davintosh » Just Stuff

The FridgeCouch

dave — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 04:18:06 +0000

Saw this on Treehugger yesterday; very cool…

Cool Couches Made From Recycled Fridges

The fridge couch — well, someone out there had to finally marry the two. Created by Canadian designer Adrian Johnson, these customized ultra-retro seaters are made from vintage refrigerators and salvaged car seats that he rescues from local junkyards. Johnson’s apparent mission: “To go where recycling hasn’t gone before.”

Speaker-integrated comfort: the 535i No Frost. Specs: Black leather 1988 BMW 535i back seat with fold-down arm rest in Harvest Gold 1980 GE No Frost refrigerator with dark walnut and oak shelving, swinging freezer door side table, storage cabinet and iPod-compatible Philips sound system.

And to think… I have a spare back seat from my 528e in the basement that’s just begging to be put back into use like this. Now; where to find a junked fridge?

Tiny Ponies All Around

dave — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:35:03 +0000

I was Googling (ok, doing a Google search) for something Apple-related this morning, and one of the results at the top of the list caught my eye:

There is a horse in the Apple Store and no one sees it but me.

I think, “Why?” What is the villain here that blinds all of these people to this situation? Am I nuts for thinking this is exceptional? Does anyone else see this? Did I accidentally drop acid and not realize? I must take a photo. I must verify later, when I’m not potentially tripping balls.

I think, “Would they notice if it were a tiger?” Or a lamb? Or an anaconda? What would it take to shake the haze from around their eyes? A sale sign? A new iPod Touch? Would they notice a new iPod Touch?

Are they just divinely focused? Are they meditating in a retail environment? Are they distracted by something shiny? There is so much shiny in the Apple Store. Is it enough to distract everyone from the little tiny horse that is at the Genius Bar?

Frank goes on to make an excellent observation;

Since then, John and I have a term called a “tiny pony.” It is a thing that is exceptional that no one, for whatever reason, notices. Or, conversely, it is an exceptional thing that everyone notices, but quickly grows acclimated to despite the brilliance of it all.

There are so many tiny ponies in our lives today it’s not even funny. It may sound a bit cheesy, but I’ve often imagined how surreal the world would be to someone who was magically transported to now from the distant past, and how I might explain to them how some everyday things work. Those imaginings make me think about some of the things we take for granted in life… Like air conditioning. When I was a kid, A/C was a luxury that my family couldn’t afford, so I remember well the times we made it through the hot & humid summers in Sioux Falls with little more than fans and cold water and a swimming pool a ten-block walk from home. But when you think about how we can take a little bit of electricity and use it to beat back the heat and humidity… And how so few people actually understand how it works, but expect it to work on demand. That’s a tiny pony.

Or even clean water on demand in our homes. Not only do we have it running from taps, but we can adjust the temperature of that water for different uses. Another string of tiny ponies to make all that possible. Or how about cell phones, or computers, or any other bit of technology that we use and in some small or large way depend on for our daily routine. Tiny ponies every-stinkin’-where. And those tiny ponies don’t just happen; they are the result of herculean efforts made by people who have gone before us to to invent the gadget, to harness the energy, to design the system, to write the standards, to maintain the system… And most of the time we have no clue who is behind it all.

Frank closes his post with another excellent point;

When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional? Is this how we get by? Would anything get done if we were constantly gobsmacked? Is this how we survive, how we stay sane? We define a pattern, no matter how exceptional, and acclimate ourselves to it?

I allow myself to get gobsmacked sometimes, and that’s probably a healthy thing.

Casey Who?

dave — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:34:37 +0000

I’ve paid about zero attention to the Casey Anthony trial, so all I knew of it was the little tidbits that I caught before flipping the TV or radio to another station when the name came up. The jury yesterday returned a verdict of “not guilty”. Unfortunately, the end of the trail won’t be the end of the endless prattling about Casey Anthony and the suspicious death of her daughter, Caylee.

