October 2007 Archives

Yet another really good reason for all my Windows-using friends to ditch that horrible operating system: The Pangea Plugin will not work on Windows, even on the Windows version of Safari.

The good news: I have also now redone the Lake Allatoona pano that was featured in this post on October 21st. The Pangea version can be viewed at this link. The QuickTime version can be viewed at this link.

The Lenox Park Maze that was featured in this post on October 13th may now be viewed at this link.

I decided to go ahead and purchase PTGui. After upgrading to Leopard (OS 10.5), Stitcher from RealViz, which I also really like, ceased to render a final pano. I talked with their tech support and a patch is in the works, but the timeline has not yet been announced. I was advised to visit their site regularly for the announcement. I might end up with both products. Each seems to have particular strengths in different circumstances.

Here is a pano I shot last April of The Wells Fargo Center in downtown Los Angeles. If you want to see the pano in your browser using the Pangea Plugin Viewer* (vastly superior), click here. Otherwise, click the picture below to view the pano.

I must say, I am extremely impressed with PTGui. You will notice a flabbergastingly enormous number of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines in this pano. In PTMac I could never get these lines to connect correctly across the shots that comprise the pano, so the pano was never published. Using PTGui, every line lines up flawlessly! Mind blowing! In this case, the actual application itself does a better job than the trial you can download!

And, by the way, I used high resolution photos with minimal compression, hence the file takes a bit of time to download with high speed access. (Sorry dial up will probably not work.) So, go ahead, zoom in and read the paper over his shoulder!

Be patient as this is a large file that takes time to download. It will appear grey and blurred until it is fully downloaded.

*The Pangea Plugin is free and simple to download and install into your browser. Click here to go to the download page at Pangea. Oh, it only works on a Mac. Hmm... I wonder if it will work in Safari for Windows?! I'll shoot an email to Brian and ask.

So here is my official Halloween post. You know how they always start: But this story is true--no really! It really is a tale of true horror and terror:

We have currently spent about $500,000,000,000 on the war in Iraq. We have killed approximately 80,000 Iraqi civilians. Nearly 4,000 Americans have been killed in the war. We are approaching 30,000 wounded Americans.

Yet "the homeland" appears to be no safer as we have been, like my Frankenstein pin, stuck on code orange for years.

What if, for the past 5 years, the duration of this war, we had spent this same amount of money on hiring 1,600,000 teachers for our public school children? We could have done that for the same amount of money we spent on the war--yes, that's over 1.5 million more teachers! I believe firmly such activity would have made a meaningful difference in "not leaving any child behind!"

Would this have made our world, our nation, a better place?

Pssst... It's time to fire some people. They have made a horrible, horrible, needless mess of things. This is the true tale of horror!

Let's see: using Zucker's logic, everyone that has ever created anything that runs on a PC should pay Microsoft a premium price because Microsoft wrote th operating system that powers the majority of the PC's on earth. Oh, but people who use Windows are already paying! I forgot. <evil smile>

NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker has said that along with flexible pricing experimentation, the company was seeking a cut of Apple’s hardware sales during iTunes contract negotiations. Speaking at an event organized by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, Zucker said “We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99. We made that offer for months and they said no,” Zucker said. “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he added. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.” NBC Universal, in partnership with Fox, today launched a public beta of the Hulu.com video service. Responding to a separate question, Zucker said that “Apple has destroyed the music business. If we don’t take control on the video side, they’ll do the same” to video.

Source: NBC Universal wanted cut of Apple hardware sales

"Sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content"? What drugs does this man do?! NBC ain't all that! The guy is crazy! I bet his legal department can't wait for him to move on to some other company.

... as apposed to blind acceptance. This can only be a good thing. I have personally known several of the key leaders of the extremist right wing Christian movement. Their extreme self-pocessed arrogance and power-hungry, self-serving behavior were the exact opposite of what I believe to be in keeping with the teachings of Christ. They couldn't get along with each other. How on earth were they ever to hold on to a coalition of political power that demands compromise and accommodation, not unyielding personalized proclamations of the very will of God!

