My view of the world

You say you’re out and about and there’s not a decent cup of espresso to be found.

Now there’s a simple solution:
The Handpresso from the Charles and Marie website.

You just pump the handle to 16 bars of pressure, add boiling water, put a standard ESE pod in the device and push the release button to pour hot espresso into your cup.

If you are out at a restaurant that doesn’t serve espresso ask for very hot tea and have them hold the teabag.

Now you have your hot water and your cup, all you need to do is whip out your trusty Handpresso and presto you have a cup of hot fresh espresso complete with foam.

What could be simpler? You not only get your espresso, but you will be the envy of every coffee drinker in the restaurant.

This is from ZDnet’s White Paper Membership

Make Compliance Work for You

New regulations have been introduced to control reporting, privacy, and security, along with other aspects of electronic data management. However, theses regulations are complex and certainly stringent.

Get to the bottom line and learn how to make compliance work for you, efficiently and in a positive manner, through this business brief.

It sounds like this is going to be really useful and help clear up some of the confusion surrounding compliance….. Wrong!

The links lead to a download of a pdf file that is absolutely nothing more than Oracle saying we’re the best, buy Oracle.

Zif-Davis presents their whitepapers as being informative, but more often than not there’s no new data, no real information… Nothing but bullshit advertising.

This shouldn’t piss me off, but I remember when ZDnet was more about real ideas than selling products.

Ah well. As we all know: “It’s all about the Benjamins.”

I’m tired of the doom and gloom. I no longer want to hear about all the projects have been delayed or canceled here in Las Vegas. So I thought it was time to mention something a bit less stressful from around town.

This is from the LasVegasVegas Blog.

Flipchip photos were taken during a stop by the Bellagio for a leisurely stroll through one of our favorite spots in all of Las Vegas, the Bellagio Conservatory.

If you go to LasVegasVegas.com there are several more photos of the Conservatory. Including a couple of the talking tree… Very nice work.

Someone I know just sent me this. Source unknown.

In Windows - start - run type telnet and hit enter.

Type o (letter o not zero) and hit enter.

Type towel.blinkenlights.nl and hit enter

Have a bit of patience.

This story has been circulating since the first of the year. I’ll use this site from January 2008 as an example.

“Las Vegas the tourist mecca of the World is set to begin development of the World’s first vertical farm. The $200 million dollar project is designed to be a functional and profitable working farm growing enough food to feed 72,000 people for a year and provide another tourist attraction to the city that does everything in a larger than life way. “

Here is a well researched mea culpa from the Business Green Blog

Last week we ran a story detailing several reports from various environmental websites and blogs that Las Vegas was planning the world’s first vertical farm - a 30-storey Garden of Eden capable of producing enough food for 72,000 people a year in a controlled and sustainable biosphere.

All very impressive I think you’ll agree, or you would if it was actually going to happen.

Chris Jacobs quickly got in touch to inform us that not only were the designs quoted in the various blog postings and news reports his, but sadly there were currently no plans to make them a reality.

In fact, he insisted that the project was “most likely NOT going to happen” and advised, quite rightly, that we should be a bit more sceptical about what we read.

Ah well. It would have been kinda cool, but, even without the current economic mess, I don’t see it happening.

This is the trouble with the internet. 90% of what you read is made up of rumors, lies, innuendo or outright hoaxes, combined with a large dose of wishful thinking.

The Governor of Tennessee has proven beyond the slightest doubt that his political career and the wishes of his political contributers are more important than anything as trivial as education.

Wired Blog Network — Tennessee Adopts $9.5 Million University Piracy Measure Despite School Layoffs.

Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million for file sharing “monitoring software,” “monitoring hardware” and an additional “recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic” of its students.

Tennessee’s measure, approved Wednesday by Gov. Phil Bredesen, was the nation’s first in a bid to combat online file sharing within state-funded universities. The law, similar versions of which the Recording Industry Association of America wants throughout the United States, comes as the Tennessee public university system is increasing tuition, laying off teachers and leaving unfilled vacant instructor positions to battle a $43.7 million shortfall.

