Google Latitude was announced yesterday. I was annoyed as heck that when I tried it on my G1 it said “coming soon” even though Google claimed it was supported on the G1 . . . well, pending an update that would roll “soon” . . . and of course there’s no way to contact the Google Latitude team to say WTF?!
I found a link to a T-Mobile message forum that said the update was rolling out gradually: some people have been updated, and others will receive their updates over the next two weeks. Two weeks? I want it now!! And I am not the only one. Waiting is for suckers, so I borrowed a mini-USB cable from a co-worker and upgraded my phone manually, thanks to these awesome instructions:
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/02/05/how-to-get-rc33-on-your-g1-without-the-wait/
Note: The “End” key means the red “call end / power” button.
In the time it took to write those two paragraphs, my G1 updated itself and now I can go play with Google Latitude!
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After a campaign centered on the idea of “change” President Barack Obama mentioned in his inauguration speech that:
“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.”
Alas, Congress decided that giving our all to the difficult task of obtaining a digital converter box, even without a government coupon, so we can finally change over to digital television on February 17, was too great a character-building exercise for the American people. And I suppose the risk of impoverished and mentally challenged consumers losing access to a constant barrage of commercial advertising would be too great a blow to our weakened economy. Congress has therefor postponed the transition to digital television until June 12, “sending the fast-tracked legislation to President Obama, who has promised to sign it.”
Really, this legislation deserves a pocket veto. “Oh, you wanted me to exercise personal responsibility? Dang, it must have slipped my mind.”
To me, this is thoroughly symbolic. And when it comes to such a fairly trivial issue as to whether we will accept a bit of minor pain and inconvenience to get the job done versus hem and haw and make excuses and opt for business as usual, we have opted for the excuses. Frustrating! After all, we how can we face up to the challenge of Global Warming when we can’t even get the TVs switched over on time?
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I guess it is official. Cisco Systems hates Public Radio pledge drives!
[CiscoSystems] would love to have technology that gives me NPR feed during KQED fund-drive when I’ve already given…feels like they fundraise every month.
I work for Cisco. I do not speak for Cisco. But, there is technology to capture the NPR feed and play it back. I even hacked up my own “Radio TiVo” a few years back. Alas, I shut the thing down since the personal convenience didn’t justify the carbon impact of running a PC 24/7.
Also, Cisco will announce Quarterly results today after the markets close. I am hoping they are favorable. Again, I do not speak for Cisco.
Update:
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) — Cisco Systems Inc., the largest maker of networking equipment, posted second-quarter profit that topped analysts’ estimates after embarking on a plan to cut $1 billion in costs by July.
Yay!
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I recently made wheat bread and stored it in zip-lock bags. Then when I finished the bread I thought I could re-use the bags, but I should label what was stored in them so that I could store comparable foods. Then I figured I might as well get bilingual, so now I have three zip-lock bags labeled “BREAD é¢åŒ…”
On Thursday evening I met with the Cartoonist Conspiracy San Francisco group. I’m not a hard-core cartoonist but I felt welcomed and I got some practice inking in some panels in different styles. I had wanted to get some thicker lines going, so here I did the characters with a sharpie, other lines, like the bread crust, are inked over about 5 times with my 0.7mm pen. And then we have some actual shading. Whooo! I added the colors after scanning.
I effed up in that the slices do not match the shape of the loaf.
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æå–œå‘è´¢!
ChinesePod.com has a lesson on New Year greetings.
牛 == niu(2) == ox
å¹´ == nian(2) == year
æ–° == xin(1) == new
So . . .
牛年 == Year of the Ox (“ox year”)
新年好 == Happy New Year (“new year good”)
æå–œå‘è´¢ == Wish for a Prosperous New Year
And of course, red is a good luck color, which is why you give kids money in red envelopes. At least, if you are Chinese. I just give them candy corn.
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I just saw a somewhat cynical view of what Obama (or any half-decent President) could accomplish in four years. What do I hope for? How pleased would I be at the Obama administration after four or eight years?
Off the top of my head:
- Afghanistan is stable, Pakistan is democratic, and Iraq is sufficiently stable and democratic such that our soldiers are no longer stationed there.
- Israel and Palestine on track to a peaceful, two-state solution.
- We have helped reduce the damage done to the world’s poorest due to famine, natural disaster, disease, and war.
- Economic opportunity at home, quality education more readily available.
- All Americans have access to health care.
- We have devised a way to reduce our carbon emissions over time to reduce our contribution to Global Warming.
- Obama does not favor gay marriage, but he should not stand in the way of civil rights. We should repeal the Defense of Marriage Act!
- The federal budget should be (closer to) balanced.
What have you got?
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I have to give a shout out to this web site which provides both word translations and illustrated explanations of characters. 谢谢! I forgot about the pinyin while drawing this with the pencil, and when I went to sneak it in the right-hand corner I did it in pen right off the bat. After scanning, I used Gimp to clean up a few lines and to re-draw the left half of the 猫. Funny enough, the left half of the character, which means “cat” was a bit larger and looked like it was part of kitty-chan herself. So, I re-drew it smaller in Gimp.
