Is making me go crazy…

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Whadda you know? Every refresh it was still in BC. :(

UPS needs to buy rocket cars…

Or, I guess I could pay for faster shipping… Naaa… Rocket cars.

OK, so I accidentally made porn of myself.

My sister’s old camera is a Canon PowerShot A75 - a 3.2 MP camera; pretty old, nothing special. I recently found out that it was broken; so of course I google the problem. It turns out the CCD went, which was a known problem, so even some two years out of warranty, I sent it in, they sent it back repaired. I had to pay $5 in shipping. By this time, my sister had bought a new camera, so naturally this one fell to me (my mom, dad, and sister already have cameras they’re happy with)

Great for me though - I’ll probably use a camera five or six times a year. This camera is good enough that I can get prints out of it, and I didn’t have to pay $200.

Of course the first thing I did was hack around and see what neat stuff it could do. I found a piece of software that can interface with the camera and do neat things. One of the things it could do was to take ultra-long time lapse photos.

So, naturally, I set it up to take a photo every four minutes all night (wouldn’t this be the first thing everyone does?). I know I toss and turn in my sleep, but I wanted to see exactly how MUCH I tossed and turned.

Well, you know where this is heading. I had it all set up by about midnight or 1 AM; I had a light turned on low so there was enough light for a proper exposure, and off it went.

At one point I managed to roll over and… well… lost the covers. So, a blog post with the pictures time-lapsed into a video will NOT likely be forthcoming (next time I try this, pants will be required…)

(It was a summer night! It was warm! I wasn’t thinking!)

Oh, and in the five hours it was running (from about midnight to 5 AM, when I got up to turn out the light), I rolled over 14 times.

No wonder I’m so tired all the time… I roll over on average once every 20 minutes.

Howdy Y’all.

So, recently we picked up a Garmin Nuvi 250 - a GPS device for in your car, or even on foot if you’re especially geeky.

Generally, I’ve found it to be pretty slick - it’s got a map database along with “points of interest”; so beyond, “Take me to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”; it can also handle, “Take me to the nearest fastfood joint” - which is very cool, especially if you don’t know the area.

By and large, I’ve found it to be extremely useful. Sometimes its routing is pretty stupid, but if you turn a way that it doesn’t expect, it’ll immediately recalculate the route, so that you can get where you want to go. So, Google Maps might give you better directions, but if you make a wrong turn with a google map, you’re screwed - this thing will keep right on tickin’.

It’s great for a sense of security; it makes you feel like you know where you’re going and how to get there. In reality, I think that the best solution would be a hybrid approach - have a map of a route that you like, and try to follow it, but if something goes wrong, the device is a great insurance policy. Of course, a Google map is only as good as your preparation. “I’m hungry”, sitting in a strange city, doesn’t lend itself to a Google map; but the GPS device can do it without breaking a sweat (indeed, Granite and I were hungry one night when I was in Waterloo; we pulled up all the restaurants near his place and it found a Swiss Chalet just a KM or two away which he didn’t know about).

Obviously, its greatest strength is, “Take me to Unknown City X”; but even in a city where you’ve got SOME idea of where you’re going, this thing can pull up little gems that you never knew about.

The other, awesomeist advantage, is that when you make a wrong turn, the device says, “Recalculating” and off you go - it doesn’t bitch about how you never follow directions and how could you miss that turn and “there’s no way to get there from here!”; it just deals with the situations as they come, as best as it can, and there’s something admirable about that.

So, quarky but quite useful overall.

…says “Your call is important to us” you know it isn’t.

I’ve been busy, yes, that’s one reason why posting has slowed.

The other is that I’m conflicted. Part of me is thinking, “You know what, you’ve got a pretty cool thing going on here - links that other people think are interesting, the odd issue being brought up. You know, taking what’s neat out in the world and commenting on it” - If that’s true; if I’ve really got something decent going on, maybe I should be taking off the blocking I do for Google and open this thing up a wee bit more.

But, if I do that, I won’t be comfortable at all discussing personal issues. I still feel like this is a pretty backwater slice of the internet, and that most anyone reading it probably knows me in person.

The thing is, every once in a while, I DO want to post on a more personal topic. So, I think to myself, what if I started a SECOND blog, with registration required to read it, that would just be available to people I know. This place could become a bit more open and public, and the “secondary blog” could become more personal. However, that’d be a gigantic pain in the ass for everybody, just to see my personal belly aching.

So… not sure what to do, I’m leaning towards “Just leave it as is”; but having that debate going on is distracting nonetheless (sort of like when you’re enrolled in a course, but you think you’re going to drop it. So long as you’re deciding, you really aren’t doing any work in the course).

Of course, I think this should be trusted about as much as a Michael Moore film - good at raising points and concerns, but much more interested in “quick and snappy” then “total disclosure”.

But, I always liked the “Bush VS Bush clips; and this seems like the 2008 version.