...is never easy. Always having to stay on top of the latest and greatest technologies while not letting the old ones go to rust may be the thing that drives more people out of the field of technology than anything else (offshoring and downsizing are probably right up there with it, though).
So, after my bicycle and I got banged up back in August, I decided it was time for me to get out of any job that required me to lift greater than 50 pounds of metal and silicon over my head on a regular basis. My company was "re-on-shoring" at the time and building out a new software development team in my office so an opportunity as a Systems Engineer for the product development group opened up and I took it.
Many of the skills and much of the knowledge that I have from my old IT days comes in handy on a very regular basis, but there's so much more on top of that stuff that I need to add to my repertoire. I learned Java back in 1997, but haven't used it much since, so a refresher is due. Websphere, SOAP, DB2, MS SQL, Weblogic...all of these things need to fill my head in some meaningful way - and quickly! - in order for me to succeed at my job.
Luckily, I am the sort of masochist that likes this type of challenge, so I'm digging in deep and fast. As I begin to form some coherent thoughts and put them into words, some future posts are sure to follow on the world of J2EE architectures....
Until then, try not to die. ;)
2.23.2008
2.03.2008
While I'm Silent Here...
I've been awfully busy elsewhere. Check out Manitou Art. It's my first Flash site, which I'm building for my wife (she designed it all in Photoshop and I'm publishing it with Flash). While I find Flash pretty intuitive, things can take a lot of time. I can sit down and start work on a gallery, feel like things are going smoothly and quickly, only to turn around and find that while I've been working my cat passed away from old age, wife left me for another man and I've grown a beard that's touching the floor. Gotta watch out for that in the future....
1.10.2008
Infinite Horizons
I've recently developed quite a distaste for the Big Bang theory. "Why?" you may ask...well, it's all about the dots. I don't like them, at least not in astronomy. They're not anywhere else in the world of physics - even our "elementary particles" keep telescoping down to smaller and smaller bits of matter and energy, each made of yet smaller bits, so why should there be a single point in time where IT ALL BEGAN? This question comes up in different guises from time to time:
"So what was there before the big bang?"
"If there was nothing and then there was something, where did it come from?"
And similar. The scientific establishment typically casts these sorts of questions away by saying that the beginning of time (t=0) may have been some sort of vacuum fluctuation or other anomaly, but we can never know because it's not observable, blah blah blah. I have another thought that I like better, so I thought I would share.
I will start by describing a common experience we can all relate to in some way or another. Imagine you are a child sitting in the back seat of a car, looking out of the back window as you depart for a long roadtrip. Staring down the highway behind you, the city that you were once in becomes a distant amalgamation of buildings drifting further and further away. As the city tends towards the horizon, it begins to look more and more like a blob, no longer with any clear distinctions between buildings, etc.
This appears to be a fundamental element of perspective - zooming out from anything causes it to look increasingly like a point. Zooming in on any apparent "point" in the universe, causes an increasing amount of complexity to be exposed. Similar in some ways to fractals and beautifully shown in the timeless (save the outfits on the couple in the park at the beginning!) Powers of Ten movie made for IBM 30 years ago, this is the basis for viewing the apparent Big Bang that I've been using recently.
There are dozens of intricacies that I have been playing with around this model and maybe one day I will get around to writing them down or blogging them out, though I won't do much of that right now. I will blab on a bit about one though....
A common reason for supposing a big bang is because there seems to be a time around 14 or 15 billion years ago when a TON of concentrated energy seems to have started dissipating rapidly. All of our known universe appears to have since been expanding out from that concentrated energy zone. According to the Big Bang theory (notice how they always capitalize it...so theological!), an expanding sphere of matter/energy has been radiating from t=0 ever since.
