Found here

There may be more feature rich tools out there, but for simple copying, I like this.

Found here: Instagram Photo a Day Challenge | whoorl

Chris Botti (trumpet) and Sting (vocal) “In The Wee Small Hours” – YouTube

My take is that if they wore these vests all the time, then there is nothing wrong with it. But everything tells me that they are doing it based on image consultants. Ironically they make change the association one has of sweater vest to a cynical one, and people will see them as a mask. That would be a shame.

For more on this, see Santorum’s Tressel Gambit — Daily Intel and Wearing sweater vests. – Things Stephen Harper Does To Seem Human

If you want eggs sunnyside up for dipping in, you can substitute baked eggs and cook them for around 10 minutes and you will get a perfectly running york with cooked whites that look much nicer than those in the pan. Plus there is the added treat of whatever you lined the pan with.

You can also saute anything you like and then serve it topped with such an egg and you have a wonderful dish.

Best of all, it’s so easy: even people who hate to cook can bake an egg. I did mine in a toaster oven and it comes out well.

You may want to experiment first before you make this for others. 375 is a good temperature to cook the eggs in, and with my toaster oven, 10 minutes yielded a very runny egg. Next time I will aim for 12 minutes. Eggs require attention for best results, but the results are worth it.

As I get older, I find I am less inclined to do new things and tend to stick with what I do well. When I try new things, I suck at them, and I give up on doing them. I find it uncomfortable sucking at things at my age. Unlike my kids, I am self conscious and uncomfortable about doing poorly at things in public. I try them, I hope they will go well, and when they don’t, I put them away. When I was younger, I would rationalize this by thinking: I have work/kids/&c to contend with….I will get to that later. That rationalization is not working so well anymore. Futhermore, there are things that I would like/love to do, but I don’t.

The things I think I suck at but would love to do and do better at are filmmaking, drawing, painting, photography, programming and running (and fitness generally). All of those things I love and I would love to be able to do well, but I know if they take them up again, I will do them poorly. My resolution is to try to keep working on them all year, even when the outcome is terrible. If at the end of the year, I still suck, then I will reconsider if I am going to keep doing them. What I resolve not to do is give up right away.

I was planning only to focus on the things I suck at for my New Year’s Resolution, but there are alot of things that I do that I don’t suck at, but I would like to improve at doing or even excel in doing. Those things include being a dad, a cook (or bottlewasher!) or an IT architect/consultant.  I don’t want to just focus on the things that I suck at: I still want to improve on those areas, because they are most important to me.

I wrote it in the hope of (a) proding me to stick to this resolution and (b) inspire others to make unusual resolutions that would inspire others.

Thanks for reading this.

ADESTE FIDELES – THE THREE TENORS

It may seem silly, but it is a debate I have been in a number of times myself, and based on this article, I am not alone: Colored vs. White Is a Christmas Light Debate – NYTimes.com. Personally I lean towards colored lights on the Christmas tree and white or monochrome outside, though not the blinking kind (they drive me crazy). However I have been overruled in my house and we have gone with white lights in and out. That’s fine by me, because in winter, any additional light is welcome. Even more so when it is festive and comforting.

Merry Christmas!

500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.

Either (a) they don’t think much of their staff, or (b) they have some really smart monkeys working there!

Well worth a read, especially for people who have a simple and limited view of Hitchens, for good or bad.

Sting – Gabriel’s Message – YouTube

I am not sure if he changed his opinion or not, but I found it interesting how he refers to Saddam with regards to capital punishment and whether or not he deserved it.

Greatness.

Silent Night – Kathleen Battle, Wynton Marsalis – YouTube

R.I.P.

I posted this last year, and I am happy to say there is a 2011 version too: Longform’s Best of 2011. Of course don’t wait until December: Longform.org has good long reads all year long. Bonus, now it is integrated with readability.com. Two great things that go great together.

As fashion photographs, they are wonderful. In the context of social statements, their value is debatable. (I use that word in a neutral way, for I think there is room for a good debate over whenever or not these photos that attempt to portray the life of black Americans in the 1960s is a good thing or not.)

