Click somewhere on these pictures

Posted on Wednesday, 2007-Jan-3rd by ralph

Here is something interesting. Go and click somewhere on each of these 8 rectangles. Then view a score showing where you and other people clicked. Go run test now, come back and read rest.

.

..

Continue reading →

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Living on $1/day for food for a month

Posted on Wednesday, 2006-Dec-27th by ralph

Here’s a guy who decided to experience for himself one aspect of being poor: living on $30 for a month for food ($US I hasten to add) Read from the bottom up for proper chronology.
Hungry for a month

My background lends well to being frugal to start with – both of my parents went through WWII in Berlin, where there was next to nothing to eat in the waning days of the war and the early years following. Consequently, my upbringing always re-enforced the idea of never wasting food and being a glutenous pig. Even though money was never that tight, at home food was never splurged on – a steak was a treat, with stew and meatloaf being more typical staple food.

Once on my own, I never was that tight for money that I had to do the Ramen noodle diet to get by to the next pay cheque. I certainly know people who have done it, especially to get to the end of a semester of school. Compared to some of those stories, this guy had it good. I recall stories like having $10 left over for food for the month after covering rent, and a bus pass. Try living on that – it’s all Ramen noodle and rice then.
Oh yeah, you’re going to school too, and have finals to deal with, so you have to actually use your brain to it’s max despite the total lack of anything nutrients being eaten. But there is always someone who has it harder than you.

I do have to comment after reading what he did that his primary complaint was lack of spice. Well, if you had to do your $30 a month long term, spice can be added quite easily. He figured he was spending closer to $25/month, accounting for leftover food and $, that would cover 1-2 spice items a month, easily. He also was less that creative on what cheap food he bought – but to his credit, he didn’t plan things out and didn’t have any previous experience – so what he did would be typical of what a first time kid on a budget might do.

If you know what you’re doing cooking-wise, you can make some pretty decent tasting food for next to nothing budget wize. Budgeting to add a few flavor items can do much to make crap food at least taste palatable – things like chicken stock soup cubes – cheap, last a long time and gets you “chicken soup” noodles rather than crap Ramen flavors. Eating nutritious on the other hand – that’s much tougher. Yeah, you can buy ground beef and cheap meat deal of the week to get protein, but you just can’t buy much in terms of vegetables and live cheap, especially in the middle of winter in these parts when vegetables get darn expensive.
I found it interesting that the guy had no idea that you can live on $30/month, indefinitely if you have to. Interesting, in that he had no idea of what he needed for food, what he *needed* to survive, rather than what he wanted. Pretty typical side effect of living with fat in the budget I guess. I went though the exercise of figuring out my minimum last year – I had a good idea but I hadn’t crunched the numbers out for a reasonably precise value. I wonder how many people know how much money they need to survive a month – not that many I’d guess.

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Wii!! Wii!!

Posted on Tuesday, 2006-Dec-12th by ralph

I’m not normally interested in what’s going on in the gaming console market – I just consider them to be crippled gaming computers – very good gaming computers, but still crippled.

The Playstation with it’s DVD player was the last console that garnered any interest, due to the fact that for slightly more than a DVD player of the day you got a game machine as well.

Now Nintento has the Wii.  I’m hearing good things about this, and from other computer geeks my age, not just ads and <18yrs olds impressed by the latest of anything. What’s interesting here is the motion sensing controller. Things like practicing your golf swing, bowling, baseball, tennis, etc. are possible, where your performance matters somewhat at least on your technique, not just twitch reactions. Whereas everyone else (Xbox 360, PS3) are just doing more of the same (graphics, horsepower, storage), Nintendo is trying something a little different. Good for them – I may actually go try one of these things out in a mall after the Xmas rush is over.

Tagged | Leave a comment

Porsche Cayenne vs skydiving Squirrel suit guy

Posted on Saturday, 2006-Nov-25th by ralph

I was watching some old diggnation episodes and hear about a guy who is trying to perfect a flying squirrel suit that will allow him to jump out of a plane and fly to the ground, landing without a parachute. Looking for more details, I through some old digg posts talking about the flying dude. That leads me to another site with a second video of the same suit. Turns out to be a Top Gear clip:

A Porsche Cayenne Turbo S driving down a hill vs. flying guy jumping from a helicopter 10,000 ft above said hill, both racing to a finish at the bottom of the hill. You can’t make this stuff up. Keep in mind here that we are talking about a C$157,000 car here, when you watch the video. Insanity, but that is what the Top Gear people seem to do best. I have to admit, I was intrigued by the Porsche SUV – 0-60mph in 4.8 sec would certainly be fun to beat those punk ass kids driving the Mustangs, and 168mph means I could drive Calgary – Edmonton in under an hour, sans cops. Plus, as a bonus, the Porsche sucks gas like there is no tomorrow. Oh, and if you can’t afford the C$157k, there is a low end model for $60,100. It just has speed comparable to standard SUVs. I just can’t see why there aren’t more of these in Calgary, land of the SUV. I mean, people are just desperate to find places to burn their hard earned cash. Perhaps Porsche needs a few well targeted ads around here to get the word out.