These men, these wealthy white men, all had mastered the use of telemarketing--a strategy well used by this administration for its horrific record of mass marketing fear as a tool for exploitation. These fanatical religious leaders had built a foundation of financial support that, for the most part, was fashioned from frightening the unsuspecting, taking money from the old who trusted their leadership and from the misinformed that only knew them as their carefully crafted media personalities. These men personally lived very well while many of their loyal supporters did without, believing they were doing the right thing.

In the late 1970s, at the behest of one of these leaders, I had the opportunity to travel the country meeting thousands of these good people. And they were indeed very good people. They were indeed doing without. They were, unknowingly, beginning the foundation of support that would catapult this extremist agenda into the White House for the past 7+ years.

What angers me the most is that these men had their day in the sun. They had their chance in political power to make our nation, and the world in which we all live, a better place. And their horrendous job performance has deeply damaged our democracy, leaving Americans in a far more precarious position in our world--a world that hates us more than ever.

They recklessly and irresponsibly turned our national coffers into a financial mess that reminds me of the convicted felon Jim Bakker's PTL ministries' fraud. (Do you remember the $8 billion in cash that was flown to Iraq that just disappeared into thin air?? It was only in the news for a few days. Why hasn't that ever the subject of investigations leading to prosecutions!?) This administration has been characterized by horrendous, deplorable financial mismanagement that has indeed benefited select groups.

I hope the people of our nation have learned a difficult and hard lesson: The ego centric, power hungry, money grabbing, self serving, extremists are never to be trusted--especially when they claim, like our president has indeed claimed (which was carefully hushed from the mass media), to speak for God. I can think of nothing more dangerous than the religious extremists abroad and at home.

The mixture of religion into politics with the design of forcing a narrowly prescribed social agenda which financially rewards the weathy onto the unsuspecting and undeserving public is not just unconstitutional, it is dangerous. It is the substance of hubris. It is wrong. I am delighted that these extremists are losing political power in both their own ranks and within the political sphere. The damage they have done to the people in their own cause who sincerely want to work good in the world, and the damage they have done to the nation will last for many years.

Below is an excerpt from an interesting article worth the read:

The founding generation of leaders like Falwell and Dobson, who first guided evangelicals into Republican politics 30 years ago, is passing from the scene. Falwell died in the spring. Paul Weyrich, 65, the indefatigable organizer who helped build Falwell’s Moral Majority and much of the rest of the movement, is confined to a wheelchair after losing his legs because of complications from a fall. Dobson, who is 71 and still vigorous, is already planning for a succession at Focus on the Family; it is expected to tack toward the less political family advice that is its bread and butter.

The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that expunged political and theological moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention are retiring or dying off, too. And in September, when I called a spokesman for the ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James Kennedy, another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I learned that Kennedy had “gone home to the Lord” at 2 a.m. that morning.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

The generational and theological shifts in the evangelical world are turning the next election into a credibility test for the conservative Christian establishment. The current Republican front-runner in national polls, Rudolph W. Giuliani, could hardly be less like their kind of guy: twice divorced, thrice married, estranged from his children and church and a supporter of legalized abortion and gay rights. Alarmed at the continued strength of his candidacy, Dobson and a group of about 50 evangelical Christians leaders agreed last month to back a third party if Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee. But polls show that Giuliani is the most popular candidate among white evangelical voters. He has the support, so far, of a plurality if not a majority of conservative Christians. If Giuliani captures the nomination despite the threat of an evangelical revolt, it will be a long time before Republican strategists pay attention to the demands of conservative Christian leaders again. And if the Democrats capitalize on the current demoralization to capture a larger share of evangelical votes, the credibility damage could be just as severe.

And while my post today is still not considered politically correct or popular, mark these words, for the truth they tell will live long past today's narrowly defined spectrum of "acceptable" debate. I feel better now, having gotten this off of my chest.

