Only the first six are available right now. But that’s enough to get you started!
A curled kittytail has never been such a beautiful sight. It has been nearly three weeks since Ya-chan suffered a spinal injury and loss the ability to control his bladder, his sphincter and his tail. At first his recovery was in tiny steps. Almost imperceptible day by day. But now each day is lightyears better than the one before. And now instead of a dead appendage following him around his tail is one again the lively, expressive tail it used to be.
Tags: cat
Thanksgiving is upon us and turkeys nationwide cower in fear. Or are basting. After a quick vet trip this morning to get Ya-chan’s fluids topped up we stopped at Shipley’s for this beautiful box of donuts. Next up is coffee and watching last night’s sumo matches.
The trees are dropping leaves finally. This usually means winter is 15 minutes away.
Tags: seasons
David Hockney has been drawing on his iPhone using the Brushes app. Thankfully, the article about it has lots of quotes from Hockney. My favorite is
But with an iPhone, I don’t even have to get out of bed, I just reach for the device, turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene.
Tags: art, brushes, David Hockney, iphone
I was thrilled to hear that Netflix is now streaming HD movies to Xbox 360 devices. So I upgraded our Netflix account and went through the process of connecting the two. That was super easy.
The first couple of days it worked great. But then we started to have connection problems.
When you first start a program it will test your connection speed. There’s a little bar diagram … you know, just like on your cell phone … and you get one to four bars. At the beginning we would get four bars and the program would start immediately.
Lately, no matter what time of day we try we might get one bar or we get no bars and a message saying “you’re internet connection is too slow”.
However, we have a Time Warner cable modem and doing a speedtest.net test shows our download time is about 6000 kbps and upload time is 900 kbps. Definitely fast enough for streaming video.
So after troubleshooting … rebooting everything, etc … and googling like crazy I called Netflix. It took about 7 minutes to get through to tier one support, then another ten minutes to get to tier two support. But they were extremely helpful and understanding about the problem.
Essentially, they said that they’re aware of the problem. And while the new service had driven an up-surge in traffic their servers were not yet even operating at 50%. So the congestion problem is happening somewhere between users and the servers. They said it doesn’t seem to be focused on any particular ISP. So in the meantime we just need to hang time and give them time to work it out.
I can’t wait. I love my HD tv. And I loved my Voom service (remember them?). But cable and satellite HD service just sucks ass. I’m hoping Netflix can fill our HD void.
Tags: HD, high definition, netflix, streaming video, xbox 360
The stacks in the Stiftsbibliothek
One of the most memorable experiences I had in Switzerland was a visit to the Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen. Stiftsbibliothek (the abbey library) is a library of ancient texts in a Swiss monastery.
Entering the library at Stiftsbibliothek.
Each semester my high school would arrange cultural trips for us to go on. This particular trip was actually a tour of several different monasteries in eastern Switzerland. I chose this trip over others for less than historical or cultural reasons. No, I won’t tell you her name 
.
However, I never regretted it. Many of the texts there were published before 1000 AD however the ones that really impressed me the most was getting to look through a first edition of Description de l’Égypte.
Sure the ancient hand-illuminated books were interesting if inscrutable. But Description de l’Égypte was extremely large and detailed and the guide allowed me to turn the pages by hand. I took some pictures of the pages but they turned out blurry; to my dismay.
Now, the NY Times is running a story that the collection is being digitized in part as a reaction to the recent flooding of Dresden. It’s not the same as being there in person and getting to walk around the stacks, but it’s the next best thing. And it’s one of the best uses of the internet that I can think of.
Visit it at www.cesg.unifr.ch/en/index.htm
Tags: monastery, st gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, switzerland
Isn’t religion one big old conspiracy theory?
My dad was in town for a couple of days and one night he told us about something he’d heard on late night AM radio. It was about an archeologist who “re-discovered” some ancient stones from Mesopotamia sitting in a British museum. The stones were covered in script that no one could read. So he started working on translating them.
After years of hard work he finally had a breakthrough and began to understand what he was reading. And it wasn’t about kings and warriors and conquests. It was about aliens and dying planets and genetically engineered workers mining precious minerals from the soil. And how the two ruling aliens were brothers and they worked different parts of the earth until they had a falling out. One of them engineered his workers to procreate so that he wouldn’t have to replace them all the time.
WTF!? At one point G interrupted him and asked if he has started smoking pot. lol.
No, he isn’t. But he tells this story with the same vigor and certainty as a stoner relating how he was chased down a hallway by an elephant-sized pumpkin muffin. “It happened man. I was there.”
Of course he couldn’t remember any names, but I thought that it all sounded very “scientological”. Turns out it’s not. It’s just yet another guy who has come up with an “aliens created humans” story. Only this one has been debunked by all the other smart people who’ve come along and translated the Sumerian language.
This all led us into a discussion on what difference it really makes if it’s true or not. So what possible difference would it make in your daily lives if your race was actually a creation of aliens? If the aliens are still among us and we can’t see or experience them then it doesn’t matter. Life as we know it goes on.
“But we don’t know” he says.
“So what.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know? Don’t you deserve to know?”
Hrm. Let me see if I’ve got this right. The aliens, if they exist, have no direct impact on the course of my life. Indirectly they have an impact in the way that I modify my life in the way that I perceive them … or don’t.
Um … just like god. God has no direct impact on my life. Though there can be indirect influence based on how I perceive god and how I choose to reflect that perception in my life. Which really isn’t influence at all but rather my own free will choosing god as my excuse to do what I want to do. Right? Maybe.
So, if this aliens-genetically-engineered-humans-to-mine-gold-for-their-dying-planet is just a galactic conspiracy theory isn’t god also?
Hrm. This could explain why I have such a viscerally negative reaction to conspiracy theories (and to the idea of god).
Tags: aliens, AM radio, conspiracy theories, god, gold, religion, Zecharia Sitchin
Perhaps this will explain … http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html
I still don’t know what to think about this. I’ll have to digest it more before I write up my thoughts. Stay tuned.
Edit: Here’s another piece of the puzzle; an opinion piece in the NY Times by David Brooks titled “The Class War Before Palin”.
This country must naturally be made up of very different people; educated, uneducated, poor, rich, etc. But when we two political parties have a lock on the system so that they are the only two parties it is a travesty for them to become the party of the educated vs the party of the uneducated.
Don’t we deserve better than that? Just take a look at the other times in history when the uneducated have overwhelmed the educated in social and political realms: the 1960′s Chinese Cultural Revolution
and the 1970′s Iranian Revolution.
Both events began with a political/social figure grasping for power by utilizing the easily inflamed prejudices and intolerances of the uneducated masses. But what was once a “base” soon just became an angry mob and the results were great cultures brought low. Only now, 30 to 40 years later are bot cultures starting to recover.
Tags: america, change, morality, philosophy, politics, voting