Vitriolic Humor

Unless you've got the correct packages installed, you'll likely get an error with some missing dependencies. You can find the missing packages at:

libicu38
libboost-filesystem1.34.1
libboost-regex1.34.1
libboost-thread1.34.1
libboost-iostreams1.34.1
libboost-signals1.34.1
libboost-date-time1.34.1

Click the above links, choose your architecture, choose a mirror, then download and open with GDebi.

Then install the Amazon MP3 downloader as normal.

I'm not sure what is happening exactly, but this is the most effective illusion I've ever seen. Stare at the green dot in the center and watch as the yellow dots sequentially disappear and reappear. The truth is the yellow dots are always there. Even if you re-size the yellow dots so they are huge (buttons on the side) this thing still works. Baffling.

World's Best Optical Illusion

This is an on-going compilation of the computers I've owned over the years. I'm keeping this for nostalgia and to share one day with my kids. It will be updated as things change.

Next time you (as a political candidate) talk of promising change, we're going to be collectively smarter and make you explain in really, really detailed terms exactly which changes you intend to bring to Washington DC and thus our country. One way or another a bunch of voters got duped last election.

Remember a change is a whole lot different that the change you wanted.

A friend's child recently watched me fighting with FBI & Interpol warning screens, distributor logos, and trailers while trying to play a DVD when she asked me why I didn't

Press Stop-Stop-Play

I looked at them funny (as I'm prone to do), tried it and now I use it every time. It will start playing the main feature without all the junk they packed in before it. Depending on the player, you may want to wait a second between presses. One player I have says "Pre-Stop" on the first Stop, "Stop" on the second Stop, then "Seq. Play" on the Play. Don't know if this always works, but it works on almost every DVD I've tried.

I've completed my quest to complete the CISSP certification exam, so I'm back to semi-regular posting on this blog.

(Yes, I passed the exam, I'm now a CISSP. Go out and get yours today!)

It's official, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says the earth is cooling. In describing their new miles per gallon (MPG) estimates, the EPA notes that their new estimates "reflect the effect of [...] * Colder Outside Temperatures."

Can we put this "global warming" noise to bed now? The climate is changing constantly and looking at measurements since we've started recording temperatures on calibrated instruments is bound to give us a false view of what his happening on the millenial, eonian (or longer) time scales.

Oh yeah, quit feeling guilty about living on this planet, you'll only be here for a while...

We have a tendency to shorten our words and forget their origins:

Compress -> Press (printing machine)
Perquisite -> Perk
Inquisitive -> Quiz
Manufactory -> Factory
Telephone -> Phone
Airplane -> Plane
Influenza -> Flu
Carriage -> Car
Cabriolet -> Cab
Taximeter -> Taxi

Do you have more examples?

I don't like to be a nay-sayer, but Nay! Instead of the Government handing out stimulus checks and cash-for-clunkers (CARS) program allowances, why not just tax us less so we'd be more likely to buy a car in the first place? Why destroy wealth by bribing potential customers to buy a new car (economic stimulation!) using an anrtificial source of funding (our tax dollars?)

Here's the summary. The US Government spent $3,000,000,000 (man, that's a lot of zeroes) to purchase a little over 690,000 "clunkers" from private citizens in the form of a "rebate" to be applied to the purchase or lease of a new, more fuel-efficient "non-clunker." Those who had a qualifying vehicle and qualifying financial resources could participate in the "rebate" system. Dealers sold "more" cars and destroyed the trade-ins (per program requirements) by running the engines with sodium silicate in place of motor oil, turning the engine into a mass of fused metal, unsuitable (or undesirable) to even automotive recyclers.

I don't use the term "destroy" lightly, please go check out videos of CARS clunkers being destroyed.

Here are just a few unintended consequences to look forward to in coming months and years:

1) Economic indicators

Will we remember when strong economic indicator results come out for the quarter/year that a lot of the automotive retail sales were spurred by taxpayer-funded government giveaways, not actual raw, market-driven economic improvements? Will this lead us into other economic assumptions and a false sense of economic improvement? You can fool most of the people most of the time...

