Category: General

Little Storping-in-the-Swuff => Mouse Update

Simon over at Little Storping-in-the-Swuff has recently been grappling with a mouse invasion.

It looks like the problem has been solved, but his latest update on the progress has given me a terrific idea.

To explain that idea, I’m going to have to take a trip around the subject for a while. Please bear with me for a few minutes.

For some time now, people have been using photo sharing sites like flickr. Flickr allows you to “tag” your photos with user defined… um… tags, that allow you to classify your photos. For example, I tag all my Taiwan photos with a “Taiwan” tag, and often tag them further with the name of the city, whether or not it has my “family”, “animals”, “costco” or “pizza” in it.

This allows people to search flickr by those tags and find related photos of interest to them. (My guess is “nude”, “naked”, “breasts” and “female” will be the most searched for tags on flickr, but I might be being cynical.)

Arising from that was the phenomena of “geotagging”. Posters would include a tag of “Geotag” on their flickr photos, and a tag of the GPS coordinates.

This week, flickr took that quaint hobby one step further by officially introducing a geotag mechanism imbedded in their database.

You can now take your flickr photos and, using a built-in interface to Yahoo! maps (nothing’s perfect), drag the photos onto the location you took them and they are entered into flick’s geotag database. Others can now go to a map of an area they are interested in, and browse photos taken at or near that spot.

Flickr introduced this facility earlier in the week, and within 24 hours had 1.2 million geotagged photos.

The interface needs a lot of work, but it can be fun browsing an area you know and looking at other peoples’ pictures.

When mice are captured humanely – that is, captured and released, rather than captured and drowned, you’re supposed to take them more than 2 miles away or they’ll just come back. (OK, I don’t actually buy that mice act as homing pigeons, by why risk it?)

So, this brings me back to my idea.

Simon’s recent capture update was accompanied by links to Google maps indicating the rough area the mice were released in.

I propose the following:

• People releasing mice should take a picture of the mouse at the point of release.
• Post said photo to flickr
• Enter the photo into the geotag database
• include the following tags “Mouse” “Mouse Release Program”

The practical upstart of this is that if you happen to be looking for a mouse to adopt, you can check your area and find if any previously domestic mice have been released in your area. With a little luck you can find them and give them a good home.

I can see a couple possible unintended consequences to this idea, though.

For example, what if you found a mouse in your home and were able to identify that it had been released by someone else in your area. Could you take legal action against them?

Or, perhaps you don’t like mice, could you use the database to locate released mice and kill them? Perhaps even posting pictures of the kills in the geotagged database?

I can envision all sorts of new games that can be devised using geotagged flickr.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Natural Sciences, Science

This photo came off of flickr by way of Michael Turton’s blog, The View From Taiwan.

I make note of it here because of the absolute gibberish that makes up the English portion of this sign. To quote:

Origin
The Tainan city government because domestic and overseas goes sightseeing the traveling service quality unceasingly to promote, in the anticipation to the home, overseas goes sightseeing the passenger to present the prefectural city historical site, the ecology, the city scenery, can provide goes sightseeing the passenger home away from home international service level to enjoy. Therefore the Tainan city government attempts from sympathizes goes sightseeing passenger’s psychological stratification plane to begin, carriers out “the Tainan City Travel Insurance Card”, the penetration medical service, the police network, the language translation, the government information center and service and so on most important traveling safe insurance provision, links from the spot to the line to the surface whole, molds the prefectural city is traveling security city.

This most certainly demonstrates why you don’t use a computer to do your translations for you…

I just hope that Tainan’s “penetration medical service, the police network… … the government information center and service and so on” is better than their “the language translation”.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Taiwan

WorldNetDaily => Evangelist drowns trying to walk on water

Oh, please, please, PLEASE let this be true!

An evangelist who tried replicating Jesus’ miracle of walking on water has reportedly drowned off the western coast of Africa.

