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A few minutes ago Brandy’s plane took off from Philadelphia. It went North over the city and then turned west and is now at cruising altitude and on its way. If she makes her connection in Minnesota, then she should be back on the ground here at 23:03. (Although they were a bit late leaving Philly, so there is a chance she won’t make that connection.) In any case… Whew!!! It will be good to have her home. I’m exausted after doing the single dad thing for 8 days. I want a nap. :-) The rumors of this got to a fevered pace over the weekend, but the offiial confirmation was at 12 UTC today. EMI Music launches DRM-free superior sound quality downloads across its entire digital repertoire
(via Digg and dozens of other places) DRM is stupid and counter productive. And as people have been finding out time and time again over the last few years, eventually futile. And attempts to make it work by law where the technology won’t do it just result in draconian laws that are completely out of line with the potential offenses. People will still buy instead of pirating if the service you are providing for the money is quicker, more convienent, and of better quality than the alternitives. But people have to get over the idea that you are paying for the content. Like it or not, content is going to be free. Not as some sort of philosophic dogma that it should be, but simply as a result of old fashioned supply and demand curves. When making a copy of something (without destorying the original) is effectively free, the supply becomes essentially to infinite, and therefore the equilibrium price drops close to zero. The only way to prop that price up is by using laws to try to enforce a price floor through artificial means. What people will pay for however is a delivery mechanism that does what they want and has the capabilities they want. And some people (not most) will still pay for creation of new content that they want. But the ballgame has changed. And the ways you can make money off it will be completely different. There are still going to be many many attempts to preserve the old business models, but it will just take time. Those old business models will go away and be replaced by new and better mechanisms. This might be a good first step. Everything sold this way will be pirated within seconds of the first sale. Might EMI still make money? Maybe. They still have the problem of being a middle man that essentially adds no additional value. But they might still be able to make good money because this will be an easier way to get their stuff than other methods. In the long run though, these middleman companies like EMI are going to end up morphing into completely new forms where they figure out how to add value in this new world, or they will go away completely. Based on history, they will probably figure it out… just many years later than they should have.
Ever since I was a kid, I have liked hot dogs with peanut butter on them. Not ketchup. Can’t stand the stuff. No mustard, no relish, none of those awful things. Just peanut butter. I always thought this was a family tradition sort of thing from my Mom’s side of the family, but she told Brandy recently that she has no idea where I got it from. In any case, as far as I am concerned, it is the only way to eat hot dogs. Oh, and it should be crunchy peanut butter too. Today Amy made us hot dogs for lunch. We didn’t have any hot dog buns in the house though, so for me she just made a big pile of peanut butter on a plate and stuck the hot dogs on top. You then sort of dip the hot dog in the peanut butter between each bite. A little bit different than the experience with a bun, but it was still good. Is there anybody else out there that eats hot dogs with peanut butter??? A quick google search shows I am not alone: Peanut butter hot dog craze sweeping Du Bois
Although that is peanut butter *in* the hot dogs, I still may have to get myself some of those to try them out…
Lets see, she was born in 1865 in Lewis County, Kentucky. She died in 1949 in the same place. In between she had a few adventures. For instance, her marriage: Lewis Napoleon Rayburn, her husband to be, stole her away from her parent’s house in the middle of the right and they rode thirty miles on a horse to cross the Ohio River to get married in Ohio. She is the ancestor that my Grandmother always mentioned was insistent that her part of the family was part Cherokee. Specifically, that Mary Alice Stamper’s father was 1/8th Cherokee. I haven’t yet found any actual evidence of that, but if true that would make me 1/256th Cherokee. (Assuming there were no other Cherokee ancestors.) Not enough for any casino money. :-) My Grandmother also had this remembrance:
She had eight children, the third of which was my ancestor. Barbara Kingsolver was one of her grandchildren. And that is most of what I have. As usual, the rest is on the Abulwiki page linked from the picture.
In 26 minutes Brandy will have been gone exactly 4 days out of the 8 days, 18 hours and 3 minutes she is scheduled to be gone. Not quite half way yet. Will I survive?
