zen.org Communal Weblog

You remember Exxon, right? Alaska? Death and destruction?

They posted the highest profit earnings of any US company. ever. Wonder how they did that? Hmm, well “[in early 2005] Exxon pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe [of global warming].” Mother Jones May/June 2005 Issue

Google, but everything is backwards—meaning, do your search backwards too.

What an awesome hack.

Visit my webcam at:

http://www.zen.org/~sven/webcam.html

When posting this it’s pointing at very interesting location, my back yard, and currently updates every 60 seconds. The camera is hooked up to my laptop which has a wireless connection, so long there is a plug around I can put it anyplace within range. Don’t expect it to be up 24 hours a day.

My question is, what should I point it at? Please post any ideas you have, no matter how silly. Some of my ideas include:

• Where the cat often naps.
• The cat door, see if he brings any critters in.
• Main Street, where speeders often get pulled over.
• The stove: “What’s Sven cooking?”
• The TV. Would that be legal?

I don’t expect anybody but me to watch it in the long-term. I just thought somebody might think of something clever.

As I try to make sure to do more blogging regarding food, I thought I’d list what we ate today…

For lunch, our classic roasted red pepper and carrot soup. Great for a yukky day like today, esp when P and I both have colds and Magda thinks she’s getting one (from us, of course). Simple and fast, that soup. It’s not actually ours, it’s from Avoca, but one of our favorites, for all year round.

Dinner was a Jamie Oliver recipe, from Happy Days, his third book. I don’t remember the actual name of it, but it was salmon fillets, baby beetroot, watercress and a creamy horseradish sauce. Oh YUM. I didn’t think that beets and creamy horseradish would go well, but they doooooo.

I’m trying to suck down as much hot lemon and honey as I can…thank heavens I love honey and lemon :-).

Have you ever writting some horrible code that works you. Then stare and stare at it for a way to make it cleaner and nothing comes to mind? I think I’ll keep it and think of it as grotesque, like gargoyles.

I called TiVo today to ask about having our account suspended or put on hold, since we’ll be away for a while and would prefer to not pay their fees. You can’t suspend an account, unfortunately, you have to cancel and then start up again. If you cancel and sign up, you’re doing it as a new user again and commit to a 12-month contract again, among other things.

Or, TiVo will just give you a credit for the cost of the automated charges for the duration of your absence, effectively making it not cost you anything to keep the service going. If we’re back earlier than I estimated, it’s effectively free TiVo.

Positive side: this is awesome, it makes it much easier.

Negative side: I wonder what it’ll take for this to go away cuz too many people are lying to get free service?

Or maybe TiVo will just absorb this in exchange for their customers being really happy?

Time on my hands? Naaaaaahhhh

But it is fun to see things like that. I love me teh interweb.

Shoe Lacing Methods

I did it. I decided. I went with the Nokia 6230i, mainly cause I liked the interface. Even if it didn’t use iSync with my iBook, I found (and bought) a program called Phone Director, which allows the Nokia 6230, 6230i, 7280, 7380, 8800 all to connect to the Mac, with more info and easier use than iSync. Loving this. I’ve tricked out the phone with my Serenity wallpaper, ringtones, message tones, and I’m working on getting the “No power in the ‘verse” as my startup sound :-).

Mucho thanks to Marie at the Tullamore Carphone Warehouse for dealing with dummy me who didn’t think things through about half the stuff we did!!

I should have the same number (for those of you who have it) once the porting from Vodafone to Meteor is done.

[tags]mobile, nokia, serenity, vodafone, meteor, marie, irishblog[/tags]

Thanks to a mention in one of Adam Curry’s podcasts, I learned that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is carried on the More4 channel in the UK. Our digital cable company in Ireland added the channel in December.

So now our MythTV box can happily grab it at 9:30pm each night for our enjoyment later. Only recently I discovered a pieced-together weekend The Daily Show: Global Edition airing once a week on CNN. While that was a great first step, this is now so much cooler. 🙂

Test 1: A few years ago I got a Logitech USB camera for “free” when I signed up for Verison DSL. This morning I finally got it working, and I made the enclosed movie.

Test 2: I have also never used the enclosure feature of this Blog thing Brendan set up.

Update: I guess Test 2 didn’t work. Try http://www.zen.org/~sven/webcam-2006-01-18.mpg