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So, if Republicans are correct and lowering tax rates always leads (in the long term) to the government taking in more revenues than it would have at the higher tax rate, isn’t the logical conclusion that the tax rate should be 0 and that would lead to the government taking in the most possible tax revenue. Although I wonder who would be paying those taxes if the tax rate actually was 0%. So, after a couple years of trying really hard to get a mythical Woot Bag of Crap, and cursing every time the stupid server of theirs would go down the instant the bag of crap came up for purchase, I’d given up hope. But, a few weeks back there was a Woot off, and I was sitting in my office, and I saw that the current item ( a wireless mouse ) was sold out, so I hit refresh to see what the next item was, and HOLY SHIT IT’S THE BAG OF CRAP. ORDER! ORDER! ORDER! Except I was pretty sure I’d missed it again, since I did manage to enter in my CVC code for my credit card, and hit the confirmation button, but then the page timed out, so I was dejected. Except about 15 minutes later I saw that a bag of crap had appeared in my “Order summary”. Woo! Here, without further ado, is the unboxing. Starting with the box…
Since it was only 5 lbs, and about 12″ along the largest side, I was pretty sure that it didn’t have a 60″ plasma display inside.
As expected, none of those items are large plasma televisions. Instead, they’re 1. A 10 function remote with a display. Apparently I need a Windows machine to set it up. 2. A Disney “Pirates of the Caribbean” phone / game holder, with a carabiner on the back side.
3. A wired “Netbook” mouse, with a cord in a little retractable holder.
4. A wireless mouse, in some kind of OEM packaging, so it might be Bluetooth or something else.
Overall, not a bad haul for $8. I’m a bit of a clock guy, and I’ve got a bunch in my house and in my office. I’ve got bunches of regular analog clocks. I’ve got my grandparent’s mantle clock that they were given for their wedding in the early 1930s, which we wind with a key and which chimes on the hour in my living room. In my office I have one of those “rolling ball” clocks as well as a ping-pong clock from Adafruit.
One thing that some clocks show better than others is the passage of time — and sometimes it’s the passage of time that is most interesting to display instead of the exact digital instant that is now. Here’s the idea: The front of the peggy is treated like a “pie”, except it’s square. It shows the fraction of the last and next 12 hours which are day versus night ( calculated from the wall clock time and the longitude and latitude which are configured by the user ) In essence, the “light” and “dark” parts of the current day rotate clockwise, and at a glance you can see how much of the day
As time passes, this display will “rotate” in a clockwise direction, with the current “time” being at what would be 12 o-clock on a conventional clock. So, this is a small version of the peggy, with white being “lit” LEDs and black being unlit, and a blue border around the 25×25 pixel field.
would indicate roughly noon, on a day near the summer solstice, and this
would be shortly after sunset, again on a day near the solstice.
Here’s a time around noon on a day in late fall, when the day is about 10 hours long.
Here’s dawn on March 21st, the spring equinox ( when the day and night are each 12 hours long )
During the year, as the seasons change, the amount of light and dark will change and along with it the fraction of the clock which is lit up. Near the winter solstice, only about 1/4 of the leds will ever be on, while in the summer 3/4 of them may be lit.
Other ideas that might be possible ( depending on how much memory code to do the above took to implement )
- The actual time could probably be drawn, either near the top or bottom of the display, using digits roughly 5 x 5 in size. - the brightness of the leds could vary, so that near the time the sun was most directly overhead the leds were full brightness, and the dimmed as the time got closer to sunset, then slowly brightened again the next day - perhaps other astronomical stuff — phase of the moon, or the tides — could also be included, although anything terribly complicated probably won’t fit in the memory available
-Keith
As some of you know, because I emailed you and asked you to donate to the American Diabetes Association for my ride in the Napa Tour de Cure. My friend, Mark, had organized a team, and because I had the same kind of bike as he has he asked me if I’d like to join in. He promised the ride would be pretty and flat. My friends totally came thru and donate a bunch more money than I even expected, and I’m both proud and extremely humbled by the generosity of people I know. The bike ride itself was up in Yountville, CA, just north of Napa, on the morning of May 5th. Loretta’s sister Maureen went up with me and also did the ride. We went up the night before because we needed to be at the start between 9am and 10am, and actually got onto the road about 9:45am, and rolled back over the finish line about 2 hours later, just before noon. I was a bit tired, and my feet were a bit tingly, but nowhere near as worn out as I’d expected. It was, as promised, mostly flat and quite pretty. Much of the ride was on nearly deserted roads, with only a few mile segment on a pretty busy highway. I taped a short movie at the start of the ride, so you can see me in all my glory, and I also taped about the last 15 minutes of the ride because I wanted to show what it was like. Sadly, the camera does jerk around a fair amount because of the bumpiness of the road.
