Sunday, February 12, 2012
http://lifehacker.com/5884261/top-10-downloads-that-enhance-windows-built+in-tools
Skateboarding 1958
Summer of 1958 I went to a nearby new construction site and got a scrap of 2x4.
I then took one of my sister's metal clamp on type of steel roller skates and took it apart.
I nailed on the toe section of the skate with bent over nails to the front of the 2x4 and the heel section to the back end of the 2x4.
The whole contraption was about 12 inches long and 2X4 skinny.
I would put one foot on it and scoot along with the other foot until I got up some speed.
Then I would put both feet on it and go a few more very wobbly yards.
Soon enough I learned that if I hit a small pebble the darn thing came to a grinding halt and would throw me forward onto my face.
In 1963 I lived next door to a very large family, a bunch of Mormon brothers who I hung out with.
One day we all went up to a local hill and started flying down the sidewalk on our homemade skateboards.
I hit a crack in the sidewalk and my board instantly came to a dead stop.
I flew forward and landed on my forehead on the concrete.
I got knocked out cold.
I saw my first commercial skate board in 1964 or 65 can't recall the exact year.
A dude showed up with it in school.
It was painted red and had something he called 'trucks.' It still had metal wheels.
I stole $10.00 from my mother's purse and got one, a lot of money back in those days.
Ya, I got found out and man was she mad as hell.
Hobie made a skate board with composition wheels.
Someone said the wheels were made up of ground walnut shells.
Those wheels were lass prone to stopping instantly on pebbles or side walk cracks.
My sister purchased one of those first Hobie skateboards, that exact skateboard she owned, with all of our wear and tear on it, now resides in the Huntington Beach CA Surf museum.
I rode that thing more than she did.
It had a tear drop shaped deck that was thick.
A true antique!
Flash forward to 1972.
Michael McDonald and i would go to the top of High Drive in Laguna Beach and ride downhill.
We had no gloves, knee pads or helmets.
He and I would do our best to fly downhill while attempting to stay on our super wobbly skateboards.
We did all right.
But our hands and knees got scraped up from frequent crashes.
By time my own son got to skateboarding, things had progressed to the point that skate boards were no longer wobbly and had sophisticated wide wheels and fancy trucks and wide skate decks with anti slip tape on the decks.
He and his friends were doing stuff we would never have dreamed possible back in my day.
My son did stuff on skate boards that really beat up his body and made him a warrior of sorts along with his friends.
Now we see "Skaters" being outlawed and controlled.
When i was a kid we could skate Board anywhere at anytime.
Of course we did not do rail slides on walls and railings etc. Nor did we wax up curbs and such.
Things have sure changed:
Skateboard 'Bombing' to be Outlawed Under City Leader Joe Buscaino's Proposal: Kid Skaters Would Also Have to Wear Helmets
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2012/02/skateboard_bombing_helmet_buscaino_law.php
“The Greatest Toy in the Universe” needs a name
Protect your automotive insurance costs
Video:
You have to protect yourself in LA.
I found an inexpensive dash cam here:
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/2-5-lcd-high-resolution-vehicle-mount-video-camcorder-with-sd-card-slot-wide-angle-35356
Another attempted fraud foiled:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRC7RO2tOJQ
If you have an android phone, I recommend Daily Roads Voyager, a free dashcam app that works wonderfully for these kinds of situations.
And here is what I believe to be the best solution available:
http://www.roadhawk.co.uk/
Water desalinization made easy
"German researchers have developed a battery that can remove sodium and chloride ions from seawater. In theory, their invention could be far more energy efficient than thermal desalination or reverse osmosis. This would cut the cost of using salt water for drinking or irrigation. It could also be used to make compact desalination systems for boats and life rafts, or crops. Each battery is made with manganese oxide nanorod electrodes, which absorb sodium when an electrical current passes through them. When the current is reversed, they dump the sodium ions out into waste water."http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/drinkseawater.html http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713144124.htm
Not sure that I would drink from this water source. Although my son and I have surfed San Onofre near the nuke plant's water discharge. There were two great white sharks swimming beneath us at the time. They were full because of all the dead fish around the nuke reactors. But none the less a hair raising experience!http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512082949.htmAll water was pee?
