I take lots of pictures, and every once in a while I get a lucky break. This shot resulted from some great clouds and evening sun coming together while I was sitting on the couch at the farm. I ran outside, took this photo and 2 minutes later the sun went away. You can click on it to get the full-sized version.
Actually the headline promises more than I can deliver. I don't really know why I returned my iPad after 3 hours. I guess it just didn't deliver $600+ worth of smiles. But here are a few things that contributed to the decision...
But mostly it just wasn't fun. So I returned it and took the 10% "restocking fee" haircut. 60 bux, for 3 hours, so 20 bux an hour...
I think I'll wait for the boatload of Android tablets that seem to be just around the corner. Maybe they'll make me smile more. Take a look at this one, featured today on Engadget. Not one but two cameras, SD slot, USB ports, etc. etc.
UPDATE:
My goodness what a difference a year or so makes. I now own an iPad 2, think Google is evil and completely disavow any responsibility for this article. 
UPDATE
Ooops. The law hasn't passed yet -- I misunderstood Rick's letter... Here's the salient quote (down near the bottom)
pass the law (well, getting closer anyway – should be next week!)
Sorry about that. I'll leave the original stupid/mistaken post here, but you can ignore it. On the bright side, I'm hoping for the opportunity to write another "Woohoo" post if the bill does pass.
Sorry about that...
Mikey
_________________________________________________________________
Woohoo! We did it!
I just got this great news from Rick King, our chair. Here's his note. The one thing I'd add is that his leadership is what made this bet worth taking.
All,
I am not a betting man. Had I been one, I would have placed a pretty big bet on the Task Force succeeding as the odds would have been against me. I mean, seriously, who would have thought that 23 people, with diverse backgrounds and conflicting interests, would have worked so well together? That we would put an agreement on paper and influence others enough to likely pass legislation to codify our recommendations?
Well, we did it. And today, almost two years after its inception, the Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force ceases to exist. In what seems like the perfect farewell gift, the Minnesota Legislature approved a bill and it was recently signed into law by the Governor. Is the new law what I would have written had I had a magic wand and lived in the Land of Unlimited Resources? Maybe not.
Is it, however, wise, forward-looking legislation that positions Minnesota as a leader in the nation. Now, with the National Broadband Report released, I think our wisdom as a state shines even brighter.
While the Task Force’s report was almost 150 pages long, our key recommendations were narrowly defined: we wanted universal access to Ultra High-Speed Broadband in Minnesota, we defined Broadband as a minimum of 10 to 20 megabits per second download and 5 Mbps upload, and we wanted the state to set a comparative goal within the U.S. and the world. Furthermore, we felt that there had to be some sort of ongoing institution to ensure that the objectives were pursued. It’s all in the bill.
With this, my last letter as Chair, I would like to recognize the talent and the hard work of each and every Task Force member and the supporting staff and friends across the state who freely gave us their work, ideas, advice and enthusiasm to create the report and pass the law (well, getting closer anyway – should be next week!). It has been my privilege to meet and work with each of you.
Together, we have contributed to making Minnesota a better place to live and work. And, a leader among the States in our great country.
I should have placed that bet.
Warmest regards,
Your ex-chair
Gracious. A fella gets going fixing one little thing on a music-making workstation and the next thing you know a year has gone by and about 42 jillion other things have broken and needed fixing. Meanwhile, no music has happened.
So today I just pushed through all the crud and said "dang it, today I'm going to produce a tune for the blog, no matter what."
Click HERE to listen to the result.
This is one of a long series of "notes to myself" which won't be very interesting to normal people. I've been diagnosing blog and wiki problems for weeks and never found a blog post that had this solution, so I'll post it here for others.
I've been rasslin' with two kinds of trouble -- our WordPress blogs all started throwing "missing a temporary folder" errors when we would try to upload pictures. And logins stopped working on all of my Mediawiki based wikis. You could logon just fine, but then it would flip right back to not being logged on, and you couldn't do anything or edit pages.
Here's the solution. Raise, or eliminate, the user-file quota for the IUSR account on the server. This is a problem unique to the WIMP stack (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) which is why there probably aren't many blog posts about this. Most folks run these kinda servers on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Here's how to check to see if you're running into the same problem I had.
