Regular Life

The Internet is making more people feel like Charlie Brown than ever before. Or maybe it’s just me.

Remember when Charlie would go to his mailbox hoping to find a letter, only to be disappointed by an empty box?

It happens to me when I check my Gmail, then my Yahoo! Mail, and then my FaceBook, and then my Twitter. I’m setting myself up just like that world-renowned blockhead.

At least I don’t have to go all the way outside to check. And, because they aren’t limited to delivery once a day, I can be disappointed several times a day, or, heck, several times an hour!

Do I check only after I have written something that requires or suggests a reply? No. Does that change my hope that I might see a number in parentheses beside my Inbox indicating there is something new? No.

Notification of comments on my blog posts go to Gmail. Alerts to activity on FaceBook go to Yahoo!, what I like to call my “online forms” account. Apparently I felt I could trust my blog (run by me) more than I could FB.

Since switching from our minitower PC to a used laptop I bought from Alvis, I rarely use my home e-mail account. That’s mostly because I don’t remember the password for AT&T’s outgoing mail server. At least I’m sparing myself a little disappointment there.

In fact, I just now checked it, and all but about four of the 140 new e-mails are from me. I use that account to forward myself links that I receive but can’t view at work. Only an old friend from high school and a few folks who are mistaking me for a realtor use that one.

I tell myself that it is not a letdown if I receive nothing new, but I’m sure on some level the fruitless checking is pecking away at me.

If Charlie Brown had this many mailboxes, message boards, and social networking sites, and could check them as many times a day as he wanted, would he go insane? How often do you check?

 
I fly through the magic of motion detection photography. (click to enlarge)

 
Tuesday evening, my wife was in bed sick and I had just put our son to bed.

Then I read a story about some MIT students who sent a point-and-shoot camera 18 miles up, via a weather balloon, where it took photos showing the black of space and the Earth’s curvature, then plummeted safely back to earth inside its Styrofoam cooler. They found it by tracking the included prepaid mobile phone’s last GPS coordinates before it buried into the ground. Total cost: $148.

This wasn’t the first time such an experiment was done, but something about their efforts caught my eye — they used a Canon camera with a hack applied to it. Apparently you just load a program on your SD card, add a few user-written scripts, insert the card back into the camera, and off you go.

As a Canon point-and-shoot owner, I needed some of that.

For free, I “upgraded” my $130 camera so that it now uses motion detection, time lapse, and many other features to take pictures and video. The customizations and the granularity of the controls are mind-boggling.

There’s even a detection script designed to capture lightning as it strikes. That’s fast.

If it helps you relate better, a musician named Arman Bohn used the hack for stop-motion animation in his “Combat” music video. The music is fun to listen to, as are the other songs on his CD.

Now, I just have to figure out how best to use my camera’s new capabilities. I can’t figure out whether I want money or power.

I know… both!. Muwahahahahaha!

Qatar has replaced child camel jockeys, sometimes no older than four years, with robots. In what began as an effort to appease human rights groups, in fact, the United Arab Emirates also plans to deploy the mechanical riders in place of what advocates consider slaves.

At least one former child jockey, now reduced to the position of stable hand, seemed to be unhappy about this arrangement. I guess when you’re a child you can’t have it both ways — protected and independent at the same time.

The use of a robot jockey still requires a person handling a remote control (and following around the track in an SUV, from what I understand). I have to wonder if the $5500 cost of each robot jockey, and the subsequent maintenance of same, is cheaper than hiring a small adult? Surely in such a country they wouldn’t have to pay a real person very much.

I have no love for horse racing, but it will be interesting to see whether these ‘bots begin riding thoroughbreds (or, in a test run, quarter horses).

National Geographic reported robot camel jockeys as news on Monday because they were first used in competition over the weekend.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0715_050715_robot_jockey.html

The robots were covered by Wired online back in 2005:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/camel.html

Of course, I found out about them from Tuesday’s page of my Uncle John’s Big Bathroom Reader Page-a-Day Calendar. How coincidental is that timing with the robots’ first use in Qatar?

Note: I played with different blog themes over the weekend, and haven’t quite found one that I like yet. I still like the idea of a banner at the top, but I like drop-down menus, too. I just haven’t quite found one that I can slap into place that does all that without having to spend lots of time tweaking the files.

Some may remember the Liger from Napoleon Dynamite. It is the animal that results from the combination of a lion and a tiger, and it is real. So are the Zonkey, the Zorse, and the Pizzly. Don’t believe it? See the link below.

http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200708/hybrid-animals-1.html

For years I believed that the nectarine is a hybrid of the peach and the plum. The smooth skin came from the plum, while the rest was peach-like. Certainly, there are real hybrid fruits — Orangelo, Tangelo — but on this one, I was wrong.

Researching how long humans have cultivated hybrids, I stumbled across a thread featuring not-so-real fruit and vegetable hybrids. My favorites are the limenut and the pearkin. Find what you like here:
http://www.freakingnews.com/Hybrid-fruits-and-vegetables-Pictures–1079.asp

Just remember, you can lead a Zorse to water, but you Canta-banana.

