Google FTW

vs.

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

Is reporting funny Google Suggest results getting old? No? Yes? Kinda?

2nd Best Pic (036)

Nights & Weekends, NOT HOLIDAYS

I think the image explains itself, but I've never been one to pass up an opportunity to repeat myself.

My billing cycle apparently began yesterday, and my 75 minutes of well-wishing on a holiday didn't count as "Night & Weekends."

Obviously my specific situation is trivial (I mean, it is on this blog after all), but I can imagine many an American family being surprised in a month when they didn't budget their month's minutes with the holidays in mind.

Funny, I don't think I had an abnormal cell phone usage spike on the Winter Solstice...

Dier Family Banana Bread

I grew up on this stuff, and those of you who grew up with me might remember this from the many packed lunches that centered around the famous Dier Family Banana Bread:

• 8 ripe bananas
• 6 eggs
• 1 ½ cup vegetable oil
• 3 ¾ cup flour
• 3 cup sugar
• 3 tsp. baking soda
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

1. Beat bananas with electric mixer (I just do it by hand)
2. Add eggs and oil – then dry ingredients. Keep stirring (of course).
   
3. Use 4 loaf pans and bake at 325 degrees for 45 to 60 minutes. Test for doneness with toothpick.
   
   • For larger loaves (less pans), after 60 minutes at 325 turn oven down to 300 and bake an extra 20 minutes or so.
   • For muffin pan (good for leftovers!) cook 25 minutes at 325.

Thanks, Don & Bonnie!

Heathens' Greetings!

hea·then
–noun

1. an unconverted individual of a people that do not acknowledge the God of the Bible; a person who is neither a Jew, Christian, nor Muslim; pagan.
2. an irreligious, uncultured, or uncivilized person.

hea·then

n. pl. hea·thens or heathen Offensive One who adheres to the religion of a people or nation that does not acknowledge the God of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Such persons considered as a group; the unconverted. One who is regarded as irreligious, uncivilized, or unenlightened. Such persons considered as a group. Heathen An adherent of a Neopagan religion that seeks to revive the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Germanic peoples. Informal One who is regarded as irreligious, uncivilized, or unenlightened. Such persons considered as a group.

* * *

What I like about the term heathen is that at least one definition above groups all people of a heathenish nation as heathens. Let's take a look at the Constitution of the United States of America:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Although recognizing christmas as a public holiday (the term holiday, if you couldn't already guess, derives from holy day...) seems to contradict the First Amendment, we're pretty much stuck with it for now, until perhaps we get a Congress or Executive Branch that will actually inspire our government to adhere to its own Constitution.

Anyway, heathens' greetings to all, as everyone in the US belongs to a nation that shall make no law respecting an establishment of a religion, whether christian or not.

St. Nick

Christianity's Profit

Eh? Eh?

Whatever. I think it's funny. Kudos to Tina for helping me come up with the catchiest 2-word phrase of the holidays. By that I mean, "Christianity's Profit."

2nd Best Pic (035)

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone!

Concise - I like it. (Quotable)

Atheism isn't an attack on diversity, it's a defense of reality.
-Greta Christina





...shouldn't that be a semicolon? Sorry.

More Illustrated Bible Stories

Oh, man...this is definitely on my wish list: R. Crumb's Illustrated Book of Genesis. Yes. YES.

I've posted about illustrated bible stories before, and Dean almost illustrated for one (oh, you Dier children are such offensive, liberal, atheist scum!). Is this some kind of trend in books? Explain bibles for what they are, without leaving out the parts you don't want to tell kids?

I think it's a great idea. After all, some people base everything they believe on these texts, no matter how many times they've been revised, changed, and are interpreted for obvious social manipulation. If your concepts of biology and astrophysics hinge on ancient fairy tales that evolved from other fairy tales, you deserve to at least reconsider the worst parts...over...and over again.

So, about that wish list... :)

Elementary Example, Valuable Lesson

Today we're going to discuss the presentation of data (yay!). More importantly, we'll discuss how data presentation translates between pay grades. If you are knee-deep in a project and, say, need to report progress up to your boss's boss's boss (to secure funding for next year), it matters how you present the data. Sometimes it REALLY matters how you present the data.

Let's take an example that doesn't matter to illustrate the point: posts to this blog.

Not counting this one (or one that was deleted), there have been 348 posts to Nerdvana. As the author, I see posts from day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month. First of all, if I was going to communicate something up the "corporate chain," first it would have to be established what the real figure of merit is to communicate. Optimization is always with respect to some quantity, so the right quantity to optimize drives any effort to improve anything (naturally). Let's assume for now that the frequency of blog posts is the thing that matters here.

Let's plot a bar chart of blog posts by month, quarter, half, and year (click the image to bigify it). A linear trend line is added to each. The only thing we're varying is the period of time that each bar represents, but to the management-type eye, there is a definite difference in information communicated, especially if you're begging up the chain for corporate-flavored dollars.