2) New car economy

Next month, next quarter, next year, expect new car sales numbers to be down corresponding to the large upturn in people who artificially decided to buy suddenly to take advantage of the CARS program.

3) Used car economy

The CARS program purposely destroys wealth by disabling (destroying) perfectly functional vehicles in the name of environmentalism. It removes cheap, used vehicles from the marketplace, dropping the supply of used vehicles and driving up the prices. Not everyone is out buying new cars and buying used cars is getting more expensive, affecting the poorest amongst us. Does this qualify as a regressive tax of sorts? You are providing new vehicles to financially capable buyers who may have been on the fence by destroying wealth and value thus putting the financial burden on those who would have been potential buyers of these so-called "clunkers." So much for only taxing the wealthy...

4) The environment

The environment, the alleged beneficiery of this program, will be the same 5 months, 5 years, and 5 centuries from now. This program will have no effect on the "big picture" of our global climate. Period.

5) Used parts economy

This one strikes close to home as I am actively keeping my car alive as long as I can on general principles (rest easy, my car is efficient enough not to qualify as a "clunker.") I rely on the availability of parts to repair my car and keep it safe and operational. When you start destroying cars pointlessly, and not recycling them, you reduce availability and artificially drive up prices of parts people need to repair their vehicles.

6) Donations to charities

Many of these Clunkers would have been destined to be donations for charities which accept them as tax-deductable gifts. A significant number of potential donations were just sold to the Government, reducing charitable-giving-by-car-donation for the near future.

Summary

So, in the face of (alleged) economic and evironmental ruin, our Government has designed a program to take a large amount of money from everyone, give it back to the middle-class (those who can qualify for automotive financing or have enough money saved up to buy a car) to convince them buy cars at an artificial discount to artificially (and temporarily) stimulate a small segment of our economy, while destroying existing wealth and driving prices up on used cars and the parts required to keep those existing cars operational. Any economic effect of this program will be short-lived, the environment will remain unchanged, and as a final coup-de-grace: charities can expect fewer automotive donations. This is governmental brilliance.

My kids won't know what life was like without the Internet, before computers were in every home. They'll never know what a modem is or the wonderful (yet grating) sounds it would make when you dialed a BBS. They won't know the joy of getting online 1200bps (and all the free time you had when you waited for downloads to complete.) Even their perspective on the Internet will be different. They won't know about Mosaic browser or text-based (only) browsing with lynx. They'll never know Prodigy or Compuserve. AOL is just a website. They won't know that Yahoo was a directory of links, or that Altavista, Excite, HotBot, and WebCrawler were once prosperous search engines with a large market share. They won't know that there were many years of Internet without Google at all...

They won't know of life before the convenience of microwave ovens.

They will think (rightfully so) that everyone has a phone and they are almost exclusively cordless or completely wireless. They won't know that at one time all phones were wired into the wall, that long distance calls were expensive and infrequently used. They will never know what a party line or a rotary dial phone was. They won't realize that phones didn't used to have cameras, games, music, and full QWERTY keyboards on them.

They won't know that people used to shave with just one blade.

Lightweight 27-speed mountain bikes with disc brakes and super travel full-suspension will be mainstream and affordable. They won't know the relatively low tech, heavy, inefficient bikes we had to ride. They won't realize that mountain biking was started in the mid-1970s.

My kids will never know what a caboose is for. They will only see them in train museums (and so we take them.)

Film photography will be some long-forgotten technique that people used to use before digital photography. They won't know what camera film looks like. They'll never know the growing pains of digital photography from low resolution to slow, delay-prone cameras. Everything will be high resolution, automatic, and instantaneous. It seems normal to them that you can store thousands of photographs on a memory card smaller than your thumbnail. Digital photo frames will seem normal to them. Static real photo frames will seem pointless.

They'll never know what a reel-to-reel, an eight-track, a vinyl record, a Mini-disc, or a cassette tape is. Even CDs are going to the wayside as things gradually swing towards completely digital music delivery, played on the all-pervasive MP3 player. Walkman and Discman will be largely historical and unfamiliar to them. They won't ever know about VCRs and Laserdisc players. They'll have always known DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and DVR. They'll think televisions were always flat and thin. HDTV will be the norm for what they are used to viewing. Their music will be all-digital and all multi-channel.