Source: Evangelical Movement - Religion and Politics - Presidential Election of 2008 - Christians and Christianity - Voting and Voters - New York Times

"Never ask a man what sort of computer he drives. If it's a Mac, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?" -- Tom Clancy

A friend in Florida sent me this one:

Liar, Liar,
Iraq's on Fire!

But first, I had to figure out how to create this pano. I shot these shots in June of 2006, holding my camera, hoping I could later stitch the photos together into a pano--doubtful without the tripod. Tonight, over a year later, I tried both PTGui and RealViz's Stitcher. The fact that the camera was handheld made it unlikely that a pano would be born, but born it was. PTGui seemed to do the better job.

This is the midnight sun from the northern most tip of Norway, Knivskjellodden, located in the municipality of Nordkapp in Norway, which is generally considered the northernmost point of the entire continent of Europe. The North Pole is just over 1,200 miles from here and would be directly under the sun, which, of course, is still visible at midnight!

I admit to doctoring the image below with a little lens flare where the sun was lurking behind the clouds, but the pano itself is without edit. Since I shot this as a single row of shots with a 12mm focal length lens, you will not be able to see the extreme top or bottom of the pano. But it turned out pretty cool as it is. (The software is still in demo mode; so, you will see "buy me" watermarks. Still wondering which software is best.)

I wish I had time to read this. I have felt for several years that this presidency was subverting democracy, the very will of the people being manipulated and controlled in alarming ways. I do not believe this will serve our country well for generations. I just need more time to read all of the things I want to read!! This has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism but lies squarely on the balance of power, which I believe to have been seriously corrupted.

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy
by: Charlie Savage

Today, this plot is coming to fruition. As Takeover reveals, the Bush-Cheney administration has succeeded in seizing vast powers for the presidency by throwing off many of the restraints placed upon it by Congress, the courts, and the Constitution.

Charlie Savage's timely book unveils the secret machinations behind the headlines, explaining the links between warrantless wiretapping and President Bush's Supreme Court nominees, between the unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department and the torture debate, between the White House's use of "signing statements" to assert a right to defy new laws and its efforts to impose greater control over career military JAG lawyers, and between the secrecy surrounding Vice President Cheney's energy task force and the holding of U.S. citizens without trial as "enemy combatants."

It tells, for the first time, the full story of a hidden agenda three decades in the making, laying out how a group of true believers set out to establish monarchical executive powers that, in the words of one conservative critic, "will lie around like a loaded weapon" ready to be picked up by any future president - liberal and conservative alike.

Source: About the Book

This article is a must read. I didn't know about several of the added features that quietly came with the 1.1.1 iPhone software update. I'm just going to bullet the main article points here. For the details, head on over to the article.

• Access to the iTunes WiFi Music Store (I thought this was a bit much until I wanted to use it--and then did because... well, I could!)
• New mail functionality (It's geeky but good.)
• Special characters added as the phone went all international on us. (¡La mañana, ahora mismo!)
• Capacity to shut off data roaming (Save yourself unexpected roaming charges abroad when mail auto syncs, for example.)
• Double click the home button (I love this!)
• Video out (Plunk down the extra $$ for the special cable.)
• Double tap the spacebar for an automatic period and space when typing (Very handy feature!)
• Re-order your stocks and weather (I had actually been disappointed I couldn't!)
• Bluetooth battery for Apple's bluetooth headset (I don't have one; so, I want this feature for any headset. Apple's headset, lacks noise cancelation technology.)
• Developer's guidelines (Above my head)
• Some bug fixes

Everyone was talking about the update bricking phones. And perhaps that's why I missed knowing about several of these features until I read the article.

I found these little tidbits from yesterday's Apple news of interest:

• On the Apple earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer cited some research from Strategy Analytics placing the iPhone as the “fourth highest selling handset in the U.S. market in the September quarter.” (The Motorola V3 was No. 1).
• Apple has sold 1.4 million iPhones in a little over a quarter. It took the iPod more than two years to reach the same number of sales. The price cut helped it reach that number, by nearly doubling the daily sales of the iPhone. And Apple says it is on track to sell 10 million iPhones by next year.
• iTunes has now sold 3 billion songs, and 100 million TV shows.

