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links for 2006-10-31

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What is stress?

Stress is when the pressure builds up so much that you cannot stop shaking, it is hard to focus because your field of vision is reduced, you cannot concentrate enough to read a single sentence and comprehend it, short term memory vanishes, and ambivalence takes hold. Then the dominoes fall.

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A blogger’s mother has passed

Alice of 10,000 Monkies and a Camera lost her mother in a car accident yesterday. Give her some good words.

I find it interesting how blogging creates connections between arbitary people. Without blogging, these arbitary people conceivably would never know of one another yet through the Internet we learn their faces, their secrets, their worries, their joys and we feel connected. So when a blogger suffers a loss of life or a hardship, other bloggers feel it too. Our world is smaller than ever and that is good.

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Picture of United States Population Density

Time Magazine has put together a picture showing US population density. 80% of the US live in metropolitian areas. Notice the great emptiness in Nevada. Can you say, "nuclear test site?" I knew you could.

In other charts, we have the cancer survival rates. Basically lists a bunch of cancers and shows the percentage of people that have survived 5, 10, 15 and 20 years with the diagnosis.

Now if we could create a chart that shows population density, cancer survival rates by region, and incidents of cancer by region, I think I could decide where to move.

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Videoblogging for money

Here is a little hint of what is to come. Google has announced that it will pay videographers $5 for every 1000 times their video is viewed on Google Video. This is not YouTube! This is Google’s answer to Revver which appends an advertisement to the end of user’s videos then pays the video maker 50% of the ad revenue every time it is clicked. Popular shows like Ze Frank’s The Show use Revver for revenue. He also sells candy. The Mentos guys made a bundle on Revver.

Grobe and Voltz, for instance, pocketed $35,000, their share of the ad revenue paid to them by Revver, for their first Coke-and-Mentos video back in July. Now, the pair could earn big bucks from Google if the latest video is a hit. The two are also hosting a video-making contest sponsored by Coca-Cola, which paid them an undisclosed amount. [Source]

I have been dying to try video publishing but I don’t feel I have the time (Ze Frank spends 6 hours creating his show of roughly 3 minutes; Rocketboom uses a staff and an entire day to produce a 3 to 8 minute show) or the tools (I really think a Mac makes video editing easier) to do it right. Maybe I should do it for the money instead of fun!

See also a similar articlea similar article now located on Tech Consumer (thanks Bob Caswell) and C|Net discussing Revver.

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links for 2006-10-30

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$5000 by tomorrow

I just saw that Blingo is guaranteeing a $5000 winner by Halloween..um.. that’s tomorrow. Current prizes:

  • Brand New Ford Mustang!
    or $20,000 cash, your choice
  • $5,000 cash
  • 42-Inch Plasma TV
    or $2,500 cash, your choice
  • $1,000 cash
  • $500 cash
  • $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificate *
  • $25 Amazon.com Gift Certificate *
  • $10 iTunes Gift Certificate or Fandango Movie Ticket, your choice. The movie certificate is good for one adult admission at one of the many participating theaters across the country (find one near you).

* Amazon.com is not a sponsor of this promotion. Amazon, Amazon.com, and the Amazon.com logo are registered trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon.com gift certificates are issued by A2Z Gift Certificates, Inc. and are redeemable only at www.amazon.com. See www.amazon.com/gclegal for terms and conditions of use of Amazon.com gift certificates.

I also see that someone recently won the $500 prize.

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Today’s Programming Hell

Today I am whimpering and crying while trying to resolve this lovely error message: "GPL Ghostscript 8.54: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1" Right now I think that either ImageMagick is not creating the eps or ps files in a way that Ghostscript likes or that I am missing some fonts. Possibly, I need to add some steps to building the eps file with ImageMagick. Of course it could be something mundanely stupid like not having the path set.

Update! A clue! A clue! Found while trying eps2eps

Error: /invalid font in findfont
Operand stack:
Times-Roman Font Times-Roman 976412 Times-Roman –nostringval– Times-Roman NimbusRomNo9L-Regu Courier NimbusMonL-Regu
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– 2 %stopped_push –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– false 1 %stopped_push 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop –nostringval– 1 3 %oparray_pop 1 3 %oparray_pop .runexec2 –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– 2 %stopped_push –nostringval– –nostringval– 1 4 %oparray_pop 2 4 %oparray_pop –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– false 1 %stopped_push 5 5 %oparray_pop –nostringval– –nostringval– –nostringval– 1 -1 1 –nostringval– %for_neg_int_continue
Dictionary stack:
–dict:1122/1686(ro)(G)– –dict:0/20(G)– –dict:88/200(L)– –dict:88/200(L)– –dict:17/17(ro)(G)– –dict:1122/1686(ro)(G)–
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
Current file position is 5709
GPL Ghostscript 8.54: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

Joy.

Update: I bet this is going to help: wget http://mirror3.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
See also. That worked!

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Can’t snuff the Firefly

The series ended abruptly with no closure. Through fan support Serenity the movie was spawned to bring closure. It did poorly in the box office with $38 million in ticket sales not clearing the $39 million production budget. Why?! DVD sales helped. The fans begged for more. Whedon has declared Firefly over. Now Universal sues to fan to stop promoting Firefly/Serenity. So, now the fans are billing Universal for time spent promoting the movie.

See also and also. Expect a take down notice on this so if you like it download it with keepvid. Of course, there is a wikipedia entry.

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Special Moments and Rituals – Evan Shaving

Evan and I share a ritual most mornings. I use an electric shaver and when I turn it on Evan comes running. It is his job to sit on my left hip and hold the container for the shaver. He plays with the paperwork that I’ve never thrown away and uses the cleaning brush to mimic the motions I am making on my face. He smiles being with Daddy and seems to like the feel of the cleaning brush over his cheeks. His dimple shows big while spending a few quality moments with Dad and I love it!

It is my goal to establish a psuedo-daily ritual with each of the children. With the older children, it might be reading a chapter aloud from a book or cooking a meal together.