Well i am very excited about the news out of NASA this past week. they have decided to send a probe on a 9 year mission to the jovian moons. sticking mostly to Ganymede and Europa. the really exciting part is if you are unaware of the characteristics of those moons, they are believed to have vast underground oceans that would be perfect for harboring life. one would assume since the planets are so far from the sun that they would be frozen solid, but due to the immense gravity from its parent planet Jupiter, tidal forces cause a great amount of stress on all the moons. causing friction to heat them. it is an interesting display of exotic situations life could exist in. most assume life would be contained to thermal vents that spew nutrients into those vast oceans much like the ones on the earths seas floor. entire ecosystems built around volcanic mounds. one can not help but to think about 2010: Space Odyssey and how Arthur C. Clarke so elegantly explained how life could and probably does exist on in these places. one exciting aspect is that this will be a joint venture between NASA and the European space agency. these are the easily the best places to look for life in our solar system, and i am super thrilled we will be going there in a decade.
So Ping is pretty useless right now. kind of sad that it is among apples biggest failures. i have a concept for how it could be used for its full potential. what i would like to see is a collaboration with facebook, that allows for a seem less and instant viewing of anything a person is listening to. so lets say i am in the car with my iPhone listening to Angels & Airwaves, right now the only really good way of letting people know about that is by tweeting that song with an app. which gets posted to my wall and people can read it but that is all. the user experience stops there. imagine ping being built into the iPod app itself, a simple toggle on and off and what it does is it "pings" what song i am listening to and instantly updates a status independent of my wall on my facebook profile page. at anytime someone wants to know more about that song they can click on the track name and instantly be linked to the iTunes web store/iTunes store. one can also comment and like any song i am currently listening to, which would then place it on my wall as a mentioned item. this feature could be turned on for any device i am using. if i am at home listening to iTunes, or at my parents house using pandora with my iPad, or roller blading in the park with my iPhone. it would instantly update a "listening to" status on my facebook page allowing people to experience the music i am experiencing.
Update on Wakemate:
so i recently said that what would make this product even better would be to have a bar graph with the information displayed on it. well it is a good thing i do not blog for a living because this very feature exists. the other night i apparently had an astonishing night of sleep i scored a 92 out of 100. 0.0 i do not know how or why. but anyway the bar graph representation is very cool, i wish i could put a link in this post to show the site, but i need to be logged in to view it so a screenshot will have to do.
Found a very cool application today, it is a companion app for minecraft called MCMap Lite. it allows me to view the map in pretty much anyway i want. i can scan downwards segment by segment. i can search for certain kind of blocks, and i can take screenshots at anytime. it is very cool and i am very excited about it. this is a screenshot of the server as of now.
It does a fantastic job of belittling our work as a whole. but you can clearly make out the pyramid, north east of that is Joe's house, and west of all that is Steve's building. gives one a good scale of things.
Have not posted in a few days. been busy procrastinating. the revolt in Egypt is all over right now so i will just briefly touch on the part i have an opinion about. looting and vandalism is rampant and one thing in the country that is probably the most valuable is the museum that houses the entire history of the region. at first the military was guarding it but apparently after a while they started to move out or become inefficient or something. anyway there was a small case of vandalism there but nothing important was damaged. then i read that groups of people from all classes were barricading themselves in front of the museums to keep them safe. this as far as i am concerned shows that we are evolving as a species. if this had happened when they burned the library of Alexandria the world would be a sharp contrast to how it is now. the fact that random people were willing to risk their own lives for the sake of the preservation of knowledge and history really makes me happy and hopeful. because without our history, and without our knowledge we are lost.
a follow up to a recent post i made about them cutting off the Internet and cell signals in that country. truly amazing thing happened. google created a service were one could tweet via a phone recording. which is amazing because it shows that no matter how hard a government tries to cut its people off from the global Internet, we will find a way to give a voice to those people. we will find a way for those people to express themselves to the rest of us, to show what is truly going on there.
Google unveiled a new "app" that i think really sums up what google is here for. it allows one to experience art from other places in the world in amazing detail. google should be here to catalog and store our global information, and allow it viewable to everyone. the 21st century is going to be about instant access to everything, and google is slowly making that possible.
