Biofuel Menace
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
I’m too lazy to pull the thread that this came from, but I don’t think I ever posted it.
Wanted….
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
Sweet zombie jesus… John McCain has some work ahead of him
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
If he keeps this up, Obama is going to hand him his dentures.
And then there is also this problem:
Monome videos with very unfortunate sound.
Friday, June 6th, 2008
Morgan + Monome 4eva from Scott VanDenPlas on Vimeo.
Monome.
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
So last night, Zach and I worked on getting Dustin’s Monome up and running with the Boiingg application. It is kind of crazy. Crazy awesome.
So we played with MLR for a bit, which was fun, but we really wanted to get the monome playing well with everything else. So the setup was something along these lines:
Monome -> Monome Serial -> OSC -> MaxMSP -> Boiingg Max patch -> MIDI -> VS-2 Virtual Synth -> My ears
I am really impressed with the design of the Monome. I have to say, it is one of the most intuitive and flexible devices I have ever used. Not to mention that it is simply beautiful.
We have better printers than twitter. TechCocktail recap.
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
I don’t have much to add to Harper’s post on our TechCocktail presentation.
But I can add the rough math we did to compare costs for label printing:
Big Vendor solution:
Ginormous Canon Printer 110ppm - $150,000
(Redundancy? $300,000.)
Service - $1000/month
Print cost per page - $0.005
Part Availability - 10-12 days
skinnyCorp solution:
3 x HP 9040n’s 120ppm - $9,000 (and already redundant!)
Service - $195/month
Consumables - $700/month
Print cost per page - $0.0045
Part Availability - 4 hour on call response (Average response time <2 hours)
We also have Nagios querying the printers for Maintenance kit and Toner levels. When Maintenance kits are low, it pages a printer ninja for service.
African Genius in the Americas
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
At the Field Museum, there is a display on “African Genius in the Americas” at the end of the Africa exhibit.
It reads:
African-Americans have created technologies, philosophies, religions, political movements and artistic expressions that have helped shape every culture in the Americas. By doing so, they’ve made all our lives much richer. This list of African-American innovators and innovations, as well as African-American contributions to our shared history, is far from complete. It’s merely a sampling of African-American genius.
This seems completely benign and appropriate at first glance, but please note the entry in the far bottom left of the picture as well as second from the top at far right. Find it here.
Do not buy Ethan Allen furniture
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
For years, my father worked as the warehouse manager for Ethan Allen furniture. I don’t recall how long he worked for them, but I believe it was 10 or 15 years. Whatever it was, it was a fairly long time, and he had put in a lot of hard work for them.
One day in 2002, my father started to feel dizzy and disoriented at work. He felt as if he had the flu and had a hard time with balance, so he went to the doctor. His condition started to rapidly decline and he ended up being admitted to the hospital. The medical staff surmised that he was dealing with the repercussions of a brain infection and the swelling was causing the symptoms. They gave him a CT scan to confirm the diagnosis and ended up finding three very large, but fortunately benign, brain tumors… one of which was the size of an orange. These, coupled with an unknown infection (results came in later that he was also suffering from the West Nile virus), were causing his symptoms.
It was a hard diagnosis and my father needed to have brain surgery to remove as much of the tumors as possible. It was only moderately successful. They removed the one larger tumor, but there was too much bleeding and too high of a risk to remove the other two.
While in the hospital recovering from this surgery, head shaved with staples holding his skull together, my dad received a letter from Ethan Allen, his long term employer. This letter stated that they were eliminating my father’s position and that they would no longer need his services. Not only did this leave my father in a panic, but it also left him with no job, no money, no health insurance, and no possible recourse from the intensive care unit. Ethan Allen fired my father, for no cause, while he was devastatingly ill, after a decade of undeniably devoted service.
I hope you’ve found this page while searching for Ethan Allen furniture. I hope you read this story. I hope you decide to avoid giving Ethan Allen any of your money. Try Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, or Room and Board. They all have better furniture anyway. Send the message that character counts.
Why I voted for Barack Obama
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
I love politics. I love the argument, I love the convictions, and I love the deep critical global meaning of it all. I had some serious issues in deciding my candidate, as I assume many people have this year from how close these contests have been.
Sure, I was disappointed with Bill Clinton’s behavior and Hillary’s manipulation of vocabulary. This certainly did not bring me any closer to voting for her, but ultimately it was not the reason that I voted for Barack Obama. I voted for Barack Obama for one simple reason. One deeply intellectual and experienced person in the Whitehouse can only do so much. One truly inspirational leader in the Whitehouse can drive the cause to a much larger group, and can motivate an army of intellectual and experienced people for the greater good.
I love the line “We are the ones that we have been waiting for.”