Given this vision of the universe and my own infinite time vision, I have tried some reconciliations, both theoretical and visual. From a theoretical standpoint, I've been thinking of the Schwarzchild Wormhole model - essentially, every black hole has a sort of matter/energy geyser (sometimes called a white hole) spewing matter and energy out of the other side. The basic model is shown below and I think the explanation on how it relates is pretty self explanatory....
On the more visual and technical tip, another model I've been playing with goes something like this (work with me here, you'll have to use your imagination some, but I will try to supplement it with an image to help you along). Einstein found that massive objects in the space-time continuum created gravity wells - areas around large bodies where space and time distort. As a matter of fact, all matter creates a gravity well, the strength of which is directly proportional to the mass of the object. Imagine a thin sheet of rubber being held by one person in each corner. Now place a bowling ball on it to get something like this:
Einstein's special relativity theory describes how time and space have no absolute measure, but only measure in regards to other objects. Thus, if time is a dimension represented by a dimension depicted in the squares and rectangles in the grid above, you can see how it would distort around the mass of the object forming the gravity well. From one of the non-affected grid areas in the outside area of the image, the grid points inside the well would appear larger - thus time is perceived to slow down as you approach the massive object. This has been the basis for any number of science fiction stories (ie, boy leaves family for a space voyage that, from his perspective lasts 2 years, returns home only to find that his family all grew old or died a jillion years ago).
So, considering this element of special relativity theory, I've been wondering how the fact that more matter / energy appear in the distance ("past" if you want, but space and time are all tangled up together under the sheets) than up close affects our perception of time. That is, we think that 14 billion years ago there was some explosion of energy, but really that may be just a simple mathematical calculation of the fact that the further back we trace our trajectory, the more all of what we're measuring collapses into a horizon, therefore looking like a single point. If we could imagine ourselves zooming our point of reference back 10 billion years, would everything actually appear any closer or would we actually find that the same mass that we've been measuring appears to collapse into a single point some 14 or 15 billion years BEFORE THAT POINT, ad infinitum.
This may seem a strange thought, but it's really no stranger than when horizons were found to be illusions to sea-faring people. There was no edge of the world that led to a giant waterfall dumping into the void, just more water leading to yet another apparent horizon. Taken to an extreme, extending this analogy into the larger universal space-time continuum, one may conclude that the universe is torus-shaped (that is, like a donut) and that continuing further and further back into space would eventually wrap back around into the present. Another extreme would be much more complex and transfer into nested dimensions, passing through matter geysers and into the black holes that live in other universes in a larger tapestry of infinitely knotted multiverses. It's a veritable mental playground.
So I've been curious what others have thought along similar lines. I'm pretty tired of reading fantastic transgalactic-space-empire SciFi, so I've been scrubbing the internet to find good, similar thought. Unfortunately, even in the age of monkeys tending towards the infinite, all banging on their keyboards and publishing to the web, there is surprisingly little to be found out there. Or I need to refine my searches. Not sure which yet. Here's a little interesting linkage I found along the way, though:
http://www.byteland.org/cosmology/infinity.html
http://scienceline.org/2006/08/21/ask-snyder-bang/
If you find or know of more, please let me know and I will add more as I find it.
"So what was there before the big bang?"
"If there was nothing and then there was something, where did it come from?"
And similar. The scientific establishment typically casts these sorts of questions away by saying that the beginning of time (t=0) may have been some sort of vacuum fluctuation or other anomaly, but we can never know because it's not observable, blah blah blah. I have another thought that I like better, so I thought I would share.
I will start by describing a common experience we can all relate to in some way or another. Imagine you are a child sitting in the back seat of a car, looking out of the back window as you depart for a long roadtrip. Staring down the highway behind you, the city that you were once in becomes a distant amalgamation of buildings drifting further and further away. As the city tends towards the horizon, it begins to look more and more like a blob, no longer with any clear distinctions between buildings, etc.