Yesterday the storm of the year hit. or as everyone is calling it the snowacolypse. i was supposed to go to work but i would have had to drive home at 11:45 in a foot of snow driving a firebird.....um no thank you. so i called off, which should not be a big deal since i have only called off one other time since i was hired there and it was because i had severe food poisoning.
Crystal and Larry came over to hang out here during the night of the storm. about halfway through the night we decided we needed some cut and bake cookies. so we ventured out into the blizzard. it was nuts, the wind had to be 40 MPH and it was not snow, it was sleet/ice. which was fun.
Steve finished the outside of the building and now has nothing to do but the inside furnishings and such. kind of exciting however this means once he has finished we both will be stuck with no ideas on what to do next.
The president used the phrase, "Spudnik Moment" in his SOTU speech in reference to JFK's rebuttal in that we would set a man on the moon at the end of that decade. it got me thinking, not only would it be impossible to actually do something major and momentous as setting a man on the moon, but in this social media climate the president would get torn to shreds by fox and other media outlets for even proposing them. personally i want something like the moon landing to happen. i would like to see the president get up on stage and say to the world that we plan to put a man on mars by the end of this decade, (we choose to go to mars in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.). if not space then something as momentous as it in comparison. something that will not only create jobs and money, but also unite us and show the world (and ourselves) that we are still capable at creating moments that we look back on in reverence for the accomplishments we made. that we are still capable of innovating solutions for our problems, and instead of spending all our time debating things that we still have the will power to actual do something about it. we are rotting from the center as a nation. we had a single moment of unity on 9/11 but our douchebag asshat of a president turned what should have been a world sympathizing healing moment into a clusterfuck war/fear/hatred mongering asscloud of suffering. i want the president to lead us for a change. i want the president to not just say what he wants us to do, i want him to dictate those things for us to do. if the hoover dam was proposed in today's world it would never leave the commissioners desk, if the highway project was proposed by Obama fox would call him a Nazi socialist and it would never even get started. if Obama proposed we go to the moon in this decade, fox would tear him a new one saying he is wasting money in space instead of spending it on things down here. nothing major can even begin to start because media has too much power and handcuffs the president from making bold decisions. whats sad is the president lets them. i say let him be bold, i say propose something major Mr. President. i want bold, i want action, i am so tired of all this talk about shit that never gets done.
Wiki Page of the Day (WPotD)
The Trump International Hotel and Tower, also known as Trump Tower Chicago and locally as the Trump Tower, is a skyscraper condo-hotel in downtown Chicago, Illinois. The building, named after real estate developer Donald Trump, was designed by architect Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Bovis Lend Lease built the 98-story structure, which reached a height of 1,389 feet (423 m) including its spire, its roof topping out at 1,170 feet (360 m). It is adjacent to the main branch of the Chicago River, with a view of the entry to Lake Michigan beyond a series of bridges over the river. The building received publicity when the winner of the first season of The Apprentice television show, Bill Rancic, chose to manage the construction of the tower.
I will never understand why companies make concept cars but never actually produce them. what is the point in spending millions of dollars to produce what would be an amazing product, but never actually produce them for consumers. like this Volkswagen XL1 Concept,
Sporting up to 300 MPG in a plug in diesel car. it will never see the light of day. why? because they do not have to make cars like this for them to continue selling cars. they can continue to make the same old shit year after year and people will have no choice but to purchase them. one of these days i will take the time to put together a complete rant of my feelings about the car industry.
Started drinking pop again. to be more specific, i started drinking Dr.Pepper at home again. to keep from everyone saying i am hypocrite let me explain in detail. it is not that i do not like pop in general, it is that i do not like High Fructose Corn Syrup. it is unnecessarily dense and provides no benefit other than taste. the body can not even digest it correctly. so i tend to stray as far away from that stuff as possible. very hard since almost everything is made with it. so companies have been releasing heritage and sugar only products for a while now and i hope they stay popular. Dr.Pepper has done this, they released a Heritage product which is Dr.Pepper without the corn syrup. instead it has regular sugar. i think it taste better, although that might be a biased opinion since i want it to taste better. i just hope companies continue to make this kind of product because if they do not then they lose me as a customer.
