Lost Season 3, Episode 23

I just finished watching the last episode of the third season of Lost. We needed a little refresher it had been a long time! Thanks Sheri for loaning us the DVDs! Yes, it's late, it's 12:38 AM, yes I'm going to regret it later, but I have to get this out there while it's still fresh.

I have a problem with these two technical issues. First, Charlie volunteers to go down into the Looking Glass sub station to disable the jammer. This radio frequency jammer was designed (evidently) by Ben and his crew to prevent any transitions off the island. It is a thorough jammer that is supposed to cover a broad range of frequencies. So my question: How in the world can the "others" communicate via the walkie-talkies all over the island? Shouldn't they be jammed too? Surely they would require a repeater.

Second, the Satellite phone or whatever device it was that Naomi, the parachutist brought onto the island could not overcome Rousseau's transmission. Now her transmission would be on a specific frequency, the Sat phone was new and certainly would be digital, and would not be affected by her transmission. Further, when Jack and the French woman enter the transmitter station (whose message, by the way, is still picked up in previous episodes despite the jamming), all she does is walk over and stop the tape. OK--first really? That tape has been running undisturbed for the last 16 years 24/7 and it still works? And second, stopping the tape from playing, while creating a silence, does not open up the frequency. It only makes the frequency quiet. We see no one actually turn off the transmitter.

Alright, I feel better now. Looking forward to season 4 which we will not be home to watch so we'll have to record it using old VCR technology and watch it Friday night instead.

My Nohari Window

This is the one nobody wants to do. But I'll do it. I'll be vulnerable! This is the inverse of the Johari window below. Where as the Johari window generally is kind enough to use positive characteristics to describe one's self, this one uses negative terms. Yikes!

You can be anonymous on this one as well! (And thanks to the couple of you who clicked away on my Johari window!) If you haven't done that one, please start with the my Johari window first!

State of the Union

In case you missed it last night (as I did), here is a convenient way to catch up on what you missed. A condensed version of the State of the Union address. Very condensed. One minute long. I have a feeling I didn't miss a whole lot.

My Johari Window

Thanks to Emily for discovering this. Take a second if you will, go here and click on five or six words that describe me. Don't worry you can be anonymous!

Blogger Label Cloud

Find out how to make the label cloud in blogger (like the one the right hand column --->) here. It's an excellent article.

Tooble - for Mac

If you've ever watched a video on YouTube and wished you had a way to keep it locally on your computer, let me introduce you to Tooble. This is a new freeware piece of software that I first heard about through this podcast.


It has an integrated search engine, as well as it's own preset categories. Once you find what you want, put check marks by the videos and click download. It will then download and convert the Youtube streams into Quicktime files and if you want, it will even import the files directly into your iTunes movie folder. Enjoy!

A little Humor

These are some pictures I have collected over the last few weeks while stumbling around the internet.

Mac users will appreciate this one.

Self-Explanatory

Highly Ironic

Is Your Computer On?

Of course it's on. You're reading this.

Do you leave your computer(s) on all night?

Read this.

I'm guilty. Four computers under my control in a day's work. I usually leave them all on. All protected, but all on--all night.

Maybe I should reconsider.

What would you do with $800?

I awoke this morning to news of the potential of an economic stimulus plan that would involve sending money our way. It could be as much as $800 for a single person, or up to $1600 for a couple.

Of course the details still need to be worked out. The political parties need to come together. There has to be some agreement. But hey, we could get a little tax refund, and then a tax refund advance. Cool!

OK, so what could we spend it on? We can't just save it. We've got to spend it. After all, it's an economic stimulus plan!

Maybe we could get a nice HD TV with it. That would help stimulate the economy.
Or how about a new iMac?

We need to do some little things around the house. Maybe a new garbage disposal. Oh yeah!

Paint. We need to paint some stuff around the house.

Curriculum. There's always something one of our kids could use to further their education.

A vacation. YES. We could make a nice trip with that! Now THAT would help the economy, wouldn't it?

But wait.

Is this a good idea? Not the vacation, the dispersion of dollars on families throughout the land. On the one hand, yeah, we wouldn't mind a little financial windfall (is there any other kind?) for our family. But from a macro-economic perspective, is this a good idea? What will be the long-term consequences?

This is probably like what a child must feel like when they fall and hurt themselves very badly or something and we attempt to pacify them with a lolly-pop. We can name more things that a wrong with the country's economic state than we can name that are right: The weakening dollar; The sub-prime mortgage crash; The lowest housing starts in years; The imbalanced trade deficit; The rising federal debt; The insurmountable consumer debt, etc, etc.

So does anybody really think handing out a few dollars to people is really gonna help? Proponents would argue that this same action in 2001 is exactly what it took to pull us out of a rising recession. But the circumstances this time around are quite different.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernake said "Fiscal stimulus that comes too late will not help support economic activity in the near term, and it could be actively destabilizing if it comes at a time when growth is already improving," Who has the wisdom to discern if this short-term solution to an economic downturn is timed correctly, will yield the desired results, or even substantial enough to matter?

Thank you, I would like some cash, but no thank you, I don't think this is going to do our country any good. Are most Americans going to feel the same way or will they just thank Uncle Sam for the "gift." We'll pay for it one way or another.

Let it Snow

Yesterday we were to wake up to a "Wintry Mix." We got much-needed rain, but no snow...that all ended up in the Mountains and mostly north of us. But wait, maybe more? I'll believe it when I see it. It is January. But it is North Carolina! This is from the News and Observer:

I'm more better than you--evidently

From MacDailyNews, a study of some 7,500 Mac users suggest that Mac enthusiasts are "...more liberal, less modest, and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large." And, "...receptive to their own inner feelings and may feel both happiness and unhappiness more intensely than others."

Yup, that's me.

Twitter

For some reason (it's Matt's fault, really), I've signed up for a Twitter account. You can follow me here. It also syncs with my Facebook status. I'm following far more people than are following me. Probably because I haven't gotten the word out.

Word is out. What's your Twitter handle?

More computer problems

Everything's back to normal. It's ok. This news is a couple weeks old. My laptop's hard drive died. This was not as big of a crisis as the home computer discussed in previous posts. The reasons for that are these:

1. All my financial data is on my home computer. When that went down, I almost didn't know how to pay a bill, or even what money I had (not much, I assure you)
2. I use iDisk. This is a really cool service through .Mac that keeps my data syncronized between my laptop and my desktop at work. All my finale files, word docs, pdf files, and everything are kept on an Apple server somewhere, plus the files are kept locally on my desktop hard drive and my laptop hard drive so I can work off line if I want to, then when I reconnect, the data is synchronized.
3. I back up fairly regularly. I have been using SuperDuper for some time, though when I went to Leopard, it no longer functioned. I am now trying out Time Machine, however, which is very cool.
4. I use the Google Browser Sync firefox extension. This is cool because any computer that I use keeps all of my bookmarks, passwords, cache, history, everything syncronized between my browsers. After installing Firefox on this machine, then installing that extension, all my settings came back and I was at home again.
5. Applecare. I walked in to the Apple store, they tested the computer, determined the hard drive failed, and replaced my hard drive for "free." Plus my fold hard drive was discontinued for this model laptop and they had to replace it with the next model up. I went from 100GB to 120GB. Cool! If you have a Mac, Applecare is worth the extra bucks. I didn't have to do anything except tell them the machine doesn't work and they took care of it.

Computer crashes are very inconvenient, no question, but as hard drive crashes go, this was far more manageable!