I pose this question to my loyal readership: Do you have a GPS unit? If so, would you recommend one like it to me?

Let me explain my expected use case so you can use that to tinge your suggestion: I wish to have geodata for content generation, largely photography. I’m not really so concerned with GPS directions for driving, really, because I typically have a good sense of direction [unless I'm on a date, and then it goes to hell ... no, really] and also have an iPhone, so I’m good when it comes to directions, mainly.

That posted … suggest away.

I took some time at lunch and watched/listened to Clay Shirky’s talk about the cognitive surplus, which I’d seen linked a lot of places, but today by Jeremy Zawodny.

I was reminded of a pledge to use time-shifting for awesome. I then sent myself to the penalty box for a ten-minute misconduct.

Okay, off to watch some Law & Order. :sigh:

Until the speedier iMacs became available this morning, I was pretty well set on going for a Mac notebook—either a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air. But I tell you … that top-end iMac, buttressed with 4GB of RAM [that I'd buy third-party, natch], that’s hard to pass up. Why?

1. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t use a laptop that much. My iBook gets some use around my house, and some use when I leave the house, but I don’t seriously attempt to work from it, unless I’m on the road with work. Which leads me to …
2. The fact that I’m about to have a work laptop [sadly, a Windows machine], which obviates any “need” [being such a relative term when we're talking about $2000 machines while people starve on far less per year in Africa; yes, I want cheese with my white whine] for having a personal laptop for quasi-work purposes. Here I ask myself: on a business trip, am I going to carry two laptops, one for work and one for personal use? The answer is, of course, no.
3. I don’t yet merit a Mac Pro, although I want one. My budget for this endeavor is largely the $2500 biennial computer purchase money I get from corporate [you'd do this, too, if you got the money interest-free]; the only machine I could see myself outspending this for is a Macbook Air with a solid-state drive, which I’d get based off of Alex’s experiences with his MBA. The top-end iMac fits in my budget, although I’ll have to be the one paying for the RAM [which is fine; I'll just get some software I'd buy otherwise pre-installed to offset that cost].

That said, I’m gonna go until at least the end of the week on this decision, because I don’t wish to act rashly just because Apple put out a new play-pretty today. [Lunch break over, back to the salt mines.]

In honor of Stephen going to ROFLCon, where at least he can’t come up with a dastardly plan to take down the server, I would like to present my favorite LOLCat of the moment:

Thanks to Chris for pointing to this earlier today when Jeff was bored. [Yeah, I know, the pidgin's not bad, but I laffed.]

I’ve become aware over the last week or so that students at The Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science are being asked to pay $500 a semester to cover room and board. I have exactly three reactions to this:

1. It would have been worth $2,000 to my parents to send me there over two years. If nothing else, I probably shaved a year off of college, and that was worth $2,000. Plus, it was one of the best experiences of my life.
2. I know a lot of folks that I went to school with would not have been able to afford this at all. Yes, as the Commercial Dispatch notes, there are waivers for those MSMS students who come from very poor families, but there is a group of students that would be left behind in that case, and as an alumnus, that saddens me greatly.
3. If this really goes into effect, I’ll give $1,000 a year to the MSMS Foundation to offset the cost, and I challenge my fellow alumni to give as well.

Now, I don’t live in Mississippi anymore, but I have family that does, and so do my friends that are also alumni. I really hope that they’ll all get involved, and frankly, I really hope that Doug takes this and runs with it as a member of the media. Big brother, if you need help finding a local student who would be affected by this, I can absolutely put you in touch with the right folks to find out.

Stephen has taken to calling John McCain “your candidate”, to which I object. Yeah, I voted for him in the primary, but I said then:

But John, just because you’ll get my vote today doesn’t mean you’ll get it in nine months.

In that same entry, I listed three topics that would likely shape my vote:

1. Technology funding
2. Fiscal policy, especially towards health care
3. Foreign policy

Well, McCain’s health policy is a non-starter with me at this point, for pretty much all the criticisms of it in that NPR story. And McCain’s push to holding the line on discretionary spending sounds nice and all, but good luck getting any Congress to hold up to their end of the bargain. And suspending the Federal gas tax is … terribly short-sighted populism. Egad.

[I don't have a huge issue with McCain's foreign policy, because I think that pulling out of Iraq would be more destabilizing than pulling out of Vietnam, and I think the "100 years" business is a bit blown out of proportion when we still have troops in Europe and patrolling the DMZ in Korea. The bit I most enjoyed, in a cold and calculating way, in the last couple weeks was [i]Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil[/i] running a clip of Dick Cheney in 1994 talking about how invading Iraq and removing Saddam would be a quagmire. Thanks, guys. Seriously.]

The Obama take on manned spaceflight funding still concerns me, but I probably overstated my point in that post. If I was closer to the two being even in my mind, this would sway me more away from Obama than it does.

I’m slightly leaning Obama, but it’s still just mid-April.

[Will someone go check and make sure that Dad didn't have a heart attack? Thanks.]

march16bennett14

Originally uploaded by verticalhouse

I aggregate all Flickr photos tagged with “Huntsville”, just because it’s fun to see how people see our fair city. [This does mean that I see photos from Texas and Ontario, but far less often than the city that put men on the moon.] There are times when I sometimes wonder why I do this.

Photos like these remind me that doing this is definitely worth doing. This is an absolute gem.

Here’s me on Wednesday:

Here’s me today:

A big difference, no?

