Won at Scabble with new rules. Only used one proper noun: Roxy. The new rules are really a take ‘em if you want ‘em. It is really a distraction and not that helpful while it raises a huge number of potential challenges. Rapper names should be illegal. I credit the high score to eating a pound of bacon beforehand.
Bush told us after 9/11 to shop.
Obama told us after the oil spill to keep trusting BP.
I recently found out I was an accidental owner of roughly $500 of Apple stock. This is less than if all Apple stock were equally divided among everybody in America. We (stockholders) only let crazy Steve Jobs back in because he brings life-force to Apple. We still demand huge profit; which is why Apple doesn’t release anything it doesn’t make ~30% profit on and also why they just passed (tied) Microsoft in market capitalization (company value).
Dropbox is an amazing service that runs on your computers to securely backup and sync up to 2 GB of files for free. You can also share files between people, host simple websites, and access all of this through their website – even if you delete or update the file!
The coolest thing is creating a custom home page for yourself. My custom homepage features a NOAA weather graph and a custom Google search. The weather graph is linked to the image that NOAA maintains you can get by: going to http://www.noaa.gov/, search for your zip-code in the forecast box in the left column, scroll to the bottom on that page and look for “hourly weather graph” in the table on the bottom right, customize, and copy link. The custom Google search is obtainable here for free. My HTML code is here.
I have ideas how to fix things:
Option 1 — Straw and Baggie — Stick a suction tube twenty feet above the pipe, put a multi-layer kevlar (high tensile strength) bag around the pipe that has a hole to the suction pipe that will suck up the oil. It may seem crazy, but just shoving assorted scientifically-specified debris sounds no better.
Option 2 – Schwarzenegger – Use chemicals to make the area ice cold and freeze the water, oil, and those damn robots. This will take a ton of chemicals and may snap the pipe through thermal strain, but could give time to work on the device.
Option 3 — Operation ‘merica — Blow up the ground underneath. Hopefully when the sediment settles (what it does best) it will plug the hole.
Option 4 — Hot Potato — Plug the hole with the Irish, super-heated Irish. A modest proposal.
Option 5 — Ira_ — Invade the pipe under false pretenses to obtain oil.
Option 6 — Pray — God made the pipeline do that and clearly wants to punish us for thinking about regulating the industry. Just let it be.
Option 7 — Power Negotiate — Plug the hole with the children of BP executives until it gets fixed. They genetically have no souls anyway.
Option 8 — Ivory Tower — Get more professors on the problem because everybody knows they are great at solving real world problems under time constraints.
Option 9 — Beck — Get Glenn Beck to reason through on a blackboard that is really a matter of the ocean retreating from American values and not the oil gushing out that is the problem.
Option 10 — Dispersant — Trust the oil companies to not just use hazardous dispersant to make the surface spills go away so it doesn’t look as bad that they were using unsafe practices against the advise employees to squeeze every penny out of the Earth. This thing is going to be the great Hinckley Fire of this century. The fire burned several towns to the ground in 1894, killed the man who shot John Wilkes Booth (read crazy wikipedia article), and lead to the expansion of regulation.
I have been back a week and have done nothing. Nothing at all. Only today did I plug in my two hand-crafted desktops to find out both suffer from some undiagnosable problem. I bought a subwoofer that is 10 inches, not 1o centimeters: shaking the neighbor, not just the house. Otherwise I’ve been fulfilling my innate physical property, that is the thing every atom does, of following the path of least resistance. Tomorrow I will spend the day bicycling around Minneapolis – going up hills only to go down them (see larger metaphor).
Bacon , Bacon, BCN – Bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon Bacon Bacon bacon, bacon bacon bacon (bacon bacon) bacon bacon bacon? Bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon – bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon. Bacon. BACON! Bacon bacon; bacon bacon bacon Malkovich Malkovich. Bacon bacon.
“U.S. Consumption of bacon increased from 16.8 lb (7.6 kg) per person in 1998 to 17.9 lb (8.1 kg) per person in 2007″
I just got back from 48 hour trip to Jordan that I went on suddenly and without really knowing which country I was going to. I swam in the dead sea. Covered myself in black mud. Almost broke down on a back road. Saw Petra (Indiana Jones with Sean Connery cliff-carved monument). Helped an elderly Iraqi Kurd get a visa to Norway. Slept in a hotel that was located somewhere in Amman. Had fun.
The people were very friendly except the guy at Avis who ripped us off by charging us 50 JOD (~$70 USD) for a scratch on the bumper of the rental car. I ate nothing but shawarma and got sunburned. It was beautiful place (pictures to come) and a great time with Romeo, Becky, and Lauren. Oh, and this in finals week (remember Islamic weekend is Th/Fri).
With only three episodes left, the LOST epic is about to come to an end. The final will be 2½ hours – so a movie. Spoiler alert: up till US airings – The last episode killed off several main characters. It was a bit strange that only white cast members have survived: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer, “Locke”, Ben, Alpert, and Desmond. The next episode is going to feature a guest actor (further spoiler alert) Allison Janney of the West Wing.
This is a graph I made of my total storage capacity over time. Please note the combination of my KAUST full-scholarship with the rise of high-definition video caused a massive boost in 2008. Yes, those are terabytes (1,000 GB). 5,136,000,000 B of total storage left out three “0″s, I currently have:
5,136,000,000,000 Bytes
41 trillion 1s and 0s
3.5 million floppy disks – a stack 7.75 miles high
Floppy disks (3.5″ 1.44MB) were created in 1987 – the year I was born.
The above image is of a very cool 16 TB NAS (Network Attached Storage) made to look like an old floppy disc box. A NAS can provide for file sharing/backup, printer hosting, internet site server, and can double as a regular computer. You don’t need one probably unless you want to be able to stream all you music, movies, and files over your home network and the internet. I plan on adapting the computer I threw together to go to KAUST into one this summer. via gizmodo
Conan O’Brien has become a martyr of comedy.
I watch Parks and Recreation partially because of Nick Offerman, who plays Ron Swanson. The character’s only goal as head of the parks and recreation department of Pawnee, Indiana is to close down the Parks department. He performs the lost art of deadpan perfectly. In a recent episode his character built a canoe. My sleep is completely messed up after pulling an all-nighter for no reason, so I listened to an Adam Carolla (Man Show, Love Line) interview him. Turns out he actually made the canoe because he is an actor/master carpenter. If you are a fan of The Office, you will appreciate that Nick Offerman built Rainn Wilson’s (who plays Dwight Schrute) dinning room table. He also has a powerful mustache and made an instructional video on how to make a canoe. I admire his belief in craftsmanship.
This summer I am planning a trip to Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana (let me know if you want onboard). It seems very tragic, but I want to see them before they go away. I’ve been to the park before for a family vacation, but want to go camping this time. It is crazy majestic and will be celebrating its 100th anniversary.
To fend of bears, I am lucky that firearms are now legal in all National Parks! You just need to comply with local state law, which in Montana probably means they will lend you a gun if you don’t have one.
Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman-Sachs, looks like a Bond villain.