This appears to be a fundamental element of perspective - zooming out from anything causes it to look increasingly like a point. Zooming in on any apparent "point" in the universe, causes an increasing amount of complexity to be exposed. Similar in some ways to fractals and beautifully shown in the timeless (save the outfits on the couple in the park at the beginning!) Powers of Ten movie made for IBM 30 years ago, this is the basis for viewing the apparent Big Bang that I've been using recently.
There are dozens of intricacies that I have been playing with around this model and maybe one day I will get around to writing them down or blogging them out, though I won't do much of that right now. I will blab on a bit about one though....
A common reason for supposing a big bang is because there seems to be a time around 14 or 15 billion years ago when a TON of concentrated energy seems to have started dissipating rapidly. All of our known universe appears to have since been expanding out from that concentrated energy zone. According to the Big Bang theory (notice how they always capitalize it...so theological!), an expanding sphere of matter/energy has been radiating from t=0 ever since.
Given this vision of the universe and my own infinite time vision, I have tried some reconciliations, both theoretical and visual. From a theoretical standpoint, I've been thinking of the Schwarzchild Wormhole model - essentially, every black hole has a sort of matter/energy geyser (sometimes called a white hole) spewing matter and energy out of the other side. The basic model is shown below and I think the explanation on how it relates is pretty self explanatory....
On the more visual and technical tip, another model I've been playing with goes something like this (work with me here, you'll have to use your imagination some, but I will try to supplement it with an image to help you along). Einstein found that massive objects in the space-time continuum created gravity wells - areas around large bodies where space and time distort. As a matter of fact, all matter creates a gravity well, the strength of which is directly proportional to the mass of the object. Imagine a thin sheet of rubber being held by one person in each corner. Now place a bowling ball on it to get something like this:
Einstein's special relativity theory describes how time and space have no absolute measure, but only measure in regards to other objects. Thus, if time is a dimension represented by a dimension depicted in the squares and rectangles in the grid above, you can see how it would distort around the mass of the object forming the gravity well. From one of the non-affected grid areas in the outside area of the image, the grid points inside the well would appear larger - thus time is perceived to slow down as you approach the massive object. This has been the basis for any number of science fiction stories (ie, boy leaves family for a space voyage that, from his perspective lasts 2 years, returns home only to find that his family all grew old or died a jillion years ago).So, considering this element of special relativity theory, I've been wondering how the fact that more matter / energy appear in the distance ("past" if you want, but space and time are all tangled up together under the sheets) than up close affects our perception of time. That is, we think that 14 billion years ago there was some explosion of energy, but really that may be just a simple mathematical calculation of the fact that the further back we trace our trajectory, the more all of what we're measuring collapses into a horizon, therefore looking like a single point. If we could imagine ourselves zooming our point of reference back 10 billion years, would everything actually appear any closer or would we actually find that the same mass that we've been measuring appears to collapse into a single point some 14 or 15 billion years BEFORE THAT POINT, ad infinitum.
This may seem a strange thought, but it's really no stranger than when horizons were found to be illusions to sea-faring people. There was no edge of the world that led to a giant waterfall dumping into the void, just more water leading to yet another apparent horizon. Taken to an extreme, extending this analogy into the larger universal space-time continuum, one may conclude that the universe is torus-shaped (that is, like a donut) and that continuing further and further back into space would eventually wrap back around into the present. Another extreme would be much more complex and transfer into nested dimensions, passing through matter geysers and into the black holes that live in other universes in a larger tapestry of infinitely knotted multiverses. It's a veritable mental playground.
So I've been curious what others have thought along similar lines. I'm pretty tired of reading fantastic transgalactic-space-empire SciFi, so I've been scrubbing the internet to find good, similar thought. Unfortunately, even in the age of monkeys tending towards the infinite, all banging on their keyboards and publishing to the web, there is surprisingly little to be found out there. Or I need to refine my searches. Not sure which yet. Here's a little interesting linkage I found along the way, though:
http://www.byteland.org/cosmology/infinity.html
http://scienceline.org/2006/08/21/ask-snyder-bang/
If you find or know of more, please let me know and I will add more as I find it.
