Author: Mark Alexander

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The Absurdity Runs Deep

“The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.
 
It’s not just ironic; it’s a symbol of how disastrous the last 15 years of US Iraq policy have been, how circuitous and self-perpetuating the violence, that we are now bombing our own guns. Welcome to American grand strategy in the Middle East.”

– Vox: The US bombing its own guns perfectly sums up America’s total failure in Iraq

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A Little Over Two Weeks In…

And so far, so good. A few little glitches here and there (all of which I’ve dutifully reported back to Apple) but overall Yosemite has been much more stable than I’d anticipated it would be.

The biggest problem I’ve encountered has been the spontaneous dropping of the connection to my Bluetooth mouse and the subsequent refusal to reconnect, requiring a complete reboot. I’m not a hundred percent sure this wasn’t a problem with the mouse itself, because it the poor thing was four years old and this behavior had been happening occasionally under Mavericks, but to rule out the mouse itself we bought a new one and the problem has disappeared for the most part.

Other issues have been mostly graphics related: items not aligning properly, text overshooting other elements in windows or being cut off, inconsistencies in what is translucent versus what is not from application to application; things that don’t prevent me from productively using the OS, but definitely need to be addressed before this is shipped.

In short, I’m still very impressed what Apple has done here.

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What Does It Mean?

Last night I dreamt that I met George Takei and Elton John (although not at the same time). I think William Shatner was also there for a moment, but only making bitchy comments toward George.

Elton was working as a waiter in a restaurant to raise money for some charity. He gave me his phone number and told me to call him to talk about music.

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Desert Breath


Located near the Red Sea in El Gouna, Egypt, Desert Breath is an impossibly immense land art installation dug into the sands of the Sahara desert by the D.A.ST. Arteam back in 1997. The artwork was a collaborative effort spanning two years between installation artist Danae Stratou, industrial designer Alexandra Stratou, and architect Stella Constantinides, and was meant as an exploration of infinity against the backdrop of the largest African desert. Covering an area of about 1 million square feet (100,000 square meters) the piece involved the displacement of 280,000 square feet (8,000 square meters) of sand and the creation of a large central pool of water.

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First Photos of One of the Solar System’s Craziest Objects

In March 2004, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft left Earth in pursuit of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Today, more than 10 years and four billion miles later, Rosetta became the first spacecraft in history to rendezvous with a comet. The probe is now soaring through space in tandem with its target—and the view is incredible.

In November, from a projected orbital distance of just 2.5 km, Rosetta will deposit a lander on the comet’s surface—all this in preparation for 67P’s closest pass of the Sun in more than six years. As it swings around our parent star, the mass of ice and dust will warm, shedding bits of itself along the way; Rosetta—and Philae, the lander—will have unprecedented front row seats to the show.

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Amen!

“For everyone who hates Yosemite, I have a perfect solution for you. Don’t upgrade and don’t complain. This is the new interface, so accept it or keep the version you have. It’s hard to believe that some of you are arguing because some people just don’t like Apple the way others think they should. It doesn’t matter how long or how short we’ve been using OS X. We’re here to appreciate the progress and submit constructive feedback directly to Apple whenever appropriate.” ~ DaJoNel at the MacRumors Forums

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Who Even Buys Physical Media Anymore?

I think it’s a legitimate question, and one that popped into my head while inventorying about two dozen BlueRay players that were unceremoniously dumped into our department the other day. They were mostly prototype units provided by manufacturers for testing, or outright trash…ridden hard and put away wet by Testing & Quality Assurance, but one or two (a Yamaha A-1000 in decent condition for instance) caught my eye and I found myself thinking that since we don’t actually own a BlueRay player I should probably keep it in mind when the department does its annual garage sale—especially since we get first dibs on anything being sold and can probably snag it for ten dollars or so.

But then I thought, “Why?”

I haven’t bought a DVD since Prometheus (yeah, yeah, I know…) came out, and with the exception of The Aadams Family/Adams Family Values disk that Ben got me after catching it on TV one night a couple months ago, we haven’t purchased any physical media at all.