The wakemate product is kind of a weird thing all unto itself. It is one of those products normal people would scoff at and quickly label as gimmicky and pointless. However for me it is quite the opposite. I tend to be very organized and due to a small level of OCD I have, I tend to go overboard with recording and storing of information. For instance I have 6 duplicates of my family photos spread throughout a 20 mile radius. Some would call that overboard, but those are the people who bitch when they accidentally delete half their irreplaceable photos. For 3 years I kept a detailed log of everything I purchased in an excel spreadsheet. I had it setup for total debt and credit management for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly summaries. I also had binders full of receipts. A binder would have 365 slots for everyday of the year. This is just the tip of the Iceberg when it comes to the information I obsess about. I have cooled down a bit over the years and deliberately keep myself in a state of apathy towards certain segments of information in my life. It is a constant struggle but in order to avoid the hermit hoarder tendency I have it is essential. With all that in mind the ability to track my own sleep in a simple graphical manner pleases me at a very deep level, almost a type of indulgence.
I have been using this for about a week now and so far i am really enjoying it. it tracks everything, from time it takes to fall asleep to how many times i move during the night. it seems really accurate too. i conducted some tests were i got up in the night to walk around and get a glass of water and it recorded it as a time awake phase. the only issues i have is with the battery. when connected the amount of sleep time it can stay alive for is really finicky. i will connect it via bluetooth and it will say 21 hours, i will look away and then back and it will say 18. so i do not know what that is all about, but i have not had it die during the night so that is good in my book. one thing i would like to see them do to the site that shows the graphics is have a bar graph displaying the time frame of sleep, and show on it marks where things occurred, like deep sleep or movement. other then that i really like this system.
On to the news of the day not much happened to me personally but a whole hell of a lot happened in Egypt. just a crazy amount of revolt and revolution going on over there right now. they even turned off cellphone coverage and the Internet to the entire country because they were being used as organization tools for the protesters. one thing i find interesting about this whole thing is, it will be the first revolution fully recorded. what i mean is that in the past when something like this happened the only people who could afford to have equipment capable of recording video or taking photos were news stations and governments. so a government like Egypt would only need to censor up to 30 different small groups from spreading news that would tarnish them. now almost every citizen has a phone capable of video recording. so for the first time we will get a real glimpse unedited from within a revolt. no censor will be able to control the onslaught of media data that will fill the Internet when they put it back online there. we are coming into the 21st century when something like this will not be meticulously recorded with detail. quite an amazing thing.
Not really sure what i am going to do in minecraft next. kind of hit a phase of indecisiveness. last time this happened i ended up with a 1/3 replica pyramid of Giza so it is not really a bad thing. trying to help Steve with his building but failing hardcore since my only task is to get the minecart elevator to work and i can not seem to do it. it would just be so much easier if there was just an actual elevator in the game.
I was watching the news tonight while on break when i saw that they are putting a ballot up for vote on changing the gun concealment laws in Michigan to allow for weapons on school and church grounds. really? i mean seriously how is this even close to a good idea. i am sure most would say that "O well this is my second amendment, it is in the constitution nanner nanner". don't you think you are taking this 2nd amendment thing a bit to far? i am okay with you extrapolating an amendment meant to deal with large rifles people used to feed their families with 200 years ago, but distorting it into something having to do with guns designed solely to kill each other, no i am not cool with that. and seriously who the hell thinks it is a good idea to allow guns on school property. i do not give a shit if the constitution says you can bear arms, it is a stupidly terrible idea and should be denied on that sole fact. stop being assholes and forcing this gun shit down every ones throats when you are the ones with problems. you do not need a pistol. you do not need an Uzi or a bazooka. it is that fucking simple. they are all designed for the sole purpose of killing other human beings and by that logic should cease to exist.
Tonight was the state of the union address, and i was unable to view it since i was working. all i have heard from the Internets via twitter and other sources is that the tea party had a rebuttal to the SOTU speech. the link to the video of quite possibly the dumbest fucking lady on the face of the planet is here. i think i heard something about Americans being 21 generations old, and that the founding fathers fought tirelessly to eradicate slavery. also some historically inaccurate stuff about Lincoln. are you fucking kidding me? why is this lady allowed to leave her home, let alone run for office. just blows my mind how embarrassingly stupid our species can be.