Once you know that you're in the same boat I am, you've got all the usual choices -- raise the quota, delete some files, etc. The big breakthrough for me was just discovering that bottleneck. In my case, I turned off the quota system altogether. Our photographs are what's burning through that quota and I'm OK just leaving that feature turned off. Your mileage may vary.
ah... The taxes are done, with hardly any damage to the checkbook. This is the goody I found when I took a little tour of teh Internets as a reward for a job well done...
Click HERE to read a great post (and discover a great blog) about getting rid of surface noise using wood glue of all things. And then click HERE to get the latest and greatest -- 'turns out that thread generated a LOT of discussion.
The key deal -- the kind of wood glue makes a big difference. The gang on that blog tend to think that Titebond Extend is the bees knees. I may have to try this out. The results are pretty darn spectacular.
Yesterday it was still winter here at the farm. Today, Spring came with a vengeance. Here's a series of pictures from yesterday's Morning Walk...
Here's a picture of the end of our driveway where it meets the road. Pretty impressive mist, no?
Well, that mist has been here all week. Here's the story, as told by one of our weather stations -- practically a week straight of 100% humidity as the snow melted.
As you can see, today's the day the weather finally broke. Here are some comparison shots. This one is from the point above the house, looking down on Marcie's planting project this winter. Note the snow.
Here's another view of the same field. Also yesterday...
And here it is today. Yay! Snow all gone.
This is what the wetland looked like yesterday...
And here it is today..
Marcie was working on marking some stuff in the woods. See that tiny orange dot right in the middle of the picture? That's Marcie...
And here's the big payoff. The Crocuses are in bloom!
There's even a ground hog out, trying to build a house under our porch. Spring is here.
Complete geek heaven. Great band. Great Rube Goldberg device. 4 videos describing the collaboration they put together. Must see, if you're a geek.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/
This is a piece by Jeff Lange in Volume One, Number Three of "Spread the WORT" -- the newsletter of WORT-FM (Madison, WI) just as it was going on the air in 1975. I've always loved this description of the consensus decision-making process we used to run the station. All due apologies to Pogo...
The big deal? The sentence that really catches it for me is "we ad WORT don wanna tred up on the wee miroridy vuponts, so we jus wade undill eberyone am finely agreed." Still works for me today, some 35 years later. Thanks Jeff!
Here's my translation, since many of you aren't native-English speakers and might find this pretty tough to read in Jeff's native Pogo-style language. Apologies to Jeff for any mistranslations.
Yes, it's a curious fact, that nobody is ever able to quite explain, how decisions get made at this particular radio station. But they do. This is a grievous hard and ticklesum thing for newcomers to digest. Take, for example, the familiar caller who, in a fever pitch of excitement, has phoned up the station with his or her (or "it's" for that matter) idea for a program. Rnnng. He (let's just say it's a "he") says "My dog can bark heavy metal rock n'roll -- can he have 5 hours on Tuesday nights?" Well, the person at the station (say it is a person) says "Isn't that the same thing as what's on WBRK every night?" The caller replies "Yes, but my dog barks badder!" Then that, says the person, is a question for the Program Committee.
The best thing then is if the caller hangs up, thinking all is well for the Program Committee will do its duty. But if the caller says "Oh, what's the Program Committee?" then the person has to explain: The Program Committee are all the people that come to the Program Committee Meeting. You can come. So can your mother. It's Friday at 8pm. No, they never vote on anything. Voting is against the rules. So is parliamentary procedure. They just talk about things until everyone is agreed, and that is consensus -- the highest form of unanimity.
Then the caller says "oh."
Then the person at the radio station should continue: "Yes, it's a curious fact, but it seems to work. So far, at least. We at WORT don't want to tread on the wee minority viewpoints, so we just wait until everyone is finally agreed. Nope, it's never failed yet... which just goes to prove: you can make some of the decisions all of the time, and all of the decisions some of the time..."
Then the caller says, "can you put me through to the general manager?"
"No, there isn't a general manager. Would you like to talk to Sarah-Gene?"
"She the owner?"
"Nope. She's just another volunteer."