Source: Digging Into Apple’s iPhone Numbers

I promised myself that I was going to be positive today. I was going to pray for more rain (done), celebrate the fact that Apple is now worth more than Intel and IBM (done--see below), and pick up the laundry. (OK, so the last one seems out of place and isn't done yet.)

• Microsoft (MSFT) - $290,326,101,760
• Google (GOOG) - $206,137,075,350
• Apple (AAPL) - $163,814,662,910
• Intel (INTC) - $156,278,400,000
• IBM (IBM) - $154,610,255,550
• Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) - $133,260,024,780
• Disney (DIS) - $67,680,019,880
• Dell (DELL) - $64,241,243,920
• Sony (SNE) - $45,994,645,800
• Yahoo! (YHOO) - $40,641,873,724
• Amazon (AMZN) - $39,037,267,570
• Adobe (ADBE) - $27,031,152,680
• RealNetworks (RNWK) - $998,960,040
• Napster (NAPS) - $152,192,000

Then I read this article at NPR. Can we get this man out of office without starting WWIII? (How many times is FOX News going to keep mentioning this?!) Can we get him out before we have spent a trillion dollars on this tragic mistake?

Bush Wants $46B More for Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan
by Guy Raz

Morning Edition, October 23, 2007 · President Bush asked Congress on Monday to approve $196 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through the end of the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. If approved, the total price tag for the Iraq war will exceed $600 billion by next October. Annual spending for the wars will hit an all-time high in 2008. White House and Pentagon officials say part of the reason is because of the unanticipated costs associated with the so-called "surge" of additional troops.

Source: NPR : Bush Wants $46B More for Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan

I ask a simple question: How on god's green earth (rapidly getting browner) can White House and Pentagon officials say that they didn't anticipate that sending the "surge" over to Iraq would cost more money?! Either they are fools or they think we are. Both disgust me.

Having just been to Denali in August, I found this photograph fascinating. The picture was taken by an astronaut on a space shuttle (exactly how fast do those things go?!) using an 800mm (or was it 600?) lens. Special calculations had to be applied to the digital image to bring all of the pixels into sharp focus because of the speed of travel and the extreme distance from the mountain range. Yet Denali is clearly visible from outer space! And the lack of cloud cover is nothing short of amazing.

My version of the same place, just a little closer while traveling a great deal slower and using a 12mm lens.

Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macintosh computers, representing 34 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac shipments by 400,000. The Company sold 10,200,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 17 percent growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone sales were 1,119,000, bringing cumulative fiscal 2007 sales to 1,389,000.

“We are very pleased to have generated over $24 billion in revenue and $3.5 billion in net income in fiscal 2007,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re looking forward to a strong December quarter as we enter the holiday season with Apple’s best products ever.”

“Apple ended the fiscal year with $15.4 billion in cash and no debt,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO.

Source: MacDailyNews

For the past several weeks I have been reading a lot of survey results from Ivy League campuses about computer use. The Mac is experiencing nothing short of a huge surge among these students. Additionally, the Apple market share has risen dramatically in the last quarter. It only gets better. And the stock prices hit new records all but weekly. What a brilliant strategy: meet real needs with quality products that work.

Here are some interesting more boradly-based college student survey results brought to us by MacDailyNews - Apple Mac on the rise among U.S. college students*.

Driven in part by what analysts call a halo effect from the iPod and the iPhone, the market share of the company’s personal computers is surging.

Two research firms that track the computer market said last week that Apple would move into third place in the United States behind Hewlett-Packard and Dell on Monday, when it reports product shipments in the fiscal fourth quarter as part of its earnings announcement.

“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a telephone interview last week. “It is outpacing the industry.”

Source: As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades - New York Times

* One thousand online interviews were conducted between Thursday, October 18th 2007 and Sunday, October 21st, 2007. Respondents participate in the SurveyU panel of U.S. college students which has been meticulously constructed to represent college students nationally. Results were weighted to reflect the demographic composition of college students nationwide according to statistics published by the NCES (National Center for Educational Statistics).