Rocket Man
She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It's lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man
And I think it's gonna be a long long time...
" We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/e/elton+john/rocket+man_10099416.html
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
God's designs are the best. "And He saw that it was good."
"The north African desert scorpion, Androctonus australis, is a hardy creature. Most animals that live in deserts dig burrows to protect themselves from the sand-laden wind. Not Androctonus, it usually toughs things out at the surface. Yet when the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage thanks to the unique structure of its carapace. Dr Han Zhiwu of Jilin University and colleagues have found that surface irregularities based on the scorpion's exoskeleton could substantially minimize atmospheric dust damage to aircraft."
Oh dear, the problems that some people have..."David S. Miller writes that when Facebook goes public later this year, Mark Zuckerberg plans to exercise stock options worth $5 billion of the $28 billion that his ownership stake will be worth and since the $5 billion he will receive will be treated as salary, Zuckerberg will have a tax bill of more than $2 billion making him, quite possibly, the largest taxpayer in history. But how much income tax will Zuckerberg pay on the rest of his stock that he won't immediately sell? Nothing, nada, zilch. He can simply use his stock as collateral to borrow against his tremendous wealth and avoid all tax. That's what Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, did, reportedly borrowing more than a billion dollars against his Oracle shares to buy one of the most expensive yachts in the world. Or consider the case of Steven P. Jobs who never sold a single share of Apple after he rejoined the company in 1997, and therefore never paying a penny of tax on the over $2 billion of Apple stock he held at his death. Now Jobs' widow can sell those shares without paying any income tax on the appreciation before his death — only on the increase in value from the time of his death to the time of the sale — because our tax system is based on the concept of "realization." Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains and the solution to the problem is called mark-to-market taxation. According to Miller, mark-to-market would only affect individuals who were undeniably, extraordinarily rich, only publicly traded stock would be marked to market, and a mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years."
Wow! Finally someone has some common sense in America. Selling used MP3s Found legal in America."After some litigation; ReDigi, a site where people can sell used MP3's has been found legal in America. One of the key decisions the judge had to make was whether MP3's were material objects or not. 'Material objects' are not subject to the distribution right stipulated in "17 USC 106(3)" which protects the sale of intellectual property copies. If MP3's are material objects than the resale of them is guaranteed legal under the first sale' exception in 17 USC 109. Capitol Records tried to argue that they were material objects under one law and not under the other. Today the judge has sided with the first-sale doctrine, which means he is seeing these as material objects."
And as you well may imagine...
Ya, sure..."A low-profile Chicago biologist, Michael Doyle, and his company Eola Technologies, who has once won a $521m patent lawsuit against Microsoft, claim that it was actually he and two co-inventors who invented, and patented, the "interactive web" before anyone else, back in 1993. Doyle argues that a program he created to allow doctors to view embryos over the early Internet, was the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window. He is therefore seeking royalties for the use of just about every modern interactive Internet technology, like watching videos or suggesting instant search results. Dozens of lawyers, representing the world's biggest internet companies, including Yahoo, Amazon, Google and YouTube are acting as defendants in the case, which has even seen Tim Berners-Lee testify on Tuesday."
Update on sharing..."This report looks at file sharing in the post MegaUpload era. The main finding — file sharing did not go away. It did not even decrease much in North America. Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links."
The iphone is a nightmare for carriers..."According to the latest EBITDA numbers from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, the subsidies they have to pay Apple in order to carry the iPhone are drastically reducing their profits. From the Article: '"A logical conclusion is that the iPhone is not good for wireless carriers," says Mike McCormack, an analyst at Nomura Securities. "When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident."' So one money sucking leech has attached itself to another money sucking leech?"
This had me cracking up since I have driven in it so many times...
?
