There are 365 days a year. In
* Lest anyone point out the obvious: yes, I know the Home-Run Derby is tonight. However, this is not a game. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
i enjoy seeing people's workplaces. i like seeing what they see all day long, five days a week (sometimes more or less). i also think the little trinkets they hang on their walls at work tells something about them. some workplaces don't allow much personalization, but still those little things creep in and define the person. i decided to take me camera to work and snap a couple pics.
this is my workspace in 220 of the state capitol. the capitol (of which i'll add more pictures later) was renovated from 2004-2008, so this is all new, although the renovation was meant to appear somewhat traditional.
This is the view out my window. i look pretty much straight down State Street towards the south end of the valley. it almost always offers an interesting view.
Here's a couple of the nick-knacks i have around. this dilbert cartoon i've had up since i started working here; it makes me laugh because we have security badges at the capitol to get into various secure offices, and i've seen this happen many times. the gay looking snow man is an orniment a co-worker made which i sort of have to display out of courtesy. 
This chart was given out at a little event i went to recently. It was a black tie affair, something like $1000/plate (i obviously didn't pay) and the guy gave hand-outs. kind of funny. anyone familair with the Book of Mormon will see where this guy got the idea for his handout.
So years ago I had this idea—which I’m sure isn’t original, but I’d never heard it before—of using celebrities for GPS voices. Well, yesterday I pulled up Google news and saw this story: Homer Simpson’s voice is being used for TomTom GPS units. I, like the author of the article, am also holding out for Peter Griffin. But of course my first choice would have to be Morgan Freeman.
There are many other great choices. Joe Pesci, Marisa Tomei, pretty much anyone from the cast of My Cousin Vinny.
So my question is: who would you choose?
As you may or may not know (the media is conspicuously less present in this case then they were during hurricane Katrina) North Dakota is having some massive flooding. Much of the territory looks like New Orleans did with houses and neighborhoods under water, people in boats, etc. However, I just wanted to direct you to these pictures. There are a total of 30 pictures there, 24 of which explicitly show people coming to help rather than being rescued (read the captions and you’ll see many of the photo’s where it looks like truckloads of people are being taken to safety, they are actually being taking in as “volunteers” to help sandbag).
At risk of being called a racist—although my point has nothing to do with race, it’s purely about culture—I’m going to bet that although President Obama has called a state of emergency in North Dakota, we will 1) not be seeing an massive dispatches of outside help and 2) will not be hearing reports of people dying, floating in the ice cold water, neighborhoods being left abandoned for years, looting, rioting and general crime sprees by the general population and congressional investigations into who was responsible for the situation. Look at the third picture from the top. Compare that picture with those of the Super Dome. Those in North Dakota will take care of it. They will not demand billions of dollars in “redevelopment” funds, they’ll just take the situation life has given them and fix it.
The contrast of New Orleans to North Dakota is a perfect example of what happens when entire societies are given everything by the government, when they become dependent on someone else to take care of them. It is a perfect example of a society that has self-reliance and one that doesn’t. While I’m sure most of us would rather take an all expense paid trip to New Orleans than to North Dakota, I feel fairly confident that if we were to be caught in an awful situation like a mass flood, every single one of us would rather have the people of North Dakota in our corner than those of New Orleans. Big Government isn’t the solution to our problems, it is the problem.
I usually don’t cross-post stuff from other websites, but this one was really something else. Time magazine has up some pictures by photographers’ Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre of the crumbling, once classic, architecture of Detroit. There’s a few more photo’s at their website. Below are just a couple of the most shocking, in my opinion.
[H/T The Corner]
Perhaps I’ll have more to say about this later, but
[Source: Breitbart.com; H/T Drudge]
So I’m a pretty big fan of music. I’m also a big fan of the website Pandora. If you’re not familiar with Pandora, check it out. It’s a free service available online. Basically, it provides playlists based on your preference of artist or song, and then finds similar artists or songs that they believe you will like. You can then rate them (thumbs up or thumbs down) and your preferences thereby become more honed.
Last October I upgraded to the iPhone. It is the greatest electronic gadget I’ve ever owned, and I’m a gadget whore. I’ll explain someday, in a future post, why it is the greatest gadget. But the problem I ran into was that I had never used iTunes and all my music was through windows media player. My MP3 player at the time was a Creative Zen 30GB. It was, and is, a great player. However, I have too much music and was due for an upgrade to higher memory capacity so I decided to switch to the iPod. I got the classic 120 GB and so far have loved that too.
One thing I’ve really enjoyed is the making of playlists. ITunes has a feature called “genius” which I have never really used, but seems like it might be some fun. But I like going through the thousands of songs I have and organizing playlists of my own. I make them by artist, genre, mood or subject. For example, I created a playlist the other day called “New York, New York.” Every song in this playlist has something to do with New York. But it’s a pretty diverse playlist, with stuff from Norah Jones, LCD Soundsystem, Moby and Neil Diamond (and of course ending with my favorite Sinatra song, “New York, New York”). Or there’s another playlist I created which is my ultimate U2 concert. It’s comprised of 40 live U2 songs from different eras. I arrange them in a way that I think would make a great concert from beginning to end.
But the point of this post is to pimp a new site I just found out about. It’s called “amplified journey’s” from Harman/Kardon. Its purpose is to come up with playlists based on your road trip. You go to the site, type in where your trip will begin and where it will end and it compiles a playlist, either based on artist or genre. And it can calculate it to give music that will change based on where it estimates you will be. So say I was driving from Salt Lake to San Diego. It would start playing lots of music that has to do with Las Vegas when I got nearer to Sin City. And that would slowly change to stuff about LA as I passed through SoCal and then on to San Diego. There would be enough music for the entire trip. Of course, all this depends on traffic estimates, and being held up for an hour in some traffic jam could mess up the continuity of your entire playlist. It’s still in the beta stage, so expect improvements.
Anyway, I’m a huge music lover and I have a pretty broad library, so it’s always interesting to see a different perspective to songs I love. Check it out.
