Chameleon

Wife has a Largan Chameleon digital camera from about 8 or 9 years ago.  Most of the indicator words next to buttons have worn off. It has a female USB A port, meaning it needs a male to male USB A cable. With no zoom or any manual settings of any kind it takes the most unusual photos. It was a gift from Wife's grandfather and I'm pretty sure it came free when he bought a machine for work. It went everywhere because of its size, but also because it had no monetary value, here you can see it braving the rain in Saint Kitts.

This camera is famous for being difficult to install with hard to find drivers.  There are no Win 7 drivers. It barely detects when plugged in to the computer.  Thanks to XP mode in Win 7 Ultimate I was able to fire up an XP machine and install the camera and grab what's left of the 51 pictures!  Unfortunately they're in pretty rough shape and they're all in variations of this masterpiece.

Cheers for XP mode at least.

Diabolical sound coming through your speaker.

It's an almost daily occurrence.  I'm sitting at a red light aiming to go straight, the light turns green and the driver on the other side of the intersection turning left jets out, ignoring right-of-way, in front of me like it's cool.  This annoys me when I'm by myself because I really like my car. When Wife is in the car it makes me furious, they're now putting my family at risk. What are my options? Usually just a long sounding of the horn.

I am impotent.

Motivation

There are lots things to help procrastinate, computer gaming, Internet, welfare, wealthy parents, low standards, solitude. It's often difficult to find motivation to get better, to budget your time and take everything in moderation.  Solid parenting & family, strong culture and a strong dream can help give you a handle on how to work for greater longterm gain instead of a smaller immediate gratification payoff but there are lots of things fighting against that.

School is becoming more and more a daycare holding pattern than a place for learning. College is works sheets, not fostering innovation.

For many Fight Club was a big inspiration. If it takes a meme to motivate you, that's fine too. Sometimes having a clear picture of what you want for your future. Maybe a partner can be your muse.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret

I think what really matters is that you find something that motivates you. I don't really care if it's a book, movie, money, boys & girls or meme.  As long as it gets you to do something it's worthwhile.

One person's trash is another person's garbage

The last few months have seen us pretty poor money wise while I look for work.  However we live adjacent to an apartment building which is the last in a line of four apartment buildings. So many people live in such a small parcel of land, it's awesome. People here like to throw away things that are perfectly good. They don't have a use for them so they place it neatly in the dumpster, problem solved! Right?

This much population density and this attitude toward stuff means free stuff for me:

• 1 x coffee table holding my server, printer and misc
• 2 x trash cans, one in use, one in basement
• 1 x deck chair on the... porch
• 1 x silverware organizer
• 2 x small stands / foot stool. used to elevate our LCDs
• 5 x milk crates doing everything a milk crate does best
• 1 x foot locker with children's toys. Locker is in excellent condition too. Most of the toys were passed to my aunt who works with kids with disabilities. 
• 1 x metal bowl, probably a base for a Xmas tree, now holding a plant

It's pretty awesome. Some stuff I put on Freecycle but because we can't afford stuff for ourselves right now I end up using most of what I find. Either way, it stays out of the dump and sometimes it finds an awesome home.

Today I found a hibachi grill, a tiny little guy sitting on the top in th dumpster.  It was a little dirty but that's it.  I spent the afternoon cleaning it and am now looking forward to grilling food this summer.

Hell

Right here in front of me and in my kitchen.
I reached for a lid, but couldn't find one. Turns out, that was the time to sort through this mess, right as dinner was ready to serve.  I pruned about 1/3 from the pile. I had containers with no lids, lids with no containers. Ridiculous.

I'm all for reusing containers but when I buy the yogurt on sale it means I get different brands and different brands think it's awesome to have differently shaped containers.

In other hell news, an apartment dweller on the right parked in front of the renters on the left. When they left this morning they knocked over a trash can into the drive way and didn't stop to pick it up. GG Mass.

Finally

I made lebne for the first time this week!

1. Heat milk until you can keep your finger in it for 10 seconds. 
2. Add it to bowl with starter. 
3. Cover. 
4. Leave over night. 
5. Strain. 
6. Isolate a small portion as next starter.
7. Nom

The land of hate and honey

I moved to MA a little over a month ago and have serious culture shock.  The neighbors above us are passive aggressive not making any effort to introduce themselves and in fact making an effort to avoid any interaction.  One of them ran to his car when he saw me pull in and pulled away quickly before I got out of my car.  None of them take out the trash, the only responsibility that we might share. After taking the trash out Thursday night for Friday pickup we left to Richmond for the weekend, on Monday we returned to find all the containers still sitting on the curb: 4 days later. They make no effort.

Tonight the person driving behind me honked because they felt I wasn't turning soon enough, despite the slushy rain and snow and the consistent traffic. They didn't have their lights on and I was the one not holding up my end of the social contract.

They're nice in person. When they get in their cars they turn in to monsters

The good parts:

• I'm living near my aunt. A relationship who's time for a close proximity has come.
• The price of cheese is zero (on a long enough scale)
• The Italian food is outstanding.  I never thought spaghetti could be outstanding
• My cat
• people say 'wicked'

Migrating from Gmail to GAFYD

I started moved from using Gmail to Google Apps For Your Domain. Here are a few resources if you decided to make the move yourself.

Migrating mail:

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21288

You lose labels if you do it through the web. If you use Outlook it should be flawless, but you need Education(must be a school) or Premiere edition ($50/user/year)

I'm sorting through my thousands of emails relabeling everythign now, using the keyboard shortcuts for the first time and it makes pretty quick work of it.

An excellent resource for migrating from Gmail to Google Apps by someone who's done it. The background is a poor choice and hurts my eyes. http://base6.com/2009/06/15/migrating-from-gmail-to-google-apps/

Contacts, you can export them and import them easily; keeping groups as well.

Calendars can be also exported and imported.

Here is the show stopper for me: the missing features. Last night I was looking for some missing features and came across a thread in Google's Help forum about Buzz in GApps:

Beyond Buzz and Voice, the list is long: Reader, YouTube linking, Google Profiles, Analytics, Latitude, Wave, iGoogle even Google Groups into which you and I are posting right now... these are all services that only work with a Google Account, and don't work (or are mostly broken) with Google Apps accounts.

The poster talks about how Gmail is a free service and gets all the new features and integration and paying Premier members of GApps have to fight for them. This is ultimately what swayed me. As far as I can tell the only advantage for me was signing in and seeing Bazuzi instead of Google in the top left, which, with the new Bazuzi logo from Jan, is pretty cool. I'd then have to wait for all the other features to trickle in. Migrating all those things, and getting friends and family to start following me at a different address along with competing with my gmail address for unique addresses and accounts(already claimed my Google Profile with Gmail) was going to be frustrating and fragment my audience.


I'm sad I won't be using the family domain to log in, but that's it. I still give out my email address as MyFirstName@MyLastName.com and that's pretty cool.