up in San Francisco, at the Great American Music Hall. It’s probably been a number of years since I last went to a concert — heck, maybe the last real one was Voice Farm, which would have been in the mid 1990s. Jonathan was great ( and, the two opening acts were also good — a music/comedy team called Paul and Storm and a dude named Kid Beyond, who was musical in a way that I can’t describe. ) I taped a couple bits of the concert on my Flip Video HD camera, because apparently it’s cool to do so with Jonathan and the openers. This is the first song of his that I can recall hearing, and I rather like it since (at times) it seems to pretty adequately describe my life. I suspect you can vaguely hear me singing along. He also wrote “Still Alive”, which is the ending song from a game called Portal that I quite enjoyed. Loretta also loved this song, and we bought the actual from the game (sung by the character in the game ). Here’s his version He also did another song that I rather like, “Re: Your Brains”, sung by a zombie to the last few survivors of humanity giving their point of view on things. Here’s a song he did called Always the Moon, with Paul and Storm. It didn’t do a lot for me, but they had a good rapport up there. And this was one where Kid Beyond came up to do a modern day banjo duel, except with electronic equipmen I ordered a fitbit a long time ago, and they finally shipped a few weeks back to their first customers, including me. My capsule thoughts on the pros and cons of this thing Pro:
Cons:
Sigh. Don’t know if it’s worth spending another $99 to get a second one. -Keith Although it’s two months since the November 2008 election that passed Proposition 8 in California, it’s still rather big news, or at least it still makes the news with fair regularity. It’s roiled a couple mailing lists I’m on, still has public protests, sparked complains about the influence of the Mormon church ( and out of state residents contributions to a California initiative ), and has led to the creation of a number of websites which display and track the donations to the pro Proposition 8 folks. For example, yesterday I heard about www.eightmaps.com, which shows the amounts and addresses on a Google map of everyone who donated to the Yes on 8 campaign. So, when I found the site, I was of course curious which, if any, of my neighbors had contributed to the yes campaign. We had a no on 8 sign in our window for the month or so before the election, and didn’t see any yes on 8 signs in my immediate neighborhood, but I do remember driving past them to and from work, and eightmaps.com did show me that some folks near where I live had contributed. I’ve heard a couple folks on the radio talking about places where this information is available, and that it has led to harassment of people and some folks have resigned from their jobs after their donations were revealed.
Which leads to my real point, which is now that I have this information, what do I do with it? I didn’t recognize anyone that I know, which I suppose makes things a bit easier, but there are thing there. The nVidia executive who donated $10,000 — I’ve bought nVidia video cards for my computer before, but maybe next time I’ll think more about ATI. Of course, I don’t really know how many donations any ATI executives may have made, and they’re big companies, so it may not be quite as cut and dried as that. But, what if I found my dentist there — not that I have, but what if? He’s a nice guy, and a good dentist, but he does own his own practice, and I’d hate to think that he is using the money I pay for teeth cleanings to deny my fellow citizens their rights. There are a lot of dentists in the valley, and I’m sure a lot of them are good ones. I could find another dentist if I needed to. And that’s what I’ll do. I’m not going to go out of my way, but if I find out that the folks at my favorite restaurant were big donors, well, I guess I can find another place to eat, because there are a lot of restaurants and many of them have good food. If the manager at my auto repair shop chipped in $500, well, I like him but I’ll miss him. Years ago, I found out that Orson Scott Card, a science fiction writer of some acclaim, was a pretty virulent homophobe. I haven’t bought or read his books since, because I don’t want to be giving money to, well, to a troglodyte. There are plenty of good science fiction writers out there, and the sooner the world says “you are dead to us because, even though your books may be good, you yourself are a horrible person” the better off we’ll be. local, Santa Clara City Council elections and who I’d be voting for. Other than an initial “Do you work for a radio or television station?” ( which, by the way, who cares considering the questions they then asked ), it was basically “Who do you expect to vote for in this city council seat: Seat 3: Will or Mario or Mary, Seat 4: Kevin, Seat 6: Jamie or Brian, Seat 7: Jamie or Ciaran or Chuck? ( City Clerk & Police Chief weren’t in the poll, although both Rod and Steve are running unopposed ) And, I’m not going to tell you who I answered, other than to say “Kevin” for seat 4 since he was the only choice in their survey ( apparently, Karen as a write-in doesn’t rate as poll-worthy ). They also asked two questions, vaguely about the two “big” issues in the campaign, namely whether the city should look at a stadium and what the city should do about the Kaiser site development. I couldn’t answer anything about the second question, since it will eventually come before the Planning Commission. And, the reason this is at all blog-entry worthy at all, other than my sheer amazement that someone is doing local, city-council level polling, was that the nice woman doing the survey had almost no idea how to pronounce anyone’s names, and she kept calling it “Santa Clarita”. After we were done I asked her a couple questions about how many calls she was making, and how it seemed to be going ( apparently lots of people just don’t know who they’re going to vote for ), and told her how to pronounce everyone’s names. Except Ciaran, since I have no idea how to pronounce that one.
I’ve been playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on my Wii ( and having fun ), but somehow I never thought it would get Lord Vader on my case… |
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