Drewski   Coming soon in three dimensions

Hello, I am from approximately two months in the future. On 10/22 at approx 2:34am CET a tachyon field failure in the main resonating ring of the LHC causes a “temporal blowback”. Shortly thereafter, the resulting destruction of the strong nuclear force causes the world to vaporize in seconds, while a few of us near the experiment are thrown into a temporal causality loop. While the predestination event (or as we have come to call it “The Big Rewind”) hasn’t occurred yet to you, for us it is about three years in our past. I came across your site looking to see if there were any other scientists that may have theorized this phenomenon who may be of assistance in preventing it. This brings me to my point, I have repeatedly checked your site for the past five rewinds at 2:34:01 CET and it still says nope, believe me at this point the LHC has most assuredly destroyed the world. I can provide a bank account in Nigeria for the funds to be placed. I am curious to the exact amount however.

Seriously, I almost want to reply.

(via Ken)

10 phone calls (1 with a piano serenade, thanks Grandma!), 2 cards, 1 e-card (containing 4 noble truths, great gift!), 1 email (and 1 blog comment), 15 Facebook birthday wishes (earliest one 186 minutes early, thanks Steve!), 6 websites’ birthday wishes, 1 emailed birthday wish for Anton Bruckner (4 days ago :)), 1 great day off with Deanna, 2 birthday meals—one more to come, who’s up for Fogo de Chão this weekend?, 1 Margarita with lunch, 1 White Russian with dinner, 1 piece of chocolate cake, 2 scoops of ice cream, 12 party poppers to top it off. 15 photos.

And 25 years! Thanks everyone!

BIS customers now getting instant IMAP e-mail | BlackBerry Cool

It’s great to see the upgrade, especially for BIS users who have had less-than-stellar delivery times, but you have to wonder why it took so long for IMAP IDLE to be supported.

Absolutely. This is the kind of fine print that they don’t warn you about when you get a BlackBerry device. “We support your IMAP and POP email, but only by routing all traffic through our servers and delaying email. Oh, and you can’t just authenticate; you need, um, service books.”

That last detail was particularly interesting to explain to my mom today, who was about to ask for a refund on her data plan from AT&T because she hadn’t been getting email for two weeks.

Actually Mom, even though your username and password are set up to check and to synchronize your email, there’s this extra layer of authentication called service books. They basically manage the synchronization between your device and the BlackBerry servers, so your mail has probably been “sitting on their server” ready to deliver, but your device hasn’t been able to get into it.

Oh, yeah, and the service books? They will stop working. Yes, even when your password is correct.

I suppose this whole instant IMAP server upgrade is to make them more competitive in the ever-lucrative consumer market, but this is the kind of zero-day feature that any real PDA should support.

Counting down the days until I can switch to something else… something that supports real internet would be good too. Maybe by the time I’m ready ($$) to switch devices, there will even be a device (Android?) that will give me pause before immediately jumping for an iPhone. But I’m not counting on it.

A few days late, but I spent the first days of this week reading about some discrepancies in Sarah Palin’s recent pregnancy. Summary: some people think the child is actually her daughter’s (and that her daughter’s current pregnancy is a cover-up).

iReport had an article, but Karion’s article was more interesting (i.e. more sources), and it’s his I want to address here. After asking my labor-and-delivery-nurse mom about some of the details, she had a few corrections:

Karion:

Three days [after birth], [she] announces (at work) that the baby has Down’s syndrome, that she has known that since early in the pregnancy. Why would a staunchly pro-life woman, who opposes legal abortions for rape and incest victims, screen for birth defects when there is ABSOLUTELY no chance that she would have an abortion?

Because it’s not about “finding out if the baby is retarded so we can abort”. My mom:

“From a medical standpoint ANY woman 35 and older has the option to be tested for any chromosomal abnormalities because of the increased risk for problems.  A woman can be pro-life and still test, just because she wants to know!”

I know that care for the mother and fetus can change significantly if there are any problems, so it’s more of a matter of ensuring the well-being of both.

Karion:

Before giving a speech in Texas on April 17, 2008, while she was eight months’ pregnant, she starts having contractions and leaking amniotic fluid.

[The next morning], someone allegedly induces labor. If the leaking amniotic fluid wasn’t a concern enough to address for 18+ hours, let alone preclude approval for flight travel (the air pressure aggravates the dangers of infection and further irritation of the leak), and she wasn’t actually in labor when she arrived, why induce a premature birth of a baby with Down’s?

Because it has nothing to do with the air pressure. My mom:

The other clinical ignorance he has is that at “8mos.” that could mean 36 wks or 32 wks depending on how a lay person is looking at the calendar.  Generally, in the ob world if a pregnancy has ruptured membranes at 34 wks + for over 12 hrs without labor, you induce so that infection does not set in.  The baby has pretty good chance of survival at that point, the risk of infection would be greater.  They also often give an injection to the mom which can help mature the baby’s lungs.