If you want to show the steady year-over-year increase in posts to Nerdvana you would obviously be better off showing the yearly breakdown, but if you might be tempted at first to just show the quarterly- or half-year breakdowns. While those both offer better insight into the real activity on the blog (the smaller the sampling period, the richer the data...always...right?), you have to go back to your intended communication. If you want to give the impression that the linear trend will in fact continue, and that 2010 will follow the yearly plot (lower right), by all means you can do that, even though it might not be the most honest thing to do.

The monthly, quarterly, and half-year period charts show a rise and a tailoring-off of the number of blog posts, which is the most truthful way to describe these data. The linear trend line isn't a good choice for the monthly data, which says a lot about how much it should apply to the others as well. After all, aliasing the data with larger sampling periods directly means there's inherent data lost in the visual communication, in this case the applicability of the trend line.

Elementary example indeed, but it's an indubitably valuable lesson in directed, possibly deceitful visual data communication - something to remember when you find yourself on either side of the presentation.

Guess the Logo (006)

You know the drill:

• Famous logo, distorted, manipulated, reproduced, skewed, (re/de)colored, etc.
• Whoever guesses the original logo first WINS!

Ready? Go!

Christina is good at this. Good luck, everyone else.

Guess the Logo (005)

Looks simple...let's see who gets this one.

Once again, some bullets to explain what's going on here:

• A famous logo has been distorted, perhaps in ways not previously explored in past "Guess the Logo" posts
• First person who guesses (in the comments of this post) what the original logo was WINS!

Ready? Go!

By the way, the leader board:

1. Christina (3)
2. Don (1)
   

Guess the Logo (004)

I'm worried that this one is even easier than the last few. The usual set of rules, which are becoming more and more generic, apply:

• The above image is a famous logo
• It has been visually distorted, perhaps in ways not seen or mentioned in previous installments of "Guess the Logo"
• First person to guess (in the comments of this post) what the original logo is, WINS!

Ready? GO!

Oh, Time Warner...

The screen capture below indicates that I'm FTPing the contents of t380.org to a new host's servers. Yeah, yeah...120,000 files is a lot, but hey. My standard Time Warner Cable "high speed" Internet connection isn't very aptly named, I tell you what, so this might take a while.

You might say, but Duane, didn't your last host kick you out because of the amount of content you had on there? Yes, but they were pricks and didn't even follow their own shady terms of service. They're also holding the t380.org domain hostage, which is another violation of their own TOS.

Let's see which takes longer: the FTP job or the domain name transfer. The necessary pages and documents are all uploaded to the new servers; it's just the photo albums that take some time. Maybe this whole put the full-sized images on the web for people to download wasn't such a good idea after all...

Guess the Logo (003)

Alright, smarty pants(es), let's see you guess this logo. Same rules:

• Famous logo shown above, though highly distorted
• First person who guesses what logo it is WINS!

Ready? Go!

Congratulations to Christina and Don for getting the first two.

Guess the Logo (002)

OK, same rules apply. Some recognizable logo has been distorted somehow, and you get to guess what it is. First person who guesses it WINS! Ready? Go!

Health Care Reform? More Like Health Care Deform!

Amber -

I heard that if health care reform passes in Congress I won't be able to buy property or guns anymore. Is that true?

- Please no Death Panels in my American Samoa

Dear Please no DP in my AS -

There are a lot of rumors going around about the Red Menace's latest attempt to bring Communism to our great nation, so here's an unbiased list of only the most sensational things you need to do to prepare for the end-times that will be our future health care system (should they prevail):

• Federal Income Tax will increase to 75% for everyone in red states
  
• The Federal Government will become "too big to fail"
• War with Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea will be inevitable just to keep the economy going
  

Nobody will be able to afford the luxury goods that drive this country's economy. Those are the facts, plain and simple.

Guess the Logo (001)

Let's start a new game. I distort a "famous logo" and you (the internets) guess what logo. First person who guesses what the logo is in the comments WINS. Ready? Go!
Note: the logo might be distorted in multiple ways, such as color, pixelization, distortion, rotation, etc..

Four-Fingered Ring

That's right.

I've talked about getting a four-fingered gold ring with Christina written in Old English font, and I now have it. I now love my girl four times (at least!) more than dudes who sport single-fingered rings to represent their love.

Here's a poorly-shot "unboxing" video when I received the One Ring to Rule Them All in the mail - there's no way I would have purchased something like this in person...

Alright, internets...what do you think? You can hear in the video above that Christina (on Skype at the time) was just thrilled. I haven't yet tried to fly with it, but I imagine it would be perceived as a weapon, given its likeness to brass knuckles.

