Author Archives: bluedepth

Christmas Cards have all been sent…

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Work is all said and done. At Western we are released from our obligations, at least this year, on Friday December 21st. Then to save money and give employees time to celebrate the holidays the University just closes down until the day after New Years. It’s a benefit that doesn’t really get a lot of play until you are in the thick of it and then realize just how fortunate you are to have something that nice that you can take advantage of.

So, for the next gaggle of days there isn’t work to be done. So I can concentrate on being at home and resting and relaxing, which naturally means that I’m going to be a jungle-gym for affectionate felines. It’s not that bad either. 🙂 One thing that I have discovered is that I’ve got bad addresses for lots of my family, so if you don’t get a Christmas card, it’s not because I’m daft or ignorant, it’s because I had a bad address and sent the card willy-nilly off into the ether, and they’ll probably eventually come back undeliverable. I don’t know whether to just edit them and send them back out when they start coming in with good addresses or just do my best to the family that moved next year. We spent about $50 in stamps, money well spent I think because we love sending out Christmas cards every year, except for the gaggle of returns that flood back around the 27th and 28th. If you are online, I’ll try to reach you and let you know that next year our list will be better.

Amongst all the cards we get, the cute ones, the beautiful ones, and the sappy ones there are a few loaded with pictures of my adorable and beautiful family scattered all about. Specifically I received the card from Steven and Lacy, and in it is a picture of Peyton. I treasure these pictures and I keep them in places where I will always see them and think about all of these beautiful wonderful children that grace our family. On the fridge in our kitchen, the heart of our house we have Peyton’s baby pictures as well as Xander and Jackson. On my phone I have Odin and Leif, Aiden, Ashton, and Ethan. It warms my heart to see them all, I just wish the distance wasn’t so very profound between us all.

Winter has come to the lower part of Michigan, at least in terms of violent winds, proper temperatures, and the appropriate precipitation, finally. The ground is still way too warm for any snow to accumulate but the grass doesn’t mind holding a record of what little fell in the previous night. I’m holding out hope that we have a white Christmas instead of a brown or green one. It may not be that the weather is really that damaged after all, but one thing I can say beyond a doubt is that the seasons are shifting. Winter is coming late and staying way into where Spring should arrive, and then Summer comes in a hurry and lasts far too long itself. It’s like the entire seasonal dial is off by about fifteen to twenty degrees of rotation. My fear is that it just gets worse, or even more disastrous, that we miss Spring and Fall altogether and it just becomes a battle between Winter and Summer. Only time will tell, so we’ll have to wait and see, perhaps there will be a saving grace that the environment can play to help keep us safe, even from ourselves.

Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

When it comes to installing things on your Macs I often times advocate a rather carefree attitude. One thing that has always been true, and this article just nails home the point, is that even the most secure system can fall if the person holding the keys is tricked or cheated into opening the door.

I have said to many people whom I’ve given computer advice, if you have doubts, please contact me and I can look at it and give you advice. It’s free, and I’d rather help in the vein of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Facebook Notification Autodisplay Trick

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I recently moved over all my old Facebook Notes entries from the past and copied them into my Day One app for posterity. In the wayback machine I found an entry from March 25th, 2009 regarding a neat little thing I found that makes Facebook a little more neat. The entry back then covered how I found a way to make my Firefox browser automatically open up Facebook notifications as new tabs in my browser window all on it’s own. So as people that are connected to me on Facebook do things that fire off notifications, those automatically create new tabs in my browser and I don’t have to worry about playing catch up with the notification system and then overloading my browser with 20+ notifications. As I do other things my browser can tend to Facebook all on it’s own and I can look over the notifications in a more organic and pleasing way. I’ve just found a way to do the same thing on my Chrome browser and for anyone who is interested, here’s how I did it:

1) Start Chrome
2) Find the Chrome Extension RSS Live Links and install it
3) Browse to Facebook and click on your notifications, then find the RSS link and copy that to the clipboard.
4) In the options for RSS Live Links, add the RSS entry to the extensions RSS list and make sure you set the refresh time properly to where you want it and then check “Automatically open new items” checkbox. Click Save.
5) Save the extension options and then you are all set.

The extension will scan the RSS feed from Facebook every five minutes and if it notices changes it will automatically open up those new items as tabs in your Chrome browser. When you are all done, you can minimize your browser and do other things and over the day your browser will automatically fill with all the little notifications that Facebook throws down all on it’s lonesome. Then you go into your browser, see the notifications and then close the tabs (Command-W) when you are done with them. Easy peasy.

