AmyGeek (n): Female who tends to be distracted by shiny gadgets; dedicated supporter of wit, humor and sarcasm; somewhat neurotic New Yorker who wandered Lost Angeles for a while and has now relocated to the Seattle area.
EVER met someone who was rich for a really annoying reason? Someone who flipped his condos just before the sub-prime crash? A trader who made millions betting his employer's money in a bull market but is so stupid he thinks the London underground is a political movement? So much is down to dumb luck. For all those who feel hard done by, read this story from Michael Mauboussin, the strategist at Legg Mason and contemplate the unfairness of life.
For almost two centuries, Spain has hosted an enomously popular Christmas lottery. Based on payout, it is the biggest lottery in the world and nearly all Spaniards play. In the mid 1970s, a man sought a ticket with the last two digits ending in 48. He found a ticket, bought it, and then won the lottery. When asked why he was so intent on finding that number, he replied "I dreamed of the number seven for seven straignt nights. And 7 times 7 is 48."
Reader Jim (aka Prup), a friend and frequent commenter at Cogitamus--and someone who does have a few differences with me about Sarah Palin's motivations as well as those of the mainstream media journalists who to this day have not investigated the ex-governor's strange, inconsistency and lie-filled stories* surrounding what has come to be known as Babygate--has written a terrific set of questions designed to get Palin supporters thinking.**
Thank you, Jim. Take it away...
Ten Questions for Sarah Palin's supporters who are also mothers:
1. If you were a state governor who was eight months pregnant--and remember, Sarah Palin already knew hers was a high-risk pregnancy because of her age (44) and, according to her book, her baby having been diagnosed via amniocentesis as having Down syndrome--and you were scheduled to fly some 4,000 miles from home to give a speech at a conference, would you (a) give your speech from home via teleconferencing, using modern real-time technology, and explain to your hosts that the high-risk nature and advanced stage of your pregnancy made you reluctant to fly; or, alternatively, send the deputy governor to give your speech or (b) dismiss any staff or security slated to fly with you and insist on flying 4,000 miles to the conference yourself?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
2. If, while attending this conference, you experienced leaking amniotic fluid and felt early contractions on the morning before you were scheduled to speak, would you (a) hand the speech to someone else, ask him or her to give it on your behalf, and go straight to the nearest hospital--one that was equipped for handling high-risk mothers, premature births, and special-needs infants--and get yourself checked out by a doctor or (b) continue with your day and give the speech anyway?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
3. After giving the speech, would you then, immediately afterward, (a) go directly to the nearest suitably-equipped hospital or (b) insist on going to the airport and proceed to get on the first of two several-hours-long commercial flights--airplanes on board which there would be no lifesaving equipment or stored blood should you go into hard labor and experience pre-eclampsia or hemorrhage, no sterile environment, and no high-risk obstetrician attending you--in order to be able to say the baby was born in your home state?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
4. At the conclusion of that first flight, would you then, upon landing and deplaning, (a) go directly to the nearest hospital in the connecting city as fast as possible, even commandeering MediVac transport if necessary or (b) take another flight lasting several hours, in order to continue heading home?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
5. At the conclusion of the second flight, would you (a) go immediately to either of two nearby hospitals with fully equipped NICU's (neonatal intensive care units), or (b) embark on a one-hour drive through dark, snowy, and winding roads in order to get to your hometown regional hospital--a facility that is not equipped to handle high-risk pregnancies, special needs or premature babies, or even twins?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
6. If you were the governor of a state and the mother of two teenage daughters--and you were well-known and widely regarded for your espousing of conservative Christian family values--would you (a) make a special effort to impress upon your daughters the responsibilities they had as members of the state's "First Family" or (b) allow one of your underage daughters to have her boyfriend "practically living in the house", fully aware they were having sexual relations, which fact would eventually be established in no uncertain terms when the two teens conceived a pregnancy?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
7. If, in addition to your to your seventeen-year-old and thirteen-year-old daughters, your household also included a seven-year-old daughter, and both girls would certainly be aware of their older sister's boyfriend's routine overnight stays--the elder one undoubtedly knowing the reason for same--would your answer to the last question (a) change or (b) remain the same.
Sarah Palin chose (b).