Since the verdict was announced, I’ve heard way more commentary on the trial than while the trial was still ongoing, and most people seem to be convinced that she did indeed kill her daughter — that’s the most logical explanation for the circumstances surrounding Caylee’s disappearance and death and Casey’s behavior — but the prosecutors failed to prove it to the jury. She did mess up by lying to the police, and will serve some time for that, but once that’s accomplished, she’ll be a free woman.

Or will she?

She knows what happened, and whether she acknowledges God’s existence or not, He knows what happened, and will one day sort things out with her. Whether she comes to terms with Him before that day and seeks forgiveness… That’s her story, and something we are not privy to. He’s definitely hoping that she’ll seek His forgiveness, and we should hope & pray the same for her, as we should for everyone.

In God’s economy, all sin — whether it’s killing an innocent like Calee Anthony or the hateful thoughts in my head toward the idiot who cut me off on the way to work this morning — carries an equal punishment; death and eternal separation from God. But no matter what our sin, should we seek forgiveness for our actions and our condition through Christ Jesus, we will be forgiven. Yes, if Casey did indeed kill her daughter, she can be forgiven, just as I have been forgiven for the sin that once ruled my life and the sins that I continue to commit. She can be forgiven just as Jeffrey Dahmer was forgiven for the sin in his life. Just as you can be forgiven.

We as a society grade each other much differently than does God. We like to categorize and rank our own sins and those of others according to degrees of ‘badness’, then dole out punishments according to where those societal sins fall on our scale of badness. God treats all sin the same, but holds us all to a single standard; Holiness. Casey Anthony was found not guilty, but that is not the equivalent of innocent. In the eyes of many, her sin is as egregious as it gets — murder of her own child — compounded by also getting away with murder. Because of that societal judgment, the remainder of Casey’s life will be far from easy, in spite of the “not guilty” finding. Sure, the morbid curiosity surrounding the outcome of the trial will likely bring her much celebrity and a lot of money — interviews and maybe a book or movie deal — but she’ll always be a pariah.

But what really confuses and saddens me following the whole circus of a trial is the level of hatred for Casey Anthony, and the hypocritical double-standard it brings out in many people. Popular opinion says that she is a cold-hearted monster because she killed her daughter, and deserves much worse than she’s getting following the trial. But isn’t it more than a tad ironic that thousands of children are slaughtered every day in abortion clinics across the country after their mothers exercise their supposed right to choose? And we as a society barely bat an eye at the carnage. It’s likely that Casey Anthony made essentially the same choice as millions of other women before her and thousands more every day; Casey’s sin is that she made her choice later than what is socially acceptable (and acceptable by the laws of the land.) She is simply a victim of bad timing, right?

The photos we have of a doe-eyed Caylee Anthony are everywhere to remind us of the precious life that has been lost, probably at the hand of her mother. But because there are no photos of the millions and millions of children that have been killed through abortion and ignored by society, we have difficulty envisioning the beauty of those children, but they are no less precious than Caylee. And lacking some visual or physical connection with them, wrapping our minds around the enormity of that loss is somehow beyond us. Out of sight, out of mind; but the loss is no less real, and I believe much more damaging to our society than we will ever know.

Caylee Marie Anthony

Edit: Turns out I’m not the only one making the Caylee Anthony and abortion connection; Rush Limbaugh: Casey Anthony Not Guilty of Very Late-Term Abortion (July 6). Jenny Erickson on The Stir: Is Abortion Age Discrimination?, and many others.

The Star Spangled Banner — The Other Verses

dave — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:53:56 +0000

The Star Spangled Banner is one of the most well-known songs in the US. It is after all our National Anthem. But did you know that what we hear sung before a baseball game is actually just the first verse of a much longer song?