From my own ashes....
At some point I realized that since my accident in August, my personal and professional interests and priorities had shuffled around so much that I had started to repress my poor blog - a simple avoidance of wanting to deal with the Lessons portion of the blog, which is no longer really relevant to my work, was making me not update at all. Thus I've decided to remove the PostgreSQL lessons and continue in other directions. I hope you enjoy!
8.26.2007
Smack, thud...ouch!!
Sorry for the lapse in posts....while riding my bike home from my chiropractor on August 7th, I had a nasty little run-in with a Chevy Cobalt that left me with a broken clavicle, torn rotator cuff and various other bumps, scrapes, bruises, etc. As a coworker put it, I am no longer a factory model. I made it to 30 (three days past 30 to be exact!) without breaking a bone or any other major injury, then bang.
Anyhow, typing is still a bit difficult but reading is not, so I will leave you with the below image to contemplate as I go back to studying PostgreSQL for my upcoming slew of entries!
Anyhow, typing is still a bit difficult but reading is not, so I will leave you with the below image to contemplate as I go back to studying PostgreSQL for my upcoming slew of entries!
8.07.2007
Common Errors in English
First, I'd like to thank my lovely wife over at boneflowers.blogspot.com for this tip: Paul Brians breaks down the English language and tells its speakers how the language is commonly abused. Informative? Maybe. Amusing? Definitely!Second, I'd like to dwell on it for a bit. Especially some of the ones that were particularly new to me. Like, for instance, the potential problem of catching flack for misusing of the word 'flak.' What? Oh, well, according to Brians,
"“Flak” is WW II airman’s slang for shells being fired at you in the air, so to catch a lot of flak is to feel in danger of being shot down. However, most civilians these days have never heard of “flak,” so they use “flack” instead, which originally meant “salesman” or “huckster.” You need to worry about this only if you’re among old-time veterans. "Hmmm, I have to admit that I never knew that. Hopefully someone out there gets something out if it, if only a chuckle...afterall, I think we've all known that there was something funny about grammer, even if we could never put our fingers on it!
7.27.2007
Against the Blog: A Dose of Pynchon
*****
So, it's been a few years since I picked up Gravity's Rainbow and became obsessed with Thomas Pynchon. Since then, I've read V. and loved it (Thank you, Jennifer!), but I couldn't quite say it was "another Gravity's Rainbow." It's sort of like reading James Joyce's Ulysses and then reading Dubliners. I mean, Dubliners was a great. Each story introduced a cultural texture that absolutely
defined several independent literary genres to follow. Alas, though, it wasn't Ulysses. Just the same, V. was a lot of fun and captured all of the great post-modern, hyper-intelligencia of Pynchon and it was centered around parts of Virginia that I grew up around, such as Newport News...it just wasn't 'Gravity's Rainbow.'
defined several independent literary genres to follow. Alas, though, it wasn't Ulysses. Just the same, V. was a lot of fun and captured all of the great post-modern, hyper-intelligencia of Pynchon and it was centered around parts of Virginia that I grew up around, such as Newport News...it just wasn't 'Gravity's Rainbow.'When I picked up a copy of Against the Day, Pynchon's 2006 release, this winter, I thought to myself "Hmmm....I wonder if this is as good as V."
Little did I know, some several months later I would be wondering "Is this 'As Good As' or (oh, dare I say it?) 'Better Than' Gravity's Rainbow?" Now, I'm just not sure you can rate the two like that. It's certainly a neck-and-neck race between the two, but the difference is more one of quality than quantity.
Against the Day, much like Gravity's Rainbow, requires that the reader have a certain amount of curiosity and lust for knowledge, because there's almost no possibility that any given reader will understand more than a particular portion of the occult references that are made. The internet is truly the reader's best friend as (s)he seeks to figure out what Pynchon is talking about at some points. Again alikening the book to Joyce's Ulysses, there are nested references to obscure texts and belief systems whose basic tenents are required to be at least somewhat understood in order for the reader to follow the text.