8. Upon your return to the office, when your premature infant is three days old, would you (a) keep him at home in the care of a baby nurse, where he can receive UV light treatment for his jaundice along with careful monitoring, should he develop any complications due his congenital heart defect; and as your staff will be excited for you, take some family baby pictures to work, thus avoiding the dangers of exposing such a vulnerable baby to the germ-filled environment of your office or (b) bring him with you to the office so you can show him off for photo opportunities?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
9. If, when your infant with special needs was a few months old, you were to be offered a high-ranking position--say, the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket--which would entail your being away from home for a few months and place you squarely in the limelight of a high-profile campaign; and at approximately the same time as this offer was made, you were to discover that your minor daughter was pregnant, would you (a) politely decline the position, citing 'family reasons', and set about protecting your daughter's privacy as your family worked through the situation and planned the best course of action for your child and future grandchild, doing your best to deflect unwanted press attention all the while or (b) accept the position "without blinking", and then parade your entire family--including your obviouly pregnant minor daughter and her boyfriend--into the bright lights and onto the international stage of the Republican Convention?
Sarah Palin chose (b).
10. Does Sarah Palin embody your definition of "Family Values?"
(a) yes or (b) no. And you choose..?
* All particulars reflect on-the-record occurrences, ages, timelines, and events, and specific details as reported by Sarah Palin herself are taken from her own autobiography and/or interviews.
** You are welcome to copy-paste or otherwise forward the contents of this post.--Ed.
The steep slope and precarious stairway between Alaskan Way and Western Avenue can be difficult for humans to navigate (especially after a few drinks). Now imagine trying to mow the sucker.
The Seattle Department of Transportation has called in a fleet of brush control specialists with four-chambered stomachs and an unstoppable desire to devour grass, weeds, thorny vines and various other forms of vegetation.
A herd of 60 goats is spending the week taking down the overgrown brambles and foliage currently choking the Pine Street Hill Climb and creating a secluded haven for illicit activities. The goats come from the awesomely named Rent-a-Ruminant, and apparently each and every animal has a name.
Portable fencing helps direct the goats to the areas requiring their utmost attention. And, according to the company's website, a "goat wrangler" is on hand to provide water and nutritional supplements for whatever essential vitamins you don't get from a diet of ivy and thorny vines.
The city expects the goats to be in place through Friday; the Pine Street Hill Climb will be closed until their work is complete.
Goat-based maintenance has been around for years--not surprise in a city with steep hillsides, fast-growing foliage and an aversion to chemical pesticides. Ravenous ruminants have cleaned up land for the University of Washington and various Seattle neighborhoods.
She’s definitely settling in. She’s very comfortable here in the house and came to work yesterday and was really good. She was not comfortable with the first few people who came into my office to meet her, but by mid morning she let Robert pet her and then grabbed her ball and hid it from him.
By afternoon, she was letting people pet her while she laid on a chair. She wasn’t enjoying it all that much, but she wasn’t running away, so I think that’s progress. I think she’s going to get more and more comfortable with strangers as she meets more nice, loving people with me (cause all my people are nice and loving, of course).
Well, Shoshanna and I drove up to Calgary (700 miles each way) to pick up Roxie. The drive was pretty good – we drove up through the Canadian Rockies, which are beautiful. We drove for about 8 hours on Wednesday and arrived in Calgary around 5pm on Thursday.
Met Roxie, her foster mom and her dogs. Roxie was very freaked out – she was barking and hiding from us. She was eventually coaxed out and she sat next to me & let me pet her, but she wasn’t really into it. We ended up going to the dog park & watching her run around.
Her foster mom was seriously attached to her – crying and stuff when we were leaving, which made it really hard. But she was great in the car – I had brought her new bed for her to lie in and she just laid down in it and was quiet. When Shosh & I left her in the car to run to the bathroom, she was patient and waited for us.
We snuck into a motel that didn’t allow dogs on Thursday night. I carried her up to our room & while we were waiting for Shosh to bring up our stuff, she jumped on the bed, let me pet her & licked my face. That was a good sign.
Drove home through Idaho (by the way – in Canada, there are “Animal Crossing” signs. In Idaho, there are “Game Crossing” signs) and got back around 8pm on Friday. We headed right to the dog park because we all needed a stretch after 10 hours in the car. Some friends met us there but she was extremely timid around them. She would run ahead a little and then run back to me and then run and run back to me – she definitely knows I’m her person.
I’m hoping that as I bring her with me to run errands and just out in the world in general and she meets more nice people, she will become less shy. We started yesterday by going to the fancy dog supply store & hanging out there for a bit, then we went to Chipotle where she quietly sat by my feet while I ate lunch, then to the car wash (lots of crazy noises) and finally back to the dog park, where she seemed more comfortable.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney is recuperating from surgery to implant the kind of mechanical pump now being given to a small but growing number of people with heart failure so severe that they would most likely die within a few months without it.
