I have no idea how many people from the science fiction convention circuit read this blog. I know I do, so there's at least one and all of them are familiar with Annalee Newitz.

A few months ago Gawker media latched onto this little piece of talent by making her a contributor to lifehacker.com and I just read today about something that the science fiction folks in my audience will be thrilled about. io9.com, the latest entry to the Gawker media juggernaut is a blog entirely about science fiction. I've been a reader of Lifehacker and Gizmodo for quite some time and I make the occasional forays into reading Gridskipper, Consumerist, Jalopnik and even Fleshbot, so I'm not exactly neutral when it comes to their websites, but io9 definitely has a place in my bookmarks bar.

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On my Grandmaster's visit this year, I expected to learn much about Tai-Chi. The cane form and 18 Lohan were top on my list when I thought about the upcoming event. There's one thing I didn't expect to learn though, and I use it every day.

We had our picnic at Crosby Farm Park in St. Paul, along the river. The shelter there has a couple of bathrooms with hand dryers rather than paper towels; I suppose that's to cut down on the amount of material that the maintenance crew has to pull out after events and for general maintenance. Anyway...

I was cooking on the grill, so I spent rather a large time in the bathroom washing my hands to keep cross-contamination between raw food, cooked food and food for vegetarians to a minimum. I was a little frustrated with the speed at which I could dry my hands with the drier in there and I was lucky to run into Grandmaster on one of my forays. He said to me "Not fast! Slow; like Tai-Chi." and explained that the drier would work better if I took my time instead of violently rubbing my hands together.

I've tried this technique in many bathrooms since then and it is reliable; hard to remember to do, but reliable. Try it sometime.

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Watch as I deliver a manifesto for an activity I have not participated in:

I read recently that you Apple Store employees didn't like it when people come in to the stores and jailbreak all the iPhones and start installing applications on them. Apparently, it takes them a few hours to restore all the iPhones to the default, locked state, readying them for the next day's assault.

I can see how this could be a problem. I think this public plea for people to stop doing it is misdirected however. The root of your problem is not the your customers are messing up your demo products by going to a specific, malformed website and hacking into them. It is that a malformed website has the ability to hack your demo products.

So in response to your plea, I give you a plea to complain to Apple about this problem. Tell them that their employees are having their time wasted by the fact that the iPhone platform is closed to development and, more importantly, that the Safari browser on the iPhone has a critical but that allows people to install arbitrary code.

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I know this is getting blogged in higher places than here, but it needs to be seen. So for my reader, if you haven't seen this, take a look. It sucks that there's no Daily Show for the duration of the writer's strike, but that's a little perspective on why there's a writer's strike.

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Last week, I mentioned that upgrading to Leopard caused considerable slowness on my Quicksilver Mac. I also mentioned that I couldn't even successfully install without removing my third-party SCSI card. As it turns out, the two were related.

I got curious yesterday about the slowness and checked to see what my CPU was doing, wondering if it was processor related or I/O related, and found that my CPU was running at 100% solidly. Well that meant there was something taking up a lot of CPU and I was pretty sure I wasn't running it. Top showed me a process named kernel_task that was using anywhere from 80% to 95% of the cpu, basically whatever I wasn't using elsewhere.

A quick google showed some forum entries from when Tiger was released indicating that the kernel_task process could take up CPU time on some PowerBooks with a bad trackpad driver and that replacing the driver with a third-party utility did the trick. Now these folks were complaining about 16% CPU going to kernel_task and that was nothing like what I was seeing, but it made me think about the fact that I hadn't installed any drivers for my SCSI card and hadn't needed to since 10.1 came out.

I don't really use my SCSI card. It's only there for my back catalog of Zip disks, and I can't remember the last time I put one in. My G3 Wallstreet has SCSI built in, so if I ever want to get rid of the old Zips I can copy them off and stick all the contents on a CD some time. One less SCSI card later, and my Quicksilver is running about as well as it was before the upgrade.

I'm still looking at the new Xeons though. 

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Hey, just a quick note to everyone who wants to read my blog on google homepage or feedburner or whatever. I got a full content rss feed going this morning at RSS.

