To my family, friends, blog readers and everyone else: Happy Thanksgiving. I just lost at Scrabble, but it appears that lunch/dinner will be ready in about 30 minutes.
Category Archives: News
Eating Humble Pie, Er Sandwich
Yesterday at lunch I regurgitated some food trivia about the Sandwich. This simple staple was named after the Earl of Sandwich who would not quit playing cards to eat. He ordered his servant to bring him so meat between two pieces of bread. Thus he could hold his cards in one hand and his food in the other. This idea caught on with the other players who wanted what ‘Sandwich’ was having. Thus, the term was born. I told this brief story and got some funky looks from my sister-in-laws. What use was this bit of trivia?
About 32 hours later it became quite handy as the Cranium game we were playing asked about just this thing. The oposing team won and the girls learned that the trivia I store in my brain, spew out of my mouth, and make them listen to… can be useful for something. If I hadn’t have told that story the other team would most likely have gotten it, but since I had already shared it they were certain. Drat!
A Fine Car Indeed
Last night I went to pick up the Peer family from the airport. We own a green Honda Civic 4 door. It seats five. Five small people. Five small anorexic people. Five small anorexic people who do not have luggage. Five small anorexic people without five pieces of large luggage and some backpacks.
Our Honda civic is too small for carrying that many people. We had luggage on laps, I think we were dragging something off the bumper as well. I think we’re going to go get ourselves into debt for a mini van on Black Friday 😉 Just kidding. However, our fine car gets great gas mileage. It gets the good gas mileage through the use of a special turbo charged lawn mower engine. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s in there because if it was any less powerful with 5 anorexic small people with no luggage it would not go.
This is in no way a complaint about Hondas. They’re great cars. But you have to use the car for the right purpose. But you know what they say: When you’re a Hammer everything looks like a Vanilla Ice.
Happy Anniversary Mom & Dad!
My Mom and Dad have been married 32 years as of today. I’ve been allive for 28 of those and I can say that through the think and thin they’ve been madly in love and its been a great example. Of course they also have their faults, too: like not buying me a recording studio ;)**
** that’s a joke, just in case you didn’t get that.
CNN Police
If you read part of this carefully crafted article “CNN.com – Police: Ludwig’s computers hold crime plans” you’ll note that there’s a building up of the story, there’s a climax that leads you to believe that the computer held exact plans… and then… then… they say, “The alleged plot was never carried out.”
Why can’t CNN, and other news agencies present the news about things like this:
The computer contained alleged plots that have not been discovered to have been carried out…
That would have been so much more forthright and useful. Instead I get to think one thing with a switcheroo ending. On top of that if people only make it through part of the article, which happens when people skim, they get only partial information because the truth was not put in the beginning of the article.
I’m not suggesting that what this teenager did was in anyway validated due to poor reporting, but I will say that poor reporting is an unpayable carreer, if I wanted to read bad news articles… I’d read some of the rumor blogs.
14 GB and Still Not Satisfied
Yesterday I finished importing my MP3s into my computer. I have been through this process before but had to do it again. I ripped them at 128 kilobits per second so that they’re of decent quality but do not take up my entire hard drive. Its over 8 days of MP3s. What on earth am I doing with this much music, and why don’t I have more? I’m going to have to record some of my own music into this array of music so that I can be inspired to write more (because my own stuff will eventually prompt me to write more, it always does).
I can understand why people have 60GB iPods though, it would be easy to fill them up.
Currently listening to Poor Old Lu, Cruciality
Happy Birthday, Uncle Eric
Happy Birthday to my uncle Eric (My middle name is his first name) who today turns $$ years old. My Uncle has taught me many, many things in this life, including a few goofy jokes, a lot of theology and how to have only girls. OK, not the last part, he has three beautiful girls, they’re just older than mine. He’s an elder (co-pastor for those of you outside of the Christianese circle) at a church in Northern California where I grew up part of my life. I’d get more biographical, but you can read more here.
Umbilicus Offus
Evie’s umbilicus fell off yesterday at some point in time (in a disgusting side note: we have no clue where it went…yet). She’s now a rather ‘normal’ looking baby. Except by ‘normal’ I mean cutest little girl in her age bracket (apologies to any other girls in this age bracket, I’m biased). I’ve got more pictures to post that I plan on posting later today.
Relax, its an Apple
Evie was crying this evening, but she stopped when I told her that the laptop on my lap was an Apple. She’s so cute and already knows a good OS when she sees one.
Attention Data
Nick Bradbury has written about attention data on his blog several times. What I see as an interesting use of attention data (that fortunately costs you some money. Yes, fortunately. You get 10 hours free to try it out.) is the site Pandora.com. While it may sound like you would be opening up a world of trouble by clicking on that link, I challenge you to check it out. You can type in artist names and Pandora will then start selecting songs that might fit your taste. What’s interesting is that you can rate the songs (click on the song in the player and choose from the popup whether or not you like it) and then they are able to take a list of songs that you’ve liked and can then compile a list of songs that you might like based on your attention data. I am amazed at the value of this sort of attention data.
Pandora’s musical evaluation of the songs is based on a complicated grid of characteristics that basically rank each song by each artist that has been rated by their group of music evaluators by various qualities so that if you’re a big fan of certain songs with various characteristics you’ll most likely get other songs with similar characteristics. Other bands with songs that sound similar will be brought in so that you can be introduced to new music. Sure, you could listen to the radio and hope that the record labels happen to be promoting the next thing that isn’t just a cookie cutter cut out of other music but this is quite amazingly good at nailing my musical preferences. As a former music department manager I can attest to the challenge of doing this manually. A database of music is just amazing in this context.
So, you pay them to use your attention data to be exposed to quality (ok, that’s a bit subjective) music, and then they learn from you to help play what you like but also they can take your attention data and discover what various tastes are and can give even better suggestions to other users.
Brilliant.
Thanks to Robin for pointing me to Pandora.