Null Hypothesis

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The world didn’t end this morning. I set my alarm for 6am and I didn’t even need that. Owein woke me up and was sitting on my chest staring down at me. I smiled and gave him some pettings and laid in bed waiting for 6:12 to roll around. What happened? Absolutely nothing. So – Null Hypothesis for the win! The day isn’t over yet of course, but beyond some astronomical or terrestrial event to tear things apart I don’t expect today to be any different than any other day. Except perhaps that work will be uniquely content-free. 🙂

12/21/12 6:14am

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I’ve been thinking about what might be tomorrow. I’ve talked about it with coworkers and friends and family and everyone is at least popularly concerned as I would expect. The natural assumption to make is the null hypothesis, that is, that tomorrow nothing remarkable will happen and the world will continue to spin on it’s axis and life will go on.

Except that the Mayans were so good at constructing really good calendar systems and they were so accurate. When the long count calendar expires, supposedly on the Winter Solstice, which is 12/21/12 at 6:14am it’s an event that is remarkable. What will happen? I’ve heard the most popular response that people have to this millennial event: “If anything will happen, it’ll be a huge move forward for people and those feeling good feelings will reap the rewards of those good thoughts and the others will end up elsewhere.”

I love this idea as it’s very tidy. I can’t help but think about some other possibilities that might come to be as well. The Mayans drew out their calendar and built in the terminal point (which is coming along) and I’ve read various theories, including an ancient astronaut theory that a Mayan God will return to earth when their exacting Calendar expires. I’ve found that my suppositions follow two distinct paths – a positive angle and a negative one.

Under the positive angle what may come of tomorrow?

1. Reappearance of Magic in our world. Imagination becomes easier to impress upon our material world, perhaps.
2. First Contact. This one actually has some feet to it. The Mayans were quite particular about their Gods returning someday and why not tomorrow?
3. Cures for modern plagues. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find the magic bullet that cures AIDS or switches off Cancer. This one could also go hand-in-hand with the previous point and be something we learn from First Contact.
4. Expansion of consciousness. We all see ourselves as individuals. Perhaps tomorrow will start a new spiritual development in humanity and help us connect to each other in more meaningful ways.

While the positive things are wonderful to think about, there are more entertaining and more dramatic negative events that may happen.

1. The Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. This would change the shape of North America and put a serious dent in America.
2. The New Madrid Fault could break and release a huge amount of earthquake energy, although this would be really scary for just the southern states.
3. A nearby star could have undergone a violent supernova and that fact could be enroute to Earth and arrive on 12/21/12 at 6:14am. We’d see a new star in the heavens and if it was close enough, it could raise radiation levels across the planet. It may be that our Sun and our own planets magnetosphere protects us from the worst of it, if it’s inbound at all. The problem with this is that nobody would know, there really isn’t any early detection for an event like this that I’m aware of.
4. Captain Trips – There has been some talk about H1N1 and other super flu viruses that just would require some generations to spread to humanity and then only a few more to become airborne. What would be worse? A Captain Trips event, or perhaps a re-emergence of something as nasty as the Spanish Flu of 1918?
5. Failure of the magnetosphere. Earth is protected from a lot of nasty space-based radiations by our atmosphere and our magnetosphere, to say nothing of the more impressive magnetosphere of our Sun. What if these fields failed for some strange reason? There would be less to shield us from solar radiation to say nothing of the stray cosmic radiations that come from space all the time.
6. First Contact. Just because a Mayan God was nice to the Mayans when they were developing doesn’t necessarily mean that any first contact event will be a positive one. One of the big lessons that popular science has been saying for a while is that a future First Contact event may not be a peaceful event but one fueled by hunger or some resource conflict. Instead of civilized explorers making first contact with us, they could be carnivores looking for a new food source.

One of the biggest things I have noticed while thinking about these things has been that people have clustered their thoughts around this event. Some are rooting for it, some are afraid of it, and some have even let the event change their natural way of behaving. Preppers getting ready for an event that may be impossible to dodge while on Earth. We just don’t know the scale of the event, or if there even is one. One thing is definitely for certain, this is a fantastic source of dramatic storytelling. The fear and the hope that battle over what is coming, or not, in a few short hours in the future make for great smalltalk and water-cooler conversations.

So, as the inaugural post for my relocated blog I will post this entry and invite people to write comments to this post. What do you think may happen in a few short hours? Will it be good, will it be bad? What do you think?

