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snooper
Whoops…oh my….whatever am I going to do?
I appear to be starting my week fully rested, relatively fed and caught up with things. This just won’t do. Where is my drama and angst?
☺
Oh…and it is a beautiful, warmish day. This won’t do at all.
I was allowed to borrow this absolutely amazing gizmo yesterday. I have it for two weeks. It is called “The Air Snooper” and it is a small black box with a thick antenna that ends in an open circle. You turn it on, calibrate the center dial to “Normal” and begin to slowly move it around your walls, floor and windows. When it detects even the slightest draft it will register it by telling you if the source is causing hotter or colder air.
Sometimes the worst drafts are in places that you cannot feel oddly enough. Like the one I found that runs around the entire length of the room where the cinder block joins the cement floor, and there are two blocks that are slightly chipped on the face that just send in a steady, subtle stream of cold air.
Someone I know found it in a garage sale, it looks like it is from the 70s. I checked online and they have either a lame version that sends puffs of smoke out or one really cool thermal unit (I think from Black and Decker) for fifty bucks (all digital and bizarre but sounded similar to what I have, the puffs of smoke thing, I think would miss a lot).
So I am crawling around my house while it is warmer and finding all these small places that work to bring my temperature down.
Ingenuity is often not so much the product of one person’s effort, but lies in one person who can bring several individual efforts together.
In Europe, Spain in particular, they are testing something called “platooning” or “road-trains”. In this – cars, trucks and buses are linked together electronically. The lead vehicle is driven by a professional driver and the ones that follow are your basic long distance commuters. By being linked to the lead vehicle, however, all of the “train-cars” do not require their driver to drive. Their cars follow the exact movement of the lead. It is like sitting on a commuter train but in your own car.
The principle behind it was to try and discover a way to begin to manage congestion through controlling the speed and fluidity of movement of blocks of vehicles. When you do this, congestion is lessened because rather then being a bunch of individual pieces moving and responding according to their owner’s whim (which inattentive and over compensating driving is one of the key contributors to congestion) blocks of vehicles are guided by professional drivers or conductors whose job it is to ensure that the ride goes smoothly and quickly. The result is a faster commute and less consumption of fuel. They also wanted to design a method that had those results that did not require billions of dollars in disruptive highway renovation.
Of the few places where “group think” is a benefit…that is one of them.
Now that is ingenious. The simple concept that the way to handle the growth in congestion is not to change what has been, but to create a new method of driving that accommodates it.
Group think that is unhelpful is the emergence of the iPhone worm. I don’t know if you ever encountered “Rickrolling” but it was heavy on youtube for a bit (and other places). You would click on a link and it would take you to the video, which would start and then suddenly it would change over to the video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It was an annoying crack on the site or video.
Now, there is one for the iPhone that comes in and changes your wallpaper to a teenybopper pick of Rick and puts the title “ikee never gonna give you up.”
Unfortunately, the person who made this worm also released four different open source code versions of it which means more and potentially nastier ones are going to come.
If you have an iPhone and you have done what is called a “jail-break” on it, which means you have bypassed Apple’s locks so you can install apps that are not approved by Apple your phone is open to this worm. The program people use to do a jail-break is called SSH. It has a default password: Alpine, which most people never change. Change the password to an alpha numeric sequence and your iphone is protected again.
Strange how some people choose to contribute their efforts to do something that will make the world a better place and some do it “to make a point.”
I have learned to be cautious with people who have “points to be made.” Or, who want to “increase people’s awareness” they seem to be the most prone to acting in ways that purposefully (or inadvertently) create a destructive environment. Even in mild and potentially helpful instances, like protesting or publishing announcements about studies or news stories that are informative and exposing – when they are just thrown out there to “increase people’s awareness” they really don’t do that…they just feed fear and a sense of helplessness. When people combine awareness with competent and thought out suggestions for actions, then that becomes a creative thing.
Ok…I am slowly waking up…
>
I appear to be starting my week fully rested, relatively fed and caught up with things. This just won’t do. Where is my drama and angst?
☺
Oh…and it is a beautiful, warmish day. This won’t do at all.
