My favourite TV networks are PBS, Food Network, and Home and Garden. I watch a lot of reno shows, particularly Holmes on Homes (which has given me a permanent case of paranoia over ever hiring a contractor after seeing the messes he’s had to clean up.) But I’m one of those guys who can measure three times, cut once, and still get it wrong. Today we bought a new BBQ and it was truly a case of frustration putting it together.

What’s with the instructions that come with stuff you have to assemble? Well at least the English used wasn’t a translation of Japanese by a someone from China who studied it for a semester and studied English even less, I guess I ought to be grateful for that small mercy. However, you’d think they would notice during proofreading (one assumes they did proofread the directions before sending them to the printer)that the pictures they used were, shall we say, less than helpful. Case in point, when assembling the side burner there was a picture with a caption that stated, note the position of the holes. Only problem was, the photo was too faint, the holes did not show. I took a guess and got it right but still wasted a lot of time trying to decipher the photo. The manufacturer provided all the screws, bolts etc, all neatly separated, and labeled, in plastic bubbles on a piece of cardboard. Problem is to get at those items you had to rip the cardboard off and lost all that precious info (and why did they have to use six different sizes of screws - why not just one.) Par for the course I got to the last part - putting the hinges on the cover for the side burner and I did not have the right screws left, or for that matter even enough screws of the ones I did have left. Yup parts left over and no frikken idea of where they belong. Oh well, off to the hardware store tomorrow to get eight self tapping screws of the correct size (fortunately they do mention the sizes in the instructions.) A handyman I definitely am not

Technorati Tags: PBS, Food Network, Home and Garden, reno shows, Holmes on Homes, measure three times, cut once, handyman

This next one via Jeff

Technorati Tags: Honeydrippers, Sea of Love, music videos

Who’d a thunk it, this blog is 6 years old

Technorati Tags: 6 years old, drivel

For the masses reading this via an aggregator there’s a new poll on the site asking

What do you like best about this site

* Music Videos
* Political Drivel
* Science & Technology stuff
* Personal Drivel
* Something Else
* Can’t stand your site and don’t know why I’m even reading it

You can choose multiple selections. Pleae visit and let me know

If you enjoyed Trilok Gurtu’s drumming in the last video check out this one Pasha’s Love - John McLaughlin, Kai Ekhart and Trilok Gurtu

Technorati Tags: Trilok Gurtu, John McLaughlin, Kai Ekhart

Blow your mind - it doesn’t get any better than this. John McLaughlin, Al Dimeola and Paco De Lucia from one of my all time favourite albums Friday Night In San Francisco

Mediterranean Sundance

Technorati Tags: ohn McLaughlin, Al Dimeola, Paco De Lucia, Friday Night In San Francisco, Mediterranean Sundance

I love jazz in almost all of its forms and Oregon is one of my all time favourite groups

Waterwheel - enjoy

Technorati Tags: jazz, Oregon, Waterwheel

I’ve just put up a new blog for my wife Diane (Modified the Dalari Dark v1.01 theme by Andreas Viklund). For not being an artist at all I thought I did a pretty good job on the main graphic to replace the one that came with the theme - learned as few new tricks in Paint Shop Pro 11 doing it too Let me know what you think.

It will be a few days before she can get at her blog but do keep an eye on it over the next few weeks as I think she will have some interesting things to say. In the meanwhile go say Hi to her at http://www.soundvisions.ca and welcome her to the world of blogging

 

Sandy Oser - February 26, 2008

Wherever your spirit is be happy Sandy. I only knew you a short time but I loved every minute of it. You were so important to your niece Diane and she misses you dearly already.