Presenteeism

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For a very long time I’ve noticed something very peculiar about my job. I like to call it the “Cardboard Standee Effect”. When my clients run into trouble using their technology they do their level best to resolve the issue before contacting me, as is what anyone would usually do, but then they give up. They contact me and ask me to either control their workstation or come out to visit them. I walk in, make my greeting and ask what the trouble is and then have them do the very exact thing they did before, which didn’t work for them, and then it works and they are utterly flummoxed.

I’ve mused in the past that the office is populated with invisible naughty gremlins that love to cause mischief. For some reason, in this imaginary framework, I like to think that I scare them off. All I have to do is walk in and arguably, that’s enough for all the technology to suddenly start working like it’s designed to.

On a more serious note, it occurs to me that each one of us has a unique perception of the world. Some males are colorblind while I am not. This sort of example may be a part of what this is all about. Perhaps my presence, my observation of the situation causes a change somehow in how things turn out. There is a lot of deep explorations one could take involving things like a Schrödinger wave collapse which might also contribute to the explanation of this. That my presence, my observation of the situation is really all that is needed to pin down the randomness in these kinds of situations.

Depending on my mood I switch between these two senses, the fantastical and the scientific. I think the world is rich enough to hold both at the same time without any trouble and it certainly does make for some easy laughs – at least for me. My coworkers may feel otherwise, but so far nobody has tried to clasp me in manacles and pin me to one place – yet. 🙂

Workflow with Pocket

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I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. 😉

Restaurant Review: Seasonal Grille in Hastings, MI

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Several weeks ago Scott bought a Groupon for a new restaurant we had never even knew existed. It’s called “Seasonal Grille” and it’s in Hastings, Michigan. We had no clue as to where Hastings was as we’ve never been there before. Turns out that it’s on M–43, which is a rather circuitous state route here in Michigan. We live just off Gull Road and as it turns out, Gull is also known as M–43. We followed the road along, from Kalamazoo to Richland, then to Danville and finally to Hastings. Parking was not an issue as Hastings was about the same size as Parchment, MI – which is to say, very small. It reminded me a lot of Cortland, New York. The restaurant itself is on a corner lot and is very bright inside and has a lot of windows, making the approach very easy for us. The Groupon was a half-off deal for a bottle of wine, an appetizer, and a main course.

We were greeted promptly and seated as it was rather late, later than most people would dine so the atmosphere was more intimate and relaxed than it otherwise would have been if we had arrived during the dinner rush. The interior is modern and spacious with a well-stocked bar which serves as a large island in the center of the establishment. The first thing I noticed was the interior lighting. I’ve had a standing issue for quite a long time with most restaurants, including all of them in Kalamazoo, that restauranteurs believe that subdued lighting lends ambiance. It’s irritating. It’s not ambiance if you cannot see anything because it is so very dim inside! It was a delight to finally find a restaurant that pumps up the ambient light as well as features strong but well-diffused lights over each table. When one eats, you taste first with your eyes. Being able to see things, being well-lit, this is totally refreshing and I cannot express how much I approve and enjoy this dining environment. Other restaurants can take a page from Seasonal Grille when it comes to interior design and especially their generous lighting strategy.

We shared a large meatball appetizer which was about the size of a baseball. It was well cooked and had a very fine texture which we both commented on. The presentation was very nice and the speed from the kitchen was exactly what we expected. It wasn’t rushed out, and it wasn’t late, it was just right. There was a little fumble with our wine order as the bottle we selected was found to be out, but switching to another varietal wasn’t a problem. We both had ordered their “Taste of Italy” which was listed as Manicotti, Lasagna, and Chicken Parmesan for $14.95. This was one of their most expensive dishes on the menu and the price was another huge surprise. The order was finished by the kitchen and arrived, everything was piping hot and fresh and the colors, the texture, the taste, and the presentation were all spot-on. I still am shocked that they priced out that dish to $14.95. The prices, we both commented as we ate our meal, were remarkably low considering the quality coming out of the kitchen. I would have expected a price point around $16.95 to $18.95. That a good meal for such a great price can be had locally is quite nice. For dessert we decided to try their Cannoli. The presentation on the desert platter shows one cannoli, however the order is for two. We really ordered too much but the quality was still excellent, and since it wasn’t included in the Groupon that was priced out separately as it should have been.

Overall I was quite impressed with Seasonal Grille. It is a rather lengthy drive from Kalamazoo, but it is uniquely positioned, as it’s roughly half-an-hour from Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Lansing. If you are looking for a new place, or maybe find a new favorite place, I really recommend this restaurant for consideration. Hastings may be sneeze-and-you-miss-it, but this particular establishment certainly is not.