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Blog Archive
Kicking off the New Year Right
2009-01-01 23:45:13My music consumption lately has been pretty out of control. This past year I clocked well over 1000 new albums, so listening to something twice practically qualifies it for my "best of the year" list. As anyone who listens to a lot of music knows, the (irony? inevitability?) is that as you listen to more, it gets harder and harder to find something that really stands out of knocks your socks off.
Still, when you do, I don't think it loses any of its power. So thanks Mark, for helping me kick off the new year right.
Online Tools for A New Small Business
2009-01-01 20:10:49One of the interesting things I've been doing recently has been looking at support tools for running a new company. I remember Ev writing about this a couple years ago. This research was pretty new for me since none of the following services even existed when we started Upcoming (not that we had any need for most of these anyway; we were focused exclusively on building a cool app: our only capital cost was servers [offset by AdSense] and our burn rate was our cost of living).
Anyway, after a day or two of poking around, here's a list of the top picks (and in some cases, worthy alternatives):
2008: Looking Back, Looking Ahead
2009-01-01 00:00:00Some years seem to pass by without much to commemorate them. I'd be hard pressed for example to recall anything specific about 2003 (that's sort of embarrassing actually, but literally true). This year flew by for me, and while it wasn't filled with any monumental realizations, it was abound with changes and things that happened - I thought I'd make a few notes in case I find myself looking back in 5 years...
Additional Personal Storage
2008-12-29 21:11:17One of the things that I spent some time working on the past couple weeks was organizing my file storage (currently about 3TB of NAS and 3TB of DAS, all RAIDed). I haven't made 100% progress, but I have made a big dent on shuffling files around - my goal is to have 2 (and only 2) RAIDed copies of important personal files, and then most "media" on a single RAID6 device. Of course, in the course of shuffling, it occurred to me that it might be easier if I had some additional storage...
After evaluating options, the real choices came down to either building a low-power NAS or daisy-chaining a bunch of drives up to my Mac Mini. The latter option is actually cheaper as long as you don't mind some manual management of mount points (which I don't), however, finding out about enclosure support for spin-down, noise, and power consumption is pretty much impossible - even though these are pretty much the only distinguishing factors of an enclosure (IMO), no one online, reviewers or users, seems to care all that much.
Snapshots of Modern-Day China
2008-12-14 17:51:44Last week Nathan Myhrvold posted a pair of photo-essays to the Freakonomics blog recounting a recent visit to Shanghai and Beijing. Some strong images (looks like he's using something like a 12mm aspheric on some of those? shame about the compression), and interesting commentary (and comments!).
Note to Self: How's the Future going?
2008-12-14 09:00:00A couple years ago, I wrote up a little post with my thoughts of big the technological changes that that would have a big impact on daily life in 5 years time. This post is scheduled to publish exactly 2.5 years (half-way) after that original post. Just a little checkup to see how things are going...
Python os.walk() vs ls and find
2008-12-13 03:27:05Since I wasn't able to find a file cataloguer and dupe-finding app that quite fit my needs (for the Mac, DiskTracker was pretty close, I'd definitely recommend that of all the apps I tried), I started to code some stuff up. One of the things I was interested in starting out was how well using Python's
os.walk()(andos.lstat())would perform against ls. I threw in find while I was there. Here are the results for a few hundred-thousand files, the relative speed which was consistent over a few runs:python (44M, 266173 lines) --- real 0m54.003s user 0m18.982s sys 0m19.972s ls (35M, 724416 lines) --- real 0m45.994s user 0m9.316s sys 0m20.204s find (36M, 266174 lines) --- real 1m42.944s user 0m1.434s sys 0m9.416s
New Music, Catching Up Edition
2008-12-01 16:21:19I've had a few weeks to decompress/catch-up on life post-election. One of the things I did involved clearing out my music backlog (almost a thousand albums - completely done until a late-night of sample chasing...). Thought I'd share some of the stuff that has caught my ear so far:
- College - When You Smile
- Cibelle - Green Grass
- Brazilian Girls - St. Petersburg
- Screaming Tea Party - Let's Do Not Say Another Word
- No Age - Eraser
- These United States - Honor Amongst Thieves
- The Old Believers - There It Is
- Emily Wells - Symphony 4: America's Mercy War
- Nosaj Thing - DISTRO
- Xploding Plastix - Kissed by a Kisser
Flickr Favs: Mon Dec 01, 2008
2008-12-01 09:00:03Yes we did.
2008-11-05 13:33:25I've been thinking about what I wanted to post - I think I'm still at a loss of words, but I wanted to post something just to commemorate. I also wanted to step back and note the bitter irony of the increased African-American participation being a factor in the passing of Prop 8, which was couched in the same language and frame as the anti-miscegenation laws a scant few decades ago. Lastly, I'm also amazed at many of the razor thin margins, both in national and local races. It certainly gives me pause, even as I appreciate the celebrations that have been going on around the nation.
We certainly have a lot of work to do.
Vote!
2008-11-04 04:00:00The music (which is perfect) is Deadbeat, by Velvetron.
This is a Poll Tax...
2008-11-03 15:06:47Rachel Maddow is absolutely correct and sums up a lot of what I've been thinking about...
Flickr Favs: Sat Nov 01, 2008
2008-11-01 09:00:06The Obamamercial
2008-10-29 23:36:26Had some trepidation, but turned out to be very worth watching. A great job by David Guggenheim.
Endorsements
2008-10-27 20:12:17During the primaries, I wrote up some thoughts on why I support Barack Obama for President. As it turns out, I've ended up getting pretty involved this year. I think it's pretty clear where I stand on the matter... So, I thought a bit about whether I'd be writing anything along the lines of an endorsement.
There is after all the 3:1 lead in editorial endorsements (in visual format), which includes some surprises like the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska's #1 paper) or the Chicago Tribune (the paper's first Democratic presidential endorsement in its 161-year history).
No Matter What Happens Next Week
2008-10-27 18:48:21After Jan. 20, 2009, a man shows up at the White House and tells the Marine guard - "I'd like to see President Bush." The Marine responds, "Sir, Pres. Bush is no longer in office." The man shows up the next day, asks the same question and gets the same response. The man returns the third day, and the Marine breaks composure just a little "Sir, this is the third time I've told you, Pres. Bush is no longer in office." The man replies, "Yes, I know, but I just love hearing it." The Marine snaps a salute, "See you tomorrow, Sir!"
Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart
2008-10-03 11:33:24Flickr Favs: Wed Oct 01, 2008
2008-10-01 09:00:03Liking This Trend...
2008-09-25 16:30:23I've started seeing some sites like Return to Ohio, and most recently, the The Great Schlep dedicated towards getting people to engage with their friends and families in their hometowns. I'm hoping that thing gets traction - having people you know, love and trust talk to you about Obama is probably much more effective than having a random stranger give you a ring.
A Story In Three Frames (One of These Is Not Like The Others)
2008-09-23 20:25:34I'll let Aaron write the essay, here's the comicbook form:
It's unclear to me why everyone isn't using OSM tiles at least for where they have no data. (Andrew and Mikel gave a good talk covering the latest stuff going on in the neogeo area at w2e-nyc last week)
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