The pumps are partial artificial hearts known as ventricular assist devices, and they come in various models. Mr. Cheney’s kind is about the size of a D battery and leaves most recipients without a pulse because it pushes blood continuously instead of mimicking the heart’s own pulsatile beat. Most such pulse-less patients feel nothing unusual. But they are urged to wear bracelets or other identifications to alert emergency room doctors as to why they have no pulse.
It should be pointed out (again) that the “Ground Zero mosque” these idiots are ranting about is actually a proposed community center with an auditorium, swimming pool, and restaurants, in addition to a mosque. It would be housed in an existing 13-story building that’s two blocks away from Ground Zero and has no view of the area; there are two very big buildings in between the proposed community center and Ground Zero. Here is an embedded Google Map in which you can clearly see that the idea of this being a “Ground Zero mosque” is a ridiculous paranoid fantasy.
This kind of deception really needs to be refudiated.
Went to meet a friend tonight and found a note that the Tardy Girl had left in my car telling me she loves me. That made me sad but I shook it off. Then while we were eating (not very good) Vietnamese food, we started talking about Gus the dog and how important he was to me. The most important thing he did was that he helped open up my heart. And of course that made me very teary.
Then I came home and watched the (dopey) Real L Word. Now, it's not a particularly good tv show and I generally avoid "reality" tv, but whatever. It's pretty lesbians making out 'n stuff. Most of them are paired up and that made me long for something - at first I thought I was really missing the Tardy Girl but then I started wondering if it was really her I miss or having someone in my life that I love and who loves me. I think it's probably that, which is the only thing that kept me from texting her and asking her to come over tonight.
I haven't had any contact with her since we finalized things and generally it hasn't been too bad. I think that if I hadn't lost Gus at the same time, this would have been a much more significant (and painful) event for me. It's just that losing Gus was such a major life event that the end of the relationship just didn't compare.
I did break down and sign up on an online dating site. And I decided that I would respond to the women who contacted me there even if I didn't initially think that they were a match. I think I need to get better at meeting new people & going on dates and stuff like that. I also think that I need to give people a chance - the same way I think that they need to give me a chance. And a couple of women have reached out to me there, which is nice.
And I'm going to pick up Roxie this week. I'm super excited, but that's probably also making me sad about Gus because it's a big sign that I'm moving on. This really is the begining of a new phase of my life. It's exciting and sad simultaneously.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen quite a few social networks come and go. The ones that have stayed strong (Twitter and Facebook, primarily) have done so because they focus primarily on a couple of things and doing them extremely well. miio is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of Twitter, while expanding into features of Facebook and even FriendFeed. So far, I really like what I see because it appears to be built from the ground up to be a centralized place that you can use feed to Twitter or any site that will accept incoming RSS.
The site is broken down in to 3 primary sections, so here’s a detail on each
Status Updates
Unlike Twitter, where your updates are generally a few words and maybe a picture, miio goes further to provide you the ability to do much more:
Reviews
Questions
Links
Photos
Videos
Locations
Each of these has the appropriate entry fields to make them viable, but they also each have a Metadata box that really makes it interesting. All of this metadata gets sorted by miio to help make up the other sections of the site.
Categories
While Twitter Search is amazingly handy, it’s often very noisy. The Categories section of miio appears to be headed toward something that’s much more organized. As the site goes through the metadata of each post, it’s thrown into the appropriate category.
Within each category, you’re able to search for the Newest, Most Discussed and Most Shared posts. This breakdown of search is what really sets miio apart in terms of its content being relevant to what you’re trying to find.
Groups
One of the biggest things to hit FriendFeed was Groups. I’ll venture a guess and say that it will be the same result for miio. Each Group represents a main theme (such as Music or Sports) and then there are sub-groups within them.
Group owners have the ability to set permissions for public or private, as well as giving some detail about its contents. Pretty much standard fare, but it’s a really organized system that all looks very slick.
Overall
I’m pretty excited about what miio has going on. To be honest, I miss FriendFeed because it quickly devolved into an ego-driven mess. While miio isn’t necessarily safe from this same fate, its “value-added” features certainly give it enough of a solid foundation to stand on even if things get messy.