As for the actual SOTU address, i have yet to watch it at any great length. i am happy to hear about Presidents Obama's plans for the digital infrastructure. linking 98% of the United States is a good idea. education is the key to a civil society. with more people connected to the Internet the ability for knowledge to be gained is increased immensely. so it may lead to a smarter population. even if it is slight. unless knowledge is like economics where the right get richer and the poor get poorer, the smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber. if that's the case then hope is lost for this species since natural selection is not really in full effect anymore.
Apparently polar bears swim up to 400 miles or around 9 days to find ice. i wonder what the possibility of them evolving amphibiously, or fins or something. would be an adaptation that would cause more bears to survive, so it is plausible.
Finished another audio book today at work. Rendezvous With Rama is rated as one of Clarke's best works. an alien spacecraft enters the solar system heading straight for our sun. no one is able to detect anything about it from outside probing. it appears to be a giant cylinder with capped ends about 50 kilometers long. they Cristen the craft Rama after the Hindu god. after sending out a mission to meet up with the craft they finally enter it and are amazed to find that it is hollow inside. the ship is a hollow rotating cylinder, providing "gravity" to the inner hull of the ship, .6 earth gravity that is.
Due to the time limit forced upon the crew because of the radical orbit Rama is taking they have to leave before it reaches para helion and becomes to close to the sun for comfort. as Rama nears the sun it becomes increasingly more active and over a time creatures begin to show up. odd creatures that have a biological built in battery system making lungs, and digestive organs completely unnecessary. and everything is in threes. all the creatures have either 3,6 or 9 legs. along with the animal triplicates all of the architecture is in triplets. after reaching the crews time limit they promptly leave Rama, but stay in a close enough orbit to view it glide through the corona of the sun and exit the solar system.
Overall it was a fantastic book and if you like hard scifi i highly recommend it.
I will be starting the next book in the series tomorrow at work, Rama II.
I finished the long and tedious work of designing our mine cart station in minecraft. the crazy intricate layout of the red stone and track underground is insane. i do not think i could possibly utilize that space anymore efficiently. i tried to take a screenshot but there is more underground than there is visible so it is pointless. the way it is designed is simple. there is a cart(pez dispenser) which brings out a cart, than the weight of the avatar sitting in the cart triggers a pressure plate which brings out a booster to boost it along the track out of the building. the receiving station is pretty much the exact same thing. there is supposed to be a really cool circuit to tell it when the avatar has left the mine cart, leading it back to the dispenser, but it just does not want to work and i am not a redstone expert. i made it so complex that it is impossible for me to find the fault. so now i just have a booster flying around the receiving track. the design came from this video. this is only part one of three.
Spent the day at a super fancy mall in troy Michigan today and had a chance to check into Gowalla a lot. one peculiar store we went into was a Sony store. i did not even know they existed. while we were in there we tested out the new PlayStation move. my review is that it is not very good, lol. the calibration before every game is annoying, tedious and utterly destroys the enjoyment. the sensor seemed to work moderately well, even though there was a very detectable delay between actions. worse than the Wii's delay making it very hard to get used to. controllers were Sony cheap black plastic. overall it felt very sloppy and cheap.
Moving on throughout the store we stopped by to check out the PSP Go. i was completely stunned at how incredibly cheap and flimsy that product is. it was so bad, it seemed like they literally spent 25 minutes designing and producing it. made out of the cheapest plastic i have ever seen, (milk cartons have better materials) i felt like i could snap the thing in half if i looked at it wrong. that's not even talking about the tortured interface and the more than pathetic Internet browser. overall felt very cheap.
Went over near the 3d TVs, put the glasses on and immediately remembered why 3D TVs are cliche and stupid. after that we walked over to the touchscreen computers where i typed this note out on the front facing monitor. so overall the Sony store sucks just as much as Sony does as a company.
Visited the apple store not only just to visit the apple store but also because Larry had them fix his iPod. got on the 13 inch Macbook Air and decided i should test it out on the thing i do most often these days, by booting up the browser version of minecraft. i successfully logged into my server i have running at home and played a bit with Steve. was really cool being able to remote access my server for the first time.
Went and saw The Green Hornet that night with Mark, Ryan and Joe. i thought it was very funny. although i am a pretty big Seth Rogen fan. some of the story line was predictable, but what is not these days. had some very funny dialogue parts along with some crazy action scenes. very satisfied with the first movie of this years movie release season.
