Seen at the California Wine Festival in Santa Barbara.
The end of the world is near. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Corrected and Enlarged
The author of the volume has a Russian sounding name. The description is likely an innocent mistake. “Corrected and enlarged edition” lends itself awfully well to many jokes.
I’ll say it applies to my ego. This past year has been good, after all.
The End of Chemical Weapons
World is safer with Utah chemical stockpile gone, Army commander says | The Salt Lake Tribune
It’s hard to believe, but there is good news out there. At least, there was two months ago when I cam across this article. The efforts to eliminate chemical weapons according to the Chemical Weapons Convention treaty to which the United States became a signatory in 1997.
This particular facility in Utah is but one facility in which chemical weapon stockpiles were destroyed, and the numbers are quite staggering:
Since the Utah plant burned its first GB nerve agent-filled rocket on Aug. 22, 1996, it has destroyed more than 1.1 million munitions containing 13,617 tons of chemical agent, said Ted Ryba, the Army’s site project manager, who has worked at the depot throughout the incinerator’s life.
Wikipedia claims that as of July, 2010, approximately 60% of the known stockpiles had been destroyed. The above story is dated January of 2012. It will be interesting to know how much that percentage has increased.
Adding to the iPhone 5 Rumor Mill
About an hour ago I received this text message from AT&T. The iPhone 5 rumor mill is working at fever pitch, and the timing of this offer seems coincide ominously with the rumored release of the iPhone 5 in September.
The nature of the offer seems to imply that the new iPhone plans will be cheaper and available from all carriers. Why else would AT&T be offering me free minutes as a “valued customer”?
What vexes me, however, is that I would rather have more text messages. I have thousands of rollover minutes. It is text messages that I usually run out of. Why aren’t they offering me free text messages?
Oh, yeah, because they don’t care. If they did they would have offered something of value to me. This lack of attention to detail may well explain why their customers move away at first opportunity, and I may do the same when my contract expires.
To be sure, I will accept the minutes. I’ll even try to use them. Anyone wanna call me?
Rude iPhone
Moments ago I was greeted by this screen when I unlocked my iPhone. Now, I had heard that Apple has been getting cocky as of late, but this is ridiculous!
How would one go about blowing an iPhone anyway?
The Dude Sings Country
Jeff Bridges is cashing in on his fame by releasing an album, and he started promoting the album by anchoring the first night of music at the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Fest. “Is that the dude?” was my reaction, and it must have been everyone else’s, too. He didn’t shy away from that expectation.
He asked if people liked the dude before singing some song from The Big Lebowki’s soundtrack. He looked the dude, he sounded like the dude, and he acted like the dude. It was almost as if he was the dude. Was he the dude before the movie, or was he transformed by the iconic character from which the spectacular response from popular culture left no escape.
Or was it that the audience could see nobody except the dude?
Either way, jt was a surreal experience. As usual, he is a celebrity fortunate enough to have had the backing of an amazing band, next to whom he could only shine as the dude and not a performer endowed with any special or extraordinary musical talent.
It was a good performance, nevertheless. The dude gave a good show. I still would have preferred a killer dj house set or a tight jazz band, but this is Santa Barbara, and the least common denominator persists as the dominant factor in guiding musical selection for the masses.
Start of Christmas season in The Netherlands
It’s perhaps my tenth visit to Amsterdam, and I finally got to eat the mixture of fried cake dough, butter and sugar that are known as a form of traditional Dutch holiday cakes.
This is how they are made:
And, this is the final product. It is topped with about as much butter as cake, and topped with a large helping of powdered sugar. In celebration of the impending holidays, I had mine additionally topped with a shot of amaretto. Six euros, almost $10, was the cost, but it went down well after a long bike ride in freezing conditions.
Yes, that is a gargantuan block of butter that has been thoroughly carved.
Wish I remembered what the damn pancakes are called. I recommend them.
Out Of Control Satellite May Interrupt Cable Television
Out Of Control Satellite Threatens US TV Service – Space News – redOrbit.