Considering the latest local news in swine flu, it might be a good thing that we’re set up to videoconference with the folks who are supposed to fly into Dallas to come visit us at the end of May. I’m also glad that it’s possible to do my job from home if needed. Were I really in a panic mode, I would say that I’m glad our family has a good place we can join them in complete seclusion from Society.

Although I have read a lot about swine flu and why a virus that jumps species can be much more dangerous than a native germ, I’m nowhere near that paranoid yet.

It’s just that, see, the Fort Worth schools announced Wednesday night that they are sending students home until May 11, at the soonest. Does this mean that one confirmed case at a middle school is enough for any school district to close, or that the Tarrant County Health Department, the parents, and the school board are particularly prone to overreacting to sensational media reports?

The city of Forth Worth had more than a half a million residents in the 2000 US Census. I have to think that with 31% of the population at age 19 or below, there are an awful lot of parents wondering what in the world they’re going to do with their children for the next eight school days. You see, Tarrant County Health officials also advised them not to send their children to daycare or any other group care facility.

Now, on to the post I had written before we heard that jaw-dropper. Notice what a different tone the first sentence takes on in light of that.

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Thursday’s post and comments got me thinking again about a favorite topic.

I am fascinated by the spread of jokes, stories, terminology, and other information that become ubiquitous through word of mouth. I also wonder how much different it will be for my generation’s children than it was for us. It will not be strange for a child in Connecticut to know a joke or colloquialism started by an Okie from Muskogee.

This isn’t always a good thing.

I grew up in Arkansas, but it was while visiting Kansas that I first heard the following song:

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Call this a glass half empty observation if you must, but I believe that social networking sites (i.e., Facebook) have killed much of the fun of class reunions.

Before all that, what’s the one thing that everybody knew about everybody else at a high school class reunion? Their age. Regardless of the level of contact you had maintained throughout the years, you knew before you arrived that all of you were approaching 30, 40, 50, 60, or some other number divisible by 10. Some have reunions more often than that, but the concept is the same.

It is a lot easier now to know more than a person’s age before the family-friendly midday potluck lunch. The Internet is so much more pervasive now than it was in 1999 that nearly everyone has their own page, albeit one designed by Facebook or MySpace and subject to the complex user agreements therein. The number of digital cameras also has increased dramatically since then. Pictures of kids and other family members are easy to share with only your group of friends or that stranger in the white van.

All of this has eliminated much of the mystery of class reunions. We already know who moved away, who has eaten too many Bloomin’ Onions, and how many (if any) kids they have. If you’re diligent, you can know what they eat for breakfast, what time they work out, and whether or not their cat is shedding.

What’s left to talk about at the reunion? I’m hoping that the few holdouts who aren’t online will be fascinating enough to keep us all engaged. Q: What made you decide to have an extra nose installed? A: You stink. Get away from me.

I volunteered to put together a DVD slideshow of pics from the past to show at the reunion. This poses a challenge because classmates will have to scan in the photos before they can send them to me. If only digital cameras had been around back then, this task would be a whole lot easier. As a backup plan, I could go to each person’s Facebook albums and go crazy with the right-click, Save As, and then put the results together for a “what are they doing now” slideshow. But that might be creepy because I don’t really know their families.

As of right now, the show will feature lots of pictures of me and my small group of friends, many of whom weren’t in our class. That is, if I ever get around to scanning in my photos. The Dr. Pepper fights won’t mean much to those of you who weren’t there. Sorry.

Despite all of this electronic communication, personal interaction still counts for something. I suspect that after the reunion, Facebook friends lists will again change. Some adds, some subtractions.

I created a web site for our 10-year reunion, and used pictures that a few other people shared. I suspect very few people actually saw it, but it was fun. If you weren’t there and didn’t visit the site, then you’ll never know why we had to hold the reunion at a different site this time. Now, scan in those photos and send them along. The more embarrassing, the better!

The title for this one popped into my head and I found it funny. A Google search of that phrase, in quotes, came up with one result.

I do that occasionally when I wonder whether a thought was original. I say as long as you didn’t know it existed before, it’s your own. The Internet makes it easy to find out whether it’s already been made public before you go claiming you are a great inventor or a coiner of clever witticisms. God forbid you should find out that a pun you came up with in the shower or suppressed in a meeting wasn’t truly original.

Moral to the story? Don’t Google it. If you like it, just feel good and go on about your daily life.

There are many great, free programs I use in Windows. I thought some of you might like to know what they are. Here comes the corny intro paragraph.

When the software included with your computer just isn’t quite enough, and you don’t want to buy something off the shelf, or if economic times have knocked new software purchases off your spending list, then these products could prove especially useful.

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I needed someone to pinch me. It was a man’s dream.

Driving back from the family holidays, I heard my wife say, “You know, I’m really getting tired of looking at that big, bulky TV in the living room. I like the nice, thin ones that my friends have.”

I nearly wrecked the van.

After we got home we didn’t discuss it again for a while. I didn’t take any action because I didn’t really believe it was a possibility. When we finally did take action, we wasted a lot of effort that involved much drilling. Let’s start in early February.

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