I was allowed to borrow this absolutely amazing gizmo yesterday. I have it for two weeks. It is called “The Air Snooper” and it is a small black box with a thick antenna that ends in an open circle. You turn it on, calibrate the center dial to “Normal” and begin to slowly move it around your walls, floor and windows. When it detects even the slightest draft it will register it by telling you if the source is causing hotter or colder air.
Sometimes the worst drafts are in places that you cannot feel oddly enough. Like the one I found that runs around the entire length of the room where the cinder block joins the cement floor, and there are two blocks that are slightly chipped on the face that just send in a steady, subtle stream of cold air.
Someone I know found it in a garage sale, it looks like it is from the 70s. I checked online and they have either a lame version that sends puffs of smoke out or one really cool thermal unit (I think from Black and Decker) for fifty bucks (all digital and bizarre but sounded similar to what I have, the puffs of smoke thing, I think would miss a lot).
So I am crawling around my house while it is warmer and finding all these small places that work to bring my temperature down.
Ingenuity is often not so much the product of one person’s effort, but lies in one person who can bring several individual efforts together.
In Europe, Spain in particular, they are testing something called “platooning” or “road-trains”. In this – cars, trucks and buses are linked together electronically. The lead vehicle is driven by a professional driver and the ones that follow are your basic long distance commuters. By being linked to the lead vehicle, however, all of the “train-cars” do not require their driver to drive. Their cars follow the exact movement of the lead. It is like sitting on a commuter train but in your own car.
The principle behind it was to try and discover a way to begin to manage congestion through controlling the speed and fluidity of movement of blocks of vehicles. When you do this, congestion is lessened because rather then being a bunch of individual pieces moving and responding according to their owner’s whim (which inattentive and over compensating driving is one of the key contributors to congestion) blocks of vehicles are guided by professional drivers or conductors whose job it is to ensure that the ride goes smoothly and quickly. The result is a faster commute and less consumption of fuel. They also wanted to design a method that had those results that did not require billions of dollars in disruptive highway renovation.
Of the few places where “group think” is a benefit…that is one of them.
Now that is ingenious. The simple concept that the way to handle the growth in congestion is not to change what has been, but to create a new method of driving that accommodates it.
Group think that is unhelpful is the emergence of the iPhone worm. I don’t know if you ever encountered “Rickrolling” but it was heavy on youtube for a bit (and other places). You would click on a link and it would take you to the video, which would start and then suddenly it would change over to the video of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It was an annoying crack on the site or video.
Now, there is one for the iPhone that comes in and changes your wallpaper to a teenybopper pick of Rick and puts the title “ikee never gonna give you up.”
Unfortunately, the person who made this worm also released four different open source code versions of it which means more and potentially nastier ones are going to come.
If you have an iPhone and you have done what is called a “jail-break” on it, which means you have bypassed Apple’s locks so you can install apps that are not approved by Apple your phone is open to this worm. The program people use to do a jail-break is called SSH. It has a default password: Alpine, which most people never change. Change the password to an alpha numeric sequence and your iphone is protected again.
Strange how some people choose to contribute their efforts to do something that will make the world a better place and some do it “to make a point.”
I have learned to be cautious with people who have “points to be made.” Or, who want to “increase people’s awareness” they seem to be the most prone to acting in ways that purposefully (or inadvertently) create a destructive environment. Even in mild and potentially helpful instances, like protesting or publishing announcements about studies or news stories that are informative and exposing – when they are just thrown out there to “increase people’s awareness” they really don’t do that…they just feed fear and a sense of helplessness. When people combine awareness with competent and thought out suggestions for actions, then that becomes a creative thing.
Ok…I am slowly waking up…
>
Buy http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Providence-d%C3%A9mon/dp/1449526756/ref...">The Demon of Providence on Amazon.com
Video Release: October 2009copyright 2000-2009 Cassandra Tribe.
All rights reserved. For permission to use any of this material please contact info@loveandwords.com
cassandra tribe is a member of newsy.com
All rights reserved. For permission to use any of this material please contact info@loveandwords.com
cassandra tribe is a member of newsy.com
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