It’s kind of funny, actually. Back in 2005 or thereabouts when iPods were first becoming “mainstream,” I was a holdout. I owned hundreds of CDs, and my holier-than-thou audiophile attitude was that MP3 encoding was shit. I was still using minidisks for my portable and in-car needs, and I couldn’t fathom getting rid of physical media. I mean, I grew up in the age of vinyl, for chrissake!

But then I met Ben, and things changed.

I bought my first iPod a few months after I got my first Mac and found myself loving it. Maybe there were a few sonic glitches here and there, but I also realized that my high-range hearing wasn’t what it was 20 years ago and I couldn’t really hear the difference anyway.

Suddenly (or rather, not so suddenly, as it took months to rip all those CDs) I was able to carry my entire CD collection around with me. I then started ripping vinyl, and not very long afterward (okay, it was a couple years) I had my entire collection in my pocket.

Something similar is happening with my relationship to video, although I’ve never been as intimately involved with movies as I was with music. At one point I owned a hundred or so movies on disk. But when I was out of work a year ago and had to come up with cash, I realized it was time for the majority of them (along with my CDs) to go. Thankfully there’s still a market!

I kept a couple dozen CDs that had some sentimental value, and a dozen or so DVDs that I actually have watched more than once and want to keep for that reason, but by and large rest of it was sold off.

And I haven’t missed any of it. New music is purchased directly through iTunes (or, acquired through other sources). With Hulu and Netflix, pretty much anything I’d ever want to watch is available on demand.

Much like I proclaimed in 1977, “I’ll never see that stupid Rocky Horror Picture Show movie!” only to stumble upon it at a friend’s house ten years later and immediately fall in love with it, in 2005 I proclaimed I’d never get rid of my CDs. Both proved ridiculously shortsighted.

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You’re Doing It Wrong

A Christian group that is planning a “fast” in opposition to same-sex marriage has claimed that members don’t actually have to stop eating food to take part.

The Virginia-based Family Foundation announced a coordinated fast earlier this month, in order to influence the US Supreme Court into rejecting same-sex marriage when it hears the first of a series of appeals cases in October.

The group had said previously: “The Supreme Court begins their session on October 6th. We fully expect them to take a marriage case sometime in the next year.

“Join us for 40 Days of Prayer, Fasting and Repentance for Marriage from August 27 through October 5, 2014.

“Our 40 Days will culminate on October 5th just before the court begins their session.”

However, the group has since told members that they don’t actually have to give up food at all to take part in the “fast.”

They wrote: “We are asking the entire Body of Christ to join us for this feast – giving up physical food isn’t necessary – but feeding on the spiritual food provided is vital.”

As people don’t actually have to give up food to take part, the group opposed to re-defining the definition of marriage seem to be re-defining the meaning of a fast.

(Source)

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So This Happened

After spending most of the afternoon attempting to download the installer, it finally completed without error.

I set up a separate partition on my hard drive and installed it.

Very pretty. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

After about an hour, I got bored. There isn’t much I could do with it, because I only allotted a 60GB partition, and while I might’ve been able to reinstall all my applications, it definitely wouldn’t hold all my data, and frankly I just couldn’t deal with all that bother anyway.

I have too much on my internal drive to just split it down the middle and restore everything from Time Machine, so I decided to load it on an external drive.

That worked fine. It was impossibly slow, but I verified that everything worked.

After creating a complete backup of the existing internal Mavericks drive, I threw all caution to the wind and ignoring all published warnings, I then loaded Yosemite on the main drive.

So far, so good. The only issue I’ve run into is that the GUI interface of my VPN service didn’t work. That’s not a big deal, as I was able to set up a direct VPN connection in the OS.

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Blast from the Past

My sister is still going through our Dad’s belongings, and over the past few weeks she’s been sending me the detritus of his electronic life. Boxes full of diskettes, CDROMs and Zip (!) disks have been arriving with disturbing regularity. They’re all coming Priority Mail, which makes no sense whatsoever, other than by spending an exorbitant amount to ship this stuff to me (instead of waiting until September when I’m in Phoenix and can ship the stuff myself), it’s her passive-aggressive way of guilting me for not being able to come coming down for Dad’s ash scattering last fall.

The other day a banker box arrived and I still don’t understand why the postman decided to stuff it into one of the parcel boxes instead of leaving it at the leasing office. I was barely able to get it out and by the time I finally freed it from the box, I was cursing out my sister for spending $25 to send this…whatever it was.