Verse 1:
Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Verse 2:
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Verse 3:
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Verse 4:
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

The other three verses aren’t quite as, um, nice or politically correct as the first, which may be part of the reason they aren’t sung often and thus not as well known, but they hold a lot of meaning, and reflect more fully the Christian faith that was prevalent among the people in days past who first sung it. The gentleman in this video apparently hadn’t heard of the other three verses but learned verse 4, thinking it was the second of two verses. He does have a great singing voice.

I don’t remember ever hearing about the other verses until just recently. Last year I bought a pile of old books at a rummage sale, and tucked into one of them was a really old & tattered leaflet of Civil War battle songs that was assembled and printed by The Lion Coffee Company; near as I can determine from the contents of the booklet, it was printed not long after the Civil War. It was a bit torn up, had had a new cover added to it at some point so was missing some of its original content, and was held together with some string. Pretty cool stuff; lots of songs I’d heard and sung before, but some that I’d never heard of and others, like the Star Spangled Banner, that had verses that were new to me. I’ll share more of the contents of the booklet later, but couldn’t resist showing off one of the pages just a little!

Physician, Kill Thyself

dave — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:19:37 +0000

Jack Kevorkian died today at the age of 83, ironically, of natural causes.

It’s The Geeks’ Fault

dave — Fri, 27 May 2011 21:59:33 +0000

At least in Italy anyway…

Italian government officials have accused the country’s top seismologist of manslaughter, after failing to predict a natural disaster that struck Italy in 2009, a massive devastating earthquake that killed 308 people.
…

Enzo Boschi, the president of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), will face trial along with six other scientists and technicians, after failing to predict the future and the impending disaster.
…

The seven scientists were placed under investigation almost a year ago, according to a news story on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — the world’s largest general-science society and a leading voice for the interests of scientists worldwide.

Alan Leschner, chief executive of AAAS, said his group wrote a letter to the Italian government last year — clearly, to no avail.

“Whoever made these accusations misunderstands the nature of science, the nature of the discipline and how difficult it is to predict anything with the surety they expect,” Leschner told FoxNews.com.

The case could have a “chilling effect” on scientists, he noted.

“It reflects a lack of understanding about what science can and can’t do,” he said. “And frankly, it will have an effect of intimidating scientists … This just feels like either scapegoating or an attempt to intimidate a community. This really seems inappropriate.”

Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella said that the seven defendants had supplied “imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information,” in a press conference following a meeting held by the committee 6 days before the quake, reported the Italian daily Corriere della Sera

In doing so, they “thwarted the activities designed to protect the public,” the judge said.

Can these people be serious? Do these government officials be so clueless as to think that the field of seismology is precise enough to predict accurately when major natural events like earthquakes will happen? Seismology, like much of science, is more of an exercise in observation and hypothetical correlation; watching what the earth does and making guesses as to what made it do what it just did. I would think that if the technology existed to predict earthquakes, wouldn’t it have been used in an earthquake-prone place like Japan?

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Oh, The Irony…

dave — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:29:55 +0000

Bad-news stories usually don’t faze me, but when I heard this story on the radio this morning, I nearly cried:

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) – A Sioux Falls man is accused of tying up and beating his girlfriend after discovering she had used the Internet to research how to leave an abusive relationship.
Police spokesman Sam Clemens says 20-year-old Jose Sanchez allegedly tied up the 18-year-old woman with a belt and electrical wire and then beat her for about 20 minutes before she persuaded him to take her to a hospital.
The Argus Leader reports that a judge set bond for Sanchez at $10,000 on charges of aggravated assault, kidnapping and interference with emergency communications.
KELO-AM News — Wednesday, February 23rd 2011 12:39pm

Good Lord; how could Jose not see the irony in what he was doing? In cases like this, the judicial system could save itself a lot of time and money by relieving the offender of two bits of his anatomy; one swipe of a knife delivers punishment and ‘cure’. Geldings tend to be much gentler.

