Johnny Cash

MySpace is streaming the soon be released final Johnny Cash album this weekend, it's here http://www.myspace.com/johnnycash. It's the final Rick Rubin/American record.

It's being released on July 4th.

Things that annoy me about our modern world

At the moment, it's the politically correct West, and their treatment of Islam. I recently came across an ad for the movie Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

I read the site and found it irritating. The phrase "religion of peace" has been repeated often enough to be ridiculous, and it is a patently ludicrous assumption. But the opposite of a falsehood is not necessarily the truth, it's usually another falsehood, as it is in this case.

Plainly put, saying a religion is a religion of peace is about as meaningful as saying the Norelco Bodygroom is an electric shaver of peace; it's a term that doesn't apply. Religions aren't inherently anything, it's all in the practice, and that varies with people location and time. If the practice at a given point in time and place is warlike or placid, then so be it. It's a meaningless statement. It's like imputing anti-semitism to vegetarians due to Hitler's aversion to meat.

Robots!

Sweet!

Microsoft Unveils Robotics Studio

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms.
Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched a technology preview of Robotics Studio, a Windows-based development environment for creating robotic applications.

The early release targets academic, hobbyist and commercial developers with a toolset for building applications that can run on a variety of robotics computing platforms, the company said. Early partners include the LEGO Group.

"We've reached out to a broad range of leading robotics companies and academics early on in the development process and are thrilled with the positive response from the community," Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group, said in a statement.

The Microsoft site is located here.

On the other hand, some people are concerned with Robot Sex.

A surprising question, coming from me...

Where is a good place to buy cookware? I've felt like getting back into that lately.

Blinded by the white

After four long years, the Creative Plumbing website gets a long overdue makeover. I decided to concentrate on a simple black and white look. I'll be adding portfolio items over the next few days.

Soon you shall all see....

This week I'm going to post short summaries of all my book ideas and hold a vote for which one I should actually start, should anyone care. I have about five fleshed out ideas I've accumulated over the past ten years or so.

Sweet!

The Silver Comet Trail is to be completed by next May. Thank you Coca Cola!

Quick Sunday night round up

• Drones over Los Angeles
• Unusual, but proven business ideas
• Smart Traffic Systems, in Georgia no less.
• Photographing Urban Landscapes
• A poll of the Muslim countries, one thing that jumped out was

  One of the more surprising findings in the poll was that solid majorities in Indonesia (65 percent), Turkey (59 percent), Egypt (59 percent) and Jordan (53 percent) said they do not believe the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States were carried out by groups of Arabs.

  which is scary, scary stuff.
  
• MSNBC has a nice catch-all page on Islam in Europe.
• Wikipedia entry of the day: Charles Martel
• Wildcats in Buckhead
  

Quotes of the moment

From the comments of a vitriolic post about an Israeli flag being waved at some soccer game

This is why the entire Arab world can barely make a good washing machine and we send people into space for fun.

And via Jane Galt (original post about second languages)

I'm a poor programmer whose solution to execution failures is type louder and more slowly.

Interesting thought of the day

This post from Global Guerrillas leads to much thought. To wit:

As people connect outward onto this platform, they see both threat or promise. In response, they look inward for sources of strength to support them going forward, and in most cases find it wanting. Their states (and corporations) can't or will not provide them that strength.

The result is an almost pandemic drive towards ethnic/religious identity -- and -- the increasingly muscular granular forces of clan, sect, gang, and tribe.

That leads to his linked articles of The Melted Map (a thought experiment about how a properly separated Middle East, while The Coming Anarchy chips in with The Real Central Asia.

Like most things, I'm reminded of Eric Hoffer. To paraphrase, changing times make misfits of us all, and those unable to adapt to new times will dream of a glorious past or a glorious future, but will forever resent the present.

All the articles are well worth reading.

A record of sorts

10:23 PM makes for the latest I've ever been out riding. Yes, it's quite dark.

Cracker Soul

Saw Cracker at the Variety Playhouse last night in a very wonderful show. They only did two songs off Countrysides, but that's my only complaint.