Luckily, a cult of Pynchon readers have come together to produce Pynchonwiki - a collective internet resource for documenting and questioning exactly what in tarnations Pynchon may be talking about in any given passage. So, since we don't have to wonder what his meanings are, we can, instead, focus on the worlds that he is creating.
So, my friends, I bring to you: Balloon-Punk. Much like cyberpunk or steampunk, there is a rapid-paced trickster-tricks-the-trickster sort of back-drop, but against it there is a late 19th- and early 20th-century backdrop instead of the typical late 20th or early 21st century storyline that you would find in a William Gibson (see Neuromancer) or Bruce Sterling (see Schismatrix) story. And, instead of a 21st-century-in-the-20th sort of storyline, there is an accelerated and particular story of things that actually happened during WW2 taking place against a backdrop of "Around the World in 80 Days."
Oh, plus there some weird-ass technology that allows people to "SCUBA" through the desert. Don't ask me, I don't know. Just read it. I swear. To clarify, I'm not talking about a "Steampunk" sort of backdrop (again reference Gibson and Sterling, this time in the "Difference Engine"). No, instead, this is a bonified story of kids against the day, much like "Around the World in 80 Days," except now they are running into such surreal nonsense as talking dogs, "SCUBA" gear that takes them under the sands in the desert and all other sort of oddities. Yes, Pynchon does it again.
Much like "Gravity's Rainbow," we now have a story of one or two dozen odd characters thrown up against one or two even odder worldscapes.
Don't expect to finish this book and feel like you finally understand what Pynchon is trying to get across. If Pynchon succeeds in his quest, you will feel far more confused about what in Hell he might have been talking about. The characters portray a convincing troupe and the world they live in so very much like our own. The difference, in the long run, is that whatever it is you think you understand about Chick, Deuce, Traverse or Nikolai Tesla will (at one point or another) be proven to be absolute horsesh&!@.
Cheers!
7.18.2007
There once was a caveman named Dave....and other stories from the trenches
Five Stars (*****)
I've never been to war.
I'm glad for that.
I'm so happy that I have never been in a battle.
That said, two major figures in my life - my grandfather (with whom I share the same name: a wonderful man with a wonderful name) and my surrogate father, Blair Stutz, both Navy radio technicians - filled my childhood with such vivid and wonderful/horrible war stories that I sometimes have dreams from the trenches.
So it seems only fitting that the newest UNKLE album "War Stories" has come screaming out of those psychological trenches the way it has. It came to me through some leaked-across-the-internet sort of way, and it, unlike very many artistic creations that pass my attention, will get some of my hard-earned cash when it is officially released on July 24, 2007. I don't care that I already have a copy. This production is bad-ass. It's just plain brilliant. It's just new in so many ways that I hadn't expected.
Every so often I think such pretentious thoughts as "Rock is done. What can rock possibly offer at this point?" For the most part, such sentiments find footing. Every now and then, though, I find an artist that defies this easy sentiment - Notwist, American Analog Set and Ladytron come to mind. Rarely, though, can any of these artists (or any other, really) give an entire dissertation on why rock should be reconsidered as a viable medium. The Doors did this with their self-titled, the Velvet Underground did it with The Velvet Underground & Nico, the Beatles did it with Sergeant Peppers, the Clash with London Calling, Pink Floyd with the Wall, Spiritualized with Pure Phase, etc. etc. I think I can actually, honestly, say that UNKLE does this with "War Stories." From start to finish, every moment of the album musically and lyrically speaks out some portion of my existence that seems to have needed to be expressed in just such a way.
