Hurricane Irene induced photographic beauty

My entire family (as well as my wife’s) live up and down a narrow section of the east coast (from Williamsburg, VA to NYC). With Hurricane Irene, I’ve been a bit concerned about everyone’s safety. As a result, I’ve been reading the accounts on the Washington Post site to keep up with the storm. I came across this little stub and was impressed.

From the washingtonpost.com:

5:08 p.m. Hurricane-induced photographic beauty

The light over the last few days has offered some in­cred­ible conditions for photography. A case in point is this image below, snapped Friday morning at the Alexandria, Va. waterfront. It looks like some surreal drawing rather than an actual photograph:

Twitter moves faster than earthquake

Interesting phenomena about how the internet sometimes can show you a glimpse into your future. Apparently, when the earthquake hit the east coast a few days ago, twitter was flooded with tweets as it was happening. In fact, if you were following tweeps from the Charlottesville area (as I do), and you live say in NYC, you would have been given advanced warning about your potential future.

Now granted, it’s just a few seconds of warning, but still, it’s amazing how twitter has been used to broadcast the Iranian protests against the improprieties that occurred during the last elections, the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Egyptian/Libyan/Algerian/Syrian uprisings and now earthquakes.

Interestingly enough, this was predicted by Randall Munro in a comic he did about a year and a half ago:

7-Eleven Introduces The Hot Dog Flavored Potato Chip: Gothamist

 

Courtesy of the Gothamist

7-Eleven Introduces The Hot Dog Flavored Potato Chip: Gothamist.

Not sure what to make about this. 400 calories packed in 22 chips.

Jobs Quits as CEO of Apple, AAPL stock sell-off begins

Steve Jobs has submitted the following letter of resignation to the Board of Directors of Apple:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

Update: Apple COO Tim Cook will replace Jobs as CEO, as per Jobs’ recommendation. Jobs was also made Chariman of the Board. Tim Cook has filled in for Jobs when he was off for health reasons. This was expected once Jobs decided to to step down.

Update #2: The news immediately affected the stock market. From Bloomberg News:

U.S. stock futures declined after Steve Jobs resigned as chief executive officer of Apple Inc. (AAPL), the world’s second-largest company by market value.

Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures lost 0.4 percent to 1,166.80 at 7:18 p.m. in New York. Nasdaq-100 Index futures fell 1.1 percent. Apple shares dropped 5.2 percent to $356.67. Jobs said he’s resigning and recommended Tim Cook be named his successor. Jobs said he would like to continue as chairman.

Six Before Breakfast: In Which We Are All Woefully Inadequate

Six Before Breakfast: In Which We Are All Woefully Inadequate….an introduction to First Grade.

She’s a friend I’ve known since she was an innocent 14 year old. Now she has a potty mouth and a scathing sense of humor. I’d like to hope I played a small part in her transformation. I would be so proud.

My Love/Hate Relationship with my Therapist

ambivalence
[am-biv-uh-luhns]

Psychology. the coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feelings toward the same person, object, or action, simultaneously drawing him or her in opposite directions.

I’ve been in therapy for about 20 years. I started years ago with an LCSW that I had a good rapport with and continued on until today, where I see a Psychologist. The therapist I was seeing before that was an awesome psychologist and helped me out tremendously, but he retired and so at the beginning of the year, I started seeing someone who he recommended.

It’s always difficult to start a therapist/patient relationship anew. I had been with Dr. C for three years and he KNEW my issues. Hell, he was there at the most difficult part of my life. Now, I was forced to re-hash all the crap to this stranger. The prospect of revisiting past event can be tiring and cathartic at the same time, depending on how the new person interacts with you.

So, as those first few sessions passed, I began to feel comfortable with her. She was my first female therapist and as a female, brought a slightly different approach to the issues at hand. Yes, I understand each individual therapist brings an approach unique to that individual; however, I would argue that there are perspectives a female can bring to a session that a man may not be as aware.

Eight months later, I find myself looking forward to the sessions more and more. There is an interesting dynamic that occurs in the room and a constant give-and-take that I didn’t have with most of my other therapists. I like the challenges she presents and, while it can be infuriating, like her placid demeanor. She’s provided me with insights on issues that were heretofore unaddressed, as well as new impressions on items I had deemed resolved. But that’s not the purpose of the post. I just wanted to get on paper (yes, I know) what me feeling were about this particular therapist;

•  I love/hate my therapist because she takes the time to ponder and mull over before interjecting
•  I love/hate my therapist because she is stoic, even when I’m breaking down
•  I love/hate my therapist because she can never be a friend
•  I love/hate my therapist because she challenges me
•  I love/hate my therapist because she refuses to succumb
•  I love/hate my therapist because she laughs with me
•  I love/hate my therapist because she doesn’t understand me completely but she’s trying
•  I love/hate my therapist because she insists on the invisible barrier
•  I love/hate my therapist because she cares
•  I love/hate my therapist because she doesn’t show it

Untethered 4.3.4/4.3.5 Jailbreak WILL NOT be forthcoming

According to sites around the web, the untethered 4.3.4/4.3.5 jailbreak will NOT be released as the expected 5.0 upgrade is scheduled to be released in September. The focus of all the good people at iDev, GeoHot, Limera1n, etc is on the 5.0 jailbreak.

If you upgraded to 4.3.4/4.3.5 and you saved your SHSH Blobs, you can revert to 4.3.3 and re-jailbreak using RedsnOw or Jailbreakme.com. This jailbreak vector is a PDF vulnerability so make sure you patch that hole after you jailbreak by downloading the PDF Patcher 2 app from Cydia.

