Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Was reading up on emergency umbilical handling procedures – if you’re more than two hours from a hospital, tightly tie off the cord 6″ from the navel, then tie another knot 2″ farther out. Cut between the knots with a sterilized knife or scissors. If less than two hours from a hospital, just leave it.
Whether expecting or not, you never know when you might need info like that.
This is one of the more interesting art projects I’ve seen in a while – mock marketing of human eggs as consumer item – human caviar – as commentary on reproductive pressure on women in their late 30s. Provoked a pretty good discussion between Amy and I. Read article before forming opinions.
It’s not a standard, but it looks like one. Also, Definitions of Managed Objects for Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware Devices using SMIv2.
All I can say is “jjeesskkeayah.”
Amy enters week 15 of her pregnancy today. According to babycenter: “Lanugo, a very fine hair, covers the body and will continue growing on the baby until around the 26th gestational week of pregnancy.”
Lanugo? It sounds like a brand of pasta.
Oh boy… the rewards of a university career…
Since you’re all dying to know this, we’ve just received official word that if you work 25 years for U.C., you’ll get a paperweight in appreciation. 40 years and you get a pin with a diamond in it (clearly a holdover from the days when only women were “staff”). And if you retire after 20 years you get a bronze clock from Tiffany’s. Goals to work towards. Happy weekend.
We’ve used a professional tax preparer for the past five years. Decided to try and save some money this year and got a quote from HR Block. Sounded like they could save us 50%. The experience was miserable. The guy we got was a dud, hated his life. “How long have you been working here?” “24 long years…” he responded, in the closest unintentional approximation of a Droopy the Dog voice I’ve heard. Didn’t even try to help us find good deductions. The place felt like a sausage factory. There were AOL logos printed right on our tax forms, that’s how incestuous these giant multinational conglomerates are.
Anyway, when he was finished we got a bill for more than we usually pay our professional preparer. So we raised a stink. We had no proof of the amount we had been quoted before we went in, since it was over the phone, and they claimed they don’t give quotes. Well, someone gave me one, that’s for sure. And it’s the only reason we wandered into that god-forsaken rat-hole to begin with.
The whole system is computer driven and the agent was powerless to do anything. Had to call a central number, who authorized a $50 rebate. Clam boogers. Decided to fight. Had to go the district manager, argue with him over the phone about it, fax in a bunch of documents and write a letter. Finally got email back today – they’re refunding us $122. Good enough. Chalk one up for the little guy.
Set up QTSS on Sherlock today. Did some upgrades to the Admissions database. Ate burritos from Gordo tonight (great spinach tortillas) and watched the first two episodes of Oz, which is pretty damn good, but not as involving as we had hoped.
Breakthrough tonight: Succeeded in taking a live video stream from DV camera and spitting it to the web in real time. The final setup will look like this:
camera –> mixing board –> G4 w/coolstream –> win2k w/qtss –> world
The mixing board will let us add titles and do fades etc. on a live video stream. It outputs analog, so we need an analog capture card for the Mac. CoolStream on the Mac takes the stream and resizes / resamples in real time, generates an SDP (streaming description protocol) file, and unicasts the stream to Darwin Streaming Server 4 (DSS4) running on a dedicated Win2K box. The SDP file gets moved to the DSS4 box as well. DSS4 then multicasts the stream to the world, all with a 7-second buffer delay (almost half the latency of Real or WinMedia).
Since you can’t embed an SDP file in a web page, you make a fake .mov file that references the SDP, then embed the fake mov in a web page.Have been fiddling with this stuff for a while, felt great to make it finally happen.
Still a good amount of fiddling and purchasing to do. Amazingly, there is currently no broadcasting software for OSX on the market, so you have to do the capturing under OS9. Apple will be releasing free broadcaster when they get the licensing crap worked out with MPEG-LA. So we’ll switch from CoolStream to that when it’s ready. I’d be running QTSS under OSX as well, but it would mean buying another Mac, and we already have this Win2K box ear-marked for media serving.
Just returned from a couple of days in Los Angeles at USC, attending a seminar co-hosted by Berkeley’s and USC’s j-schools. Around 125 educators and online journalism professionals from around the world, arranged in panels discussing the state of online journalism, how it could be done better, etc. Much discussion of whether and how much it’s appropriate to utilize the audience as information gatherers, which touches on the topics of community-driven sites, blogs, etc. In fact, there was quite a bit of discussion about the blog phenom, professional journalists who maintain blogs alongside their regular journalism, etc. Also much discussion about training – old-world journalists need to know how to use typewriters, but that’s not enough anymore. How to bring the old guard up to speed. Debates on whether we’re “doing it right” or not – what does that even mean? Is there a succesful online model yet? Is the internet different enough a medium that it deserves to be treated as categorically different re: journalistic techniques, or is it just another means of distribution with a few unique characteristics. Is the “immediacy” of the internet anything new? Radio and TV are immediate too, so no, not really. Anyway, some interesting discussions, but mostly debate, not a whole lot of concrete stuff to take home, and nothing technical. Worth the trip though. Shook some good hands, made some contacts, etc.
Anecdote: At one point, a panelist was talking about the “three-dot column” form of journalism, like Herb Caen of the SF Chronicle. “… three guys in a restaurant trading bites of top sirloin … Time for a new mayor … ” So this woman in the audience raises her hand and asks “What was that address again?” Confused looks, awkward silence. Took a while to realize that she had thought he was talking about something.dot.com. The term “three-dot column” is fading out because, well, because there aren’t many three-dot columns anymore. Well, it was funny at the time. Maybe you had to be there.
Note to self: When you teach this PHP/MySQL class next semester, make damn sure that all the students name their tables and columns *exactly* like I do in the examples. I kind of assumed they would, but they took a lot of liberties tonight, stretching their wings, and chaos reigned for the second hour as we debugged one broken script after another. Which would be fine one-on-one and is actually kind of educational, but takes a lot of time away from the rest of the class.
Second note to self: If you try to videotape something (like this class, since some of the students couldn’t be there tonight) and the camera has an audio shoe on it, remember that its presence overrides the built-in mic and you either have to remove it or plug in an external mic. I just taped two hours of silent lecture. Doi.
Other than that, the class is going great. They’re starting to get it, and seeing real results pop out gets them jazzed.