She Ate All the Gherkins

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The UK’s Mark Steel has a particularly humorous piece on Hillary’s problems with accidentally mis-speaking and making strange claims, because she says so many words:

Her next round of soft-focus adverts will probably feature her soothingly saying, “My fellow Americans, I drank a pint of walrus milk once for a bet. I speak fluent Eskimo. I once ate all the gherkins in Belgium. My brother’s got a yak in his loft. I fell asleep on a night bus once and woke up in Munich, and had to get a lift back on a camel. I used to live on an iceberg. I’ve got a waffle-maker that works underwater.”

Okay, so maybe it’s overly critical of her. But I can’t help but chuckle as I read it.

A Little Competition ;)

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title=”Colored Amp by n1zyy, on Flickr”>Colored Amp

Okay, so I much prefer Andrew’s. But I woke up this morning and Kyle’s guitar amp was the first thing I saw. “That’d make a good photo,” I thought.

I don’t know what to make of it, though. I always envisioned it as something that would be a good picture at a concert, lit by various stage lighting. In this case, it was lit by light coming in through the window, and the shot would essentially have been black and white.

So I wonder what to make of my modifications. If I told you that I set up two slave flashes, one with a blue gel over it, and one with a red filter over it, and positioned them on opposite sides of the amp, you’d think I was a really advanced photographer, going to great lengths to create a good shot. But I’m a college student with no external flash, much less two radio slaves with colored gels I can slip in. So I used Photoshop to add in some colored lighting effects, and dialed the opacity down to make it more subtle. I also applied some very “broad” sharpening, because the “Jay” was initially thrown too far out of focus. It’s still not nearly as good as I’d like, but the outline’s better.

So the net result, I think, is that it conceivably looks like a shot taken at a concert, or something else interesting, versus something taken of my roommate’s guitar amp on the floor on a sunny morning. But part of me thinks it’s “wrong” to go that far in Photoshop.

Naming

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Fark.com reports that a group of people in San Francisco have started a petition to, well… I’ll quote them.

Kennedy had a stadium named after him. Reagan has an airport. Where will George W. Bush have his name emblazoned? In San Francisco, it looks like that honor will go to a sewage plant.

Of course, my understanding is that this is just something one group is proposing, versus a city initiative.

Lightning

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A cool map of lightning frequency over time across the globe. And a live version for the U.S. Heck, a zoomed-in version on the Northeast for the past 60 minutes. It turns out that you can even buy a small Lightning Detector to map local lightning strikes on your PC. It listens for the signature static crashes from lightning, sometimes called sferics (short for atmospheric noise), much like you can hear on an AM radio during a storm. You can even listen to streaming audio from NASA‘s (Alabama) VLF receiver.

Oh my!

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It seems that the strong wind today, April 1st, has caused this server to serve posts with some of the letters upside down! We are aware of the problem and looking into it. Expect it to be resolved around the conclusion of April Fools Day. In the interim, you can click through to the actual post, which isn’t affected by this strange bug.

Argh!

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All of a sudden my Treo 650 locks up hard when I try to enable Bluetooth. You have to do a hard reset (wiping all data) to get the phone feature to work again. I was able to back it up before doing this, but… What gives? I can live without Bluetooth, but I kind of like it, when, you know, all of the phone’s features work.

Steve, is this a sign?

Sit in the Corner

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I started a blog post about this, but it talked about terabytes NASs, HDTV DVRs, VoIP / SIP, LDAP, DNS caches, NTP strata, and a bunch of acronyms.

So instead I’ll be incredibly precise. This PC, seemingly sold only at Walmart, is really cool. It’s not that fast. Its specs are bad any way you look at them. Unless you look at power consumption. 20 Watts peak power, 2 Watts average. By comparison, my desktop machine has a 300 Watt power supply. For someone who wants to set up an always-on Linux server, this thing is screaming your name. I’m strongly attracted to the idea of setting this thing up with handful of 500 GB drives, to build a network fileserver with a terabyte or two of capacity. And doing software RAID across them. (I’m fairly certain that the hard drives would draw more power than the whole system… Although you could set up power-saving features, since a home fileserver could surely power down the drives periodically.)

There’s also a cheaper one that seems to be the same, except it comes with 512 MB RAM instead of a gig, and comes with gOS instead of Vista. I’m dying to play with OpenFiler, a Linux-based “appliance” software package for some superb fileserver tools.

Sheesh

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Now that Comcast has vowed to quit arbitrarily blocking services on their Internet service, they’ve decided to shift the degraded quality to their HD offerings. This article talks a bit about how Comcast is running some heavy compression to fit more HD channels into finite bandwidth, but it has lots of words. So check out some pictures of screen captures of identical footage from FiOS versus Comcast. Slashdot has the story here.

ShotSpotter

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Are you familiar with the Shotspotter system? I’d seen it on a National Geographic TV show, and remembered in the back of my head reading about it being deployed in parts of Boston. It’s actually very cool how it works — it essentially has a big array of microphones, and when it “hears” a gunshot, it’ll compare the exact time of arrival of the sound at each location to triangulate a position, which then pops up on a dispatcher’s screen.

So I’m listening to Boston PD on the radio, and maybe five minutes ago the dispatcher called out for a reading on the ShotSpotter system. “Five, six, seven, looks like eight shots fired.” She figured out the location from the map (apparently, an alley), and started a couple cars. In maybe 60 seconds an officer was on the scene, reported a car leaving, and had confirmed that shots were fired with a witness.

About a minute later, the dispatcher said that they had received a 911 call for shots fired from the same location. (Which means that they had an officer arriving on scene by the time the call came in!) They’ve just pulled over a possible suspect, and another officer found the shell casings. Detectives are en route now for forensics processing.

I’ve got to say, this seems like a pretty impressive system.

Write It Out

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I’ve seen this suggested before, but only half-believed it.

When you’re stumped by a question, write it out. We’re hosting a video game tournament tomorrow, and I was thinking about scoring. I got stumped by some technical problems with the way the bracket would work.

So I decided to burn my weekly Ask MetaFilter question. Except, three-quarters of the way through writing out the question (in great detail), I realized exactly how you solve the problem.

The thing is, if I sat here and tried sketching out how the bracketing would work, I never would gotten it. For some reason, writing it as a question caused me to be able to answer my own question, in a way that starting at it didn’t.

Seriously, try it next time you come across a tough question. It obviously doesn’t work 100% of the time (“How many escalators are in Wyoming?”) But something about writing it out causes the mind to look at it differently. And sometimes that’ll solve your problem!

Also, an Excel hint… How do you do “Best 2 out of 3?” in Excel? There’s no native function to do it. And if you asked me to write code, I’d overthink it and write some contrived thing that would take the best x of y items. But let’s say that cells A3, A4, and A5 (thus A3:A5) contain the three scores, and you want the best (highest) two of the three. =SUM(A3:A5) - MIN(A3:A5) does it. Best two out of three is the same as “All of them, discarding the lowest.” This doesn’t scale: if you wanted the best six out of eight, it’d be much harder to compute. But here, you’re just dropping the lowest.