http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/108/open_lightbulbs.html
Nice article about how much money (and pollution creating electricity) you can save by buying CFL lightbulbs.
Monthly Archive for August, 2006
My computer does all of this stuff, and it does it with dual monitors. Does yours?
http://slated.org/xgl_on_fc5
Seriously, this is XGL running on top of Xwindows for Linux. it is just a way of getting all the eye candy you ever dreamed of for Mac OS X and Windows Vista, and then some more stuff that you didn’t even know you wanted. The best part is that it is an architecture that supports plugins, so if you don’t like one of those things, you disable the plugin for it, or if you want it to do something it doesn’t someone might already be writing that into it as a plugin.
Once you get used to the flipping cube thing (or just virtual desktops in general) it is really hard to go back.
I’m happy the new OS X Leopard is going to have virtual desktops in it.
Seriously, I never knew eye-candy could improve my productivity until I started using XGL with some of these plugins.
Current Mood: 
moody
moodySometimes I feel like a really weird person, cuz I have all these conflicting things going on in my head at the same time, or right next to each other.
( Random Introspection )
So, all in all, my life is pretty good, but it just feels shitty I think because there is a lot of pressure on me at the moment.
I mostly just wish this pattern of odd melancholy didn’t happen the way it does, and that it wouldn’t be so predictable….predictable unwanted thinking and behaviors make me feel stupid because they should be unavoidable or at least easily dealt with.
But alas, that is so rarely the case.
http://tripcart.typepad.com/tripcart_the_blog/2006/08/an_outkast_in_a.html
Cool acoustic over of the Outkast song “Hey Ya” by a guy named Mat Weddle from the band Obadiah Parker. This band has some pretty cool music up on their myspace page as well. Check it out http://www.myspace.com/obadiahparker
And, finally, chords for those interested…I don’t think they are the way he plays it in the video, but something interesting to check out anyway if you are into such things.
http://www.fretplay.com/tabs/o/outkast/hey_ya-crd.shtml
Finally, I’m at work today for a while 
But at least it is quiet, so I can get a lot done when not blogging.
So I’ve always toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo, but I could never think of anything that I permanently wanted on my body. I mean even some ornate religious thing like a cross or something might look crazy stupid when I’m 60 or something.
Anyway, enter the UV tattoo. Apparently there is a UV reactive ink that is tattoo safe, and it looks totally normal under normal lighting.
Here is the article:
http://blog.wired.com/blacklighttats/
Anyway, now I need to start thinking about this again, because this could be the best of a lot of worlds for me….finally getting a cool tattoo, and having an excuse to set my blacklight back up.
In a similar vein I’ve been thinking about doing a UV water-cooling mod for my computer…it looks cool as hell when the blacklights are and the UV reactive water is flowing through the system.
Lately I’ve had a couple of less technical people ask me how to get around corporate blocking of certain ports (google chat, built into gmail is one good example). I want to tell them that setting up an SSH tunnel to some remote server is the best way to do that, but everyone stares at me blankly when I say that.
So I saw this fairly technical article on what “tunneling” is, but it sorta geeks out, so I’m going to take a minute and break it down a little simpler. Here is the article for reference if you want to read it:
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/3624566
The internet is an interesting beast. Everyone has addresses assigned to their computer, sometimes that address is an ‘internal’ address behind a router, sometimes it is a normal IP address that the world can see. Lots of people have a basic understanding that your IP address is like your street address for the internet, and that an ‘internal’ address is like the equivalent of someone else who lives in your house (or in other words, your router) going through the mail and handing you only the mail with your name on it.
( Only read if you want to understand the internet better )
That’s right, I’m in Toronto in the land of the people who prefer hockey to football.
I’m thinking tomorrow night I’m going to try to go to the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship for a “Revival” service.
Now, I have no idea what that is, but this is the famous (or perhaps infamous) Toronto church that started the Toronto revival, so it could be crazy silly cool, or weird, or perfectly normal and serve my mid-week church fix since I missed small group tonight.
Anyway, I need to get to bed so I can be ready to sit through hours of more meetings where no one needs my input and I don’t really need to hear what they have to say (not in the depth of what they are going into anyway). Ahhh, working for a big company, and visiting vendors.