I did a nice geek project over the weekend -- repairing the weather-stations here at the farm. We've had a couple stations (one on the ridge, one in the valley) for a couple years. I had this lash-up gizmo put together with a couple of machines, each talking to one weather station and then trading data, to come up with a single (crummy) web site. In short, a kludge. The whole thing died when I pulled the plug on one machine and upgraded the other to Vista. The weather stations still worked just fine, but they couldn't share their weather goodness with the rest of you...
Until this weekend. I finally got off my rusty-dusty and figured out a whole buncha stuff to get them back on the net. Here's their new web site:
Write that down. Now you can look over my shoulder and see what kind of weather we've got. Mostly we're interested in two things. How is the weather? And, how does the weather down here in the valley differ from the weather up on top of the ridge? Now we've got a nice little site to find those things out.
There are some cool tricks in that site. The best one is that whole thing is generated from one PC using Davis WeatherLink software to talk to two weather stations at the same time (multiple loggers and multiple weather stations on the same PC). The trick there is to set up WeatherLink, copy the whole Weatherlink program directory and then run two instances of the program at the same time. Weirdly, it works. No shared DLLs. What luck.
... that really do a good job of summarizing the security situation and the dilemmas it poses.
Leading off with Michele Neylon's post which explains his reasons for skipping this meeting and the need for thoughtful discussion (comments are really good on all these posts by the way)
http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2010/02/13/personal-reflections-on-icann-nairobi/
Maria Farrel posts a very balanced/detailed note about the situation here (Rod Beckstrom, ICANN CEO, posted in the comments)
http://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/12/14645/
Kieren McCarthy (until recently the ICANN staff person responsible for remote participation) posted a followup here -- which really does a great job of turning lemons into lemonade in my view by saying that this may be the event that really pushes the remote-participation capability to new levels
http://kierenmccarthy.com/2010/02/12/why-icann-nairobi-may-be-a-blessing-in-disguise/
Nick Ashton-Hart (current ICANN staff person in charge of remote participation) posted this in the comments to Michele's post;
"Thanks Michele for your thoughtful and balanced post. I, too, would like to echo the call that people respect each other's choices about attending or not attending the meeting. I think that characterising the choices of others in negative terms doesn't really benefit anyone.
We are working very hard internally on remote participation for this meeting; I'm the overall coordinator of the effort. I think everyone will find that things RP-related at Nairobi take quite a leap forward from previous meetings.
You will find that when the schedule is posted on the 15th, detailed information on remote participation for all sessions is published along with the session information. More details will follow shortly thereafter too."
I'm still on the fence -- read those posts for the reasons why I'm still leaning towards going. But we'll see...
This just in from The Onion News Network
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/new_law_would_ban_marriages?utm_source=onion_rss_daily
Thanks for the tip Wayne!
I'm thinking another fold-out business card may be required;
Volunteer
Vice Chair of Finance and Operations (of the)
Commercial and Business Users Constituency (which is part of the)
Generic Name Supporting Organization (which is in turn part of the)
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
Can you see why ICANN has a bafflegab problem?
I'm quite excited about this one -- it's got lots of tasty issues and it's the ops and finance stuff that I love to do.
I had another fold-out business card job back in the early '90's. That fold-out business card read;
Temporary Interim Acting Assistant Associate
Vice President (supervising)
Administrative Information Systems
Business Operations
Quality Management
Operations Improvement (for the)
University of Minnesota
or... Vice President of Stuff that is Busted. This new gig is a lot less complicated than that one was.
Here are links to his first State of the Union speech and the Q&A portion of his remarks to the House Republicans two days later. The real deal instead of the sound bites. Hey, this guy's still got it for me. Just sayin'...
State of the Union
Q&A - Republican Caucus
Ah bafflegab. A word steeped in tradition. This word was invented in the early '50's by a fella named Milton A. Smith -- who received an award for inventing it. At the awards ceremony, he was asked to define it. here's his response;
"Multiloquence characterized by consummate interfusion of circumlocution or periphrasis, inscrutability, and other familiar manifestations of abstruse expatiation commonly utilized for promulgations implementing Procrustean determinations by governmental bodies."
You can read the whole article i stole this from here -- http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-baf1.htm