It turns out I shouldn’t have been so quick to judgment. While I was initially disappointed when opening the box and seeing Dad’s old wool Navy blanket (something I’d told her repeatedly I didn’t want), I dug deeper and found a small oil painting Dad had done of me as a baby and—this was an OH MY GOD moment—my old commercial aviation scrapbook from when I was a kid.

This was something I’d completely forgotten about, but seeing it’s bright orange cover jogged that memory in an instant. As I gingerly opened the cover and saw the very first page plastered with Airline logos from the late 60s and early 70s, it all came flooding back.

Among the newspaper clippings, hand-drawn airplanes, airline advertisements, box covers from the models I’d built, boarding passes and printed paper schedules, were a dozen or so photographs I’d taken from the observation deck of Sky Harbor Airport. (This was pre-jetway Sky Harbor, when you actually got to talk on the tarmac to get on an airplane; back when there was an outside observation deck!) Being 40-plus years old, the photos were faded and discolored, but through the modern day magic of Photoshop, I was able to return them to their former glory.

Remember PSA?
Remember Western?
That’s a Delta DC-9 and a Frontier 737 behind that Western 727.
Air California, acquired by American in 1987,

And then there was the day the first 747 landed in Phoenix. It was a very big day as I recall, as the mayor came out to greet it as well the full media complement. I had seen a PanAm 747 from a distance when we’d flown through O’Hare earlier that year and I was in awe. How could anything that big actually fly?

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Moving

In a little more than a month, Ben and I will be moving.

Again.

No…not out of Denver (that is still two years away), but simply into a smaller, cheaper apartment.

While I’m looking forward to the monthly cost savings this move will provide, just thinking about the actual process of getting from here to there has me wide awake and blogging at 4:30 in the morning.

Like most young people, when I was in my 20s it seemed that I moved every six months. And to be honest,  I loved it. It was an adventure; a new place, a new neighborhood. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to loathe the whole process. Once I’d moved back to Phoenix from San Francisco, I moved only twice—and one of those moves was simply to a different unit in the same complex—over a span of eight years. I like being settled, but with the arrival of our annual $100/month rent increase notice a few weeks ago, the cost-to-benefit ratio of staying in our current apartment for another two years simply didn’t make any sense. Both of us are already stretched financially; we’re no longer using that second bedroom, and its Pepto-Bismol stained carpet is a constant reminder that we need to get out of here and into somewhere that’s totally free of the bad juju of the past year.

We looked at several other places. We wanted a location about halfway between both our jobs, but it seems everything built in the Englewood/Tech Center area of Denver was designed with ridiculously overpaid urban professionals in mind; a demographic that apparently owns nothing more than a love seat and a twin-size bed and doesn’t mind paying an exorbitant amount of money for living in an oversized coat closet.

I’m sorry, but we have stuff. Not an inordinate amount, but even with a bit of extra room that would be available in a separate garage, we need more storage in the unit than what is being offered these days.

Fortunately, we finally found a place that met all our requirements about a mile and a half from our current location. It was built only a few years ago and the rent is what we were hoping to pay. It’s not perfect; we’re back on the third floor and we’ll be giving up our current faux-wood floors for a return to carpet throughout, but it’s gotten excellent online reviews (in stark contrast to our current complex), and it’s conveniently located adjacent to a light rail stop for my snow day commutes.

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America’s Next Rocket

NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS, will be the most powerful rocket in history. The flexible, evolvable design of this advanced, heavy-lift launch vehicle will meet a variety of crew and cargo mission needs.

In addition to carrying the Orion spacecraft, SLS will transfer important cargo, equipment and science experiments to deep space, providing the nation with a safe, affordable and sustainable means to expand our reach in the solar system. It will allow astronauts aboard Orion to explore multiple deep-space destinations including an asteroid and ultimately Mars.

The first configuration of the SLS launch vehicle will have a 70-metric-ton (77-ton) lift capacity and carry an uncrewed Orion spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit to test the performance of the integrated system. As the SLS is evolved, it will be the most powerful rocket ever built and provide an unprecedented lift capability of 130 metric tons (143 tons) to enable missions even farther into our solar system.

On the anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, I can’t tell you how much this excites me.

Source: nasa.gov