Yes, while taking the pano of the dried up Lake Allatoonah, I decided to do a rain dance! Well, nothing else seems to be working, right? And this morning? A few hours of rain! What can I say?! As we need days and days of precipitation, I should have danced longer I guess.

This whole issue of the impact of global warming, a phenomenon the President assures us is not happening, remember Black is the New White*, will probably have untold human and economic impact in the next 50 years. Rising sea levels will only be one issue, but people can move. But it goes deeper. Alabama is already suing Georgia for more access to drinking water. I suspect that access to pure drinking water will become the stuff of war and terrorist attacks.

Where will it all lead? What will the migration patterns of people in the USA look like as they avoid the swelling seas and hunt for cooler climates with more water? Tim says this is real! And then from the New York Times:

Draining: The 100-foot-high bathtub ring left by the dwindling waters of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam.

The Future Is Drying Up
By JON GERTNER
Published: October 21, 2007

... global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. ... Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

Source: Climate - Drought - Global Warming - American West - Arizona - Utah - Colorado - New Mexico - Nevada - New York Times

* Oops, my anger over the failure of this administration is showing yet again! Is anyone paying attention?

Oddly, just yesterday I saw a stretch Hummer limo. My friend commented on how utterly obscene such a thing is. I suggested that it could perhaps be much more comfortable, and therefore practical, than trying to crawl into your typical limousine in which you have to crouch and crawl--all dressed up as well. Then, as the owner of a Prius, I suggested that someone needs to make a stretch Prius. We laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

Today I see a post about just such an endeavor. I suggest it can't be true because the article claims the car still maintains 50 mpg fuel efficiency. My non-limo Prius has been running about 44 mpg lately, probably because I live in the infernal, never-ending heat of hell here in Atlanta.

Can you guess which ones?

Lost Cities were real, prosperous, well-populated areas of human habitation that fell into terminal decline and whose location was later lost. Most lost cities are found, and have been studied extensively by scientists. Here's our list of the 10 most amazing lost cities in the world.

Source: 10 Most Amazing Lost Cities

You know, do you ever have those times when you feel like no one is listening to you? No one is taking you seriously? I thought I already addressed this issue: the web as a platform. I don't want it! So everyone stop it already!

Adobe Preparing Full Shift to Web Apps
At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said that the company is working toward shifting all of their apps online, but that it would probably take about 10 years for a complete shift. While the web as the computing platform of the future is currently a popular idea, and while prognostication 10 years out is rarely a good idea, we're skeptical that Adobe could pull off a full shift of its software catalog to Internet apps.

You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.

Source: Weekly Wrapup, 15-19 October 2007

The tragedy of the failing water supply really hit home today when I visited part of Lake Allatoona, one of the two lakes that supplies Atlanta with drinking water.

One area of the lake is completely dry. In chatting with a man who is the host for a campground that has been closed for 3 years, he said this particular area "went completely dry two weeks ago." His job at the campground is to prevent vandalism, and four wheelers and trucks from getting stuck in the muddy bottom of the lake. In the picture above (click on it for a larger version), you can see where a truck tried to make it across the dry lake bed.

In this first picture on the left, "No Wake," is No Problem as there is No Water. The full picture on the right gives you some sense of how high the water should be in the lake. Yes, the zoomed in sign on the left is from near the top of the bridge support structure in the picture on the right (click to enlarge). Instead of water that would be at least 10 feet deep in normal conditions, you can see a tiny litle stream of water that isn't even an inch deep, a stream that dries up before it ever gets into the main lake. Additionally, from the pano at the bottom of this post, I would have been standing in water well over my head, probably between 10 and 15 feet deep. Of course, there is no water at all. In the distance of the lake bed (pictured below on the left) you can see the signs of new life--green plants are growing in what was once the lake's bottom. In the next picture (below on the right) you can see what once was a floating buoy warning boaters in the lake to slow down to prevent dangerous wake near the bridge. The water level here would also have been well over my head.