A warning to all

Read this article: Visa Says ATM Breach May Have Exposed Data and then check your bank statements. I found a $461 dollar charge I didn't make. I just called Bank of America and started an investigation about it. They reversed the charge pending the outcome of the investigation. Scary stuff really. I'm not legally liable for the charge, but still....

More world domination planning

Green Media Works and I continue our schemes to dominate the globe. After the meeting we took some pictures from the roof of his lovely downtown office.

Gallery Here.

The century

Saturday I biked a Century (100 miles), which was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

The middle 16 miles are on a highway, and not a trail. That puts you in the direct sun and very rough blacktop from Rockmart to Cedartown, which makes for a draining adventure. I also ran out of water for 30 miles, which was horrible. But, I did finish in a little under 7 hours, albeit in the dark, with an average speed of 14.7 miles and heart rate of 140 bpm. It was the first time in a long time where my legs have ached during the ride.

Sunday rapid fire

• Create Visio diagrams programatically
• An interesting interview with Frank Miller
• Creepy pictures from North Korea
• A new studio album from Ramblin' Jack Elliot!
• I rode past this last week.
  

Yay me

I biked a hundred miles and didn't die, though this was the toughest ride I've ever done. More details later.

Religion and super heroes

Here is an interesting list of Super Heroes by religious affiliation.

Least surprising: Captain America - a Protestant, no shocker there.
Most surprising: The Thing - Jewish!

They classify the favorite of my later teen years, the Question, as Objectivist, which is close enough to a religion I suppose.

My blog rule

As some people have asked; my profanity rule is that I only speak profanities, never write them. I think it works rather well.

I laughed hysterically

When I found out that Ann Coulter is a Mac user. I can't tell the actual joke that occurred to me without breaking my no profanity on the blog rule.

New gallery - HoundogRadio.com party

Not my best work, but some of them turned out well. I only got shots of the A-Sides and the Luxury Kings.

Check it out.

Random thoughts

It's time for the MySpace fad to be replaced by something else.

Real college professors get fooled by fake reality show. I've seen one episode of the show and it doesn't seem that good.

Another Video Blog. I like them better than podcasts.

The most vapid article on CNN.com in quite a while is Tattoo nation -- the U.S. is getting inked.

The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that's almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S. adults had a tattoo.

"Really, nowadays, the people who don't have them are becoming the unique ones," said Chris Keaton, a tattoo artist and president of the Baltimore Tattoo Museum.

They quote contradictory surveys; then assure us that 24% is close to 25%. Later they have the stats on the survey, which is

The telephone survey on tattoos included 253 women and 247 men and was conducted in 2004. It has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

Which seems to make it a weak basis for drawing strong conclusions.

The photos from last night will be up soon.

Where the sidewalk didn't end

Today, for no particular reason I decide to set a new cycling record. I decided to ride to the end of the paved area of the Silver Comet, which their website assured me existed. It gives the impression that the end is in the 37 mile area. My previous record was 60 miles.

Much to my surprise, the paved area did not end at 37 miles, which is a little beyond Rockmart. It keeps on going in fine order, I assume to the Alabama border, which will be a ride for another day. I make it out to the 40 mile mark before I realize how late it's getting.

I prefer using the die in place method of setting distance records; it's going out a long way in one direction and then back.

I wound up going a little over 80 miles, averaging 15.2 miles an hour, with an average heart rate of 151, which is surprisingly high for a ride that lasted over five hours. I have the heart rate monitor set to mute, but if you go far enough over into your maximum, which I did when I came across a sharp hill at mile 38, it beeps at you.

I spent the last 20 minutes or so in darkness as I underestimated the daylight. The forest canopy does a good job of eliminating ambient sunlight.

On the whole, it was a pleasant and scenic ride. The one exception was when I ran out of water for a 20 mile period and that brought all of the symptoms of fatigue very quickly. Once I got some more (at around mile 11 on the way back) I felt much better.

Below are some photos I took with the camera phone on the ride.

A very large factory that seems to make concrete forms. It's somewhere around mile 12.


More of the above.


I have no idea what road this is.

A very long and chilly tunnel. I need to take some more fiddler photos here.


