Rambles » Miscellaneous

World Blogger Championship of Online Poker

Lance — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:49:23 +0000

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! PokerStars.com is the home of Free Online Poker Games, bloggers can play for free in the exclusive WBCOOP tournament, register here to play: WBCOOP

Registration code: 896782

Google Reader annoyance

Lance — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:23:20 +0000

Sometime recently I noticed a change int he way the ‘Mark all as read’ button works in Google Reader. I used to be able to press it, have all the articles in the listing marked as read, and then go back and hit ‘m’ to set one or a few of them back to ‘unread’ mode so I could catch them later.
Yesterday, I tried to do that only to find that the ‘m’ key stopped working on all those articles and the ‘keep unread’ check box was gone from the bottom of each article so there is no way to make a ‘Mark all as read’ article ‘unread’ anymore. How frustrating.
I don’t know why Google added this behaviour, but it sure is annoying and I’d like them to fix it.

The Whirlwind that is GA

Lance — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:20:06 +0000

Well, I have a few minutes downtime when I’m not totally exhausted so I can write something here, finally. I had plans to do a daily post sharing my impressions of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into delivering all the GA website reporting and video streaming. That plan crumbled upon contact with GA. I actually did write an outline draft for the first day, but haven’t gone back to it and haven’t jotted anything down since.
GA, as usual, has been a wonderful, energizing, stressful, joyful, fun, event. I need to fine a way to do my job and have enough time/energy left over to write about it.
I’m very pleased with how the live streaming is going. We are getting lots of comments back about it and most are good. Some folks are having problems and we are trying to fix things for them. The file capture for later on-demand viewing is having some problems and we are working through them as well. My team of videographers are doing a bang up job of taping workshops and other events, ripping the tapes, and getting them ready for upload. I’m very proud of them.
More later!

Cops gone Wild?

Lance — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:04:54 +0000

This is nuts. Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer pulls an ambulance over for failing to yield, while the ambulance is transporting a patient to the ER, and assaults one of the medics after the officer tries to ticket the ambulance. I’m stunned that cops would harrass EMTs while the EMTs are trying to do their job. It just boggles my mind. I’m glad the patient came through everything OK and I hope that the leadership of the OHP and the EMT service sit down and work this out and proper discipline is applied to the wrongdoers. What a sad situation. Sourced from The Agitator.

Ants in the sink?

Lance — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:20:51 +0000

Weirdness abounds. I’ve dealt with ant intrusions into my home while living in various apartments all my life. It’s just something that happens occasionally. A call to the apartment complex to get the exterminator out usually ends things quickly.

Last week, I experienced a first. It appears that large black ants have taken up residence in the overflow opening of the sink in my guest bathroom. We saw them wandering around the bathroom so we had the exterminator out. They set out traps and sprayed and we saw several dead ants when we got home that day. I thought the problem was solved.

This morning, I went into the guest bathroom to fill our cat’s water bowl and noticed ants hanging around the overflow hole in the sink. A closer look revealed large headed soldier-looking ants just standing there guarding the hole with jaws large enough for a good bite. Uh oh… Looks like the traps haven’t done the job yet.

I’ve got another call into the apartment complex management. If I didn’t have a cat to worry about, I’d buy some Terro, put it out, and be done with the little buggers.

On letting the radicals control speech

Lance — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:25:10 +0000

Once we start letting the fear of offending some group of people control what books are published, where does it stop? Books are about ideas. I might viscerally hate the ideas in a book, but I don’t think my hatred of those ideas should prevent the book from being published or sold. Publishers should have the courage to market books wherever they think they might sell.

Trying to avoid offending people is a race to the bottom leading to pablum and mediocrity.

Link to B92 article ganked from Jamie Larue’s wonderful blog.

The Modern Flying Experience

Lance — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:40:45 +0000

Someone finally captured the essence of air travel today.

Spiders!

Lance — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 05:27:18 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Dave Brady’s Insect Picture of the Day website since I first ran across it. It’s in my “read every day” folder in Google Reader. He’s inspired me to try my hand at insect photography and I got my first chance recently. I own a Canon Powershot A610 so most of these aren’t all that much to talk about, but there are few good ones in my first photo set.

I found these two hanging out in a random web nestled into the angle between a set of steps and the edge beam for the porch on the mess hall at Millstone 4-H Camp. I think they were mating when I first saw them; they were tangled up with each other. I didn’t have my camera with me and when I came back they were just hanging out in the web separately. They look frighteningly big in the photos, but were actually tiny. Only about 2cm leg tip to leg tip the long way, if that. I had to get right in there with my camera in macro mode to get the closeups. If anyone can identify them for me, I’d appreciate it.

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP

Lance — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:14:19 +0000

I can’t think of any other author who had a stronger influence on me than Arthur C. Clarke. His was some of the first science fiction I read and I still regularly return to some of his collections of short stories. I must have read “The Nine Billions Names of God” the first time when I was 9 or 10 years old. He was the master of the short story and could transport you to another world, another mindset, with just a few short lines of text and then totally re-arrange your thoughts with a single line.

“The stars started to wink out of existence one by one.”

He changed our lives in so many ways its impossible to count. Arthur, you will be missed.

On a somewhat lighter note:

A UU Postsecret!

Lance — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:43:01 +0000

This past Sunday’s selection of secret-bearing postcards includes one from a UU!