Let me just take a quick step back, just a decade or two, here...a little more than half my waken life flashes by our eyes in reverse and lands you, my gentle reader, somewhere around 1990. Wow. Look at all that hair (actually, don't look too much or too long...especially not at the 13-year-old with the Dangerous Toys t-shirt). That's right, we're standing in the middle of the Richmond Coliseum and there are more Robert Smith and Ronnie Dio lookalikes than anyone will ever care to recount, and they're all within a missile's shot.
The band that's claiming center stage tonight, though, is the Cult. While now they may seem like nothing so much as a washed-up semi-goth act from the late 80's and early 90's, this band was actually far more than just a kick-ass live performance. They were Ian Astbury....who can forget "Fire Woman?" Well, I never followed Ian as a performer after seeing him live back then, but his voice takes command on two tracks - "Burn My Shadow" and "When things Explode" - in ways that the Cult never could have produced. His voice has taken a sort of uber-Jim Morrison, uber-Lou Reed tone that only time could lend it. The resulting voice and the music he puts it to just makes any self-respecting citizen take immediate attention and give respect. Beautiful, just freaking beautiful. These tracks have driven my curiosity to see what this guy has been up to in the last 17 years.
Speaking of curiosity, two bands that I have never even heard of are winning more of my old hard-earned. To be honest, that was part of the appeal of the first UNKLE album, Psyence Fiction, for me - I came to appreciate DJ Shadow, the Verve, Radiohead and the Beastie Boys for their artistic impact on the times instead of just for their singles because of that album. The difference is that I already knew who DJ Shadow, Richard Ashcroft, Thom Yorke and Mike D. were...until last week, though, I had never heard of Autolux or the Duke Spirit. Now, the only thing that's keeping me from listening to my newly purchased albums of theirs is the fact that I can't stop listening to War Stories in heavy repetition.
I've never been to war.
I'm glad for that.
I'm so happy that I have never been in a battle.
That said, two major figures in my life - my grandfather (with whom I share the same name: a wonderful man with a wonderful name) and my surrogate father, Blair Stutz, both Navy radio technicians - filled my childhood with such vivid and wonderful/horrible war stories that I sometimes have dreams from the trenches.
So it seems only fitting that the newest UNKLE album "War Stories" has come screaming out of those psychological trenches the way it has. It came to me through some leaked-across-the-internet sort of way, and it, unlike very many artistic creations that pass my attention, will get some of my hard-earned cash when it is officially released on July 24, 2007. I don't care that I already have a copy. This production is bad-ass. It's just plain brilliant. It's just new in so many ways that I hadn't expected.
Every so often I think such pretentious thoughts as "Rock is done. What can rock possibly offer at this point?" For the most part, such sentiments find footing. Every now and then, though, I find an artist that defies this easy sentiment - Notwist, American Analog Set and Ladytron come to mind. Rarely, though, can any of these artists (or any other, really) give an entire dissertation on why rock should be reconsidered as a viable medium. The Doors did this with their self-titled, the Velvet Underground did it with The Velvet Underground & Nico, the Beatles did it with Sergeant Peppers, the Clash with London Calling, Pink Floyd with the Wall, Spiritualized with Pure Phase, etc. etc. I think I can actually, honestly, say that UNKLE does this with "War Stories." From start to finish, every moment of the album musically and lyrically speaks out some portion of my existence that seems to have needed to be expressed in just such a way.
Let me just take a quick step back, just a decade or two, here...a little more than half my waken life flashes by our eyes in reverse and lands you, my gentle reader, somewhere around 1990. Wow. Look at all that hair (actually, don't look too much or too long...especially not at the 13-year-old with the Dangerous Toys t-shirt). That's right, we're standing in the middle of the Richmond Coliseum and there are more Robert Smith and Ronnie Dio lookalikes than anyone will ever care to recount, and they're all within a missile's shot.
