12 Witnesses

I’m at a family reunion at Heber Springs, AR. If you are looking for a good getaway, you should check out Lindsey’s Resort. They are a Christian family with a family run environment on the Little Red River, which is fed out of a dam, making the water temperature about 50 degrees. Native fish can’t really thrive in that cold temperature, so they stock the river with Rainbow Trout, and it’s good.

Anyway, here are some pictures from this morning. If you like these, you can check out my photoblog for more.

[Show as slideshow]

…or… what not to do. We can all relate to the Oregon officials that thought they had a good idea that turned out to have unexpected consequences.

Oh, by the way, this is verified true by snopes.com.

And you can visit the longstanding, low-tech website: The Infamous Exploding Whale.

Ok, if you’ve not heard of twitter, you need to, because it seems to be the new fad in online communication. Apparently it is streamlined blogging with one sentence updates of what you are doing throughout the day.

Now, before I rant, I usually like to clarify what I’m about to say by telling you what I am not saying, so that people don’t misunderstand. I am not about to say that twitter is evil or that people are foolish for using it. I am not about to say that it is not the future of blogging because it may very well be just that. I am not saying that my friends who twitter are no longer my friends or that they are inferior in anyway.

Having said all of that, let me tell you that if you are my friend and you twitter, I AM TALKING TO YOU!

Stop putting your twitter updates in your blog or rss feed to which I subscribe. If you want to tell the world that you are constipated or that you are having a bad hair day…week…life then fine. Frankly, I am skeptical that people want to know this about you, but… Who knows? There might be stalkers out there who have targeted you and you may very well enjoy helping them to plan their assault on you.

That is irrelevant to me. I care not one whit. I will gladly attend your funeral and will mourn appropriately and will be outraged at your untimely and gruesome death at the exactly appropriate level. I may even offer to adopt your children as a way to minister to your family.

I might just do ANYTHING in an attempt to dissuade you from telling me the minutiae of your existence in a constant flow of information.

I am interested in your thoughts on deeper things, so I put your blog in my feedreader, but to my surprise, I began to find the rudimentary goings on in the lives of people I once thought fascinating and it came in buckets of crushing and yet uninteresting information.

Let me simply say that I love you, but not that much.

My wife doesn’t even want to know that much of my life, and I am pretty confident that I don’t need to know that she put on lipstick at 9:14 am before a meeting. And we love each other a lot.

Now that I’ve said that, let me encourage you to twitter all you want, but if you don’t take those blasted updates out of your rss feed, I’ll take your rss feed out of my feedreader. I will still love you. In fact, maybe I’ll love you more from a distance. But I’ll know much less of what you think about real things and I will actually be the lesser for it.

So for the betterment of me, please, if you love me back, stop rss-ing your twitter. Or at least do it separately so that those who do like to stalk you can do it without my knowing as much as they do.

Have a good day.

Apparently the “Toronto Blessing” or the “Spirit of Holy Laughter” that Benny Hinn is said to keep in the folds of his jacket has its roots in India…

It’s a joke, people. Laugh a little.

From the Skit Guys:

I mentioned in Better Blogging: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that Search Engines will evaluate your host server’s ability to handle traffic and will not send you what you can not handle. Nevertheless, having your own site instead of having a .blogspot.com, .wordpress.com, .typepad.com, .squarespace.com or whatever other free blog site you might acquire will cause you to stand out to Search Engines better and is easier for most people to find. Remember, although you are super tech savvy, most of the world is still catching up. The vast majority of the world does not read blogs, but if you want them to find your content, you have to get the Search Engines to rank you high enough that you are found before they get tired of looking through all the links.

There are other reasons. One is financial. Believe it or not, typepad is not free, although your blog will show up as a subdomain on their site. For a couple of dollars more per month, you can have your own .com website. Granted, this is more than the other subdomain sites, which are free, but it is not overly expensive. I bought my server space for two years up front and haven’t had to worry about it since that time. It’s coming up again, and I’ll evaluate as the time draws near, but I use Bluehost and they are pretty good - constantly upgrading, etc.

By the way, I’ve given this before, but I’ll give you another link to “Who is Hosting This?” Go to the site and input the address of the site you wish to know about, and it will return the registered host of the domain in question. Just in case you want to know who your favorite blogger uses as a host.

As I mentioned, performance is an issue. I know that I just said that Bluehost is good with its servers. It is. But. Did you know there is more to server speed that you should consider?

Up until recently, the size, speed, operating system and uptime (time your servers were running properly, which equals the time your site functioned properly as well) were all that you had to consider when it came to choosing a host.

That was all I worried about when I signed on with Bluehost and all that I concerned myself with until I found this out: The scientists that actually invented the internet - no, not Al Gore, but the physicists at Cern - have actually already re-invented the internet.

Here’s the brief sketch and a link to the full story.

They invented the internet to store data that they were collecting as they attempted to record the splitting of atoms in the world’s largest supercollider. Well, the old internet has proven to be insufficient to handle the data, because, no matter how big and fast the computers they attempt to use to record everything, the massive amounts of data that get collected bottles up on phone lines that are not efficient, even for phone service. Thus, they have replaced the phoneline connections with a series of fiber optics called “The Grid.”

The Grid is 10,000 times faster than the typical BROADBAND connection. Think, the fastest connection you can get vs. instant. The only thing slowing you down now is your own computer. What’s this got to do with blogging? As technology advances, prices will come down. This will one day be affordable. Well, first it has to be available, then it will become affordable. It will happen a lot faster than the first internet, though. That’s what I think, anyway.