My kids won't know what a floppy disc was (8", 5.25", or 3.5") Wow! They won't know DOS (and I'm doing all I can to make it so they won't have to use Windows.) They won't know about daisy wheel printers, slow and noisy dot-matrix printers or fan-fold paper.

My kids will probably never know much measured in terms of 'megabytes' and will likely be more familiar with the concept of 'terabytes' rather than with 'gigabytes'.

I'm excited about the rapidly changing world they've been born into, but I'm sad they won't know the world as I do. I'll try to teach them what I can and maybe if I'm lucky they'll help me see their world through their eyes someday.

Wired recently published an article containing 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know.

I was just staring at an old 8-inch floppy disk I keep around sitting on my desk, contemplating how storage capacities and densities have increased since it was introduced on the market in 1971.

The outer dimensions of the disk is 200x200x1mm or 40,000 cubic millimeters. It holds 79.7KiB of data or 81613 bytes. That works out to 2.04 bytes per cubic millimeter.

For comparison, I've chosen the modern-era microSDHC card. It has dimensions of 15x11x1mm or 165 cubic millimeters. It holds up to 16GiB of data or 17,179,869,184 bytes. Quick math turns up 104120419 bytes (104MiB) per cubic millimeter.

In 38 years the storage density of removable media has increased by a factor of over 51 million. I wish I knew what a 8-inch floppy disk cost when it was introduced to the market to do some cost/capacity comparisons.

SanDisk has announced they expect a 128GiB Micro SDHC card to be available in 2011.

It can be daunting and confusing to depart from your camera's 'Auto' mode and explore the capabilities of your digital camera. There is, however, a lot of power and flexibility hidden just behind these letters P Av Tv M (or P A S M depending on your brand of camera) once you learn a little and experiment with them. I had previously only dabbled with these modes on my first two digital cameras (P&S) for the first 6 years of my digital photography. Since I got my first DSLR, I've jumped in head-first trying to learn the finer points of my camera's capabilities and why (and when) I might use these various modes. Experimenting with these modes and observing the results will both improve your understanding of photography and hopefully open doors into what you can capture creatively with your camera.

Full Auto - Just like it sounds: the camera will choose your shutter speed, aperture, focal points, ISO, metering mode, white balance and whether or not to use the flash without any input from you. This will result in a "correct" exposure and a decent picture most times. The modern camera is a machine with numerous sensors and intelligent brains, but it is basically responding to measurements from its sensors, not "comprehending" what it is taking a picture of or what your intended picture should look like (though more and more point-and-shoot cameras are including face recognition and even smile recognition.) It may deploy the flash when you would use a longer exposure and natural light, or it may over- or underexpose the image because of how it metered the scene instead of what you "meant" for the camera to capture. These unintended results can be controlled more accurately and creatively by learning how to control you camera in the different modes below.

P (Program AE (or Flexible Program) Mode) - I find it easiest to think of this as a semi-automatic mode that will allow you to make certain general adjustments to shutter speed and aperture. The camera calculates the shutter speed and aperture for "correct" exposure and allows you to choose from several different shutter speed/aperture combinations (with the main dial just behind your shutter release switch) that will all form a "correct" exposure. ISO, AF Mode, White Balance, Metering Mode, and Flash are all completely manual in this mode. This is a good mode to start exploring, it's like the camera is guiding you, but still letting you make decisions to affect the outcome of the picture you are taking (you can choose a different exposure time or different aperture for a particular effect, for instance.)