If you already upgraded your iOS device saved your SHSH Blobs (here’s a tutorial on how to do so) and you want to restore to the earlier version, you can follow the step by step process on YouTube. Otherwise, DON’T upgrade to 4.3.4/4.3.5 and upgrade to 5.0 when the jailbreak is announced. good luck!

Mother bear kills cub and then itself

One of the most depressing and sad stories about animals I’ve heard in a long time. Before we condemn the Chinese, let’s remember what we put young cows through for the sake of veal.

From AsiaOne:

Mother bear kills cub and then itself.

The Chinese media has reported on an extraordinary account of a mother bear saving her cub from a life of torture by strangling it and then killing itself.

The bears were kept in a farm located in a remote area in the North-West of China. The bears on the farm had their gall bladders milked daily for ‘bear bile,’ which is used as a remedy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

It was reported that the bears are kept in tiny cages known as ‘crush cages’, as the bears have no room to manoeuvre and are literally crushed.

The bile is harvested by making a permanent hole or fistula in the bears’ abdomen and gall bladder.

As the hole is never closed, the animals are suspect to various infections and diseases including tumours, cancers and death from peritonitis.

A person who was on the farm in place of a friend witnessed the procedures and told Reminbao.com that they were inhumane.The bears are fitted with an iron vest, as they often try to kill themselves by hitting their stomach as they are unable to bear the pain.

The witness also claimed that a mother bear broke out its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

The workers ran away in fear when they saw the mother bear rushing to its cub’s side.

Unable to free the cub from its restraints, the mother hugged the cub and eventually strangled it.

It then dropped the cub and ran head-first into a wall, killing itself.

Many TCM practitioners have denounced the use of bear bile in their treatment as there are cheaper herbs and synthetics that can be used in its place.

Bear bile is traditionally used to remove ‘heat’ from the body as well as treat high fever, liver ailments and sore eyes.

RELATED STORIES

• Bitter way to purify blood
• Severe threat to bears from illegal bile trade
• Bearing down on an illicit trade

Social Media & other Subjects for the N00b

It seems to me, being in the tech industry, that there are a lot of words, phrases or acronyms (there are as many acronyms in tech as there are in the Military. OK, maybe not as many since there is a division in the military devoted simply to the creation of acronyms. It’s called the Fabrication and Utilization of shortcuts for Kombat Events) that the common user may have heard of but not fully comprehend. I would like to try to cover some of these buzz words and phrases that are being tossed around like a football in a Mouse Davis offense (obscure football reference). So without further ado, here are some current terms and their definitions:

Social Media
It’s what you do if you’re on Facebook. It means interacting with people via the internet, whether passively (Facebook/LinkedIn/YouTube, etc.) where you post or comment then may receive a reply or comment sometime later, or actively (Twitter or Google+) where you have interactions with almost instantaneous feedback. They make money by providing you with a medium to interact with others, then providing you with specific ads based on your “likes” or comments.

The Cloud
From Wikipedia:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

The concept of cloud computing fills a perpetual need of IT: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

In layman’s terms, it means that the cloud (which is usually “owned” by a provider) uses multiple redundant parallel systems to provide customers with various offerings, such as databases, collaboration, communication, finance, etc. in such a way that there is access everywhere (since it’s on the internet), protection (since data can be spread across multiple locations), and dynamic allocation of resources should the need arise (e.g., additional capacity/resources).

Virtualization
The ability to run multiple virtual machines, whether they’re servers or PC’s from a single system. While the initial cost of the machine (it needs to be robust) is high, as the number of virtual machines on that system increases, the ROI increases. Since it consolidates multiple servers/devices into just a few, you reduce cooling requirements, management costs and electrical costs. You can create both desktop and server environments which allows you to reduce hardware costs as well. The other advantage is the since the virtual machines are simply files, you can back them up and restore them very quickly to it’s previous state. This minimizes downtime and again, cuts costs.

Most common software to achieve this is Microsoft’s Hyper-V/Virtual Server or VMWare’s ESX/ESXi

Mobile Computing
As computers and mobile devices converge, futurists have posited that the desktop/laptop computer as we know it will be replaced with a device that will act as desktop/smartphone/entertainment system in one.

Since we are headed towards a state where all the software and data will reside in the cloud (private or public), it becomes immaterial what device or OS you use, since all you need is a browser. The future office will simply have a dock connected to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. Upon arrival, you dock your mobile device (tablet or smartphone) which then allows you to work as you do today. Your data is backed up in the cloud and at the end of the day, you undock your phone, place it in your dorky belt holster or purse, then head home. Upon arriving at home, you have a dock connected to your TV set. You place your phone in the dock and you can watch either downloaded movies or other type of content; or, using the WiFi built into the smartphone, you can stream content wirelessly. This is the future, and, with the 1st device that can do this in the market (the Morotola Atrix), it will be the predominant paradigm of the next generation of devices.

Jailbreak
refers only to Apple iPhones and orthe iDevices, it simply means the ability to use a distribution channel OTHER than Apples App Store. You are breaking out of the virtual “jail” that Apple has created which mandates that you can only get content from them. It requires an elevated level of technical know-how to jailbreak idevices as well as what to do to add software to the device using Cydia (the non-Apple “App Store”).

Rooting
Same as Jailbreaking, but with the Android system. It is more complex than Jailbreaking since it is phone and OS version specific. Also less of a need as there are multiple places you can purchase apps for Android devices (Amazon has an app store for Android as well as T-Mobile and Google).

So there you have just some of the popular IT terms you might have heard of but were too embarrased to ask about. Any other term, feel free to comment and I will be more than happy to explain.