Awesome Visible Shock Wave Video

dave — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:12:30 +0000

This sort of thing has always fascinated me; a plane moving at supersonic speed leaves a shock wave in its wake. The sonic boom is one thing, and is pretty awesome to experience, but the visible shock wave is something else entirely! This video of the launch of an Atlas V rocket shows a visible shock wave that radiates out horizontally as the rocket ascends; it looks like waves in a pool after a rock was thrown in the middle. I’ve never seen anything like that before.

And this video has the same event but from a different camera & vantage point (it’s toward the end of the video, at about 2:20.) Lots of other good video footage in it that I’ve seen before, but still amazing.

When I was in the SD Air National Guard we had somewhat regular training exercises where we would do our jobs as if we were really at war. To add some realism, pilots & aircraft from other bases would often be recruited to play the aggressors. On the Saturday morning of one very memorable training exercise, an aggressor snuck in under the radar and screamed past the base at supersonic speed (or very near it.) I happened to be walking across the flight line as he flew over, and remember it distinctly; looked up & saw this F4 Phantom fly past silently but incredibly fast. A half-second later the shock wave hit, and it almost knocked me over it was so LOUD… Wow. Because I was on the flight line and he was dropping imaginary bombs and strafing the aircraft on the line with imaginary 20mm rounds as he flew past, I instantly became an imaginary casualty and spent the rest of the guard drill laying on a cot in the morgue. Cheery.

Define Curb-To-Curb Plowing

dave — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:11:46 +0000

I glanced at the Argus Leader in the break room at work yesterday, and the letter to the editor on the front page of the Voices page jumped out at me; it literally warmed my heart!

Snow accumulating along curbs
DEB K. OLSON • SIOUX FALLS • JANUARY 20, 2011

Could someone define curb-to-curb snow removal?

The snow in our neighborhood is 5 feet or more from the curb and not because cars were on the streets when they were plowed as we are diligent about moving them before the plows arrived.

Get it wrong the first time, and the snow gets farther from the curb with each new snowfall that requires plowing.

If I put the extra snow back in the street, all along my property line, could I call the street department and request someone to come get the leftover snow, or will the city put it back in my driveway because it had a do-over?

Or, could I call a private plow operator and send the bill to the city?

Mail is not being delivered to our curbside mailboxes because the mail trucks can’t get close enough. Why should homeowners be required to move the snow that shouldn’t have been left there in the first place? Maybe Mayor Mike Huether could pick up our mail at the post office and deliver it to us on his way to Whisk & Chop to discuss the events center.

When the city plowed the emergency snow route at the end of our block, twice, it left the extra snow at the end of the street. That made it pretty tough to get through, and the snow turns to concrete as we have to drive on it until we are blessed with a snowplow.

Does anyone at City Hall really listen when concerns are called in? What are we paying taxes for?

The work is half-baked at best.

I’ve been singing that tune ever since I became a homeowner and have had to park a vehicle on the street. At our house — with it’s narrow, short driveway and an attached single-car garage that rarely has room to fit a single car — four of the five vehicles we have are relegated to park on the street. Several of our neighbors also park on the street, so when the street narrows because of snow accumulation, we really notice it.

When the snowplows come by our house they typically have the edge of the blade a good foot or so from the curb. When they are pushing a good amount of snow, a lot of the snow falls back behind where the edge was, so the snow ends up even further from the curb. And when they’re not being especially careful about where they have the blade they can start out a good two feet from the curb, and then the lost space really starts to add up.

At our house we’ve resorted to going out after the snowplows have been by and digging the snow by hand right up to the curb. We pile the snow between the street and sidewalk, but that has its limits; right now the peak of the snow pile is a good five feet tall, and throwing more on it just lands it on the sidewalk. The photos above are from a year ago, but it looks the same this year; you can hardly see the roof of my 735 from the front window of the house, and the Hondas just disappear behind the pile. It’s a little ridiculous. It also makes clearing frost & snow from the windows interesting because there’s so little room between the car and vertical snowbank. And forget about opening the passenger-side door; just ain’t happening.