This one wasn't on the ride, but I did see it yesterday and found it funny.

Friday round up

• Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
• The physics and biology of Superman's possible reproduction
• Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
• Why women have fat thighs.
• Amazing RC Plane Demo
• Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
• Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
  

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Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer

• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
• It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
  

Ambrose Bierce

• Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
• To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
  

H.L. Mencken

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Cooking for Engineers

Info is found, not surprisingly, at CookingforEngineers.com. It's how to cook for those of us technically minded folks. They have wonderful "Recipe Cards" that make much more sense than the unorganized (to me) mish mash found in cookbooks. Some of this might actually be worth trying.

HT: LifeHacker

Blogger is finally recovered.

Or so it seems. The Blogger site has been out all day.

The big news of the day is that happy occasion of al-Zarquawi's demise. CNN actually has video.

John Robb has an interesting post about the event, and the meaning of Zarquawi in general. Short version - Zarquawi was more venture capitalist than general or cult leader. RTWT. It provides a lot of perspective about the nature of the conflict.

Last night's open mic

It went very well. I didn't win, but everything was well received, and the playing and singing were good. For some reason the bass drops out in the monitors, but other than that, it was good fun. I did Magnolia Wind, Left Alone, Waitin' Round to Die, Red Clay Halo and Walkin' Cane.

In tall buildings

I just got back from my first meeting at the new Green Media Works world headquarters. It's in the Flatiron building downtown, and manages to be two corner offices in one. A very cool space. It had sort of New York in the 20s vibe, very similar to the headquarters of Doc Savage or the Shadow (as told in the comic books). It was our initial meeting on our current plan for untold wealth and world domination. More on that as things develop.

The photo was taken from one of the windows.

Random thoughts and links

Things I found interesting today

• What is childhood but a series of injustices that we spend the rest of our lives avenging?
  Colin Quinn
• An interesting collection of photos from New Orleans. It's still a wasteland.
• Voluntary kidney donor Virginia Postrel delivers the smackdown to the National Kidney Foundation.
• GreenPeace is funny, but not on purpose, from one of their "fact sheets"

  "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

  Via The Agitator
• AllOfMP3.com finally gets some attention, thought not in a good way.
  

First ride on the new bike

So, I'm not feeling sore or congested anymore, so I take the new Fuji out for a spin. It felt good. For anyone curious, I went 33.5 miles at 14 miles an hour, with an average heart rate of 140. The handlebars are going to take some getting used to, as is the braking, but on the whole, the road bike is a pleasant change from the hybrid.

We all knew it would come to this

Granted, this lawsuit is happening in England, but still.

...

After having a £4,000 boob job sales girl Sabrina Pace is suing her boss for looking at her breasts too much.

Sabrina, 26, went from an attractive B-cup to a whopping DD size after her boyfriend forked out for the enlargement op.

Despite opting to pump up her cleavage to glamour girl proportions, the pretty brunette says the attention her new chest was attracting at work was sexual harassment.

Jury selection on that case must be a strange process. On the other hand, maybe there's more of a market for the conversation poncho than I thought.

Quote of the moment

"Money doesn't talk, it swears".
Bob Dylan

Wacky twists of fate

So I get the new road bike, and I'm too sore to ride and have too much insomnia to sleep. Lo, the irony. The bike is cool though.

Rapid fire and random thoughts

• Interesting thoughts on the use of mercenaries to settle third world conflicts (Darfour, the Congo, etc) at Instapundit and Marginal Revolution. I'm a bit queasy about the idea myself, though it's probably worth trying.
• Congress asserts amazing immunities for itself. No-knock raids and tear gas are good enough for you and me though.
• Why do we believe anything sponsored by supposedly independent interest groups, in this case, an epidemic of girls going wild?
• A nice AJAX primer from Brainjar.
• Traffic Data in Windows Live Local.
• The current media created craze is the fight club. I think this article misses out on reasons why it is appealing to techies though. If you're a programmer, you're spending all day in your virtual world, and stepping into the ring is about as far away from that as you can get.
  

Finally done for the night

Such an evil project. A cool link is WikiMapia.

On another note, a client of mine, Food 101 made the AJC.