And I skipped the English translation since it was somewhat obvious.
ä½ å¥½ == ni(3)hao(3) == hello
猫 == mao(1) == cat
å’ª == mi(1) == meow
猫咪 == mao(1)mi(1) == kitty
Best I can tell, if you inquired about ä½ å¥½ 猫咪 in China people would be puzzled, since around the world this Japanese emissary of cuteness and love is known by her English name: “Hello Kitty”.
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Over Christmas I found some index cards in my pocket. I don’t know when I doodled them. Probably around 2004 . . .
On the back it says “Feb 1920, at Restaurant.” But not in my handwriting . . . possibly the ex-wife’s?
Just nervous energy.
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I was thinking maybe just maybe I might enroll in a Chinese class. Then I might even learn something, but CCSF started classes last week. I also been thinking it might be great to get more of a regular habit of drawing or doodling. Then I was thinking I might as well just wrap them up together, and illustrate Chinese words. So, here we go: a little homage to Dr Seuss!
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Well, I found a torrent and acquired the .iso file. How to verify that it is legitimate? Well, unlike free software projects, Microsoft doesn’t supply checksums, so I Googled the md5sum:
0-23:03 djh@noneedto Windows 7 Official Beta 1 build 7000 x64 EN$ md5sum Windows\ 7\ Official\ Beta\ 1\ build\ 7000\ x64\ EN.iso
773fc9cc60338c612af716a2a14f177d Windows 7 Official Beta 1 build 7000 x64 EN.iso
Well, no panics over a trojan. The install process was quite boring. It loaded files, then it presented, of all things, a blue screen! But not the blue screen of death, but the blue screen of light glowing from the top. The computer sat there a good five minutes showing me the blue screen of light as I wondered to myself whether the install had wedged. Eventually a button appeared that said like “Install Windows Now” and I chose my old Windows XP partition. You can’t “upgrade” from Windows XP: it just moves the old Windows out of the way and you get to dig around your hard drive to find all your old files and drag them to where Windows 7 can find them.
I also had to whip out the old Knoppix Live Boot CD to restore my bootblock, because unlike free software projects, Microsoft assumes that there is only one Operating System you care to run on your computer. I Googled up this reference page and ran the following:
sudo grub
> root (hd0,1)
> setup (hd0)
> quit
My details differ slightly because my Linux partition is on the second partition, whilst Windows is on the first.
The initial impression is that it is really zippy. I installed the free version of Avira AntiVir and Windows shut up about virus protection. I was pleased when Windows gave me a dialog asking if I really wanted Avira to edit the system settings so that it could start on boot: hopefully this will lead to less cruft in users’ systems as Windows 7 gets deployed.
The “Shutdown” item doesn’t actually present a menu to Shutdown or Reboot, it just shuts the thing down–fast!
My next adventure will be to figure out how to turn down the power supply fan speed. I accomplished this with lm-sensors and the like so now Linux runs very quietly–until Windows can run without aggravating my Tinnitus I’m not likely to use it much. I’m also not sure what I would do with Windows, besides occasionally play a PC game or possibly manage photos. I have gotten very much at home with Linux.
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As someone who has wondered at the issues involving monastic vows of sexual abstinence, I found myself dog-earing the following passage from an interview with a Buddhist couple who gave up the monastic life for marriage, as interviewed by Leslee Goodman in the January, 2009 issue of The Sun. (more…)
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A bit that got me laughing out loud, from a New Yorker article on breast milk:
In 1735, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus first sorted out the animal kingdom, he classed humans in a category called Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts. Even those of Linnaeus’s contemporaries who conceded the animality of man averred that people have two feet, not four. Ah, but hands are just feet that can grip, Linnaeus countered. This proved unpersuasive. By 1758, in a process that the Stanford historian of science Londa Schiebinger has reconstructed, Linnaeus had abandoned Quadrupedia in favor of a word that he made up, Mammalia: animals with milk-producing nipples. (The Latin root, mamma, meaning breast, teat, or udder, is closely related to the onomatopoeic mama—“motherâ€â€”thought to derive from the sound that a baby makes while suckling.) As categories go, “mammal†is an improvement over “quadruped,†especially if you’re thinking about what we have in common with whales. But, for a while, at least, it was deemed scandalously erotic. (Linnaeus’s classification of plants based on their reproductive organs, stamens and pistils, fell prey to a similar attack. “Loathsome harlotry,†one botanist called it.) More important, the name falls something short of capacious: only female mammals lactate; males, strictly speaking, are not mammals.
Personally, I think I would approve of anything that was scandalously erotic. Oh my! Also, my high school biology teacher said that I, a male mammal, could indeed lactate, if given the right hormones. I was glad to hear that I had the capability, just in case . . .
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