Off Topic
my random and often incoherent thoughts that fall outside the other categories
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Pictures from 2012 Global Summit
Hi all, my first submit summit was an absolute blast. I’ve never been treated more like royalty or had the privilege of conversing directly with so many esteemed members of the community and Microsoft leadership. I am truly in awe of the entire experience. Assorted MVP Summit images are posted in a public album on my Facebook page. If you switch to my videos there’s a few short clips as well. Enjoy!
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Why I hate Walmart: Abridged Version
It’s dirty. From the moment you enter the parking lot full of oil spills and garbage, to the floors and shelves, everything is sticky, grimy, and gross. Everything is broken. The place looks like it’s being run by 8-year-old McGuiver wanna-be’s. Everything is tapped up, tied up, wrapped up, and bandaged together. Both ad-hoc signs and even actual product displays. At the checkouts (if you can find one that is open) the credit card readers are usually busted (not an IT issue, I mean physically broken/cracked/hanging with wires exposed). Unprofessional. While we’re on the subject of dirty taped-up signage, can…
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Moore Storms
Back in December of ‘06, I was asked to come up with artwork for a team, the Moore Storms. Although I never took it further, I re-discovered a rough draft I came up with while digging through some archives. If you aren’t familiar with the meteorological symbols, here they are in order, following the tornado: snow storm, hurricane, thunderstorm, cold front, and dust storm.
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The Future We Live Within
My thoughts after noticing the incredible pace and significance of recent papers in the scientific community… On several occasions, I have yielded to my inner nerd and shared with friends how much I’d desire to have been born a few centuries later, to grow up in a world not unlike Roddenberry’s fictional universe. As any dedicated Trekkie will gladly discuss at length, many of the principles and concepts in the series were inspired either directly or indirectly by actual scientific research and mathematical postulates. As for gadgets, today you can point to a number of now-commonplace examples of what was…
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How far we’ve come
Of the things we take for granted, instantaneous global communication is perhaps the most far-reaching. But it’s such a recent advancement. A mere 50 years ago, the only way to communicate overseas was by a letter and a boat. Where it took weeks to have correspondence before, the first trans-Atlantic cable allowed us to have – get this – 30 simultaneous voice calls going on at once. Thirty! It truly is amazing how far we’ve come in that 50 years. And you might think that our advances continue to accelerate. That is true, but consider these thoughts: We couldn’t make…
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How We Used to Vote
I saw this on Slashdot earlier. Very interesting! “Think hanging chads, illegal purges of the voter rolls, and insecure voting machines are bad? The New Yorker looks back at how we used to vote back in the good old days: ‘A man carrying a musket rushed at him. Another threw a brick, knocking him off his feet. George Kyle picked himself up and ran. He never did cast his vote. Nor did his brother, who died of his wounds. The Democratic candidate for Congress, William Harrison, lost to the American Party’s Henry Winter Davis. Three months later, when the House of Representatives convened hearings…