The band that's claiming center stage tonight, though, is the Cult. While now they may seem like nothing so much as a washed-up semi-goth act from the late 80's and early 90's, this band was actually far more than just a kick-ass live performance. They were Ian Astbury....who can forget "Fire Woman?" Well, I never followed Ian as a performer after seeing him live back then, but his voice takes command on two tracks - "Burn My Shadow" and "When things Explode" - in ways that the Cult never could have produced. His voice has taken a sort of uber-Jim Morrison, uber-Lou Reed tone that only time could lend it. The resulting voice and the music he puts it to just makes any self-respecting citizen take immediate attention and give respect. Beautiful, just freaking beautiful. These tracks have driven my curiosity to see what this guy has been up to in the last 17 years.
Speaking of curiosity, two bands that I have never even heard of are winning more of my old hard-earned. To be honest, that was part of the appeal of the first UNKLE album, Psyence Fiction, for me - I came to appreciate DJ Shadow, the Verve, Radiohead and the Beastie Boys for their artistic impact on the times instead of just for their singles because of that album. The difference is that I already knew who DJ Shadow, Richard Ashcroft, Thom Yorke and Mike D. were...until last week, though, I had never heard of Autolux or the Duke Spirit. Now, the only thing that's keeping me from listening to my newly purchased albums of theirs is the fact that I can't stop listening to War Stories in heavy repetition.
7.02.2007
Since you can't activate the iPhone on the BES....
I own a BlackBerry 8100 ("Pearl"). Before this slim formfactor device, I had the full QWERTY interface of a BlackBerry 8700. I thought I would hate making the switch to the multiple-letter-per-key form factor of the 8100, but it has turned out to be a smooth transition. Because the Pearl has such great features, interface design and intelligent predictive text, I thought I would never miss the switch to the Pearl....
Today I activated a new BlackBerry 8300 ("Curve") for the first time, though, and now I think I might wish that I had waited. I
t's slick and feature rich like the Pearl (mp3 ringtones, a camera that renders pleasantly serviceable .jpg images, the new "nipple" scroll interface, etc.) but stills has definitive letter input. I mean, it's not an iPhone - it won't play your mp3 collection to you and there's no flashy colors and touch screen interface - but it runs on the relatively reasonable EDGE network, fits nicely into pant pockets without looking like a mammal has nested near your crotch AND (due to my profession this is nearly obligatory) can be activated on a BES for Exchange service. Hopefully future BlackBerries (and the iPhone, if it ever becomes BES aware) will be upgraded to a WLAN (such as Verizon's) instead of EDGE. Until then, though, the new round of BlackBerries are quite impressive.
Today I activated a new BlackBerry 8300 ("Curve") for the first time, though, and now I think I might wish that I had waited. I
t's slick and feature rich like the Pearl (mp3 ringtones, a camera that renders pleasantly serviceable .jpg images, the new "nipple" scroll interface, etc.) but stills has definitive letter input. I mean, it's not an iPhone - it won't play your mp3 collection to you and there's no flashy colors and touch screen interface - but it runs on the relatively reasonable EDGE network, fits nicely into pant pockets without looking like a mammal has nested near your crotch AND (due to my profession this is nearly obligatory) can be activated on a BES for Exchange service. Hopefully future BlackBerries (and the iPhone, if it ever becomes BES aware) will be upgraded to a WLAN (such as Verizon's) instead of EDGE. Until then, though, the new round of BlackBerries are quite impressive.
6.28.2007
Steampunk Fireflies!
Yesterday was a perfect example of why I left the east coast: the combination of heat and humdity is like kryptonite to me. There are some things that I still miss after nearly 7 years in Denver, though, such as magnolia trees and fireflies.As a child, I would regulary catch twenty or so fireflies and trap them inside a glass quart jar that I would keep by my bed as an eerie nightlight.
While it might not be quite the same, this jar of mechanically operated fireflies created by Jesse Ferguson gets extra points for being a cool steampunk design, plus the light it gives off is UV. Just imagine: blacklight fireflies!
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