Okay, so I began reading a little bit about how the next version of Vista (or rather, some versions of vista) will incorporate the Media Center Edition functionality into the core system. The guys over at ExtremeTech did a review of an early beta, and the first page is extremely promising:
It’s been some time since I’ve been able to get to the climbing gym, and recently I have felt my muscles getting weaker. The climbing bug has not gone away at all – I still look at pictures like the ones below and say “COOL! I want to do that!” So, in the “things I’m gonna do before the New Year” list – one thing is to find a day, or a few days, where I can get to the climbing gym regularly. Anyone is welcome to join me! In the meantime – enjoy the pictures, and dream of being on the rocks!
Find the climber!
Interesting…I appear to be listed #13 on Yahoo! search for “Cinncinnati Police Frequencies” without the quotes. Just thought I’d share 
Okay, this is just too good to pass up. Everyone is probably familiar with Cindy Sheehan, the lady who took up a veritable crusade against the President for the war in Iraq after her son died, something she couldn’t live with (aside: her son joined the military, and I don’t care if it was the reserves, there’s a chance you will go to war and die serving your country if you are a member of the military, or am I missing something….). Anyway, after her “extremely successful” campaign outside of the President’s ranch in Texas, she decided to write a book. And where better to have the book signing? In the same area of Texas! The press showed up to photograph the throngs of…chairs?
Thanks to Doug Ross @ Journal for the original post which covers other misdoings of the mediacrats….
I enjoy watching Meet the Press – and I’m sad that I missed Howard Dean’s appearance recently. Tim Russert does a good job at bringing issues to the table, and usually making both sides of the political table look silly. I think that’s why I like it – I can laugh at the politicians who are trying to be very serious. Sometimes though, he doesn’t have to try very hard:
From Doug Ross @ Journal:
Russert: What is the Democratic position on Iraq? Should we withdraw troops now? What do the Democrats stand for?
Dean: Tim, first of all, we don’t control the House, the Senate or the White House. We have plenty of time to show Americans what our agenda is and we will long before the ‘06 elections.
Russert: But there’s no Democratic plan on Social Security. There’s no Democratic plan on the deficit problem. There’s no specifics. They say, “Well, we want a strong Social Security. We want to reduce the deficit. We want health care for everyone,” but there’s no plan how to pay for it.
Dean: Right now it’s not our job to give out specifics.
Yes. That’s. The Chairman. Of the Democratic Party.
Okay, this was just too funny not to post…luckily most will not get the humor…
(more…)
That’s right, this weekend it hit me: I’m addicted to adrenaline. I was at the Bands of America Grand Nationals competition to do photography for my high school Alma matter, and I realized that I haven’t been genuinely nervous since I was there playing a solo in front of some ten thousand people or so. We had a late slot for semi’s, or maybe it was prelims – I really don’t remember, and everyone was there to hear awards announced. Come to think of it, it may have been at a regional. Anyway, I digress. I remember having that pit in my stomach, but still going out and facing the nerves head on. And this weekend, it dawned on me that the reason I want to do all of the “extreme” type sports (i.e. – rock climbing, sky diving, etc) has been to get that nervous feeling, that pit in my stomach, but to keep moving on.
Wyatt, Tim, and I have discussed more than once planning a skydiving trip, and I’m going to hold them to it. We’ll schedule it and go jump out of a plane (after the training – Wyatt and I want to pull our own chutes the first time – cuz in addition to being adrenaline junkies, we’re also control freaks). I want to go out camping in the back woods where there’s no civilization around – and see the beauty of nature – but also be in a situation that I’ve never been in before. I like being challenged, and conquering things. I want to learn to fly a plane, and get licensed. That’s right – I don’t just want to do all of these things, I want to do them to become proficient enough to share the fun with others.
I’ve heard skydivers talk about how they are nervous before each jump. And I’ve heard rock climbers talk about some of the perils of taking a big fall on a rock. That danger makes it more fun! Concentrating on something until that’s the only thing your mind is doing – where each breath is taken because you’re not busy with something else. I guess you could say its almost Zen-like in that regard – fully aware of everything going on in your world at that moment – whether the moment lasts for hours, minutes, or just a few seconds.
Live life to its fullest – challenge yourself beyond your comfort zone – and when you’re going, INVITE ME!!!
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE! I cannot stress enough just how quickly you will lose your audience if you do not send a message that they can understand. This goes for anyone, but I will elaborate on one particular message: business people talking to engineers…
Gone are the days of being able to download something faster at work for most people. Thanks to changes in our proxy here, and all traffic essentially being routed through our parent office now, I can download things faster on my machine at home than I can at work – by a factor of almost 4x sometimes! Isn’t progress great? I should probably create a rant category for things like this…
Okay, so project #3 or something like that for the yet-to-be-formed HTG LLC was going to be a real viable project: An MSI-like installer for the linux world. One of the thoughts I had seems to have been released already. It’s called klik and is essentially what Mac does with disk images. You “install” a single file, which can be mounted as (or extracted to) a file system. Everything unique to the application (thinking COTS apps here) would be included – so shared libs are still the responsibility of the distribution.
Maybe there’s still a good opportunity out there – finding the marketability of the installer app would be interesting…
