Trip Begins

Music

I’m hoping to blog this trip better than my last one, so here goes. I got through security without any troubles and began the trek to my gate which was quite literally the furthest in the airport. I got here find but my shoulder hurt a bit from my carry-on, so I was glad to finally be able to sit down. This part of the airport looks like a mall, just with more places to sit. The food smells great. Anyway as I sat down and opened the Powerbook to write this entry I noticed my pants were sitting a little low — I had left my belt at security. Half an hour later I’m now back where I started. At least I got a little exercise. 🙂 This is going to be my first long trip since I got the iPod and I’m looking forward to enjoying good music and not having to worry about battery life. I’ll see you guys again when I get to the Golden State.

More Pingomatic

Tech

66,639 pings on Ping-O-Matic yesterday, let’s see if we can beat that today. 🙂 I rewrote the pinger deamon in Python, because the old PHP one was crashing the system on a regular basis. The new one is amazingly light, and was ridiculously easy to write. So now Ping-O-Matic is powered by PHP, Python, Perl, and caffeine. Right tool for the right job.

We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas. We can share and sort our knowledge and behavior. We can communicate and come together in an instant. We also have new ethics and attitudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet’s connective tissue to leap over borders—whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order.

— Jeff Jarvis in the book What Would Google Do? Published 2009.

Interesting to revisit as they float trial balloons on breaking Google up (terrible idea) or other antitrust enforcement.

Small Hit

Apple, Humor, Review

The NY Times has a profile of John Ternus as a possible successor to Tim Cook that has a number of ridiculous lines; it’s quite bad, but this is one of my favorites:

Apple has had many small hits under Mr. Cook and continues to be one of the most profitable companies in the world. 

Goodness! I would love to have a hit someday as the small as the ones Apple has had under Cook. Apple Watch sells more than the entire Swiss watch industry. Airpods are the most popular headphones in the world. Their market cap is bigger than the GDP of all but four countries in the world.

TopStyle 3 again

Tech

Well I’ve gotten a copy of the 3.1 beta I mentioned in the previous post and I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web Tech SIG sometime within the next couple of months. My initial impressions of the program are very good. The user interface is really well done. I’m going to start putting it through the heavy paces later tonight. My approach to reviewing this product is going to be to just throw my self into it, so I’m associating it with all the files it can possibly edit, I’ve edited the registry to make it the default source view for Internet Explorer, and I’m going to be using it for all the coding I’m going to be doing. I’ve found in the past that this is the best way to really get to know a product and its quirks. Wish me luck :).

Block Those Ads

Personal

I’ve seen some pretty good host files in the past, but this one looks like the most thorough. Not sure where the name comes from though. “. . . so quite simply this file tells your computer to try to access itself whenever a banner advert is requested from a server that is in its ‘black’ list, so instead of contacting the advert server your computer simply tries to request itself and as your machine doesn’t contain any adverts (if you are not running a web server on it) nothing will be shown.”

Cloud Pictures

Gallery, Travel

When I was young I would go on trips to exotic locations and come home with nothing but pictures of the clouds in various cities, states, countries. Looking back I would say that clouds are certainly a unifying aspect of global scenery. 9-4-2002–Going back to my roots. You can never have too many cloud pictures :). Actually I really enjoyed the way the light and dark clouds contrasted in some of these pictures. Grab a full size if you feel like replacing that boring cloud backgroud that comes with Windows 95 and on. Tip: when viewing a photo you can click on it to see a really big (2048×1536) version, which usually varies from 300-600k in size.