The end result? I’m on miio, I’m using it to feed my Twitter and so far I’m loving it. But, miio needs more users in order to really thrive. Right now the suggested list is filled with RSS feeds. While there’s nothing wrong with that, you just won’t get better content than user-generated.
So come join me. You’ll find me at http://miio.com/bradmccarty Interested in more social media news and discussion? Join TNW Social Media on Facebook and Twitter, or grab our RSS feed here.
okay, I'm checking this out. As usual, I'm amygeek if you want to find me.
I don’t watch any of the late night chat shows. I mean, I do record Jon Stewart & Colbert so I guess I sorta do, but I have never been a regular watcher of the Tonight Show (with any of its hosts), Letterman, O’Brien or even Craig Ferguson. I do really like Conan & Craig Ferguson a lot though – it’s just that I don’t have an interest in that kind of show. I think that those two stand out because they don’t go for the lowest common denominator type of humor and talk to their audience as if they had some type of intelligence. Jay especially is just oh so white bread. Not interesting at all.
And while many of the vapid guests are pretty to look at (and I do occasionally record these shows when a particularly pretty (or interesting) guest is on, I just don’t find myself interested in listening to them pitch their newest flick.
I was however, really disheartened by the way that Conan O’Brien was treated by NBC and even felt bad about not watching the show and showing that I supported him. And recently, I was happy to hear that the Tonight Show with Jay Leno’s ratings are lower than they were with Conan. Stupid, shortsighted American corporation comes to the rescue again. Yay capitalism.
Anyhoo – this all leads up to an interesting blog post about a (three hour?!?!) talk Conan gave recently in San Francisco about how the internet has changed the media biz.
“Those men behind the curtain—the great and powerful Oz—are scared shitless right now,” O’Brien said, adding that the chaos is so high that anyone in the audience could just as likely be running a major network in a few years. O’Brien opened by saying he was choosing to see opportunity in the volatility in his business, but over the next few hours it was clear that it wasn’t that simple.
…
O’Brien talked about when he got the Late Night Show job in 1993. He was so unknown that no one could find a photo of him to run with the news story. Imagine: No TwitPic, no Facebook profile image, no Flickr—nothing. Newspapers ran a gritty image they snapped from the television screen instead. And it took him several days to get a photo together to send out.
Today, anyone with his level of experience at the time would have thousands of clips from YouTube, from tried-and-failed cable shows, live video from standup gigs, maybe an appearance from a Funny or Die skit, not to mention thousands of images online. On the one hand, he said it had opened up opportunity for funny people everywhere, especially women, African Americans and other minorities that don’t get as many plum jobs in the entertainment world. But on the other hand, if he were up for that job today, he admits there’s so much competition he probably wouldn’t have been given a shot.
…
He said several times how much people loving his work enough to support him – even if that support was a mere two-second Tweet for “Team Coco”—meant to him and how it kept him going.
It seems that the members of the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church aren't very happy about the San Diego Comic-Con. According to them, it's a gathering of lost souls who are obsessively worshipping false idols like Batman:
Are you kidding?! If these people would spend even some of the energy that they spend on these comic books, reading the Bible, well no high hopes here. They have turned comic book characters into idols, and worship them they do! Isaiah 2:8 Their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made: 9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not. It is time to put away the silly vanities and turn to God like you mean it. The destruction of this nation is imminent - so start calling on Batman and Superman now, see if they can pull you from the mess that you have created with all your silly idolatry.
Members of the church intend on staging a 45-minute protest during one of the least busy days of the convention in order to get everyone back on the right track. [Blastr via Nerd Bastards]
Send an email to Rosa Golijan, the author of this post, at rgolijan@gizmodo.com.
Seriously, these Westboro Baptist Church people have totally lost their minds. I mean, they're losing focus here - they're supposed to be hating the gays and now they're all distracted by nerds?
Stuck with one of those non-magical iPhone 4s? Sad that, despite the beautiful retina display, the faster internet speeds, the longer battery life and the 5MP camera, you might experience a drop in signal strength when you hold it wrong?
Then iTape is for you. This innovative roll of Scotch-tape will boost the signal of an iPhone 4 when slapped over the problematic bottom-left corner of the antenna-band. In fact, the tape is simply a roll bought from the hardware store and put up on Ebay, along with the fancy picture above.
The seller, Jason Nolasco, isn’t trying to scam you: All proceeds from this practical joke go to the American Cancer Society (or so it says on the Ebay listing). Even if you aren’t interested in a $3.50 roll of iTape, you should check out the page just to see the great spoof slideshow detailing its features.