So the mere fact that she was leaking for over 12 hours would make them likely to induce. The whole timeline makes me think that the amniotic fluid would have been a concern, except that she (for some reason) ran away from care for that long.

I respect that this is just a big rumor, but it does have some interesting details, and I’m curious to see how everything will play out.

Twice now, I’ve had pingbacks from Freeinfowire.com (look them up, I’m not linking to them). The first time, it was my post about Obama and Twitter, and since the article was about Obama that made sense. Sorta. It wasn’t really linking back to my article, and I suspected they were just trolling for blog posts about Obama in hopes that someone would click on them.

Well, it happened again: they linked to my article about the internet and attention, again in an article about Obama. Lame.

Google Photos Blog: Announcing Picasa 3.0 and a new version of Picasa Web Albums!

With Picasa’s announcement of the updated Web Albums site, I’ve settled on it for my own photography needs. Their “name tags” feature is incredibly well-done, I can arbitrarily tag my photos additionally, and they’ve added other compelling features that have sold me on it.

Previously, I had been using Flickr. By the time I joined, it seemed to be the premier community for photographers, and it offered the most features I wanted: licensing photos, tagging, flexible management of albums/sets, RSS feeds for nearly everything, and super-cool mash-ups with other sites.

Separately, a lot of people have been using Facebook for photos (at least those of people-based events and such), namely because their person tagging is very good: boxes around faces and notifications of tagged photos. (Flickr has tagging, and you can separately add boxed notes to photos, but it has no way to connect that directly with people.) While not a photography website per se, it is certainly a great way to share photos easily.

Picasa Web Albums has been a nice project, and I had used it occasionally, but not very often. The interface hasn’t been the best, it felt very closed off from any sort of community, and it seemed to be wedded to the application Picasa (which has a pretty shoddy track record on Linux). I can (and do) manage my photos quite well via F-Spot, but there was a lot I couldn’t do without Picasa (the application).

But in one fell swoop, they’ve knocked down the competition. The name tags feature is so nice, it’s actually fun to use; in about an hour I tagged about 700 photos with my existing Gmail contacts. I’ve also tagged my photos with some other keywords, in case you really want to see what photos of roller coasters I’ve taken. Lastly, I can release my photos with Creative Commons licenses, so neat things can happen.

The sum of these features is what drives Picasa’s new Explore page. You can see popular tags, locations, and featured photos. There’s even a (mediocre) game where you guess the locations of photos.

All in all, Google has a good product and it breeds good competition in the photo website space. You can see my photos on my Picasa profile.

(PS: If it seems like I’m talking slow, that’s because I’m sapping my bandwidth uploading four albums at a time. )

You are busy. You have many demands on your time and attention. Never, under any conditions, hesitate to ignore anyone or anything that’s not making good use of your attention. Ever.

The ever-insightful Merlin Mann. The first thing I did was to stop following him on Twitter; he asked for it.

I suppose this also means I should focus my RSS reading on things that will help me learn, will enlighten me, or a selective set of quality distractions (because—let’s face it—I will read Dinosaur Comics).

I also think that Facebook fits in here somewhere—their lack of RSS meaning I just shouldn’t bother visiting their site perhaps?—but in general, I do think that a lot of the social sites are the chief computer distraction for me (and I’m guessing Merlin too, as he brought it up).

Anything else I should consider? I’m a sucker for good reading online, on a variety of topics, but I also recognize the need to limit oneself.

YouTube - Inní mér syngur vitleysingur

Not the best video ever (by a long shot), but I love this song. So joyful.

Add Andrew Conkling [to our list of contributors] - he has done so much work for so long in Bugzilla, should have been listed here long ago.

[banshee] Revision 4414.

It’s not why I help out, but it is nice to be recognized. Thanks Gabriel!

It’s really very satisfying to contribute to the Banshee project, even if it’s not code. Part of my motivation is to help out the developers so they can focus on development itself, but it’s also been a good way for me to get my foot in the door while I work on my education. I certainly plan on (one day) being able to contribute my own code to Banshee and some other projects.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the ride.

On the Web, Obama’s Twitter site now has more than 60,000 followers, who receive updates from Obama’s town hall meetings and links to his Web site.

The article also mentions that “Republican John McCain’s campaign, meanwhile, has not highlighted text messages,” Instead McCain is going old-school with viral YouTube videos, [sic] “McCain’s recent ‘Celeb’ ad, which compared Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, has received about 2 million hits on YouTube.”

via Twitter Blog: Mobilizing His Followers

My favorite part: the AP calling YouTube “old-school”.