Author: Gary

I’ve been thinking a lot about the trip this last week. Some things I need to do:

Get SCUBA certified. I’ll have opportunities to go diving and I’d like to take advantage of it. It shouldn’t be that hard as I have a diving center about a mile from my house.

Upgrade my amateur radio license so I can use HF bands. I’d like to take a small HF radio with me to talk to people on the trip. Probably the most popular thing in amateur radio is DXing, which is just racking up contacts in different locations. I’ll be in enough different locations that I should be a good contact to do DXing with.

As an interesting side note, what constitutes a “country” is different for different things. The UN has 191 members and a few countries with observer status (Vatican and Palestine). The Travelers Century Club recgonizes 315 “countries”. Amateur radio recognizes 425. The UN only recognizes sovereignty. The other lists make distinctions between politics and geography.  Example: To the UN, the United States is the 50 states and all territories. To amateur radio, it is several units. The continental US is one, Alaska and Hawaii are both separate, and then there are separate entries for Guam, American Samoa, USVI, Puerto Rico, Johnston Island, Baker and Howland Islands, Midway Island, Guantanamo Bay, Jarvis Island and Kingman Reef, Wake Island, Kure Island, Navassa Island, and Descheo Island. 

I will also be taking some classes on video and photography. My current level of knowledge is not sufficient.

• What sex is your brain? Its really long and you need a ruler.
• LewRockwell.com has posted Hayek’s 1960 essay “Why I am not a Conservative”. Hayek (winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics), I believe, is one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th Century and is almost totally ignored in universities. (One of the others is Eric Hoffer who will never appear on a unversity syllabus) To understand the relevance of Hayek essay today, read this quote from Matthew Yglesias:
  

  …the era of big government being over is over. It would be a serious mistake to confuse Bush’s brand of big conservatism with liberalism, or with any kind of real concession to liberalism, but it suggests that the underlying political dynamics have shifted a great deal. If you did have a progressive president, there’s no longer a particularly large amount of popular resistance to expanding the activist state. Even most Republicans don’t especially care about small government.

  He’s right. Its dark times for those who just want to be left the hell alone.

• Removed Weatherbug from my life and replaced it with WeatherPulse. I get the temperature in my toolbar and none of the bullshit that comes along with Weatherbug.
• I’ve been goofing around with greasemonkey on Flock. Greasemonkey lets you run scripts to modify webpages on the client side. If a site has a bad interface, you can change what can be seen. There is a pretty big collection of scripts you can download.
• Is it me, or has Microsoft become irrevelant? The only non-Windows MS app I use anymore is Media Player, and that has been replaced by iTunes for most stuff. Vista is completely a non-event for me as there is nothing I really need in a new OS. I use OpenOffice/Abiword almost exclusively. The only thing I can think of where they might be doing something that interests me is Xbox360. All they can do is play catch-up Google and try to do half-assed copies of whatever they do, but they’ll never be able to beat them because they have a corporate culture that requires them to try to milk a dime out of everything they do and push every other MS product down your throat.
• I went through my Sony Vaio laptop today and cleaned out a load of programs and cleaned up the registry. Its running way faster. I install more crap on here than I do on my desktop computer.
• 43 Things is a really interesting site. I’ll post my list when I finish it.

Not much today:

The Gigapxl Project. Its is a group who are taking ultra resolution images of well known locations. By ultra resolution images, I mean images with so much resolution, they have taken photos of the San Diego skyline from across the harbor and were able to zoom in to see the contents of individual hotel rooms several km away. Not only are the photos they’ve taken stunning, the technology behind how they are able to do this is really interesting. Despite the name, they actually have to take the photos on film becuase there are no CCD’s capable of taking images of this resolution. They have some very ambitious plans on capturing many of the significant places around North America.

Del.icio.us. I’ve been goofing around with Flock the last few days. I really like it so far. Its not so much a new browser as just an enormous plug-in or wrapper for Firefox. It has integrated Flickr and blog support. I’m writing this post with the built in blog tool. The use of del.icio.us is an idea who’s time has come. Using online bookmarks really a no brainer. I think this is something that Google could comeout with at anytime. Not only would it be trivial (for Google) to make, but it would be invaluable in knowing the relative popularity of the sites they index. The link for del.icio.us above is to the bookmark list I created over the last hour. If anyone else creates a bookmark set in del.icio.us, leave a link in the comments. Its an easy way to share interesting sites you like.

Interesting things in the news:

• Minneapolis High school offers online gym class
• Space Elevator Games
• Noam Chomsky: Ub3r Capitalist
• Intelligent Design proponent admits “astrology is a theory”
• UN report released in MS Word format shows edits and deletions made to document
• A new browser (based on Firefox) is available. It seems to just be a wrapper with goodies like RSS and blog updating built in.
• A new version of Open Office is available. I’d say its 90-95% as good as MS office, but 100% cheaper.
• If you don’t like the OO word processor, download Abiword, which is the first open free word processor with a grammar checker.

I read once that Jews in Europe considered it bad luck to drop a book, and if they did they would kiss it after they picked it up. That was how much reverance they had towards reading and literature.

Today I cleaned out my bathroom of magazines.

For most of you, you might have a magazine or two in your bathroom, but I had a lot. I mean a LOT. Those of you who have been to my house know what I mean. I had so many, I had a serious fear that they would collapse and bury someone while they were on the toliet. I wish I had taken a photo. Five years worth of magazines, journals, newsletters, and books. Everything from the Planetary Report, Forbes, tropical Fish hobbiest, and Foreign Affairs. I think it was like 6 boxes of magazines. Probably better in terms of quality and quantity than most high school libraries.

I feel bad about throwing away any literature. I’m not a pack rat in general, but I can’t throw away periodicals. I always want to have them around for reference, even if I know I’ll never read it again.

On a positive note, the bathroom is once again safe, even though you wont learn as much while your there.