Airborne wind turbines

Seems like a good idea to me. “1% of the jetstream’s wind power could supply all US electrical demand.”

Hey neat

Not even going for two whole weeks yet, and already this page is on the first page of results for ‘narcissist behavior’ at MSN.

Better procrastination advice

Give up on yourself. Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect, or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself. Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die.

— Dr. Morita Masatake

Yawriats Ot Nevaeh

It’s “Stairway to Heaven” reversed, then cut up into quarter-notes and resequenced, so that each reversed piece is in its original position in the forward order. So you hear the same melody, but all trippy and backwards-soundy. It’s pretty damn cool.

OK procrastination advice

David Seah on ‘premature optimization’:

Optimization itself is always desirable in an end product, but performing it before you fully understand where the bottlenecks are is a recipe for wasting time and energy. In the real world, it’s like arguing what the best way to do something is before anyone on the team has really done it; at some point, you have to try something and see what happens. Trying to be efficient before you have real experience just slows you down for no reason. In real-life work, it makes sense to just learn by doing, and make incremental improvements in the process as you gain experience with it. Make your best guesses based on what you do know, but don’t encumber the process with “it will be more efficient if we do it this way” conditions. Instead, focus only on the “it will work” conditions.

There’s more; I’d say it’s worth the read.

Wow, that’s some tunnel

“We’ve now got a dedicated tunnel task force, which works with the DEA and border patrol to proactively look for tunnels.”

Quit complaining about your job!!

Quit complaining about your job!!

The third one down is my favorite.

Take pride in small accomplishments

I did two (2) pull-ups today! I had to cheat a bit by bending my legs on the second one, but it was the first time I’ve been able to get my head over the bar twice in a row. Then I did a half-dozen negatives, and a couple of sets on the assisted pull-up machine. For the assisted ones, I also went down a notch on the amount of assistance I’ve been using. I was able to get through 10 reps on the first and 7 on the second. After all that, I must admit I felt a little queasy.

Also, I just realized that I didn’t take any ibuprofen this morning, and that I might live to regret leaving the bottle at home.

Flocking and feeding

Autonomous Light Air Vessels. The posted videos are well worth a look.

Man, it would be cool to get to work on something like that.

Life-size frozen Han Solo made of lego!

Hello? Excuse me? I said, it’s a life-size sculpture of Han Solo frozen in carbonite, made of lego!!! I’m not sure you’re with me, here. We are talking life-size. Frozen. Han Solo. Of LEGO!!!

I don’t know if I can make you realize how flippin HUGE this is. Sure, as an exercise in pure lego insanity, it’s barely in the same league as, say, a working harpsichord - but as a feat of sheer geekery, it’s utterly nonpareil.

I figure, something like this automatically gets you a chance to basically have the woman of your choice dress in a Princess Leia gold bikini for your pleasure.

Yojimbo

Yojimbo is a new software from Bare Bones, the people who make the deservedly well-loved BBEdit. It’s another information organizer/freeform database thingo, like StickyBrain or (somewhat like) DevonThink. There seem to be a lot of these sorts of apps for Mac as compared to a strange dearth of anything really similar on the Windows side, other than maybe OneNote from Microsoft, which seems to be fairly popular on the MS campus and no where else that I’m aware of.

So anyway I downloaded the Yojimbo demo last night, and plan to play around with it a bit more. My first impression is it’s pretty comparable to StickyBrain but may have a better designed interface. The thing I’m still not getting is why there are so many apps like this for Macs when the filesystem, along with the Finder and Spotlight, can be so easily employed to accomplish the same ends. I’ve run across some complaint about the Finder UI, but to me it seems to allow me to do everything these “organizer” apps do: create a special area to drop notes, receipts, PDFs, bookmarks and similar digital ephermera, and then impose whatever loose or strict hierarchical organizing scheme as seems most helpful at the moment. Everything is indexed and searchable with Spotlight, and since Tiger I can even create smart folders. Nothing I’ve tried so far has seemed to do this so much better that I could see the need for a special tool for it. I’m willing to give this Yojimbo thing a try, however - mainly just because Bare Bones made it. We’ll see I guess..

Rarg

Planning on a lunchtime run today, I brought along my gym bag. Too bad I forgot my running shoes aren’t in it, since I wore them home yesterday.

I swear, I’m so disorganized it’s a wonder I can find my ass in the morning.