On the side streets the distance between the snow pile and the curb is one thing, but there are a couple of places near home — on 22nd and 26th Streets, near the VA Hospital and Children’s Care Center &mash; where the same street-narrowing thing happens, and many employees continue to choose to park their cars there anyway. With heavy traffic flowing in both directions through those areas, it gets a little dicey driving past those spots.

I can understand that the plow drivers need to keep their distance from the curb a bit to avoid damaging the curbs and their equipment, but it’s pretty annoying for them to keep moving further and further from the curb each time. Even though we go the extra step in clearing the snow right up to the curb for them, they still maintain their distance when passing our house, but even if they did push the snow up against the curb in front of our house, the snow would have nowhere to go anyway, so…

It’s there that I run out of steam on my rant. Beaten again by overthinking the issue.

The Psychology Of Being Watched

dave — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:18:33 +0000

The pressroom manager at work — Steve — has been having trouble with some of the night & weekend shift guys getting on his computer and playing games & whatnot, and generally making a mess of his desk by getting ink on his stuff, so he came to me a couple of weeks ago for some help with an idea… He wanted to put up a dummy camera in his office pointed at his desk to deter some of the stuff that was going on. I told him he’d have better luck keeping them off his computer if he just changed his password & kept it a secret, but he was wanting to also keep them away from his desk. So I tracked one down (much easier and cheaper than I thought it would be) and installed it yesterday. The reaction thus far has been pretty amusing, and a bit surprising.

The camera arrived on the perfect day, coinciding with some employee meetings that were going on, so I did the installation while the night shift guys were in their meeting. I made a point of walking past the room where they were meeting carrying a ladder and a roll of cable. The job of installing it was completed well before the meeting was done, and it didn’t take long before they noticed the camera and its blinking red light. And reacted.

The pressroom manager got a call from one of the guys last night, mad as a hornet… “What the (insert expletive) is going on with all the (insert expletive) cameras around here?!?! We feel like we’re being watched!!!” He calmly responded that it’s one camera, and it’s not intended or being used to watch anything but his desk. Today, things were tense all over; people were upset that they were being “watched”. That the camera was evidence that they weren’t trusted. The truth of the matter is that his reaction was evidence that things were going on that shouldn’t, and he feared the camera’s presence would give him away.

The funny thing is not only that the camera is a dummy, but that for the last three years we’ve been running an iPrism web filter device that keeps tabs on every excursion to the Internet, tracking the sites everybody on the network visits and how long they spend on them. Everyone was informed of the iPrism’s presence and function when it was installed, and the pressroom people are reminded of its presence any time they try to get to the Internet from a non-authorized computer. Even if the camera was real and was really watching that one desk, their online activities are actually being “watched” and scrutinized more thoroughly by the iPrism. Yet because they see the camera and don’t see the iPrism, the camera is the problem. And that phony camera will probably keep them in line far better than the iPrism ever will.

Steve is getting a good laugh out of it the whole situation. A few people around the company know it’s a dummy, so I’m not sure how long the secret will last. I’m sure he’ll milk it for all it’s worth though.

Day-later update: God has a great sense of humor, and timing. I wrote that yesterday, then today’s devotional in Our Daily Bread had to do with the very same thing:

Someone shared with me her observation about two bosses. One is loved but not feared by his subordinates. Because they love their boss but don’t respect his authority, they don’t follow his guidelines. The other boss is both feared and loved by those who serve under him, and their good behavior shows it.

That’s pretty telling of the atmosphere at work; very relaxed, almost too relaxed at times, which leads to low productivity levels. Steve stopped by my desk this morning and said that press output jumped considerably in the last couple of days. If one dummy camera can do that, he’s wondering where he might put a second one, just for good measure. Amazing what a newfound fear of the boss can do for people.