When I was a child growing up on the Gulf of Mexico, I always thought it would be totally cool to see the bottom of the Gulf without any water. This is surreal. It isn't cool. It speaks of the tragic. Click on the picture below to see a pano of the empty lake.

According to this article, Britain has more surveillance cameras than any other place on earth: 1 for every 14 people! The title of the article is "The Surveillance Society Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Brother." (emphasis added)

What? Love Big Brother? Who on earth paid to have this prattle posted?

Would anyone in his or her right mind blindly trust an invisible government? I am reminded of these relevant words: "of the people, by the people, for the people." Somewhere I missed "watching the people."

From my vantage point, in order for government to be accountable to the people in a democratic society, it must be visible--very, very visible. Invisible government becomes unaccountable for its actions and abuses its power.

And a final question/thought: just how much money is being spent on all of that surveillance? One camera for every 14 people is a lot of cameras. How must is a single camera installation? Is this at all cost effective?

Let me be clear: I don't want the web to be my platform! At least at the present time, I want my OS X to be my platform, even as it leverages new web technologies like the 10.5 version of iChat, which will allow me to present Keynotes via the web while the person on the other end of that video chat sees both me and the presentation. The new iChat apparently leverages total desktop control via the web, which means opening, manipulating, and saving documents on another computer across the web. This add new functionality that has some substance.

But I don't want to give my operating system away for the web. I want my stuff on my computer. I don't want web-based applications where I use an application through a web browser and save a file to some server in the sky. I don't want to stream everything from some server--a server whose owner will eventually want my money and can cut me off.

So I don't like what the Google guru is saying. And as for those Google Gadgets... nonsense! They are ugly and provide little of no meaningful functionality. But are they designed to take us a simple little safe step closer to the web as a platform? Is this a brilliant marketing strategy?

The platform wars are over. Long live the Web. That was the basic message delivered by Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, in a ten-minute presentation at Web 2.0 a few minutes ago. His talk was nominally about widgets (which Google calls Gadgets). Huber noted that over 100,000 sites have already embedded Google Gadgets, with 63 of them attracting more than one million active users a week. While the first phase of these gadgets involved people using them to syndicate content out to other sites, the real promise he says is their ability to spread applications far and wide:

What we see is applications fundamentally changing. Just like the model for content changed from monolithic sites, now applications are going to be feeds and containers.

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.

Take that, Facebook.

Source: The Web is the Platform

The whole concept of improv is creative, innovative, and fun. But this idea is at the top of the list. This project shows the fine line in our culture between permitting sexual display and sensuality to sell product and banning the same display of sex/sensuality in the market place itself because it doesn't earn the vendor money. Or maybe the store didn't like it because it exposed them--so to speak. In my opinion, the people who thought this up went way beyond clever. They show us our hypocrisy and foolishness--brilliant!

A shirtless male model paid by the store welcomes customers into the Abercrombie and Fitch store on 5th Avenue in New York. What happens when 111 shirtless men of all shapes, sizes, and ages gradually enter the store to actually go shopping? I mean, they are really buying what I consider to be the insanely overpriced shirts sold by Abercrombie and Fitch. The only difficulty is that each of the 111 men, like the paid model at the entrance of the store, does not have on a shirt. Check out the videos and the photos from this incredibly well executed improv event!

My favorite quotation from the 2nd video: The cameraman asked this little boy who participated in the event if he thought anything was funny about the experience. Without hesitation, the child said, "Yeah, the prices!" Priceless!

He was a Christmas gift. He was bald. He got watered last week. Click on his image to see the whole do.

• Last month, over 1 billion (yes, with the "b") dollars worth of mortgages foreclosed...in Atlanta alone!
• Atlanta's water supply is now critically low with talk of water rationing.
• It's the middle of October and it's still hotter than hell here.
• Our president tells us everything is fine.

The sad state of our nation: Americans have turned to corporate America to perform more and more of the policy duties of government. What exactly is our government doing for the people of our country? We are paying a bloody fortune for it. What exactly are we getting for our money besides corruption?

