Thursday, November 28, 2002
We took a closer look at the land down the street today. 100 acres, so it's nice and big. An all-season maintained road hits the one corner of the lot at a high point, perfect for building. It's got tons of hills and very varied terrain. There are some wide open fields (currently dotted with cedars, hawthorn, prickley ash, and the typical stuff). There's also some very large cedar and pine growth, as well as some giant oaks, maples, poplars, apple trees, and others.
The low lying areas have some swamp and marsh, and an all-year creek runs through the lowland. The far edge of the property is bordered by an abandoned railroad track that is now a maintained government snowmobile line. There are gigantic boulders that dot the property, and there are game trails everywhere so it's very easy to traverse, although it's easy to get lost because it's so up and down. The property is covered in birds and deer and is an absolute wilderness dream — with the kicker that it's just minutes off the biggest highway in Canada.
Here's some of the pictures I took today:
That's just with my video camera, so pardon the resolution. It was snowing and rather hazy so it's a bit desaturated… This is definitely one of the most impressive low-cost properties I've seen so far.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
It seems that no matter what I do, I keep getting really poor surface piercing photos sent in. While I'm glad to say that people are finally starting to come around to the idea that surface piercings need to be done with surface bars (although there are many piercers out there who use the word without knowing what it is), it doesn't do any good if they don't know how to use them.
The disturbing trend I've been seeing lately is piercers using surface bars, but using them very wrong so they don't work properly. Anyway, in the diagram below you see five potential surface bar placements. All five are variations I see regularly. Only the first one is a good placement. Here's why:
- The bar has tight bends, sits uniformly under the skin, penetrates at a perpendicular angle, and contains enough space above the skin to accommodate for minor swelling.
- The bars are not long enough, which means that there's no room for swelling to occur. The holes may enlarge, the piercing may be drawn up and into rejection (it may start to surface like #4), and it may not be able to drain as well. Note: Let me be clear that I've greatly overemphasized the lengths on diagrams 1 – 3. In #1, the balls may be gently touching the skin, and #2 is meant to show bars that are short enough to pull the bar up against the skin, and the ball down toward to hole.
- The bars are too long, so the piercing will get twisted constantly. This twisting leverages a lot of force onto the exit holes, causing them to enlarge and can easily start a rejection process.
- The bar was placed crooked and/or the placement is to long or short causing the bar to twist lengthwise. If one end surfaces healing will be no easier than with a straight barbell and rejection is likely.
- It's not even a surface bar. You can't just put bends in a bar. It will usually reject if you use such jewelry.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
I present to you two million-dollar-ideas which I will not pursue.
…So feel free:
1. aogoogle.com – “Afraid Of Google Dot Com”
As you may or may not know, google logs every single thing you have ever searched for, and keeps that in a database which is linked to you both by cookie ID and by IP. Especially now that they are required to share those records with the feds*, aogoogle.com would serve as a gateway to google and other services (to strip off potential monitoring devices). Yes, I know there are similar anonymizer services out there, but “aogoogle” is a a killer name, and it's not taken, plus it would get a lot of press and attention (and maybe a lawsuit or two).
2. (no site name yet) – Speculative News
Every day the site would post six to ten news stories. Half would be “speculative news” — that is, news stories that could be true but aren't. These stories would range from the silly to the serious. Anyway, people would guess which ones were real and which were, with the day's winners being put into a draw for a daily prize. The real key to the site though is the attached debate forums which I believe would be very vibrant.
Both of the above ideas could be kick-started on a budget of probably $2500 or less, with advertising revenues supporting the sites as they grow. Well, I thought they were decent ideas anyway…
And does anyone else think it's odd that the slogan for Microsoft's search engine is “More Useful Everyday”? Doesn't that imply that it was pretty much useless in the recent past? Although the wording is interesting — what does it mean when you say “more useful everyday” rather than “more useful every day”? I assume it is a conscious decision.
* Thanks to the Homeland Security act, the government needs NEITHER A WARRANT OR PROBABLE CAUSE to demand your search records from Google (Google can confirm that they comply with these requests, but legally they are not even allowed to tell us how many such requests have been made). There's a good chance that a copy of the entire database has been obtained by the IAD. So ask yourself — what would YOUR search records say about you? Oh, and if anyone's wondering, I'd light my servers on fire and throw them servers off a roof before I'd give the government access to my records.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
About a hundred acres, mixed brush, swamp, road access, creek, open field, forest, etc… Also a similarly very inexpensive price, and also just down the street from here. It's amazing. These properties are just off the highway, a reasonable drive away from mainstream employment, and gorgeous. Why don't people buy them? Why is it considered throwaway land?
Yeah, it would realllllly suck to live there…?
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Two insane stories in the news:
Every day I become more convinced that either I, or the world, have gone entirely insane. Most likely both… Oh, and the new Mozilla is out (I know there are some Mozilla users, let me know if IAM doesn't work using it if you want).
PS. In less cool but equally stupid news, the Pentagon wants another $50 billion over the next five years, and Bush wants to spend well over $500 billion more on defense during his first term as Clinton did during his last term (but even that won't be enough). Osama is winning and the American people are losing unfortunately…
