Plenty of Clouds

So much to discover in the World Wide Telescope, but one thing that caught my interest early on is the Earth, feature, especially “Earth at Night”.

Scott Barnes posted on some higher quality pictures of the Earth at night, but in WWT the globe is interactive, and you can even turn on a cloud layer!

Pretty sad, actually, how much we have come to rely on electricity at night, how this has changed both the planet and our relationship to it, and how we seem to be oblivious to its effects.

Here’s another picture, taken from satellite at the time of the blackout in the northeastern part of the US:

I have a 95 Land Rover Discovery, which takes me to places I wouldn’t take most cars, has plenty of room for the dog, camping gear, and the occasional run to the dump or lumber purchase.  However it gets 15mpg on a good day, and a weekly trip to the gas station for a $75 fill up was becoming ever more painful.

Aside from that, the Land Rover has been having multiple annoying little problems, all of them costing $200-500 to fix.  Nothing big, things like the electric windows not working, a bad fuel pump, a bad electronic ignition module, etc. etc.

So to make a long story short, I rather impulsively went out and bought a 97 Saturn SW2 station wagon.

After driving it for two weeks I’m beginning to worry a little less about what a mistake I might have made.  The Saturn has a lot of miles, 140k+, but it seems like it’s in very good shape.  I replaced the stock speakers, which were blown, and flushed the radiator and changed the plugs, but not much more to do to it, really.

I’m waiting on a hubcap, coming from eBay, and I’m still waiting for something bad to surface, but breathing a little easier each day.  A mileage check came in at 25.1 mpg, so if it holds up for 2 years it will pay for itself in gas.

As of now I’m keeping the Land Rover.  For one thing the bottom has dropped out of the SUV market, and I still really like it, in spite of its faults and the gas mileage.

I was just reading Marc Canter’s latest post on “The Live Web”, and I commented about what is becoming a real issue; that is, how to not only connect up anywhere and everywhere, but how to disconnect.  Working with LiveSide, we have contributors spread out across almost 20 hours of time zone differences.  Mid day in Australia is the middle of the night in Europe, and someone is always either just getting up and logging on, or trying to log off when suddenly everyone shows up.  Asynchronicity means that questions aren’t answered immediately, and while waiting for someone’s IM message, time has marched on.  We are moving quickly toward a Live Web, where information flows, people are connected around the world, and news is where you find it.

The problem with this, of course, is that it is so hard to walk away.  There always seems to be a conversation going on, a reply awaited.  Then something new pops up, one more check on Techmeme, one more email.  Imminent news, known to be coming but just not quite when, makes hitting “refresh” far easier than hitting “shut down”.

I see many messages on Twitter revolving around “I should go to bed”.  Of course it’s not Twitter, just.  The same thing happens when watching late night TV, or reading “just one more chapter”.  Our appetite for information seemingly has no end, and as a revenue model for the Live Web depends on ever longer and more involved interaction, there isn’t a lot of incentive to get us to disconnect, to go outside and play.

We're using Community Server on LiveSide, one of those situations where we have way more functionality than we need.  Truthfully, it gets in the way.  Simple things aren't so simple.  So I'm going to use this site to try to get to know Graffiti a bit better, and see if we can downsize, which shouldn't make much of a difference on the front end, but will make quite a difference to me.

Hopefully I'll be adding a bunch of stuff to this site to see what it can do.

Apophenia: In psychology, the perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.

Been thinking a bit about Techmeme lately.  While it’s kind of addictive to see our name “up in lights”, we get almost no direct traffic as a result of making it onto Techmeme.  What does happen, is that if the story is any good (and by definition almost it is, since it’s on Techmeme), is that another blogger picks it up.  And what happens then, is that unless you get a real good link and mention from that blog, if they are bigger than you (who isn’t?), they rise above you on Techmeme and then they get the links and the traffic.

Now of course this would happen at some point anyway, Techmeme just makes the process a little more convenient.  And yet, it’s hard not to think about how to get back on Techmeme ;).

Yesterday I bought a Xacti, and today I caught a glimpse of the Dalai Lama with it, very fun.  Just happened to be in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seattle, meeting some friends who are here for the Microsoft MVP Summit, and the Dalai Lama is staying at the same hotel.

Video: Dalai Lama at the Grand Hyatt, Seattle

Spent some time this morning on Techmeme, and thinking about the volume of news.  There is a mass of commenters, who are basically going to comment on something.  On busy news days they may get fragmented, as the Apple/Google/Valley/MS news divides attention, but on a slow news day, all the attention gets thrust upon the top of techmeme, whatever it happens to be.  Today it was Apple and its attempt to bundle Safari for Windows with an iTunes update, and before that it was Sony and a $50 charge for not installing crapware on your new expensive laptop.  What Bill Gates talked about at Mix n Mash, an ability to map this kind of info, or visualize it, would be really fun.

Then I spent a bit of time with my latest eBay endeavors.  I broke my own rule for buying, and bid and won an 8gb Zune from a seller with 0 feedback.  Now I haven't heard a word from him in 7 days, meaning not a word at all.  EBay requires that you wait 10 days to initiate a complaint, but PayPal doesn't, so tonite I started that process.

In the meantime I bought another Zune - this one a 4gb - and I'm actually looking forward to having it arrive (heard from that guy right away - I usually have good success on eBay, but I do have a set of caveats I follow, which I broke above).  I added a Zune card to the sidebar here, but of course don't have a Zune to make sense of it.  I also picked up a Car Kit and a Home Kit, so I am well Zune-equipped.

Another bit of online goodness today was finding out that a credit card I rarely use, with 0 balance, was somehow compromised.  Someone racked up $1200.  The account showed that it had been locked for the past week or so, with too many login attempts.  Then tonite I logged in to my Bank of America online banking, and did log in to the card, only to find that someone in New York went shopping.  I called and everything is handled, but now of course I'm going to be studying my purchases carefully on all my cards.  Not that I don't already.

And now I'm waiting for my laptop to finish installing Vista SP1.  I had to upgrade the biometric reader driver to get SP1 to take, but looks like it just finished and now were good to go.

Just joined up on friendfeed (kip).  I don't use a bunch of the services it monitors (although I should be using Flickr, for lots of reasons), and I'm a little unsettled to see that it shows me Robert Scoble's stuff even though I specifically didn't include him in the setup :P.  We'll see how much use it turns out to be.

We're all set up finally with T-Mobile "Forever @Home" service, which is a $10/mo. unlimited long distance phone plan, using voip.  Even after buying a new set of phones (4 panasonic 6.0mhz cordless phones - I base station and 3 satellites), and the router needed to run the service, the savings are going to be significant.  Our last MCI telephone bill was $82.

In addition, I'm trying out a new wireless range extender, which should come in handy when and if the weather ever gets better.  Plenty of clouds, indeed.

I've also been working on a number of little computing setup projects, this blog being one.  After LiveSide crashed last week (hardware problem on the server, but we were out for about 20 hrs), I've been trying to get a little more organized about how everything is set up and backed up.

One simple solution was to buy a hard drive enclosure, and after taking out one of the 300gb SATA drives from the Windows Home Server (a bit of overkill, there's still 800gb with about 65% free space), I plugged it into the WHS and backed up all the Shared Folders.  While the hard drives are all in the same room at the moment, at least there is a full backup of the information, which is as it should be.

Next is some filing cleanup work, but things are getting more organized all the time.  The WHS is a great tool, and I'm backed up daily without basically having to even think about it.

Jill Bolte Taylor at TED