It's a Lifestyle!

This was Apple.com's website for a couple of days! Way to go Al! Way to go Apple.

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
- Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher (1813-1855)

The art and science of making a pano has been a royal headache to date: trying to calibrate my 8mm fisheye so I could develop a lens template has all but driven me to drink! And all of the recommendations and step-by-steps leave major aspects of the process out or assume you understand the deep science of optical arts: precise focal length, precise nodal point, distortion measurements, control point variance minimized, pitch, yaw, roll, blah, blah, blah.

However, I've learned recently that my headache is bad software--or, at the very least, software that is anything but helpful. I downloaded the trial version of RealViz, after seeing it was used by a panographer (is there such a thing?) who produced some astoundingly difficult panos with intricate lines. The user interface and the whole logic of the process of the new software is very different. You work in 3D space! Being completely unfamiliar with the tools, I just clicked the autostitch button to see what happened.

Dear god! Instant pano without a single issue! I tried several panos that I've shot but never assembled because I can't get them to work at all. Autostitch: instant pano! The only retouching I did on the one presented below was take out the tripod from the bottom shot! That's it.

So what's the catch? About $600! But it works! It really works!! So before I plop down the cash, I'm going to double check around the www to see if any other miracles are out there. In the mean time: here's an instant unretouched pano of an area that would be a headache from hell in my other software. The wind blowing through the trees would alone have sent me wailing from my work at the computer! And the tiny lines in the far building would have been the beginnings of utter insanity.

Click above to view the panorama. It's over 10 meg and will take time to download (clear up).

(Update: The final pano posted above is now a pano made by PTGui.)

So Newt and other Republicans are bitter that Al Gore earned a Nobel Peace prize. I guess they want one for starting the war in Iraq.

Do you want to know what I think is amazing about all of this? Al Gore, who, by the way, as a reminder, won the popular vote in 2000, has done more for peace in our world than W has done in the same period of time after his being appointed to the presidency by the Supreme Court.

I just have to wonder: How different would our world be today if Al Gore had been our president for the past 7 years? I have a cold shudder at the legacy of this current administration. Within my lifetime, will our nation recover from all of the damage that has been done?

After seeing Versailles - Galerie des glaces I was inspired. How on earth did the photographer gain sole access? How did the photographer get such a dead sharp, beautifully lit image? Just a spectacular result. So, I decided to assemble a pano I shot in Alaska, regrettably, the only pano I shot in Alaska.

Click above to view the panorama. It's over 20 meg and will take time to download (clear up).

This quotation from the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday, October 7, 2007:

How is it that our government hasn't addressed some of the most pressing issues facing us? Energy dependence, global warming, campaign finance, health care for the poor and medical costs for everybody, the national debt, special interests in charge of congress.

My disgust with the failure of our government over the past 7 years has been no small secret on this blog. Because I have squarely blamed the Republican party for this wretched mess, readers have found it easier to dismiss my concerns with the label "liberal" than to think through the complex issues that swirl around our lives. I only care to blame the Republican party because they have undisputedly been the party in charge--and have failed to attend to their duties and responsibilities.

I want my government officials held accountable for their lack of appropriate job performance. Basically I want them fired. I have seen little more than greed, hypocrisy, lesser important issues continuously thrust into the media limelight to hide what has and will continue to be the primary responsibilities of government--responsibilities that have gone unmet by our politicians.

Again: I want politicians held accountable. I want them fired. I demand a return to government for the people and by the people--not corporate and religious special interest groups with open bank accounts.

I want to encourage everyone to ask: are the issues that are being paraded out in front of the public by the politicians during this election cycle just more smoke screens or are they the true issues that face the people of our nation--all of the people of our nation? Will we tolerate another election year focused on meaningless marketing machines, or will we demand attention to domestic and foreign policy that will have the needs of the American people at heart?!

I love it. Why hasn't someone done this already?! I hate parallel parking!

