I just signed the papers on a Ford Escape Hybrid and I read this article about the limits of lithium (as in lithium ion).
…there’s simply not enough lithium available in the Earth’s crust to stick a lithium-ion battery in the world’s 900 million cars, and at the same time expect the auto market to grow. It’s just not sustainable…
Boingboing reports that George Clooney and the SciFi channel are teaming up to make a miniseries from one of my all time favorite novels.
“…it could become a prison.” -Jello Biafra
MC Paul Barman is not the ultimate in geek rap — far from it in fact. Check out the upcoming documentary Nerdcore Rising about the Nerdcore scene and it’s frontman, MC Frontalot. With cameos from the likes of Weird Al and Brian Poshen this could get geeky.
As part of their promotional materials, the film makers behind Nerdcore Rising are putting up vblogs for Nerd of the Week. Their first one centers on PAX, the expo put together annually by the Penny Arcade guys.
Those of you watching Top Chef are probably annoyed, as I am, with contestant Marcel Vigneron. In the most recent episode this snotty “chef” paraded his exclusive dinner club where he and his friends use molecular gastronomy to create “food”.
I am so disappointed that the judges didn’t pick Sam or Elia that I almost don’t care about the finale. My only hope is that Ilan can lay waste to Marcel.
Remember Sobbing Sooner? I got a nasty email from YouTube saying that I violated DMCA laws (see below). What kind of world do we live in where I can’t lift 13.26 seconds of video from a television station?
Read all about how awful your IT department is but ignore the note of condescension in his voice. I take the article personally since I’ve worked in IT for nearly 15 years. I have met the people the author talks about — those nasty IT people who (as Scott Adams coined) are “preventers of technology” — but the problem did not start there. At one point in history the people who maintained the infrastructure were working arm-in-arm with the people running the business, or the people running the business maintained their own systems. Then the companies became large enough and the technology became complicated enough that management decided to separate the technology maintainers from the business maintainers. That separation instilled the business people with a sense of entitlement. “We make the money. We touch the customers. We are above.” IT is viewed in many places as a service akin to building maintenance. Still, the author wonders why IT people are so snotty and so public about it. If facilities employees had as many blogs as IT employees this could have been a very different book.
If you feel the same way as this author does about your IT staff I would give you the same platitude I give in almost every situation: “change starts within”. When I started my IT work I was in the same building with the people using the infrastructure. I was sandwiched between the customer service department and the sales department. Anytime they had a problem it only took them a dozen steps to poke their head in my cube to get a response. Most of my success however was with the tech support department who were in another building altogether, but they invited me to planning meetings and would often call or email me before they requested a change. They would explain their needs and bring me into the process as a partner. I wasn’t a warehouse where they could order widgets and have them delivered without having to share designs.
As the years have progressed the company I work for has gone from a few thousand domestic employees to tens of thousands employees around the world. My department has been (IMO) the most successful of all the IT departments because we insist on being near the business. We have weekly meetings with them that force them to reveal their plans and goals, and force us to commit to delivery time frames. In this way we have been able to achieve success, and (I hope) the business sees us as an asset and a partner.
I realize that our IT department is, if not unique, at least better than most. We are often recognized as being very efficient and committed to seeing the company grow. We are only able to achieve this success because we have business partners who see us as partners and keep us involved. If you want your IT department to be an asset, you need to treat them like the intelligent forward-thinking people they are. As soon as you have a design that you think might impact IT, bring them to the planning meetings or send them an email to keep them in the loop. Stop treating them like mechanics and janitors. It is easier to have them involved ahead of time than it is to have them fix the machines after they break and clean up the mess.
You can keep your Ravin’ Rabbids and Monkey Balls, I would have bought the Wii just for the chance to play Toe Jam and Earl again. Ahead of their time in funk, behind the time in fashion, timeless in game play.
Finally, the liberal conspiracy is revealed.
I know I’m being naive, but I’ve totally taken a break from paying much attention to politics now that there’s a branch of our government not controlled by Dick Cheney. It’s just not as interesting without the constant threat of everything going off the rails at any moment.
Now who’s ready for election season?
Here’s a few pics from our Christmas journey. We went to Fort Worth (194 miles) for one night to see my first college roommate Danny Torres, then to Shreveport (232 miles) for one night including dinner with my second college roommate Robert Willis (and we were hoping to have breakfast with Ashley, but she got sick) , then we drove to Bald Knob, AR (280 miles) for a two night stay with my parent’s families, then to Siloam Springs (251 miles) for an evening with my parents and sister, then we left the next afternoon and made a motel stop in Gainesville, TX (275 miles) so we could break up the long drive back home to Austin (another 250 miles). That’s a total of 1483 miles not counting side trips to drug stores for forgotten toothpaste, Olive St Bistro, Murrell’s, or Wal-Mart for last minute Christmas gifts.
We stayed at the Fairfield Inn in Shreveport. It’s a really comfy B&B that allows small pets and has this awesome elephant topiary in the front yard. The Fairfield Inn is just down the street from one of Shreveport’s two circular buildings, the Fairfield Towers. In the shadows of this strangely abandon cool building you will find the Edgemont Tea Room and the elegant Olive St. Bistro.
Murrell’s is a classic diner at the intersection of two keys roads in Shreveport. It was serving up the “best pies ever” to the Caddo Indians way back before they got wiped out by smallpox. We stopped in for dessert the night before, and then for breakfast on our way out of town. Becky went with scrambled eggs and grits — I gotta start making those at home — while I went for an old-fashioned burger with jalapeño and onion hashbrowns (and I took Becky’s bacon). I don’t miss a lot about Shreveport but Murrell’s is a real draw for me.
We had to stop in Fouke, AR to get a picture of The Boggy Creek Monster. Why are there two pictures? C’mon! Look at that dog! I swear she had to be a show dog. As soon as I raised the camera(phone), she posed — she actually posed.
My aunt and uncle live 2.5 miles past the pavement on Liberty Valley Road outside Bald Knob, AR. (Yes, the town infamously referenced in Beavis and Butthead.) It’s near the banks of the Little Red River, just a stone’s throw from where it meets the White River. It’s a fine example of America’s quickly disappearing delta wetlands and even features a nearby protected fowl life sanctuary. While we were there we probably saw thousands of geese overhead and in the rice fields.
It may be just me, but this tchotchke in my aunt’s bathroom just didn’t seem right. Here is this poor snowman who has slipped through the ice and his buddy is smiling beatifically at the heavens, leisurely reaching over to pull his friend out…and the guy in the icy water is also smiling beatifically at the heavens. Shouldn’t someone in this scene feel a little sense of urgency? Maybe not, though. Maybe icy pond water is just like a sauna for snowmen.
One of my Dad’s newfound retirement distractions is feeding a flock of Goldfinches. That’s them on the spiral feeder on the right. At times there are 15-20 of them fluttering around it, and he swears that in the summer they are the color of canaries.
Bonus Pic:
The night before we left Austin our dinner was from our favorite to-go joint, El Chilito, which offered this holiday beverage treat.
For those of you who missed it, I finally made an ass out of myself due to overindulgence. My first few years in Austin I lived with a friend who, when pushing the imbibing envelope’s edges, would pass out and imitate a sack of potatoes. I tried really hard over those three years to emulate him. At one point I even polished off 750mL of tequila in one evening to no avail — I was legally over the limit but still mostly functional. This New Year’s Eve, quite unintentionally, I achieved the plateau I had dreamed of. I got sick enough that Becky had to drive me home at 9:45p.
Thank you. Now, I never want to do that again.