Take a look and decide for yourself, here Black Americana – Vogue.it

Snack smart. See the wired.com article for more of the details.

As it says in wikipedia,

“Uptown” is the album’s (Dirty Mind) high point, with Prince singing about a utopian paradise where everyone is free to express themselves regardless of age, gender and skin color. This album was to set the scene emphatically for Prince’s chart domination later in the 1980s. It fused black and white musical styles in a seamless fashion and showed that Prince was not afraid to push boundaries. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times described the music from the album as “confident and highly danceable blend of post-disco funk and tasty, hard-line rock”.^[19]

We take Prince and his music almost for granted now, but he and he music was anything but at the time. It was fresh and original and raunchy and set to accomplish something unique in the world of the popular music.

Hear, here: John Coltrane – Lush Life – YouTube

R.I.P.

Dobie Gray. Drift away – YouTube

Hey, if you are going to be making New Year’s Resolutions to get fit, save money, and help others, this offer helps you hit the sweet spot.

Scaffolding is a necessary part of city streets, and if you can’t hide it, why not feature it? For more on this, see: Coming Soon to the Sidewalks: A New Look for Scaffolding – NYTimes.com

I was excited to see three of my favourite things come together: the writer Adam Gopnik giving the Massey Lectures on the topic of Winter (all rolled up into this book). I haven’t started to read it yet, but I am looking forward too.

While not in the same league as Gopnik, last winter I was inspired to write about winter as well. If you can’t get enough about writing on the joy and beauty of winter, you can read some of what I wrote here:

Some thoughts on memory and winter

The quality of darkness and the luminosity of winter nights

One of my favourite weeks: the mild weather week in February

The joy of the cold and the dark (some thoughts)

On light at night (some thoughts, random)

If on a winter’s day you board the wrong train…

Omawumi – If you ask me (follow link for lyrics) – YouTube

The above is by Donwood, found here, Thought You Should See This, where you can see a much better representation of it, as well as find out more about it.

Here’s Fairey’s, remixing his classic HOPE poster:

Found here: Occupy HOPE – OBEY GIANT

But if you want to see the original, go here: The Top 0.01% and Top 1%’s Income Share: 2008 — Visualizing Economics

It’s 2008, but if anything, it is still relevant (although the top 1% are even richer, relatively speaking, to the rest.)

and

Groove In G as part of Playing For Change

Every year, the Toronto gallery, art interiors, holds their annual event whereby they sell small pieces of their artists’ work for very reasonable prices. (For example, this great painting by Peter Andrew, from his Highway Series). I highly recommend that anyone interested in wonderful works of art check out their web site and pay them a visit here: Affordable Artwork / Canadian Art / Gallery / Framing / Canvas / Art Interiors – Toronto, ON

Paintings are going from $55 to $250. You can’t go wrong. Canadiana at its best. (And Peter Andrew’s paintings are fine examples of 21st century Canadiana.)

From Sachin’s Space. Sachin Agarwar parked next to Steve Jobs’ car on the day he went for an interview at Apple, years ago, and he took this photo.

The blue line is the price of hogs in America over the last decade, and the black lines represent approximate times when McDonald’s has reintroduced the McRib

It goes into details on why McDonald’s might introduce the McRib when it does and why. It has other things to say about the sandwich, not all that I agree with, but overall the article is thought provoking and well worth a read.

I would also add that besides price, Marketing cycles have something to do with it. McDonald’s is constantly turning over promotions, and the McRib would likely have to be tied into that campaign cycle as well.

You can find more examples and links to other work from him on the always great blog, Colossal.

The button on the bottom left controls the mode. When you push this button one of the four modes will flash (TIM 1, TMR, ALM 1, or CHRO). Push the mode button until TIM 1 flashes. Now, you are in Time 1 Mode. You should be able to see the time, seconds and date on the face of the watch.

Hold down the mode button until the hour starts flashing. You can now set your time. The top right hand button will move you from hours to minutes to date, etc. The bottom right hand button will change the digits. When you have set it correctly, you can press the mode button (bottom left hand button) and it will start acting like a normal watch again.