Japan's Nissan Motor Co. on Friday unveiled a new version of its egg-shaped Pivo concept car that can drive sideways and has a small robot to assist with navigation or calm down angry drivers. The Pivo 2 three-seater electric car has wheels that can turn 90 degrees for easy parallel parking. Like its predecessor, which was unveiled two years ago, the new Pivo has a cabin able to revolve 360 degrees, eliminating the need to reverse. ... The car has "by-wire" technologies that use electric signals in the steering and braking. Unlike the first Pivo, it has no axles. Instead it has four separate electric motors, allowing the wheels to turn further than a conventional car.

At the very outset of our reaction to the terrorist attack of September 11th, I feared we as a people and our government were not thinking clearly. I was especially fascinated by the immediate "off the shelf" nature of the sweeping legislation that immediately followed. Too swift. Too canned a response. Too much of what I grew up believing our nation stood for at its very foundation abolished with the stroke of a few pens. Rather than reasoning our response, we had a collective national emotional reaction. Someone seemed just a bit too prepared. Have we gone too far?

This little film makes some interesting suppositions. I think that the ideas are at least worthy of debate and thought.

I blogged about this outrage recently. They were exposed for what they are, and now they want to pretend they aren't. But AT&T is unwilling to put it in writing by amending their terms of service. If it looks like, acts like, well... it just is!

"AT&T respects its subscribers' rights to voice their opinions and concerns over any matter they wish. However, we retain the right to disassociate ourselves from web sites and messages explicitly advocating violence, or any message that poses a threat to children (e.g. child pornography or exploitation)," the spokesperson told Ars Technica. "We do not terminate customer service solely because a customer speaks negatively about AT&T."

Oh, really? Then change your terms of service!

Some readers who learned of the updated Terms of Service were upset by them, but not surprised. A reader drew connections to AT&T's involvement in the recent domestic spying scandal. "Given the fact that AT&T doesn't seem to have been hurt much with the spying case, I really don't think they will be hurt much if they cut off people that criticize them," wrote one reader.

Source of the quotes: ars technica

OK. Commenting on my blog has become a real pain. In fact, I haven't received an actually comment posted to the blog in almost a month. I've received some emails about this issue.

Why Is Commenting on timtyson.us Such a Pain?
Well, it isn't... any more.

I went through this period of horrendous comment spam. Everyday I was having to delete hundreds of spam comments generated by the little nasty spambots that troll the internet looking for blogs to which to post comments that advertise or harass or both. I got sick of dealing with it.

I then decided to make spam commenting all but impossible. It worked. I haven't had a spam comment since that time. However, at the same time, the method I used, which was the most secure method to adopt, required you have a TypeKey login. Many readers do not. And while getting one is free, I wouldn't do it if I were just a casual blog reader.

I've explored a new technology: CAPTCHA, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. In other words, those challenge responses you are accustomed to seeing where you have to type in what the image says. An example is posted below.

In theory, machines can not do this. Thus, the comment spambot fails at its task because it can not make out the wavy letters.

But sometimes I even have a hard time deciphering these things! So, in case you're like me and can't see too well, you can ask the system I chose, recaptcha, to play a rather noisy audio file (unfortunately) of different people reading several numbers aloud. You just enter the sequence of letters (or numbers if you can't read the letters) and post your comment.

Hope this makes everyone's life a little easier without inviting more spam attacks!

How many nuclear bombs have been tested in the atmosphere? Where did the radioactive fallout land? When? How many nuclear bombs have been tested under ground? What are the radioactive readings of the water in those watersheds?

Has anyone produced a graphic showing where the levels of cancer in relationship to these test sites? (Well, I'm sure "someone" has, but will we ever see this information?)

I find it hard to believe that the Russians, or any government on this planet, would detonate in our earth's atmosphere a nuclear device that was 10 times more powerful than all of the munitions used in World War II combined. And yet the narrator sounds so matter-of-fact, even cheery about it all. Small comfort! Small comfort indeed!

The video is dark or pixelated for less than 5 seconds but then displays properly.

Clever product idea: the BeatBuckle