Tag Archive for: general

Week in Review

From my travels on the web last week.

Are you doing a lot of research on the web? Do you want a very handy tool to help you annotate your research? Scrapbook is a Firefox extension that allows you to save Web pages to your local machine and manage the collection.

The current stock market does not bother this gunslinger.

And, if his perspective doesn’t help calm your concerns about the market, this chart might.

Fast Company’s most innovative business people of 2007. Some interesting names. And some surprising names. The slideshow can be found here.

A friend of mine finds himself on Wikipedia. It happens.

How a geek gets ready for the end of the world.

Want to start getting things done? Start here.

Talk about some aggressive goals for a CIO. Randy Mott, currently with HP, is planning to consolidate 85 HP data centers worldwide down to six in the United States; 6,000 legacy applications down to 1,500; 1,240 IT projects down to 700; and 19,000 internal IT and contract workers down to 8,000. He is also looking to flip the ratio of IT workers supporting old applications versus those working on new apps from 70%-30% to 20%-80%, and increase the percent of IT projects being delivered on time from 81% to 98%. And all this in just three years. Note to self: check back in three years.

Happy Day

I came down with an ear infection earlier this month that played havoc with my hearing for a couple of weeks.

I thought that it had cleared up earlier this week but on Monday I was back in the world of intense pressure in my inner ear. And some pretty dramatic hearing loss.

I could not hear anything below 349 Hz in my right ear!

Now I should know better. I should have remained positive and optimistic. That was one of my resolutions for the New Year. However, after a couple of weeks of this maddening condition, I became quite negative and pessimistic. Stroke one resolution down.

Perhaps it was time to head over to the doctor and get this thing checked out. Late Monday evening, the pressure in my inner ear subsided.

I just finished testing my hearing and not only can I hear fine below 349 Hz, I can detect equal pitch on both ears and relatively similar levels of amplitude. In other words, back to normal.

This makes me very, very happy.

The Week in Review

From my travels on the web last week.

The corporate cage. An interesting post on the joys of spending your days in a cubicle maze.

Looks like some folks I know are going to try a social lending business in Canada. Social lending matches borrowers with lenders. Usually small amounts of money. Interesting to see whether Canadians will embrace this type of business.

Dave Ramsey, author and host of a popular radio program in the United States, has an interesting program for churches. He offers Financial Peace University for churches to help families restore order to their personal finances. According to Ramsey, 7 out of 10 families live paycheque to paycheque and they spend more than they make courtesy of their credit cards. I did not notice a Canadian version.

Some people have obsessive compulsive disorders. Others measure non-modal peaks and nulls. If you like to read about these acoustic monsters, the text version is here. If you hate reading and prefer to watch then this page has a number of videos. Scroll down for the video on non-modal peaks and nulls. Balloons were used to mark the nulls. And, from what I understand, no balloons were harmed in the making of the video.

Okay. I have been watching the sixth season of 24. Pretty much every night. One or two episodes. And I have a question. Is it me, or does the scar on Jack Bauer’s hand keep changing shape and location? Google could not help me.

With Warner jumping over to Blu-ray, five of seven major studios are now exclusive to that format. Right now it looks like Blu-ray will win the format war. A war that should never have started in the first place.

With all of the discussion on the environment and pollution in our media, I have yet to see this list highlighted. And there is also the dirty thirty. I wonder where Canada sits in relation to these lists?

Conflict Management

One of the gifts that I did receive over Christmas was Season 6 of 24 on DVD. My wife and I started watching it last night. One or two episodes an evening now until we get through all of the episodes. To all of my friends: I won’t see you for a few weeks.

Jack has an interesting approach to managing conflict. In the first episode, Jack is being tortured by one of his captors. His captor has been making some pretty good progress with some pretty nasty instruments. The poke in the back looked particularly painful to me.

The captor is just about to hack off one of Jack’s fingers when he gets interrupted by an urgent telephone call. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? A pleasant morning of brutal torture has to be put on hold.

The captor and the guards leave the room. Jack, for whatever reason, is hooked up to a heart monitor. He pulls it off which creates a no pulse alert. One of the guards comes back into the room to check things out. But he gets a bit too close to Jack.

Jack kills him using a centuries old technique first demonstrated by vampires. Yes, indeed. Jack kills the guard by biting through the poor fellow’s jugular vein.

Messy work, this counter-terrorism thing.

Jack

Houston We Have A Problem Again

A couple of days back, I posted a video here. And a few of you told me that your browser had some trouble with the clip. I put it up on YouTube so that trouble should be gone.

And here is another clip to make up for the trouble. Well. Someone has to be good at this.

Week in Review

From my travels on the web over the Christmas break.

Top ten tips for getting noticed on Flickr. Some people apparently care about these types of things.

Annoying and bothersome is what I call it. Some might call it an ear infection.

Mars Hill, a growing church in Seattle, has hit the news. And not in a good way. The saga continues here, here and here.

The emergent church is a form of paganism. That assumes, of course, that people have heard about the emergent church. Anyone?

Doug Pagitt is apparently one of the spokespeople for the emergent movement. His well reasoned response to the charge of universalism can be found here. Too much. Just too much. To give you a feel for the discussion, you can hear his views as they were broadcast here and here. Pagitt disagrees with the dualistic-Platonic understanding of the cosmos and denies heaven as a real place.

Amazing. In a league of its own. And it was on my Christmas list.

An interesting online hearing test on equal loudness contours.

This is what I use for processing HDR images. It can be used to create images like this.

Almost ran out of storage for my photos. Time for another 500GB G-Drive.

Slowest update ever. Although, since Time Machine is doing a fine job backing up two disks, local hard drive and photography archive external drive, I am not in that much of a rush.

Happy New Year

Welcome to 2008. And many thanks to those of you who drop by this blog.

I was going back through my photos and I found a few band shots. Thought you might like to see them.

Beatles and me

Rolling stones and me

Christmas Morning

I was up before everyone else this morning and I thought I would share a couple of pictures from the Cleaver household. This set of photos is before the gifts are brought out from under the tree. My wife does an amazing job of setting up the stockings and wrapping all of the gifts.

My contribution is a small development project that lives under the second Christmas tree in the foyer.

I think I hear the kids rustling so time for me to sign off for today.

Christmas Day 1

Christmas Day 2

Christmas Day 3