When I started my Whiskerino journey, I never really thought that I’d get that involved. I figured that I’d stay out of the Hall of Shame—I actually got thrown in there shortly the first week, but begged my way back out—until work made me shave. Oddly enough, work never said a thing about it—okay, there was a little discussion of it at my last staff meeting, but that’s really been it. [My cover story from the start of 2008 on was that I'd trim the beard when we shipped our next set of flight hardware---because I knew we'd ship on 29 Feb, the last day of W'rino.] I never expected to win a King Beard or have Stephen pose with me. [Closest I got to a second KB was last weekend with a photo of my friend Megan in there with me. W'rinos like redheads, apparently.]

All I know now is that I’m hanging out some in the Talk and I can’t wait for 2009. I am happy that I’ve trimmed, though: I was getting tired of eating my beard, and it did hit 75F in Huntsville today. But I’m also very happy that I participated—because in doing so, I became a part of something larger than myself, which is always a fulfilling thing to do.

It’s like it’s 2003 all over again. Oi with the memes already.

The Rules:

1. Link to the person that tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
4. Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
5. Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

This is all Jeff Holland’s fault.

Six Non-important/habits/quirks about me:

1. My keys are always in my front left pants pocket, my iPhone is always in my front right pants pocket, and my wallet is always in my right rear pocket. If I’m in pocket-less shorts, well, my iPhone and wallet always stay to my right, and if I’m not carrying my keys [usually in my left hand, with my left pinky through the keyring], they’re tucked into the waistband of the shorts on my left side. Asking me to change might cause spontaneous combustion.
2. Because I slept for years on loft beds and bunk beds without rails, I have to have my head against a solid surface for me to sleep. It’s the only way I can locate where I am as I sleep. I think if you moved my bed to the middle of the room and removed the headboard, I’d never sleep again. I might kill you first, though.
3. I check all numbers that come into my worldview for divisibility by 3 and 9. One does this by adding the digits; if the sum is divisible by 3, the number is divisible by 3 as well. [Same goes for 9.] I used to while away time whilst bored in classes by putting a long number into a calculator, then factoring it down to 1 by adding or subtracting a number and dividing by 3. [No, I didn't date until college. Why do you ask?]
4. I tug on my chin whiskers as I’m thinking, usually with my left hand. My theory for using the left hand is that I’m trying to stimulate creative thinking, so I use the motor skills on that side.
5. I lock everything. Even when I’m pumping gas, I lock my car door. When I walk into the house, I immediately lock the deadbolt behind me.
6. My passive soaks usually find me out driving. In fact, I haven’t had a good passive soak in far too long. Maybe I’ll do that as I leave the office today … drive out east into the Appalachian foothills and see what I can see.

Victims:

• Misty
• Jonathan
• Amy
• Adam
• Kari
• Ronzilla

You know you love me.

Jeff posted this on The Rumor Forum today, and it was fun seeing folks’ responses, so I’ll replicate it here:

1. Go to Wikipedia’s random page generator. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to Random Quotations. The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to Flickr’s Interesting Photos from the last seven days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Put it all together, that’s your first album.

I had: The Killing – End of the Gun:

[If you blog this, make sure to link to the Flickr photo's original page so you don't violate their TOS. Thanks. ]

Well, looks like my photo from the SFA Honoree thing ended up getting me King Beard.

You can call me the King, or Kinger, or El King Bearderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

[I'm trying to arrange a meetup of the Huntsville Whiskerinos. If you are one, holler at me. Pip and I have been talking.]

If you want to see me in the Marshall Star, well, it’s online. I’m on Page 7.

I’m headin’ out Sunday. Gonna be fun.

Alternatively, I could have titled this “Thursday nights in 2001″. Ahh, the dumb shit you do to blow off steam in college.

I love it … I’m getting all sorts of PHP XSS injection attack attempts on GFMorris.org purely because I’ve mentioned phpBB there before. Shoot, until lately, I’ve hardly been a phpBB admin, choosing Simple Machines in the meantime.

Even funnier is that the two or three phpBB installs on the box? Going unattacked.

So as I realized I needed to do some laundry tonight, I said, “Dang, I need something to do to keep me awake until about ten o’clock.” What do I do? Bootleg work! Hacked and slashed and out comes the finished product. Then the fun begins: as noted before, my G4 iMac eats keyboards. So when I went to connect to upstairs on my mini to grab the files over the network … nothin’. The keychain had lost my password for the mini. :sigh: And what’s worse, the keyboard being out means there’s no way to load a CD-ROM, so I can’t just burn a CD-R [which I'd do anyway] and copy over.

So I head back upstairs, thinking that I’ll just connect down to the iMac from the mini. No go. Won’t connect. Then I grab my iBook. Connect to the iMac? Check. Connect to the mini? Check. Use network aliases to send folder from one to the other? Check. So, here are the lessons:

1. iBook FTW! It heard me talking about letting it go now that I’m rocking my iPhone, but this is one way it can say, “I’m not done yet!” [Plus, it was very handy last week while my mini was in the shop.]
2. I really need to see about getting that iMac into the shop to get it fixed. Sadly, I’m afraid that the answer on that one is “needs a new Logic Board”, and I’m worried that they don’t even make ‘em anymore.

Okay, off to bed with me.

So, I’m good friends with the LOLTrek guy. [In fact, I'm already having happy thoughts about having beer with Stephen after work tomorrow.] I’ve watched him degrade into this LOL$-obsessed guy over the past few months, though, and I’ve joked a couple times about staging an intervention. [What I want to know is this: why have we not seen LOL-Zombies yet? Really.]

All that said … when SOG tweeted, “um, ING, where’d my external accounts go? you’re not much good if i can’t get money to or out of you,” my first instinct was to grab a large image of the ING lion and break out the Impact, and the lion say, “I made you a pile of money … but I eated it.”

I think it’s time to go to bed.