Is anyone else familiar with the term “sneaker net?” It may be an old school way of doing things, but I just bought a 16 gig flash drive and a DVD burner from NewEgg for a grand total of $63.97 including shipping. At that rate I can transfer a shit load of mp3s and even burn them to cd or dvd for my friends, cheaply, if I’m so inclined.

This new law also means they are going to have to install software to detect usb or even mp3 players on every computer on campus. –How are they going to differentiate between an mp3 player loaded with RIAA compliant songs and one loaded with pirated music?

The RIAA has succeeded not only in forcing someone else to act as their personal policeman but getting them to pay for it as well.

The recording industry has applied the knuckle-dragger’s brute force approach to enforcement in the delusional belief that it will actually have an impact.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that even if the filtering technology “magically” worked, students are going to continue to swap music.

The dinosaurs aren’t extinct. They just moved into the recording and movie industries.

Someone started a conversation about “cloud computing.”

My initial response was that is was a marketing scheme designed to get you to pay for a service or services you either already have or don’t need.

More importantly all the hype says the same thing. Cloud Computing puts your company data in the hands of some other company. –Are they out of their ever lovin’ minds??

At any rate, I went looking for sources to back up my view. Once I got done wading through the bullshit spewed by companies who thought they could profit from “the cloud” I found a couple of good quotes.

According to Larry Ellison of Oracle:
“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?

“We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud.”

Cloud computing is “stupidity,” says Linux guru Richard Stallman in an interview with the Guardian:
“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.

“Somebody is saying this is inevitable - and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.

Somebody on a blog said something about the convenience of being able to access your data from any web browser. –Trading security for convenience. What a wonderful concept.

It gives the bad guys easy access as well. They no longer need to worry about dealing with a broad array of corporate databases, firewalls and vpns. –They can use the same methodology against everyone in a given cloud…. It’s one hack fits all.

Cloud Computing as a fashion statement: –The paisley shirt of 2009

— Have you ever felt like you were the weirdest guy in the room? Well guess what.. The odds are you’re not even in the running. —

Sun UK –A DESPERATE boyfriend ripped his willy to bits when he tried to cure premature ejaculation by having sex with a HEDGEHOG.

(Yes boys and girls you read it right. Sex with one of these.)

Zoran Nikolovic of Belgrade, Serbia claimed to be following the advice of a witch doctor when he injured himself on the animal’s pricks.

The 35-year-old said he had not yet told his girlfriend about his spine romance and added: “God knows what she will think of me.

“I don’t know whether she’s more likely to dump me for being some kind of pervert or for being such an idiot.”

He explained: “I was so ashamed to go to a normal clinic to discuss sexual problems that I was ready to try anything. When the voodoo man suggested having sex with a hedgehog I walked out.

“But he guaranteed me total discretion and 100 per cent success so I decided to try it.”

Sun Health’s Dr Keith Hopcroft says: “It’s not a treatment I’d recommend ? but it could cure premature ejaculation because he’ll probably never want sex again.

Over at Pioneer Loan and Jewelry they took in an interesting toy.

It’s a Sony Mavica cd400 that is is admittedly not one of Sony’s great success stories. But it’s a movie/still camera that burns to 156mb cds, which gives it great potential.

The Mvc-Cd400 stores 66 images at 2272 x 1704 and fine quality or 119 at standard quality.
At 640 x 480 it can store 658 frames at fine quality and 1291 frames at standard.

Amazon.com:
* 4.1 megapixel sensor creates 2,272 x 1,704 images for prints at sizes up to 11 x 14 inches
* 3x optical Carl Zeiss Vario Sonnar zoom lens and 2x digital zoom with 5-area multi-point autofocus
* Stores images directly on 156 MB 8cm CD-R or CD-RW (rewriteable) discs
* Discs can be read by virtually all Mac and PC CD-ROM drives (not currently compatible with Apple iPhoto)
* Uses proprietary Infolithium rechargeable battery (NP-FM50 )

I like that “not currently compatible with Apple iPhoto” when is Apple going to figure out that going proprietary on everything is not a good idea?

Because the Mvc-Cd400 burns to cd it’s considerable larger and bulkier than the more conventional pocket digital camera which is probably the reason it’s out of production.

Still with 156mb of cheap storage it might be fun to play with. I’m going over to take a look at it in the next few days.