Now to get the permalinks working...

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When I stepped out the door this morning to walk to work, I'd swear somehting cold drifed down and fell on my nose. My wife looked at the confused look on my face and said "Yes, it's snowing". So I continued in my task of picking some Nepali Orange peppers for a co-worker (there weren't enough to do anything spectacular this year) and continued on to work.

After I stopped for coffee the snow picked up in earnest and turned into big, fluffy flakes of snowy goodness. I might have to grab my camera when I take off this afternoon.

Oops... It looks like it stopped.

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Looks like I've got some catching up to do with my blog. I suppose all those times that I thought "I should blog this" would have been good opportunities for posts.

Let's see... what's happened lately. Well, Minnesota decided to have an "Early Antlerless Deer" hunt this year on October 13 and 14. So I went to my traditional hunting spot in Bemidji with my wife's aunt and unkle. The three of us came out of the weekend with two deer. Two of us did not get any deer. I saw several fast-moving deer-shaped objects and a few deer that were doing an excelent job of hiding behind brush and trees. Unfortunately, none of them were cooperating enough to be shot.

The week after that, I had a meetup with some photographers I met on line through strobist.com. We had several people confirm and four actually show up. Still, it was quite a bit of fun, and we're planning to do it again, just not very quickly. Not that we're not planning to do it soon, just that we're not planning very quickly. Later that afternoon, I decided that we were out of Coke. We still have several cans in the 'fridge left over from this fall's Tai-Chi picnic, but it's that American stuff, made with corn syrup. So at around 17:00, we piled into the Outback and headed north to Thunder Bay. We didn't make it until early Sunday morning. It was late enough when we hit Grand Marais, that it made sense to just stay the night on US soil, since we weren't sure if the Grand Portage border crossing was open 24 hours. It was a safe assumption, but we were tired.

It turns out there was another reason to drive to Canada; iTunes gift cards. The Canadian iTunes store has different music because the record companies think it's a good idea to limit their markets when they produce albums rather than allowing the whole world an opportunity to purchase them. If you are paying for music on the iTunes music store with a US credit card or other form of payment from the US, the only music available to you is from the US version of the iTunes store. But a gift card counts as a form of payment from the country it was purchased (or intended to be purchased) in. That works for the UK and Japan and all other countries as well.

I think that one of the more entertaining parts of the trip to Canada was our interactions with the border patrol:

"What is the purpose of your visit"

"To buy Coca-Cola"

"You can't get Coca-Cola in the States?"

"Yeah, but it's not made with sugar, it's made with corn syrup"

"Oh... Does it taste different?"

"I think so" (Duh)

This coming weekend, I'm making the trip up to Bemidji again for more deer hunting. I've been skunked on the last two trips and I'd really like to get me a deer this year. I'd rather not be one of the 50% of hunters who come home empty handed.

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So, I got my new Pocket Wizards from Midwest Photo Exchange. My 3rd floor studio is pretty much set up and I shot half a card on Sunday with my hacked-in batteries on my flashes. I'm pretty happy with the results so far.

That brings me to my wish list page. Those Pocket Wizards are still listed because you just can't have enough of them and I don't really expect anyone to spend $200 on me anyway. Steph's wish list is, in theory, at the same location, but I have to get her to keep feeding me the info. It's easy for me to create a shopping wish list for myself, but I have enough trouble figuring out what to get for Steph without giving away all my ideas.

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I was reading on target.com about the AEM646 espresso maker that they have for $59 and I saw this review

"I bought this for my wife and received it a few days ago. It had a bit of a learning curve to it, but my wife got the hang of it after two attempts. Now her creations really do taste like something from Starbucks."

I guess, if it makes coffee like from Starbucks, I should keep looking for a better model.

---

...Which I did. The next most expensive one that Target had was the DeLonghi EC140B. Amazon had this "helpful" suggestion at the bottom of their page:

I added up the regular, Amazon-discounted price for both units and it, unsurprisingly, added up to that exact dollar amount. Great Savings!

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