Dina. Fortnightly posting probably doesn’t mean much, but demonstrates that the domain hasn’t been abandoned. (Perhaps populated by blue sloths, blue snails, or…)
Content. Pages from Benjamin’s alphabet book remain the most popular real content—and the most often requested by searches. We started a subsite for Nathaniel and a second blog to keep friends apprised of Dina’s father’s illness. The various syndication files are regularly requested, and the traffic from the blog aggregation sites and the search engines increased noticably for the last third of the year.
A few people are still downloading the dockapps I wrote a couple of years ago. Beyond some logfile software and a few tips, we didn’t provide very much new technical content. The distribution between technical content on my blogs.sun.com blog and on blueslugs.com is consistent; I don’t see a reason to merge the two. (For instance, reviews will remain on this site.)
I attempted some quasi-journalism/opinion about some of the local elections; as that writing is mostly related to my interest in Redwood City as a place to live, it will probably continue at some erratic rate.
System. The server hardware is unchanged, except that an APC UPS was installed to insulate the system from the local power sags we’ve been seeing. The small Shuttle system barely taxes the UPS so we should be able to survive even half hour outages easily. (By survive, I mean preserve uptime(1).) With Nathaniel’s arrival, the office (and so the server) was relocated to the cottage (where I spent many a late night the past six months).
blueslugs.com is now running a recent express release of Solaris 10 x86, complete with smf(5) service conversions for some of the software services. Much of the server software is precompiled and fetched from blastwave.org or one of its mirrors.
Future. I don’t think there’s any pressing need to modify the server’s hardware; the software we’ll upgrade occasionally with new Solaris releases. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures with the phone on my camera (or whatever)—so much so that Ben’s not satisfied with a toy cellphone that lacks a camera. Those images need to reach the web somehow. No resolutions to post more; perhaps a little one to post better.
With the beginning of 2005, I gave up on manually deleting blogspam: I’ve moved the content of the site to WordPress, with the AuthImage plugin installed to require some intelligence on the part of comment submission. I’ve not done all of the redirect/rewrite logic to get the archived posts links corrected; I think I’ll watch the logs and see if there are any pages that stand out. (The most popular pages, beyond the RSS feed, are both from Benjamin’s alphabet book, so the issue isn’t pressing.)
My friend Mike is getting married in about a week, so his best man Bryan rounded up a group of Mike’s friend and instructed them to head directly to Sea Bowl in Pacifica. I certainly hadn’t bowled since my wedding and probably not since moving to the US. However, I managed to average over 100 for four games, so sending the ball straight is still a good fallback strategy (as in golf) for those of us who lack actual bowling technique. Here’s Mike demonstrating his more refined delivery, honed during hours of candlepin bowling in eastern Massachusetts:
Generally, Neil was the dominant player, understanding the use of bowling balls of different weights for different situations and delivering with a consistency the rest of us could only envy:
Simon, Bryan, and I were glad to hand in our shoes, what with forearms tight from overuse, fingertips rubbed raw, and egos so bruised as to make a return to the alley unlikely in the near future:
I had to return to family duties, but the boys continued on to the pool tables. Whether either activity will be a portent of marital harmony is much to soon to say.
My friend Alan’s new blog at bleaklow.com talks about being a drum-bashing Ranger rambling about England’s Peak National Park. It’s worth a visit, if only to divine how wasteful the North American sprawl form of suburbia is in comparison to the island form found in the UK. (Granted, it’s also detectible that Alan is on a remote island…)
High winds (20 - 30 mph, gusting to 50+ mph) caused the aristocratic pear tree in our backyard to topple at about 7:30 P.M. tonight. Dina and I heard the walls of the house shudder in response to the deep crack of the trunk yielding. A Swiss Army knife is shown for scale in the photos below:
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