Black available now, white shipping in July (har har).
Well, I’m back from my diversion also known as Kona. It was a good, extremely quiet trip. I stayed with Alexa for a few days and then with Matthew & Kara & their collection of three limbed creatures (actually, it’s only two out of three creatures but I’m kinda nervous that the last one may end up missing a limb if it misbehaves).
I got to cuddle a bunch with Zippy the dog but Rose the dog would forget she wasn’t scared of me until each evening and then would maybe let me pet her a little at night. Then she’d forget again the next day and we had to start all over again. Mugwai the three legged cat is a HUGE cuddler and slept with me each night, which was great. She was my first fuzzy friend to sleep with me since Gus died.
I didn’t bring my fancy camera with me but did shoot a few pix with my little camera. I just ordered a demi-fancy every day camera to replace my carry around camera. It lets you do all kinds of cool manual stuff but it’s definitely bigger than the little one I’ve been carrying around with me. I’m looking forward to it arriving though – comes on Friday – Yay! It should be way fun when I don’t feel like carrying the entire SLR rig with me.
Anyhoo, I did some diving (did a black water night dive and saw pretty much everything in this video – including the rare Pelagic Hawaiian Seahorse, which made me super-happy). We go out about 3 miles offshore at night and jump into the water with flashlights. We only go down about 50 feet, but we’re in 3,000 feet of water watching the deep sea creatures and larvae come up to feed. It’s an unusual type of diving but I love it. Everything is bizarre and unknown and weird. My kinda world.
(Matthew shot that video in case you’re wondering)…
And in totally unrelated news, you HAVE to watch this video Matthew shot on a black water night dive – stick with it to the end which I find hysterical.
and a Manta night dive where we saw about ten feeding Manta Rays: Manta Ray Night DIve
It was actually way better than this cause we had so many Manta Rays. I’ve seen them in the water before and even seen them feeding, but not like this. They (the dive boat operator people) set up lights on the ocean floor (about 40 feet deep) pointing upward to attract plankton. It gets dark, the lights are on and the plankton come. The Manta Rays come to feed on them. Divers go down and sit/hover/try to get comfortable in the sand around the lights. We point our flashlights up to attract more plankton.
The snorkelers are above us pointing their lights down. The Mantas swoop between us – seriously, they were swimming/flying inches above me. It was friggin’ amazing (and a bit of a circus – there were 12 boats there and a bazillion people. I’m glad I got to experience it, but not sure I’d rush to do it again.).
Note: videos are not from my actual dives, but give you an idea of what I was up to. Or seeing. Or whatever.
I read a bunch of books, napped, hung out with my friends, drove around the island, wandered some galleries (discovered some new ones but didn’t buy any art), bought some more fresh Kona coffee for the house, went to a (seriously) hippie farm, stayed at a (seriously) hippie “temple”, ate fresh Ono fish & chips (um…yum) and basically did nothing. It was pretty great.
I’m back home now and while the house is super quiet without Gus the dog and Always Tardy Girl, it’s not making me totally depressed any more. I do miss them (especially Gus – hey, he was around for 10 years and she was only around for 2 – or whatever).
Microsoft's improvements to its Worldwide Telescope project include tons of additional Mars images from NASA.
(Credit: Courtesy of Microsoft/NASA)
Microsoft has made a number of improvements to its Worldwide Telescope project, including partnering with NASA to offer much better imagery of the planet Mars.
In some cases, the imagery lets you get close enough to see details such as the tracks left by the Mars rovers.
"You can see the boulders and things like that," Dan Fay, director of Earth, Energy, and Environment for Microsoft Research. Microsoft previously teamed with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a Mars project that let youngsters and other space enthusiasts help count and label craters on the planet's surface.
With these changes, the telescope will gain several different new views of Mars as well as guided tours from some of NASA's experts on Earth's neighbor.
The addition of Mars imagery is one of several changes to the telescope that Microsoft is showing off Monday at its annual Faculty Summit meeting with outside researchers.
Other improvements to the telescope include an effort to add an improved spherical image of the full sky and make the seams between individual still images much less visible.
In all, the telescope is now based on a terapixel image of the known universe. To put that in relative terms, Fay said it would take 500,000 HDTVs to show the image in its full fidelity.
"We don't think there are any other images that are larger than this," he said.