More specifically, I have an order in which I do what I do. Each evening, the first 40 minute task is email. The second is doing financial stuff… paying bills, entering receipts into Quicken, etc. The third has lately been genealogy stuff, but I have recently switched this to being a random selection from a set of about six other tasks ranging from cleaning to reading to playing chess. If I finish all three of these then I repeat and start at the top again. In reality, on most weekdays I only ever get in the first segment. Some weekdays I get two segments in. It is a very rare weekday when I get in three. But on Saturdays and Sundays I can often get in two or more cycles of three items. I find giving myself this structure at home ends up in me being a lot more productive than leaving the time unstructured. It has helped me a lot in getting things done. I have felt much more productive since I started this, and I have a good daily gauge of how much I’ve been able to do… just could how many 40 minute blocks I managed to get done. I haven’t yet given myself quite the same sort of structure at work. I think it might be useful though, so I am thinking about it. Just have to get an appropriate timer in there. (At home I use an OS X Dashboard Widget.) Problem is, at work the day is so punctuated by meetings and random interruptions that it is harder to do the same methodology. But certainly on days when there are long uninterrupted stretches it would help. Without that sort of structure two things tend to happen with me… they are somewhat opposite, but they both happen depending on what else is going on. #1) I get focused on one thing and spend too much time on it to the exclusion of other things that also need attention. #2) My top priority task is one that for whatever reason I am mentally procrastinating, and so I bounce back and forth between that task and other random tasks of lesser priority, and the primary task gets less attention than it should. The 40 minute method… or any length of time where you force yourself to focus on one and only one thing for a length of time… plus the rotation through types of tasks that need to be done… solve both those problems quite nicely. So I’ll probably try it at some point. So far though it has been easier to execute at home. And I am very happy with it. A wild rumor on some of what Apple might have up their sleeve sometime soon. The Multi-Touch Screen
(via AppleInsider) Anyway, it looks like Apple has hired this guy or licensed his technology or some such. (They also bought a company called FingerWorks who developed similar technology for touchpads.) They showed this technology working in the keynote where they introduced it for the iPhone. But this video shows it can be used way beyond a cellphone screen. Very cool looking stuff. It takes the original “you will want to lick it” of Apple’s Aqua a step or two further. You want to fondle it. Definitely watch the video. There is a second video linked from the Pogue post too, but at the moment it isn’t working for me. I’m not sure exactly how it would work in, say, a new iMac. I mean, do I really want to touch my screen to move windows around and such? But if anybody can do cool things with a technology like that, it would be Apple. If it turns out this is one of the “hidden features” in Leopard and the new range of iMacs all end up having multi-touch screens and all, I will be quite jealous that Amy is the next one in the family in line for a new computer…
It is good to know that now, wherever I go, if I am stuck somewhere with nothing to do for awhile while I am waiting for something, I can just watch some of my home Tivo for a little while. I will need to get one of those stereo headphone adapters for it though. I feel self conscious sitting there watching TV on my phone with the audio loud enough for people walking by to hear. Headphones are a good thing.
Amy and I got back just a few minutes ago from leaving Brandy at the airport. She is heading back to Pennsylvania to see her mother for awhile, mainly to help clean up her house in preparation for putting it on the market. And also just to see her mom for a bit, as it has been a little while. Her plane is due to leave the ground at 05:00 UTC today (less than an hour from now). If everything stays on schedule, her plane will land here again at 23:03 UTC on April 3rd. That is 8 days, 18 hours and 3 minutes. This will be the longest Amy and I have been left alone with each other since the three of us have lived together. We have both promised to be good, to take care of the other, and try not to destroy the house or anything with our wild partying. :-) At the moment, Amy is cooking dinner. So I think we’re off to a good start.
I haven’t posted every time there is one of them, but earlier today Amy had another performance with the Seattle Children’s Chorus. This time was part of a festival with a bunch of children’s choirs and choruses from all over the area. This picture is when they all sang together at the end. Amy is one of the ones in light blue. |
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For a couple months now I’ve been doing a “40 Minute Thing” as a way to manage my time at home working on the various projects at home I want to work on. Basically it is a simple thing. I work in 40 minute segments. Once I start a segment, I try to work on that one thing and only that one thing for 40 minutes straight without letting myself get distracted by anything else. At the end of the 40 minutes, I take a quick break, then if there is enough time, I start another 40 minute segment. Repeat until out of time. If for whatever reason I get unavoidably interrupted in the middle of a segment, I pause the timer and then restart it once I get back on task.