A or Av (Aperture Priority AE Mode) - The camera will allow you to select an aperture (with the main dial) and it will automatically adjust the shutter speed to make a correct exposure. A wider aperture (that is a smaller f/number) will have a narrow depth-of field and a smaller aperture (a larger f/number) will have a larger depth-of-field. This allows you to control the range of objects in your photo that are in sharp focus and control the blur of the background in your photographs. Keep in mind the effect of the shutter speeds the camera is selecting in terms of freezing or blurring motion and minimizing camera shake. ISO, AF Mode, White Balance, Metering Mode, and Flash are all completely manual in this mode. As an exercise, try shooting a moderately close shot of a flower, a letter, or the back of a playing card. Shoot with a wide open aperture, a medium aperture, and a stopped down aperture. Notice the difference in effect on your resulting photograph. Here are someexamples illustrating the concept of depth-of-field from my photography.

S or Tv (Shutter Priority AE Mode) - The camera will allow you to select a shutter speed (with the main dial) and will adjust the aperture automatically to make a correct exposure. Basically you'll control the time the shutter is open and the camera will adjust the aperture setting to make a correct exposure. A faster shutter speed tends to freeze motion and reduces shake. A slower shutter speed allows photography in lower light settings, blurs motion, and may unintentionally reveal shaking of the camera operator. ISO, AF Mode, White Balance, Metering Mode, and Flash are all completely manual in this mode. Here are some examples of longer exposures from my photography.

M (Manual Exposure Mode) - ISO, AF Mode, White Balance, Metering Mode, and Flash are all completely manual in this mode. The exposure scale which usually shows your exposure compensation, acts as an exposure meter in real time. You must choose both the shutter speed and the aperture you want to take the picture with every time. If you don't change the setting, it will use the setting from the previous picture or the previous session. Experiment with manual mode my noting what the camera is guiding you to use (especially the shutter speed and aperture settings) in Program (P), Aperture Priority (A), and Shutter Priority (S) modes and use them as a starting point. Manual mode can be very useful when shooting multi-part panoramas as it allows you to keep the exposure consistent as you pan through your shots, making the images easier to stitch together accurately and smoothly. This mode puts all the exposure/aperture decisions in your hands. The camera will indicate whether or not the exposure is correct, but won't do anything to correct it, that's your job (or you may be over-/under-exposing for a particular reason or to get a specific effect (silhouettes, for instance.)

Specialty Modes - Almost all cameras have a range of preset modes for Sports, Fireworks, Portrait, Landscape, Indoor, Snow, Beach, etc. Please read your owner's manual for which modes your camera supports and how to use them.

There are a large number of options on the average digital camera today, just remember that you'll only be adjusting a handful of them at a time typically. Don't get overwhelmed with all the choices.

Take some time in a controlled environment with no time constraints to experiment with your camera. Play with shutter speeds and understand how they can freeze or blur motion. Take a series of the same shot with different apertures and notice how the depth of field changes. Experiment with Autofocus (AF) Modes and Metering Modes. Consider how and where you'd want to use the techniques you'll discover. When it all clicks and you can understand and control this machine in your hands, it's so much more than just hitting the shutter release and "hoping" for a good result.

Please stop by and see more of my photography.

This is a complete motorcycle, the engine is disassembled and in need of repair.
It is not currently running. This bike would make a good project bike, a parts bike, or great basis for a race bike. It does not include elbow grease, you will have to provide that.

2001 Ducati 748 Superbike monoposto (single seat) in Fly Yellow

Spun rod bearing. The crankshaft, bearings, piston rods, and pistons need to be replaced and the engine needs to be re-assembled. The bike is otherwise in normal operating order, light wear. Less than 10,000 miles on the bike. Bike was used as a weekend, sunny day vehicle only and is in otherwise great condition. This bike is being sold as-is with its engine disassembled.

I'm interested in selling the complete bike if possible. Will consider parting out if someone wants to buy a significant portion of the parts.

Photos of assembled bike here.

Recent photos of the disassembled bike here.

One owner. Clean title.
Lived in CO and AL, always garaged.
VIN available upon request.
Bike is located near Prattville, Alabama.
Prefer you pickup motorcycle in person.
Cash or certified funds only.

Drop me a line if interested.

Autauga County Heritage Association New URL, new content!

Prattville History on Prattville.Com

Prattville History by tbrown. Excellent source of information on Prattville's industrial history, Contenental Eagle, cotton gins, the history of the cotton trade in general.

Prattville Dragoons

Alabama Counties Formation Maps