Tagged | 3 Comments

Mini Firefox 2.0 review

Posted on Wednesday, 2006-Nov-22nd by ralph

Easiest install ever. Done in 90 seconds. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you how long it took, but it felt short. I’m sitting there running FF2.0, thinking “that’s it? I’m done?!” No reboot. No long download. Okay, I did close my apps like recommended, but that’s it. My bookmarks all look the same. Firefox didn’t try to pester me to change my homepage. My plug in (Flashblock) is still there. Bears repeating: Easiest install ever.
First impressions: I can use RSS feeds in the browser tried it – works. I don’t know what to do with RSS feeds yet, but they work. Spell checker for writing blog posts works – underlines misspells and suggests corrections on right click, has add to dictionary. Nice.

New skin – the look is fine, one minor tweak they made the search bar on the right a bit bigger – maybe  there was a way to change that on 1, but it’s bigger now at any rate.
Firefox was easy. Now I need to figure out what to do with RSS.

Tagged , | 1 Comment

The new media

Posted on Tuesday, 2006-Nov-14th by ralph

Further to my last post, I actually found something interesting being done by a Canadian broadcaster CTV. Now, for the last two years, they have been releasing the previous season of DVD’s for a show around the time new episodes are airing over broadcast. Not a bad idea, you get into a show that’s in it’s nth season, and you can get caught up, without gaps, right to the current episode. I’m guessing this is the model for a lot of shows out there right now, from what little I know of other programming. It’s a good thing – it always sucked to get drawn into a show and not know how it started.

Well, now CTV is doing something new* out there (*new to me). You can go and watch shows from the current season, online. Even the current weeks episode, one day after it’s broadcast. I just used this service over the last two nights to catch up on the one new fiction show I still watch on TV, Corner Gas. This is a wonderful thing. I can now watch when I want to watch, and not remember to watch, which I’m out of the habit of doing these days anyways. On top if it, commercials are blissfully absent, barring a few CTV plugs for other shows. We’re talking 90% fewer commercials here people. I don’t expect this (almost) commercial free bliss to last though. Suck them in and jack up the price, y’know.

Now, as far as the actual interface goes, it’s definitely a “1.0” deal. It’s a flash plugin that needs some TLC. For one, it doesn’t work under Firefox 1.5 right now. It does work under IE 6. {Bleach} I’d give you a link, but you can’t link to it directly. Goto  www.ctv.ca and you’ll see “CTV Broadband Network” on the front page if you want to try this out. It has problems with popup blocking, even though you clicked to open the popup window in the first place. You can go back and forth in the video, sometimes.  You can play/pause, assuming you can actually bring up the play/pause. For that matter, play/pause isn’t linked to the standard play/pause most keyboards have or, the space bar, you have to use the interface, which sucks when you’re full screen and you don’t have an interface to work with. You need to just know that ‘Esc’ gets you back to a window, mouse click won’t work. The full screen is nice quality though – I’d say VCD level. I will give them high marks for providing a scene selector, similar to what you’d see on a DVD. If you missed the last half of a show, you can click right to the 3 of 4 acts and go. Here’s hoping they deem ondemand worth putting the effort into a 2.0 version.

One thing of note: CTV doesn’t have all it’s programs on here right now. It looks like there trying to hit the younger appeal stuff, so you can watch “Canadian Idol”, “Corner Gas”, “Degrassi:…”, “Instant Star”, and “Whistler”. I really hope they expand the lineup over time to cover all their shows, particulary Robson Arms, which is the first program in a long time I’ve seen that I would say deserves a wider audience.

It’s good to see that somebody out there gets it – on demand is the future of media – I look forward in a few years to scrapping my cable connection in favor of sitting down when I want to watch my “TV”.

Tagged | Leave a comment

TV is dead, long live TV

Posted on Saturday, 2006-Nov-11th by ralph

TV as we know it from basic cable and air broadcast is dying. About time.

I have been watching some episodes of Tiki Bar and Diggnation. One led me to the other, in a weird warped way. But that’s not my point. My point is, the last two new things I have been watching have both NOT been on broadcast TV. In fact, I’m to the point where “old style” TV pisses me off enough that I only watch it when I’m trying to stay off the computer and a DVD won’t cut it, or there is something I really want to watch. Scratch that, there is nothing I *really* want to watch. I don’t pay attention to the previews. There are way, way too many commercials, there is too much “reality” TV – you’ve heard these complaints before.

The difference now is I have alternatives. I can just be patient and buy my TV on DVD. I can watch clips on YouTube. I can watch “Podcasts”, which I’m still trying to figure out what they’re all about. If I’m really stuck I can just “borrow” a copy of an episode off the internet that I missed on TV, which I’m having to do more and more often because I’m just totally out of the habit of scheduling my life around TV, even as far as taping goes.

Oh, it helps too that stuff on the web doesn’t have the evil emp-, er, CRTC/FCC watching their backs, so you get some cool shit. Take Diggnation. Two guys on a coutch, talking about the latest popular stories on their parent website, digg.com. Oh, and they drink beer while doing this, with an informal review of said beer during the show. There is even a website showing all the beers they have drank on their show. They’re not always sober, and they’re not always on topic, PC or PG13. But they do come up with some funny shit, just sitting there shooting the shit. Never would make it in any form that preserves the entertainment value if ported to regular TV.

