Generation gaps and the Internet

I just stumbled across a blog by an elderly man in Nova Scotia. He's 93 and has a blog AND a Wikipedia page.

I'm more amazed by the fact of his net-presence than the actual writing. It's just so shocking I guess that someone that old would know or care about blogs and Wikipedia, and really incredible that he's using these mediums to give himself some virtual immortality, and maybe to bridge a huge generation.

I kind of wish all my elderly relatives would start a blog now. Not necessarily for the typical day to day life stuff, but just to share their thoughts on their lives and the world.

Happy "Most Miserable Day of the Year" Day!

(Written in the style of www.girlsarepretty.com, it's just so fitting).

Today is January 22nd. The daylight is short, the temperatures are frigid, snow has been on the ground for as long as you can remember and there's a couple months more of it to come. Your Christmas credit card bills are due, your children and family have all left to go back to their lives, and you have no events in the near future left to plan for. Even "studies" have shown today, January 22nd, to be the most miserable day of the year.

Happy "Most Miserable Day of the Year" day!

Winter, Alaska, and Siberia

I don't know about everyone else, but I am pretty fed up with winter and snow. The Big Blizzard of 2006 happened on 12/20-12/21 2006. A month and 2 days ago. Of course, it's snowed more since then and the temperature has only been above 32 on a couple of days, so the massive piles of compacted, thawed and refrozen snow (I would say 10 feet tall in the parking lot at work) show no sign of going anywhere.

But thankfully, we don't have it as bad as others. About a week ago the temperatures here hovered around -5F through 5'F for about a week when an arctic front came through.

Here's a video made in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the temperature was -45F.

A pan of boiling water thrown into the air, evaporating almost instantly. Video taken in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the UAF campus.

Also, here's a collection of pictures taken by a group traveling across Siberia. The temperature there stays around -50'F.

Why I love foxes so much

This pretty much sums up why I love foxes so much.

(They're a dog and a cat hybrid. All the wonderful dogginess, with the elegance of a cat.)

Cool 3D Face Modeling

In one of my graphics classes in college, I remember being told how difficult computer vision is. Specifically extracting 3D information about an object or scene from just a picture. The technology in this video is probably pretty complex under the hood, but it's done so well that it just looks trivial. That's how you know it's good, I suppose.



Anyway, I can see this tech spreading like wildfire pretty soon. Consider:

• Consumer entertainment: video games, virtual reality, video chat, etc
• Movies/special effects: Modification of actors' age/gender/weight/etc. Add/remove makeup, etc. (Polar Express did this with Tom Hanks). Bringing dead actors back to life for new movies (Superman Returns did this with Marlon Brando).
  
• Security/biometrics: ID a person in a security video or single snapshot more easily
• And we all know the porn industry will jump on pretty quickly. Who says this tech couldn't be applied full body?
  

Deforestation

I don't know why no one ever thought to do this yet, but you can really see the scale and effect of deforestation with Google Maps or Google Earth. Here is a large area in South America where there is pretty much nothing left. It's important when looking at that to zoom in and out and look at the distance scale in the lower left to understand the magnitude.

End to end, that patch of land is roughly 250-300 miles long.
Colorado is roughly 370 miles wide East-West. 280 North-South.

Yikes.

Showing off screenshots

It's that time again, where I've found a look for my desktop that I am quite happy with, and for some reason am motivated to show it off, so without further ado:

Top 10 Martial Arts Moments

Here is a collection of the 10 best martial arts moments. It's a pretty good list: Jet Li is in 3 of them; Jackie Chan in 1 or 2, Karate Kid's famous Crane Kick. Number 9 seems to be the origin of Neo's 1-vs-1000 Smiths fight.

On the iPhone

So, Apple announced the iPhone 2 days ago. It's a buttonless masterpiece. I won't go into the details of what it has and hasn't because that's not the sort of crap I write about. You can hit up the website if you want to see the features.

This post is more an observation about what Apple does to me (and lots of people like me).

First, I dislike Apple. I disliked them for most of my life, and then worked 2 years writing Linux software for Apple hardware and had to deal with Apple quite a bit. I like them even less now. I don't like the way they treat their customers, I don't like that no product of theirs has a model number (try telling someone which revision of a PowerBook you have). I don't like their cockiness. I don't like the user base. I just don't like the Apple experience.