One thing: I start going off on a tangent in the video about how I thought my middle finger was actually bigger around than my index finger. Well, if I had actually looked at my hand it's pretty obvious that the opposite is true. I think I was in a stupor of exuberance upon receipt of the glorious ring.

Web Host Woes

I have no idea why I went with EasyCGI as a web host for t380.org (I would link to the site, but it's down at the time of writing - I'll get to that). Oh yeah, I do know why: they claim to provide 350 GB of disk space for your site at a reasonable price, with bandwidth limitations that I'll never exceed with a Boy Scout troop web site.

Why wouldn't someone want to be a customer of EasyCGI? Well, if you care about this kind of thing (I seem to), they host on Windows servers, which caused a surprising amount of downtime. It was kind of pathetic. Why else would I want to change hosting providers? Well, they lie. They claim one thing (350 GB) then hold you to another (20 GB) while dangling a supposed violation of their terms of service (TOS - which I don't actually violate) in attempts to get me to reduce my disk usage. By the way, I'm using less than 50 GB now, but that is far below the advertised disk space, confirmed through their own control panel tools - I have plenty of disk space left - and like I said, I come nowhere near the bandwidth limitations. Seriously, like a dozen or so people look at the site, and pretty infrequently at that.

OK, so they start threatening you to decrease your sub-50 GB down to sub-20 GB, even though they claim you have 350 to play with...that's not so bad. It wouldn't be, except that my account has been suspended and the site is down. I'm still paying for this horrible service, by the way.

Anyway, I'm pretty pissed off right now about this and I'm in the process of transferring to a reasonable host with good old Linux servers. I'm thinking DreamHost. Their TOS doesn't seem to have any funny wording to be bent out of shape and used against honest customers. Let's see how long t380.org will be down in the meantime.

Photo Roundup

From Thanksgiving:

The Gosneys hosted game night - everyone had fun playing Catch Phrase (who doesn't?).

I'm pretty fat.

Photo credit: Don. Watercolor credit: Darrel. Couch "credit" goes to the 70s.

After Thanksgiving:

I'm excited about my new pots and pans. I even found room for them in my new closet/apartment!

Creepy fun house image (reflection in the new pot pictured above). *shudders*

I've been doing a whole lotta lazy non-blogging, which is probably disappointing my readers. I give a whole-hearted politician's promise that I'll post something worth reading soon.

Banana

Can you teach a dog to talk? Dean can.

More Google Wave Invites

The Google Wave gods just granted me an additional 17 invites. Let me know if you need one, interwebs.

Cason the Scot

Cason is working on his business card - throwing around some ideas at the moment. I took the photo he's currently using and guess what? I did my little Black/White conversion to it:

If you want to try out this technique yourself, here's the basic operations I use in The GIMP (with liberal variation - depends on the image!):

1. Desaturate (make greyscale)
2. Apply Cartoon filter, which basically blackens and boldens the edges (better than the edge detection filters do for this purpose)
3. Apply a threshold with a black slider value at whatever seems appropriate to get the right features to stand out

There's an optional step 0 that wasn't mentioned above (or used for this picture of Cason), which is to prep the overall image with some additional lighting/shadowing/corners/fading/etc. that you will think help frame the subject. This was critical to get the somewhat circular glow behind the Avalon Casino I showed in a previous post.

Anyway, happy GIMPing!

More B/W Fun

I seem to be really into black/white binary images. Something about being able to compress very large-dimensioned images into practically nothing (file size) using PNG or GIF. Don't take my word on that file size statement - click on the frog to get the full-sized image: 1890x1972 pixels, yet it only consumes 74 kB. That's PNG - GIF gets you down to 82 kB for the same image at those dimensions.

Related:

• Avalon Casino
• Simplified Eye
• "Fuck You" the frog
• Lefty from Downtown
• Layers of Love (though best viewed as XCF to decompose the layers...I think I only sent Tina that version...)
• Ambigram signature
• Tina has a posse
• Catalina Coffee
• Oil drums
• Times Tables (or the search for primes)
• Cason the Scot
• Ornery Square
  

There are some more blog posts with this kind of image, but I guess I didn't label them GIMP, so I didn't see them immediately when I filtered on that. Whatevmo.

Buddy Hollyday Party

I arrived late (damn work!), but I caught pretty much the entire blue album with a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in my hand. Prom photos to follow...

Avalon Casino

This is a GIMPed-up photo from the trip to Avalon that Christina and I went on over a year ago. Time flies! Extra points to anyone who can figure out what operations I applied in The GIMP to convert the source image to what you see here... (hint: it wasn't that many...) or perhaps what you would have done to the source image to achieve this effect.

Vintage 2009

Has anyone else had Trader Joe's 2009 Vintage Ale? I know, it's kind of lame to have a specialty-style "vintage" beer with a national grocery store brand name on it, but I'm curious if anyone else has tried it. 'Sgood!

Anyone tried any good beers lately?