I’m hoping for more of this kind of stuff, some low budget program typing things, something different. Cuz I ain’t seeing it on TV.

Tagged | 2 Comments

Sultan’s Tent is no more

Posted on Wednesday, 2006-Oct-25th by ralph

So I’m talking to Dillion on the the phone and he mentions that the Sultan’s Tent has been torn down. Noooo! From what I can find out here and here it would seem that the Sultan’s tent is gone, at least for the time being, succumbed to the building boom that is Calgary right now. It wasn’t a place I could dine at frequently being on the expensive side, but was well worth the money to treat one self and friends on. The unique atmosphere of individual tent rooms for each dining party and the touches such as pre-dinner hand washing (since you’re going to be eating with your hands) just made dining there an experience, not just a meal out.

Here’s hoping they re-establish in a new location!

Tagged | 1 Comment

Evil Blinky Self Serve

Posted on Monday, 2006-Oct-23rd by ralph

So a couple of months ago I tried out the new self – serve checkouts at Home Despot. You know, the ones where you scan your own stuff. They even have evil blinky green lights to try and get your attention. Not like lately you don’t have plenty of time to ponder other things while waiting to get through a till in Calgary.

Now, Home Despot had four of these things, often empty or with one person using them during slow times. The ONE till they had open was lined up with people each buying half a house. So I was bound to try one of these things the first time I only had one or two items to scan. Since then I’ve used them a few times.

They work pretty good – a few things need improvement. 1) Better descriptions so you know what you just scanned. 2) A very obvious beep when you scan something, so I don’t scan things twice. 3) An undo, for when I still manage to screw up. Right now an accociate has to do the undo for you. 4) The interface kinda sucks. They put the signature pad way the hell over to the right, so you have to sign your credit card auth. and take two steps to the left to see if your scrawl is something you’d recognise as your own if it ever came down to a dispute. I don’t even what to think about signature forging with this thing.

Other than that, I love them and I hate them. I love the fact that I can get through the tills quickly especially if I have only one or two items. I hate the fact that shopping has gotten yet more impersonal. On the other had, I love the fact that shopping has gotten more impersonal because sometimes I just want to kill the person that is trying to serve me.

Fast forward to today. “I am trying to find Season 3 of Corner Gas” I tell the Wallrat employee. “You want season 3,” he burbles back, in a voice and manner I can only describe as a carbon copy of Peter Sellers from “The Party” (Think goofy Indian accent if you havn’t seen this movie). “Yes, Season 3”. He grabs something else that was season 3 yes, but not “Corner Gas”. “No, I want Season 3, *Corner* *Gas*” He goes to ask someone if they have this. I hear him get an explanation from the more senior Wallrat in the next isle that it will be with the TV shows, in the “C” shows, between the “B” shows and the “D” shows.

Okay. I’m guessing they’re out at this point, me having checked this already. But now I have to wait for Buddy to figure this out for himself, which is rather amusing to watch him recite his ABCD’s. He then proceeds to offer me CSI:Season 3. Deep breath. Look at shelves myself, this time checking the labels. “Look, it has spots Corner Gas here for Seasons 1 and 2, which are empty so you must be out of season 3 as well”, I explain to him. “Oh yes, we must be all out, bad luck for you then”. Right, birdy num-num, bad luck for me, good luck for you that I didn’t loose my cool.

Did I mention Wallrat is evil? Not only do they sucker me into buying stuff sometimes because it’s so cheap (Futurama, Season 1 $18) but then they make me put up with not being able to find shit because they can’t keep they’re stock in reasonable order (not the only store in town with this problem by far). Then I have to line up forever to give them my money.

You see where this is going don’t you? There I am waiting in line, and these blinky green lights get my attention. Oh no, Wallrat has installed self-serve tills as well. Do I go try them? Hmmm. I have a lot of stuff. Clothes. Might have problems finding / scanning the tags. Can’t see if there is a line or not, with the 15 tills between me and the self-serves. Plus I’ve got this bitch’n spot in line – only two people in front of me, with full shopping carts, but only two of ’em! I decide to give them a pass this time, however, I do check them out on the way out the door, so see what the lineups are like. Great. The self-serve tills are lined up too. I doubt I would’ve saved more than a minute of my five in line.
Well, now I just hate self-serve tills.

Tagged , | 4 Comments

USA! USA!

Posted on Saturday, 2006-Oct-7th by ralph

You know, Canadians spend so much time bashing Americans we forget that Americans at their best produce some truly awe – inspiring feats unmatched the world over. Specifically today I am referring to the Mars Rovers, which are sending back pictures like this one. If you have not been following their travels lately, check out the pictures taken by Opportunity at the edge of Victoria crater.
These two robotic explorers, designed to last 3 months, are now on their 32nd month on the red planet. The pictures of rugged terrain coming back now are both beautiful and potentially laden with science information about our neighborhood planet. Way to go USA – I hope those rovers keep going for another 32 months of exploration where no one has gone before.

Tagged | 1 Comment