In normal time mode, you can switch to TIM 2 by pressing and holding the bottom right hand button and set the dual time in the same manner.

Thanks, Laura!

This one in particular, lalalala love, has a series of photos of people being photographed. Except the photos we see are like this:

As she says:

The next time you see a bunch of people getting ready to take a group picture…stand behind them. That’s where all the love is!

There are lots of good posts on her blog. Go to Color Me Katie and see.

The ING New York City Marathon is this weekend! I ran it years ago and it was one of the best things I have ever done. The organization was superb, and the New Yorkers that came out to cheer were exceptionally good. If you want to run a great race and have a great experience, I highly recommend trying to enter it.

This race in particular will be interesting because Deba Could Be the First New Yorker to Win the City’s Marathon.

She is originally from Ethopia, but she now calls New York home. If she were to win, this would be a huge boost for running in the United States. I hope she does — it’s always great for the home town representative to win — but it will be tough, for the NYC Marathon is very competitive. Let’s see! Go Deba!

And recently this clip has been getting alot of attention, of PETMAN:

I was alarmed when I first saw this video. I don’t imagine the scientists at Boston Dynamics are blind, and they can likely see a lot of uses for PETMAN besides testing clothing. (Watch the way the man pushes the robot to show stability, for example.) If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it doing a similar support role that BigDog with the U.S. military. The first “man” into a fire fight would be PETMAN.

After being alarmed, my second thought was to think of the funders of this, namely DARPA. DARPA also was instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and needless to say, the first purpose of the Internet as DARPA saw it was not to be able to exchange cute pictures of cats on Facebook. But that is where we ended up. Likewise, I could see a similar thing happening with robots, and they could end up being domesticated, just like the Internet is. The robots will become appliances, just like all the other smart devices will be in our homes. (And very soon everything will be “smart”, be it your fridge, oven, washer, etc.) They will be an appliance that moves. They’ll carry in groceries. They’ll paint things. They’ll even vacuum. (Wait, we have that.).  We’ll end up complaining that our robots are too old and can’t do the cleaning tasks that the brand new robots can.

Will robots be used in war? Of course. But if one soldier is accompanied by a PETMAN and his enemy is accompanied by heavy artillery, my money is on the enemy. They will still be effective in many ways, but like any weaponry, armies will adapt to meet the challenge.

Before I close, I want to add that this is a really under-reported story. There are lots of stories out about the latest mobile device or the latest laptop, but the rapid advancement of robotics in the 21st century is going to be a big deal.

For example, if you want to get my timeline, you can use

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/blm849.rss

If you want to get 200 entries, you can use:

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/blm849.rss?count=200

If you want to get 200 entries and use JSON instead of RSS, you can use:

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/blm849.json?count=200

If you want to play around, replace “blm849″ with your twitter handle or someone else’s that isn’t protected.

For more on various formats and parameters, see GET statuses/user_timeline | Twitter Developers. Also make sure you check it for limits.

Here’s another option. If you want to get the statuses for the entries in my FAVS lists, you can use:

curl http://api.twitter.com/1/blm849/lists/favs/statuses.atom

If you go to the REST API Resources for Twitter Developers page, you can see other options.

Essentially you need to play around to take a command you send to the REST API (e.g. GET lists/statuses) and learn how to turn it around to a commend you can pass to twitter.com/api.twitter.com.

If you say: hmmmm, some of this is inconsistent, etc., I confess I have just started experimenting. But I wanted to get something down before I forgot about it, and I will build on it later.

Good luck!

It’s a good read. And I suspect being a billionaire is strange. I like what he has to say about books and statistics, too.

Zombies, Run! is an ultra-immersive game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android where you help rebuild civilisation after a zombie apocalypse. By going out and running in the real world, you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts that you can use to build up and expand your base – all while getting orders, clues, and story through your headphones.

If you find your running routine is getting stale, this could be the perfect way to reinvigorate it. I haven’t tried this yet, but I am thinking about it, especially for winter, when running becomes that much more challenging.

