Playing a Little Catch Up

So, here's a quick update on what I've been up to since the last post.

Natural Bridges State Park with just a wee bit of saturation.

Yacht Harbor Bubble - I've been able to ride my bike more and toured through my old stomping grounds yesterday after work. It was nice to roll over places I've spent so much time on before.

Fuzzy SC Boardwalk at night.

For a number of reasons, I am unable to provide much detail on what, exactly, I've been up to.

Here are some things I've been thinking about and talking about behind private doors on the internets.

Purity balls, in which girls 'gift their virginity' to their fathers until marriage, sweeping America

How an Under-Appreciated iOS 7 Feature Will Change the World - this is a brilliant idea that I hope gets baked into all devices moving forward to extend networks seamlessly out into the boonies.

Taking homophobia and applying it to religiophobia FTW.

This American Bro: A Portrait of the Worst Guy Ever - to which I would add, friends don't let friends become or behave like bro's. Bro's need to be exiled from society and left to starve in the wilderness, they diminish all of society by their overt and inane douchery. Yes, I know we'd end up losing Las Vegas entirely (the Bro capital of the world save Spring Break when it becomes LAUDERDALE!!!1!).

Fun at the park.

Girl Genius - a highly entertaining webcomic by the Foglio brothers of Dragon magazine fame from waaaaaaaay back in the day. Really entertaining stuff.

Not sure how all the graphics are going to play in the post. May have to make some adjustments. But I've added stuff I've reshared because I strongly believe the sentiment expressed. The bonuses for the do-nothing greedheaded assholes on Wall St. exceed ALL the earnings made by minimum wage employees. And somehow it is the lowest rung that continues to shoulder the heaviest burden while the rich get richer.

Something has to change. We cannot continue to expand the chasm between haves and have nots. The have nots simply will not stand for it beyond a point and there will be a rising up and a culling.

Greed is the problem. Not caring for the poor. GREED.

What Life Should Be Like

Like this

And like this (taken 2/21/14)

Not like this (taken 2/21/14)

Any questions?

Media Dump!

Haven't posted up here in a little while and thought I'd go through my G+ albums and repost images I've posted over there.

This first is a neat app on my iPhone called Photo Flow that lets you take a static image and "flow-isize" it. The term for these images is called a floto or flowto.

It works exceedingly quickly and well when used for water, fire, smoke or other similar movements.

Here's another made from a recent trip out to the beach.

The neat thing is the app makes it very, very easy to mobilize pixels. Just drag your finger and the movement starts, it is even keyed to how quickly you move your finger so you can make a really fast river if you so choose.

And how's about some ninja style dodgeball gif action too? Not mine but too awesome not to share.

More? You wish for more of this awesomeness?

I'll see what I can do. Because I'm a giver.

Capitola beach divided by river runoff.

Here's another shot from the beach trip a few weeks ago. I enjoyed watching nearly every person try to cross that log across the river and fall in. Except Graydon who walked back and forth again and again and did not fall in once.

Pilon Universe.

And, last addition to the post. How not to enter a parking garage with your bike on the roof of your car.

And that's all for now, folks. I could be encouraged to post here more often if there were some comments.

Today in Pictures

We went to the beach today, it was a little hazy but pretty warm and mostly sunny. We splashed around in the water alot. Nande got run out, Grady got run out, Sully got run out. They are all sleeping well now.

More Fire Fridays!

I had to hang out at work for a couple of extra hours yesterday since somebody set a grassfire that go out of control really quickly and burned down at least 9 structures including some houses. The big smoke cloud photo was taken from my school some 8 or 9 miles away. The helicopter was one of two that was buzzing the highway on the way home and the CDF investigation team was set up on the median strip of the highway and watching the hillside slowly burn itself out.

And everything smells like a campfire this morning.

In a bit of potentially good news, there is some serious debate about whether or not to sell fireworks locally. This is one of the few places you can buy fireworks but, given the dryness of the area and the multiple fires we've already had, the authorities are giving some thought to not allowing any sales. And I'd be fine with that. I'm sure Nande would be too since she spends all night panting and freaked out by the illegal fireworks being set off.

Play With This!

Check out PicLens and load up an image search and have fun sweeping along a wall of images, browsing to stop and look at just one for a moment before sweeping further along.

You can do Google and Yahoo image searches, Flickr and others too. It is mesmerizing and a fantastic way to explore.

In chatting about it with a teacher today, I had the idea of a Flickr search sorted by date for Burning Man to start at the beginning and go all the way through to the end. I'm sure the search would have to be narrowed down some as it's likely a rather large pool of photos. But its a cool idea.

I suppose it would even be possible to set it up to show photos live with a camera with a wireless card on board. How sweet would that be? Photos appearing on a wall of photos in near real-time of the event you're at? I loves the tech!

And I'm going to build a little demo slideshow now. Be back in a few, I hope.

Stop Reading This and Go Back Up Your Data

The continued heartache I've been dealing with over the catastrophic loss of my laptop hard drive is the final kick in the pants I really needed to get a back up system in place and underway.

I've been somewhat lucky so far. I've gotten the first six months of 2007's photos back but have lost (so far) the last two months of photos. I hope Disk Warrior is able to pull that data but I don't know yet.

So, really, stop reading this and go back up your data. Burn it to DVD and put it in a safe place. Heck maybe burn an extra one and send it to your parents for safe keeping.

I'm using iBackup right now. I'll let you all know how it works for me.

Also, I read a good tip on Wired's Wiki about how to pull music off an iPod so I'll be able to repopulate my iTunes without too much trouble.

But I'm pretty sure there are a large number of files that are lost forever and that totally sucks. I still Apple should be more proactive in notifying users about potential drive trouble and pending failures. What use is a silent reporting mechanism that you have to go and check to see what's going on?