This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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 One of the reasons I like working where I do is cool stuff like this. I just did one work unit. Only takes a few seconds.
Help Find Jim Gray
Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.
Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.
This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.
Direct link to the MTurk hits to do this work is here. Do one or two.
 Guess what… yup, time for another of my ancestors. In my systematic posts in ahnentafel order we are now up to #20… my Father’s Mother’s Father’s Father.
That would be James Raymond Wootton who was known as “The Little Sheriff” of Central City, Kentucky. He was apparently known for being “smart” at catching the criminals, and for having a pack of bloodhounds that he used for that purpose and had trained to only eat from him so nobody would poison them.
He was also a member of some sort of Freemason/Shriner type fraternal organization. At this point I have not identified WHICH such organization he was a part of, but I know that the hat, belt, sash, sword and scabbard that made up his costume and which you can see in this picture are currently located at my father’s house. I quite well remember in my teenage years taking them out and looking at them… and probably putting them on… I mean, come on, OK, the hat with the feathers is a little goofy, but it was a real sword!
Anyway, he was born in 1850 and died sometime before 1918 when my grandmother (his granddaughter) was born. He married Susan Catherine Groves in 1873. My great grandfather was their fourth child.
He sounds like an interesting character, and I wish I knew a bit more about him. But for now that is all I have.
A few days ago Brandy found my missing lens in the grass. Once all the snow had melted away it was a lot easier to find it seems. It was almost exactly where Amy had hit me in the face with a snowball. Right where I thought it would have been, but I had looked there a number of times while the snow was still there with no luck. But Brandy found it.
So a few minutes ago when the contacts started bothering me I took them out and put the glasses back on. Ahhh!!! Much better! No more contacts for me for awhile. Probably until next time I break my glasses.
I’ll still get new glasses eventually too sometime, but it now drops way down on the priority list again.
 Once again while I hate to post two DVDs in a row, nothing drove me to post in between. So here we go.
This time I am once again on my quest to watch all of the 100 Years 100 Movies list the AFI put out in 1997. They just announced that they are going to revise the list this year for the 10th anniversary of them originally putting out the list. I need to get my pace up! I started this process at #100 soon after they put out the list. M*A*S*H is #56. Which means I have watched 45 of these movies in 10 years. I need to watch the next 55 a lot faster if I’m going to watch them all before they revise the list! Who am I kidding, I’m not going to get them all watched that soon. But I’ll finish off the old list (it’ll probably take another 10 years) then I’ll go back and pick up whatever new movies they add since then. :-)
Anyway… M*A*S*H. It was nominated for some awards when it came out. It made #56 on this AFI list. I must admit I don’t see the appeal at all. Now, maybe it is because I watched the TV show a lot when I was younger and was used to that, but it just did nothing for it. But I’m not sure that is really it. It is more that this movie was not a single coherent story. It was more like several separate episodes of the TV series (or a TV series) . But they weren’t funny. And there was never enough length to really get to know the characters. And you (or at least I) never really cared about them at all.
It was neat seeing Radar, cause of course unlike all the rest, he was played by the same actor in the TV series. But otherwise, it felt like there was nothing to see here. It plodded forward. A few things happened. Hearing the theme song with the actual lyrics rather than the instrumental version used in the TV show is neat. But that really is about it. There is the shower thing with Hot Lips, there is the whole fake suicide thing the theme song was written for, and there is a stupid football game thing at the end. And then it ends.
Woo. Anyway, no need to see this one again. Once was more than enough. Before I started this I actually thought I’d seen it before many years ago, but after seeing it I realized I’d only seen bits and pieces on TV… and I’d always switched to another channel after watching only a few minutes at a shot. Now having watched the whole thing, I understand why.
 I’m not sure how long ago it was at this point, but we got this a bit ago and watched it. Brandy liked the mini-series when it was on TV in 1994, so here it is. This disk is the first half of the mini-series.
In this first half, a bunch of people die from a super-flu and then a bunch of those who are somehow immune start getting dreams which lead them to either Boulder, CO or Las Vegas, NV depending on if they are good guys or bad guys. At least that’s how it seems after the first disk.
There are definitely some creepy bits what with all the dead people and such… and Molly Ringwald sings in it. I’m really not sure which of those is more disturbing.
I’m not going to be rushing to see it again any time soon, but it is entertaining enough that the second disk is on the agenda.
On Thursday for the first time I did a locate thing with the phones when all the phones were actually in different places. I had called Brandy a few times and she hadn’t answered, so I checked the locations. She was at home. Amy was at school. I was at work. (Although about to leave for an after work social thingy bop which was fun.)
I like the locator things. I still want to do an auto updated real time map of my own phones location with history going back a few days. That would be cool. Maybe someday.
The first tiny scratch in the finish of my iMac that I bought just under a year ago showed up today. Well, I noticed it today. Thought it was just dust. But it won’t come off. It makes me sad. Now, you have to look closely and pay attention when there is a pure white screen at that spot to really notice. It may have been there for months without me noticing. But now that I *have* noticed, you know I’m going to always notice. I’m just that way.
Oh well. It really isn’t a huge deal, things age as time goes on, and when I’m ready to replace Cronus in early 2009, this will be the least of this machine’s problems.
But I still hate it when the “new thing” isn’t quite new any more.
 This is this year’s school picture of my “little” sister.
Just under 16 months until she is as old as I was when she was born.
Time sure goes by quickly, doesn’t it?
I was a bad brother and missed her birthday this year though. Ended up IMing a happy birthday a few days later. I’ll send a belated present soon, although I haven’t decided what it will be quite yet.
I definitely miss being close enough to visit Cynthia and the rest of my family (both sides of it) on a regular basis. Sometime this year we’ll have to organize a quick trip (or trips) to see my DC family, Brandy’s PA family, and my OH family. The three are so far apart though it is hard to make a quick spontaneous trip for that sort of thing though.
I am glad I have automated daily backups again! My iTunes library got fraked up somehow on Monday. I Moved two files from yesterday’s backup and everything was fine again. Backups are good things. Just gotta get the weekly offsite backup going now too.
OK, so it is a low quality cellphone picture… I don’t make a habit of bringing a “real” camera to the office. But you get the point… Skyscrapers, Puget Sound, Mountains… and a view of my car if I choose to park on the top floor of the garage as I did today.
This is the second office move since I have been in this job. Averaging 6 months between moves, that isn’t too bad. I started out on the 5th floor, then moved to the 1st, now I am on the 3rd and for the first time have a window. Woo! Go windows! (It’s also a little bit bigger than the last one, which was a ittle cramped sometimes.)
Anyway, just moved into the new office this morning. So far I like it.
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