If you are trying to get your own iPad magazine off the ground, you can spend alot of effort learning how to do that. Or you can take a short cut and pledge $200 or more to Tim’s Kickstarter project and you will get Xcode sample project that shows how to make everything that’s in Letter to Jane Magazine, so you can learn to make your own iPad magazine (some knowledge of Xcode required). And if you pledge $450 or more, you get the source code + full page ad. If you work for an ad agency or some communications firm or in communications in a larger organization, that is not alot of money. But it will save you alot of time, and time is money in this case. The business case is a piece of cake.

Go here and pledge: Letter to Jane Magazine for iPad by Tim Moore — Kickstarter.

Do yourself a favour: kickstart Tim’s project and you can kickstart your own  as well.

Zombies, Run! is an ultra-immersive game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android where you help rebuild civilisation after a zombie apocalypse. By going out and running in the real world, you can collect medicine, ammo, batteries, and spare parts that you can use to build up and expand your base – all while getting orders, clues, and story through your headphones.

If you find your running routine is getting stale, this could be the perfect way to reinvigorate it. I haven’t tried this yet, but I am thinking about it, especially for winter, when running becomes that much more challenging.

In IT, open source technology has allowed people to create software any other technology that would not be possible otherwise. This openness made great advances possible. It now looks like social media is doing the same thing in the world of ideas. Maybe we need to change the term from “social media” to “open media”.

As soon as he was elected to the papacy, Leo XIII worked to encourage understanding between the Church and the modern world. When he firmly re-asserted the scholastic doctrine that science and religion co-exist, he required the study of Thomas Aquinas[16] and opened the Vatican Secret Archives to qualified researchers, among whom was the noted historian of the Papacy Ludwig von Pastor.

Leo XIII was the first Pope of whom a sound recording was made. The recording can be found on a compact disc of Alessandro Moreschi’s singing; a recording of his performance of the Ave Maria is available on the web. He was also the first Pope to be filmed on the motion picture camera. He was filmed by its inventor, W. K. Dickson, and blessed the camera while being filmed.[17][18]

Leo XIII brought normality back to the Church after the tumultuous years of Pius IX. Leo’s intellectual and diplomatic skills helped regain much of the prestige lost with the fall of the Papal States. He tried to reconcile the Church with the working class, particularly by dealing with the social changes that were sweeping Europe. The new economic order had resulted in the growth of an impoverished working class, with increasing anti-clerical and socialist sympathies. Leo helped reverse this trend.

While Leo was no radical in either theology or politics, his papacy did move the Church back to the mainstream of European life. Considered a great diplomat, he managed to improve relations with Russia, Prussia, Germany, France, England and other countries.

Pope Leo XIII was able to reach several agreements in 1896, which resulted in better conditions for the faithful and additional appointments of bishops. During the Fifth cholera pandemic in 1891 he ordered the construction of a hospice inside the Vatican. That building would be torn down in 1996 to make way for construction of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.[19]

His favorite poets were Virgil and Dante.[20]

A simple illustration of this is his appearance in this film in 1896 (1896!)

Remarkable video of a remarkable man.

India : Oxelo Skateboards on Vimeo

Notice the focus on the 1%, including here:

What is happening in the U.S. and elsewhere is a focus on the inequalities (and more) between various economic groups. The inequality is not new, but the focus is new, and it is a result of the efforts of groups of people striving to highlight the financial difficulties that they are having. If people say it doesn’t matter, they are wrong. The ability to shift the focus in a culture matters is a big deal. It’s a big deal that the Occupy movement and the We Are the 99 Percent people have managed to achieve.

As for mobile devices that get wet and stop working, once trick is to get a container of uncooked rice. If you have an iPhone, bury it under the rice. If you have a Blackberry or some other device with a removable battery, remove the battery and any other removable parts and put them aside while you bury the device under the rice. Leave it there for a few hours (or overnight). The rice will draw the water away from the internals of the device and may allow it to recover. (Sometimes it does: other times, it will be too far gone). After you are, throw the rice in the garbage.