Well, I’ve been in Kona for a week now and it’s been a very relaxing time. I’ve been staying with friends and sleeping in and surfing the web and scuba diving and reading. My friends have to work ‘n stuff (oddly enough. This is real life for them), but I’m fine just wandering around during the day.
I’m staying with some friends now that have several animals (two of the three of their animals only have 3 limbs. Hmmm….) and that has been nice for me. I’ve been spending a lot of time cuddling with the dog that isn’t afraid of me and the three legged kitty has been sleeping with me and she’s a huge cuddler. I miss that a lot.
Got all sad about Gus twice so far this week.Gus was my companion and in my life on a daily basis for almost ten years. I know it’s not the same as a person, of course – losing a partner, a child or a parent must be a completely different experience, but for me – he’s been the one constant in my life for a decade. And every now and then I remember that he’s gone forever and it makes me so sad.
I know that with time, it will get easier and there’s no replacement for time. This Saturday will be a month since he died. I asked a friend here on the island who is a woodworker to make a box for Gus’ ashes. I think that would be better than the default thingy they gave me.
I’m sad about the Tardy Girl too, but I think that losing Gus is such a major event for me that it’s really distracted me from focusing on that situation so much, which is a good thing.
Anyhoo, I’m doing laundry, reading the interwebs and considering showering. You know – vacation!
Flights to Kona were pretty uneventful, which pretty much works for me. I had a direct flight from Seattle to Maui, then an hour layover and then a quick (25 minute) flight to Kona.
My bags came out pretty quickly, little Hertz mishap which resulted in a car upgrade and went to visit Matthew at his shop. He’s my buddy in sarcasm. He also checked out my regulator see if it needed to be serviced before I could go diving (it’s fine, in case you were wondering). Hung with him for a while, met up with Alexa, stopped by Costco for a case of water and headed up to Alexa’s house (aka: the Hula Hut).
She lives up on Hualalai at about 1,800 feet above sea level overlooking the town of Kona & the ocean. It’s quiet up here – no tv and I had to unplug her computer to log on with my kewl little netbook.
We went out for dinner & checked out the miniature horses at the house down the road. There’s a baby about 6 weeks old and I approached her and she came up to me and let me pet her which was really cool. In the midde of our touching bonding moment, I got electrocuted from the fence I sticking my hand through (that was the moment I realized it was an electric fence) & the shock transferred through me and to the poor baby horse. I don’t know that we’ll ever have another “moment”.
I was in bed by 9:30. Read and then slept until almost 10, so I was obviously run down.
It’s been a quiet day here today. I wandered the interwebs, did a little bit of work and then ran some errands. I did manage to score some Ono fish & chips for lunch (yum! fresh Ono), dropped off my dive computer to have the battery replaced, sat by the ocean & read a book and just generally relaxed.
I’ve been coming to this island since 1993 – from the best of my estimation, I’ve been here more than 40 times. It really is a second home to me. I was driving back to Alexa’s and I got sad cause I wanted to call the Tardy Girl. I love this place so much and I want to share it with someone, ya know? I behaved and did not make the call, but there has to be an interesting, fun woman who wants to be taken to Hawaii for fun & adventure, right? (and who will love & appreciate my oddities and sense of humor.) Sigh.
First dive tonight. It’s a black water night dive (aka pelagic dive). I’ve done this dive once before & it was incredible. Basically, you wait until the sun goes down & it’s nice & dark and then you jump into (very deep – 3,000 foot or so) water. It’s pitch black except for the light of your flashlight & you’re tethered (tied) to the boat so that you don’t get lost. The animals come up to feed from the deep & they look like space creatures. Take a look at the video on the black water link above. It’s a great experience, but not for the faint of heart (or new divers).
Here are a few pix I took today:
Baby miniature horse before I scared the crap out of her:
Ribs the dog (she has another name, but Alexa calls her “Ribs”). She wanders the neighborhood.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen quite a few social networks come and go. The ones that have stayed strong (Twitter and Facebook, primarily) have done so because they focus primarily on a couple of things and doing them extremely well.
While Twitter Search is amazingly handy, it’s often very noisy. The Categories section of miio appears to be headed toward something that’s much more organized. As the site goes through the metadata of each post, it’s thrown into the appropriate category.
One of the biggest things to hit FriendFeed was Groups. I’ll venture a guess and say that it will be the same result for miio. Each Group represents a main theme (such as Music or Sports) and then there are sub-groups within them.
It seems that the members of the Topeka, Kansas-based 
Posts
