Just a simple trees to sky view I took sometime in March this year. I do remember the breeze was warm but moving in quick gusts. The trees would all shake, then become still again just a quickly as they started. The combination of the motion and silence was very relaxing.
Trees to sky (simple)
Just another nice sunset, Texas style. Taken on the 10th around 6:50 pm when it was still cool down here.
Sunset - Texas
Every year around this time, over 250 million Monarch butterflies migrate over 3,000 miles from Canada to Mexico. I caught some of the early travelers on the way down this week.
Monarch Skies 1
Most were too high in the sky for my camera to catch in detail. But every little dot in this photo is a butterfly. Hundreds of these little flapping dots were moving across the sky, heading south.
Monarch Skies 2
This guy was taking the low road. For such tiny creatures, they move pretty fast.
Monarch Skies 3
As the season gets underway, and as the stragglers show up flying much lower, I’ll be able to get better photos. Sightings and migration maps are available on tracking sites like this one.
One of the more obscure things I can do is program readerboards. Those LED kind of displays you see under a big business sign that scroll images, show what’s on sale, display the time and temperature, and so on.
Problem is, most readerboard software I’ve had to use is complete junk. They’re horribly unstable, crash often, and are not put together in any form of English I’m aware of.
Waitting in progress
The thing is I don’t know anybody else who does this. Most of the bigger companies have someone specifically fly out from corporate relations to change their readerboards, and they don’t like to talk about what they use. If they’re a franchise, they just stick a memory card the corporate office sends them into the feeder computer to update the screen.
So by now I think everybody has seen the new ad for the Ipod nano with video. It’s a catchy little jingle called “Bourgeois Shangri-La” by Miss Li.
I’m guessing nobody at Apple bothered to check the lyrics to Bourgeois Shangri-La.
“Keep you locked in a shopping cart
A Bourgeois Shangri-La”
and
“House, and a boat and a great shiny car
Things just to prove you go far
So’s the streamer watching TV cute little dog
Perfect in your shallow Bourgeois”
And to top it off, Bourgeois is defined as “(1.) A person belonging to the middle class. (2.) A person whose attitudes and behavior are marked by conformity to the standards and conventions of the middle class. (3.) In Marxist theory, a member of the property-owning class; a capitalist.”
So either Apple was intentionally poking fun at itself and its’ rabid fans, or they just went with this song because it sounded pretty. Either way, it’s hilarious.
But the all time winner for missing the point has to be Mercedes-Benz for having the unmitigated balls to use Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” in one of their commercials. According to Wikipedia,
“Joplin wrote “Mercedes Benz” together with the poet Michael McClure and Bob Neuwirth, as a critical social commentary on how people relate happiness to money and material possessions. The song was originally written as something of a negative commentary about materialistic individuals who place too much value on items like a Mercedes-Benz.”
And what does Mercedez-Benz do with it?
Blasphemy. Blasphemy of the highest order. (Lyrics to Mercedes Benz.)
This week only you can get the World of Goo game for PC and MAC and Linux for any amount you want to pay. $1. $5. $20. Anything works!
Just go to the 2dboy game’s website and click on the “Happy Birthday Sale Time” link midway down. From there you can buy the game with any amount you want to put in.
After you complete checkout, in a few minutes a secret link to the game will appear in your inbox to download the full version from their servers. It’s that easy.
The World of Goo game has no copy protection whatsoever. For a game developer in this day and age, that’s unheard of. And pretty spectacular.
You can try the World of Goo demo first at the 2dboy main page for Windows, Mac or Linux if you want. But the reviews for the game are all four and five star, with a 9.0 “devious, intelligent puzzler” review on Gamespot and an “absolutely phenomenal” review from IGN. And for an entry price of $1, you really can’t go wrong here.
I was at Staples some time ago and noticed this little setup in the software department.
Staples - D'oh!
Pick a version! Any version! It’s the same price!
That was easy.
Finally getting a break from the 110 degree (43.3 c) heat index down here. The new clouds are a very welcome sight.
Early October Skies (2)
The temperature already dropped to 92 degrees today (33.3 c). It doesn’t look like they will stay past Wednesday, though. Back up to 99 degrees (37.2 c) on Thursday.
Early October Skies (1)
Just a quick observation. If you use RipIt for the mac to backup your movie DVDs, you might want to go to RIPIT in the top menu and PREFERENCES and choose NETWORK.
RipIt preference
From there, unselect REPORT SUCCESSFUL RIPS (ANONYMOUSLY).
This option is checked by default. I’m not a fan of any logfiles like this, and am quite surprised this is on by default.
I usually don’t post on Sundays, but this is really important.
If you have a T-Mobile Sidekick, do NOT power off your T-Mobile sidekick or let it lose its’ charge over the weekend.
According to several tech sites, “T-Mobile [is] reporting that ALL personal data stored on Sidekicks… has been lost.” Any contacts, photos, calendars, or to-do lists that haven’t been locally backed up are gone. And anything that is still on a sidekick from T-Mobile will be lost if the phone is turned off and on again.
So, again, do NOT power off your T-Mobile sidekick or let it lose its’ charge over the weekend.
A big post on T-Mobile’s site has the details. And it’s bad with a big red capital B. “Regrettably… we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger… The likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low.”
On a related note, all new T-Mobile sales have been suspended on the T-Mobile site. And T-Mobile isn’t going to say anything official until Monday the 12th.
Nice. I wonder what idiot at T-Mobile did a major server upgrade without a full local backup and a backup of that backup? And no contingency plans for a complete server failure? And no off-site data mirrors? And no 30 day deep storage backup?
Hey T-Mobile. If you survive this, you might want to hire someone who knows more about computers than the ones you got now. Just sayin’.