But I also love Apple. Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field" definitely works. I love the beauty of their products, the simplicity in performing the basic tasks. The fact that new machines don't come filled to the brim with useless junk (my mom's new HP desktop had so much in the start menu that the menu wrapped 4 times, filling the screen, and the last column wasn't even visible on screen).

So here's the iPhone. It's an iPod. It's a Phone. It's Revolutionary. It costs $600, *after* signing a 2 year contract with Cingular. It has a full fledged web browser.

But I don't want it. I like my phones and phone services stripped down. No data plans. I pay for 300 min/month and use half of that. Why would I want this beast?

because now that I have seen it, any other phone will make me cringe from it's hideous design.

It's not that I want *this* phone. I want the future that this phone represents.

"Happy Cruelty Day"

I stumbled across a website today, www.girlsarepretty.com, which seems to be the blog version of the book Happy Cruelty Day!. Both are a collection of short (1 page at most) stories that are oddly cruel, depressing, and hilarious.

Some of my favorites so far:
The Santa Who Wasn't Day
Jump Out Of A Plane Day!
Enjoy!

Boredom

Ever have one of those days where you don't have much to do at work, the minutes grind away for 8 hours, and eventually you've done your time and hurry back to the comforts of your home only to realize...

I still have nothing to do. I am still bored. At least I was getting paid to be bored back at work.

Health insurance nightmare continues

Recall, if you will, that I was diagnosed with type 1 Diabetes in August 2006. I started taking 2 forms of insulin every day, and testing my bloodsugar 4-6 times a day. I also began 1 on 1 counseling with the Diabetes Education Center at the local hospital to learn how to manage the whole thing. I checked first that it would be covered by insurance.

Roughly 5 months later now, and my insurance has never covered a test strip (costing me roughly $130/month). Last I've heard is that I need to mail in the receipts and a claim form because it's medical equipment, not medication. Of course, I can't do that yet because no claims I submit will be processed until their medical review board finishes looking at my profile. In other words, either trying to prove Diabetes was a pre-existing condition, or just use red tape to deny paying my claims.

So I ran around to all my current and previous doctors, authorized them to release my medical records to the insurance company, and faxed off a list of doctors required for their review. I thought all was finally moving along.

Earlier this week I received a hospital bill for $800. I called and told them about the situation and they noted it on my account and said not to worry about it.

Lastnight I received a letter from a collection agency on behalf of the hospital, this time for $180. So I called the hospital to explain again. This time I find out that I don't have *one* account at the hospital. I have 6. One for each visit. It's idiotic and I don't understand it, but it's not the problem right now. The problem is that each of the 6 accounts was treated differently by good old Blue Cross.
One was paid.
One was marked to be paid by me as part of the deductable.
Two were pending the medical review completion (which I thought was already done).
The other 2 they simply denied payment for.

The grand total? $1139. Due by me, now. If I ever manage to get Blue Cross to pay for this, I will be reimbursed some of it, but that doesn't help me now.

This is what the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies Insurance Devision is for. You can bet they'll be getting a call from me in the very near future.

I could also burn their building down.

The one that I love

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Ornament

Wibble Sleeping

Wibble Sleeping

My mom's dog Wibble asleep on her lap on Christmas. We'd all been gone all day and she was very happy to curl up and go to sleep once the family was home safe.

Missed Photo Oppertunities

Mordor or Denver?

My drive back to Fort Collins after Christmas was late in the day, and one of those occasions I kick myself later for not taking pictures of.

Here is the only shot I got from the drive. It's looking east, at Denver illuminating the night sky. It reminded me of Mordor. Alas though, there were far more spectacular scenes along the way. Glenwood Canyon is always amazing, especially at night covered in snow.

A few days later (Saturday the 29th) I was going to Erin's parents' house for the afternoon and thought about bringing my camera but decided to leave it at home. Maddie was giving countless adorable snow poses that I missed, and we later went for a drive farther south where the evaporating snow had created a thick fog, which I would have loved to get shots of.

Swimming Pool. Dec Blizzard 2006

Swimming Pool. Dec Blizzard 2006

Believe it or not, this was once my swimming pool. A place to lay out in the sun and feel the heat soak into you, and then jump into the pleasantly cool water.

Now, it's nothing but a slight depression in the snow.

New Blog

Due to my previous blog software (bBlog) being old, it was easily exploited and was causing great pains to my Host. So I am trying a new solution. If it looks like it will work out, I will try to migrate all the old posts over to this.