I wish I had been better at maths when in school. If I had been I’m certain my life and career path would have been much different. I don’t doubt for a second that I would have gone on to a career in the sciences if that had been the case. Science and technology just plain fascinates me. This morning reading this article IBM calculates the force it takes to move atoms, all I could think of was is that not just too cool or what

It is hard for us, (and especially those of us who are “getting on” in years, whose formative and majority of adult life were in pre-personal computer days ) to grok the implications, never mind the scope, of the information explosion going on around us. Consider this small factoid. In 2006 humans created approximately 161 EB (ExaByte - or 10¹⁸ in decimal or 10⁶⁰ in binary, which translates as one quintillion,1,000,000,000,000,000,000, bytes, or 1024 PetaBytes where 1 PetaByte equals 1024Terabytes and where one TeraByte is 1024 GigaBytes to bring it down to a scale you may be familiar with ) of data. That is about 3 million times the amount of information in all the books ever written. That’s one frikken huge amount of data no matter how you look at it.

The logarithmic increase in knowledge has made it impossible for anyone to be a generalist anymore. Indeed it is getting so large that you can’t really be a generalist in a particular major category of science anymore, like biology, physics, chemistry etc. as there is just too much happening in any one field to stay on top of it, constant drilling down to ever more specialized sub-fields is required to stay current.

Dealing with this much data requires huge amounts of computing resources and is quickly becoming responsible for no small amount of green house gases. Currently the fastest computers in the world are supercompter mainframes working at teraflop speeds (flop=floating point operations per second) which is one trillion flops per second. IBM and others expect to reach Petaflop speeds in the near future and groundwork is now being laid for Exaflop computers. The research being done on pushing atoms around will no doubt play a part in that as it is directly tied to reducing transistor size and therefore the speed at which calculations can be done.

All very cool stuff and I wish I had a clue about it

• Castro Resigns: I have to say this makes me feel old now. I remember when he came into power - I was 10 at the time and saw quite a bit on TV
• Cross-Site Request Forgery: A flaw that is going to let a lot of nasty pricks off if this becomes too well known to smart defense attorneys.
• Arthur Schlesinger and the Willing Executioners of Democracy: A fascinating look at the morality, or rather lack thereof, behind the man and those he served. Reminded me of The Fog of War the portrait of Robert McNamara
• Bottlerama: remembering a place I visited several times as a kid. (here’s another I remember well and is quite close to where I now live)
• Wag The Finger: A good expose on how the media distorts the facts.
• Space Wars - Coming to the Sky Near You?:“A recent shift in U.S. military strategy and provocative actions by china threaten to ignite a new arms race in space. But would placing weapons in space be in anyone’s national interest?”

Do any of you know how FeedBurner counts RSS/Atom downloads? What I mean is, if I have my FeedDemon client (or any other RSS/Atom client) poll a feed at FeedBurner more than once in a day will FeedBurner only count it once or will it count is each time it polls?

I ask because I find it curious that FeedBurner tells me that between 70 and 115 times a day my feed is downloaded but I usually only get 10 to 20 people showing up on the site (or at least 10 to 20 who are not blocking the Sitemeter javascript counter). So are there only 10 to 20 people who read this site in any format or are there 70 to 115 who read it in various formats and differing ones come here in “person” at differing times. (Gad I hope it’s the latter ;))

Where do you stand on the political scale? It’s been a few years since I last took this test. It looks like I’ve moved a bit further to the left since then.

The Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: -8.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.41

No surprises here really but it’s interesting to view the US Presidential candidates mapped in a similar fashion, based on their policy speeches, platforms, scrutiny of public statements, manifestos, interviews and voting records

hat tip to Norm

Technorati Tags: political scale, test, The Political Compass, Left, Right, Libertarian, Authoritarian

Back in September ‘07 I asked if anyone could spare me a copy of Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus. Two days ago I received a copy from fellow blogger Jon Husband of Wirearchy. Thanks Jon!

Now, it’s going to take me a few months to read this as there’s a lot of bad health shit going on here that I ain’t going to talk about but when I’m done I’ll send it along to some other deserving blogger so if that’s you do let me know. If you can afford to go out and buy it then please do, I’m sure Joe could do with the extra funds to spread around Belize, If, like me, you can’t then so much the better, you’re who I want to forward it to. Let me know.