This is absolutely the best thing that could have happened to cable television. Only basic cable is included in my rent, and I have always been hesitant about upgrading, but, ironically, this is exactly the upgrade that I wanted, and I never could have afforded it.
iPad Carnage
Apple’s new product announcements never make much sense at the time they are made. It takes a while for people to understand the ramifications of the technology being introduced and the shakedowns that will ensue. The iPad announcement may well have been the paradigmatic enigmatic announcement. The stock has tanked, and everyone is talking about the announcement being “underwhelming”, but Apple’s competitors are shaking in fear because they can see the carnage coming. Here is a short list of products or industries that will soon be laid to waste by the iPad. In no particular order, these are the products, corporations or industries that could be eradicated by iPad’s success.
- The Kindle DX Without a doubt, the first product to die will be Amazon’s Kindle DX, the larger kindle model with a color screen designed for viewing textbooks. For the same price as the Kindle DX, the iPad offers a complete computer capable of viewing textbooks with a far richer content, word processing, games, music, photos and countless heretofore unheard of new applications. The iPad will run Amazon’s Kindle and Stanza apps, on top of all this. So, Amazon was wise to hedge its bets with its iPhone apps. In essence, Amazon was well aware of the inevitable.
- Portable Game Players If the iPhone and iPod touch failed to obviate the need for small game consoles like Nintendo DS and Playstation Player, then iPad positively will. The iPad promises graphics and action that rival those presently available only on powerful desktop computers. So, why compromise excitement for the sake of mobility? Sure, there will be many holdouts who like the little pocket devices, but the kids will want an iPad, and parents and game enthusiasts will abandon the little devices in droves.
- Amazon Kindle Subscription Service As the New York Times’ presence at the Apple announcement on Wednesday showed, the iPad offers publishers infinitely more flexibility than the Kindle does. Publishers are free to offer something as simple as a web subscription, and everyone with an iPad (which has a full browser) will be able to take advantage of it. People with Kindles will not. Furthermore, publishers will have the ability to offer their own subscription services or product lines through an app over which they can exercise complete control over appearance, behavior and content. Amazon’s Kindle service is not as accommodating of publishers. The Kindle limits publishers to formats that Amazon defines. Publishers will have no incentive to stay with Amazon. They will abandon it in droves, and the Kindle subscription services is thus assured of a quick and untimely death, unless Amazon can reconfigure the service. Oddly enough, the Sony reader may survive because it is not tied down to any one distribution channel the way the Kindle is.
- Windows Tablet The most shocking revelation in the iPad announcement was the fact that Apple rewrote its iWork productivity suite to be fully functional on the iPad. iWork on the iPad was a demonstration of how Apple’s grand designs for the iPad were vastly more ambitious than any pundit, prognosticator or Wall Street analyst expected. Apple is announcing that it is beating Microsoft and Google to the mobile computing platform with a fully functional mobile computer that runs a proven and battle tested mobile platform (iPhone OS) and that is ready to do everything out of the box before any of these guys even leave the gate. Oh, yes, indeed. The carnage could be far bigger and far uglier than anyone expected.
And, the folks at Wired.com seem to agree, though they use slightly less explicit language.
Of course, the basic premise that people will want to do their computing with hand gestures on a thin, mobile tablet that has amazing computing capabilities may turn out to be false, but Apple’s experiences with mobile devices so far would imply otherwise.
It will be interesting to see who still stands after the iPad earthquake and all of its aftershocks because the landscape will change completely.
Improving Windoze
VMware Fusion 3.0 makes Windows look like Mac
How does one go about improving on Microsoft Windows? One uses a virtualization engine to make it look more like a Mac. This development bespeaks frustration of biblical proportions that drove programmers to undo what Microsoft programmers spent billions of dollars to implement.
This tops even the wine project, wherein programmers forewent compensation for the pleasure of having Windows programs work inside Unix-like operating systems.
Still, Microsoft will never understand user interfaces and user experience issues.