Finally, Layered Technologies offers a different type of grid. Although out of most people’s price range at $49/mo, LT handles your information by spreading it out over several “nodes” rather than piling all on one machine, which can only give your site so much time if it also happens to host one or more busy sites. Thus, the requests for your info gets shared over a system of servers rather than just one machine. That is also technology that is going to get cheaper as time goes by.

Heck, it’s already cheaper than a tank of gas, though that is not saying much.

For my beautiful and loving wife, the Math nerd.

[edit - Actually, my wife, said math nerd, checked him and he did miss two of the three digit numbers. It takes a math nerd to want to check the mathemagician. She says, while sitting next to me, “Accuracy is important in math.” Of course it is. That’s why she’s the best.

In this edition, a tool to keep your hands clean, a little girl’s power sander, 1950’s documentary of a dream trip to Disneyland (MUST WATCH), the most expensive bottled water (you thought gasoline was getting expensive…), writing 200,000 books ain’t that hard, ballroom dancing with dogs (not kidding), pachyderm painting, serious paintballers only, efficient freezer baggage, subdivision affordability with transportation factored in, table top biosphere, re-packaging your computer into a teddy bear, the new source of antibiotics: alligator blood (not kidding) and, finally, this week’s sign that the end is near: Mommy 2.0.

The Handler

This handy pocket tool/key chain keeps your hands off of filthy things, and has antibacterial coating as well. Germaphobes, this is for you!

The outrageous hello kitty Power sander

Well, it is what it says it is. A Hello Kitty power sander. Yikes.

Disneyland Dream

You’ve got to go watch this real live piece of Americana from the 1950’s. This Connecticut family documents the winning of a contest to go to the newly opened Disneyland in California. Fringe coats, different hats for the different areas of the park and a neighborhood tickertape parade to send them off in style.

Most Expensive Bottled Water

Need to drink water from a glacier? I hope you have some coin… Apparently this is all the rage among people with more money than sense.

LINK BY LINK; He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work)

Got writer’s block? Maybe you can borrow this guys computer program which will fill in the pieces for you after you give it the necessary information.

Dance, doggie, dance

No kidding, Youtube video of a dance with dogs as the partners. No kidding. Did I tell you I wasn’t kidding?

Elephant Painting

Youtube. Fascinating.

Paintball Turrett

Need to defend your fort? Watch your back while you snipe the enemy? You may be a little to serious about paintball, but this will help you do it. It is automatic.

Speed tip: Make individual portions in freezer bags

Freezer bag efficiency. This is actually a good idea.

How affordable is that subdivision?

Affordability Index

This set of links is to a story and tool, respectively, that will help you figure out what the real cost of a subdivision is when you factor in the cost of skyrocketing gasoline. If your city is like mine, the cheaper subdivisions are a long way away - and that means driving. How expensive is your home if you have to drive 25 miles to the office and then another 25 to get home?

Make your own Biosphere

For your desk as a conversation piece. Complete with shrimp and other fun, living things. Once you seal it, you never have to open it again.

Programmers, DIY Types Embrace Soft, Hackable Chumby

This computer is made to be taken apart and rehoused in whatever you want to put it in. Like a teddy bear.

Antibiotic Alligator: Promising proteins lurk in reptile blood

Thought that diseases were outsmarting our overuse of antibiotics? Apparently, there is a whole new reservoir of bacterial resistant proteins in the blood of alligators.

Mommy 2.0

This week’s sign that the end is near: A book that helps moms explain to kids why they are going to get plastic surgery.

In this issue: canned fast food, street shoot outs in the (suburban) hood, killer dolls (does Chuckie live?), interesting vids, spyglasses, you have to keep your junk mail, how to dial a phone, 3D Google Earth, High Tech ahead of its time, Wal-Mart exposed and a nice but not too bright dog.

Just in case of nuclear war, and you need a fast food fix: The Canned Cheeseburger

Apparently, Orange County Florida is the Wild West. (extra gooey: it happened as a guy dropped his kids off at school)

Could Elmo be possessed? Kid’s doll is making death threats…

You just gotta see what Adie Russell does with historical recordings.

Think Geek has some sunglasses that are also a 1.3 mega pixel camera. (extra gooey: they also have built in ear buds so you can still catch your tunes - could be used with the laderhosen. hmmm.)

If UMG sends you a promotional cd that you didn’t want or ask to receive and you throw it away, they claim you are breaking Federal Copyright Laws.

If you think my tech talks are rudimentary, wait until you see the ones your parents got.

Did you know you can “Flickrize” Google Earth?

Check out the working “Difference Engine” - a design for a massive mechanical calculator that was WAAAAAAAAYYYYYY before its time and never built by it’s designer. (A bit of a modern day DaVinci, it would seem.)

Mad at Wal-Mart for ruining the small town economy? Get your pennies together and share with your neighbors to buy their candid closed door meeting videos at about $250/hour plus fees for research and copies of pertinent video. (extra gooey: one vid has Sam Walton telling the Board of Directors that there were not enough women in management, circa 1988) [No wonder the IMBOT doesn't want their meetings recorded - Art]

Finally, if you’ve had a long week, take solace in the fact that you are smarter than this dog:

This isn’t my pic, but I thought it was hilarious. Apparently, technology has caught up with certain makers of Laderhosen, where they have installed iPod controls in the pants leg. Fun.

Check out the full story here:

IFA2007: Fingers-On with the MP3 Lederhosen and Hunting Jacket

Or you can catch a few of my pictures on my photoblog.