"The north African desert scorpion, Androctonus australis, is a hardy creature. Most animals that live in deserts dig burrows to protect themselves from the sand-laden wind. Not Androctonus, it usually toughs things out at the surface. Yet when the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage thanks to the unique structure of its carapace. Dr Han Zhiwu of Jilin University and colleagues have found that surface irregularities based on the scorpion's exoskeleton could substantially minimize atmospheric dust damage to aircraft."
Oh dear, the problems that some people have..."David S. Miller writes that when Facebook goes public later this year, Mark Zuckerberg plans to exercise stock options worth $5 billion of the $28 billion that his ownership stake will be worth and since the $5 billion he will receive will be treated as salary, Zuckerberg will have a tax bill of more than $2 billion making him, quite possibly, the largest taxpayer in history. But how much income tax will Zuckerberg pay on the rest of his stock that he won't immediately sell? Nothing, nada, zilch. He can simply use his stock as collateral to borrow against his tremendous wealth and avoid all tax. That's what Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, did, reportedly borrowing more than a billion dollars against his Oracle shares to buy one of the most expensive yachts in the world. Or consider the case of Steven P. Jobs who never sold a single share of Apple after he rejoined the company in 1997, and therefore never paying a penny of tax on the over $2 billion of Apple stock he held at his death. Now Jobs' widow can sell those shares without paying any income tax on the appreciation before his death — only on the increase in value from the time of his death to the time of the sale — because our tax system is based on the concept of "realization." Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains and the solution to the problem is called mark-to-market taxation. According to Miller, mark-to-market would only affect individuals who were undeniably, extraordinarily rich, only publicly traded stock would be marked to market, and a mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years."
Wow! Finally someone has some common sense in America. Selling used MP3s Found legal in America."After some litigation; ReDigi, a site where people can sell used MP3's has been found legal in America. One of the key decisions the judge had to make was whether MP3's were material objects or not. 'Material objects' are not subject to the distribution right stipulated in "17 USC 106(3)" which protects the sale of intellectual property copies. If MP3's are material objects than the resale of them is guaranteed legal under the first sale' exception in 17 USC 109. Capitol Records tried to argue that they were material objects under one law and not under the other. Today the judge has sided with the first-sale doctrine, which means he is seeing these as material objects."
And as you well may imagine...
Ya, sure..."A low-profile Chicago biologist, Michael Doyle, and his company Eola Technologies, who has once won a $521m patent lawsuit against Microsoft, claim that it was actually he and two co-inventors who invented, and patented, the "interactive web" before anyone else, back in 1993. Doyle argues that a program he created to allow doctors to view embryos over the early Internet, was the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a web browser window. He is therefore seeking royalties for the use of just about every modern interactive Internet technology, like watching videos or suggesting instant search results. Dozens of lawyers, representing the world's biggest internet companies, including Yahoo, Amazon, Google and YouTube are acting as defendants in the case, which has even seen Tim Berners-Lee testify on Tuesday."
Update on sharing..."This report looks at file sharing in the post MegaUpload era. The main finding — file sharing did not go away. It did not even decrease much in North America. Mainly, file sharing became staggeringly less efficient. Instead of terabytes of North America MegaUpload traffic going to US servers, most file sharing traffic now comes from Europe over far more expensive transatlantic links."
The iphone is a nightmare for carriers..."According to the latest EBITDA numbers from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, the subsidies they have to pay Apple in order to carry the iPhone are drastically reducing their profits. From the Article: '"A logical conclusion is that the iPhone is not good for wireless carriers," says Mike McCormack, an analyst at Nomura Securities. "When we look at the direct and indirect economics that Apple has managed to extract from the carriers, the carrier-level value destruction is quite evident."' So one money sucking leech has attached itself to another money sucking leech?"
This had me cracking up since I have driven in it so many times...
?
Tuesday, February 07, 2012
Shekinah Fellowship: Where Are the Prophets?
Shekinah Fellowship: Where Are the Prophets?
Shekinah Fellowship: You can do it
Shekinah Fellowship: “Who do you say that I am?”
Shekinah Fellowship: Your Particular Calling....
Monday, February 06, 2012
Ya Baby
I Confess To Having Two VCR's
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