Pastor Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle, and he attempted it from a beach in Gabon’s capital of Libreville.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Paranormal

OK, as you can imagine, after bringing my MacBook home and shortly thereafter it tanked on me, I was… shall we say… a bit perturbed.

I was also not thinking to level-headedly either. Since it was too late to take it back to the Apple store, later that evening, I performed the “normal” diagnostics, including resetting the PRAM, which seems to have resolved the problem.

I’ve also since installed the latest MacBook firmware update, which supposedly only modifies fan behavior,but so far the machine is running fine.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Applecare, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX

I got my Macbook back today.

A quick check this morning revealed that Applecare had Fedexed my Macbook back to the Apple store. It was already in Phoenix last night, and I could reasonably expect it to arrive today.

As I left work, Fedex showed it had been delivered several hours earlier, and, since the Apple Store is on my way home, I swung in to see if I could pick it up.

It hadn’t be unpacked yet, but they were kind enough to check with the testers downstairs (apparently there’s a basement) and one of them uncrated my machine and brought it up for me.

We powered it up and checked it out. I seemed to be working normally.

There are, to my knowledge, 6 commonly mentioned problems with Macbooks

1. Mooing
2. Random Shutdowns
3. Random Wireless loss of signal
4. Stains forming on the case
5. Screens showing white with colored bars

Mine has been doing the Moo thing since I got it, but, it’s so quiet it really doesn’t bother me. Apple just released a firmware patch that addresses that issue, and my hope was that it would be already installed on my newly refurbished Macbook. It wasn’t, but when we powered it up at the Apple store, it was ready to download and install it. I choose to postpone that till I got home on electrical power.

Of course, mine was experiencing the random shutdowns and wireless losses, which is why it was in the shop. So that makes 3 problems that should have been addressed.

The staining had not been an issue at all with mine, but I discovered that Applecare had replaced the offending plastic parts anyway. Can’t complain there, that’s 4 problems addressed.

Finally, the color streaks… I’d never seen any sign of it. Until I got it home today and rebooted, and now it doesn’t work.

Looks like it is back to the Apple Store tomorrow. This doesn’t leave a good impression.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Applecare, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX

I remember the good old days when “monsoon” season meant rain every day, not once a month. Now, monsoon just means high heat and high humidity.

We do still get some nice cloud build up at sunset, though.

Technorati Tags: Blog

You know, normally, I really, really just don’t care what the neighbors do with their landscaping.

I know that a lot of them get all goofy when someone’s lawn is 1 inch longer than regulation, or there’s a plastic grocery bag blown into the hedges, but I just generally don’t care.

Live and let live, I say.

But this is over the line. Last Sunday this car caught fire about 3 houses down the street from me. It’s been a week and the burnt out hulk is still there. I’m getting rapidly tired of the neighborhood looking like a set piece for a Mad Max movie.

Besides, they haven’t even bothered to sweep up the debris in the road surrounding the wreck.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Commentary, Rant

My baby is on its way home!

(Took long enough, didn’t it? Hope that means I have a new revision motherboard now.)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Mac, MacBook, OSX

camerongray.net => This train is delayed until Windows reboots

Oh heck, it’s just fun to pick on Windows some days!

In this case, the train scheduling system for a UK train is no longer operating because of low Windows virtual memory. See the article, and more importantly, the picture for more details.

Picking on Windows is just a relief for my frustration as they’re still waiting on the part to fix my Macbook. (arg)

Sure, I like to complain about the squat toilets in Taiwan, but at least the expectation is that you use toilet paper. (But don’t flush it, heavens no!)

This photo of a squatter in Bali really makes you think: How do you use that scoop to clean yourself? Do you fill it with water, bend over and attempt to power splash yourself with it?

I’ll stick with my electronic Japanese-style toilet seats, thank you.

On a seperate note, this photo is from Alidarbac’s Flickr Page. I don’t know the guy, but he’s (usually) located in Taiwan, and he takes a lot of really nice photos. His is one of the very few Flickr photostreams that I subscribe to.

Technorati Tags: Blog, Toilet, Travel