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Idle

Submission + - Amish Drag Racer Arrested (aolnews.com)

head_dunce writes: "From AOL News, "Police in Ashland, Ohio, say they have charged an Amish man with driving left of center after he clipped a motorist during a horse-and-buggy race.""

Comment Boating and Shooting! (Score 1) 347

You need to get away from the screens. In the summer, nothing relaxes me like going for a boat ride - even if it's just a little row boat - it's a great way to disconnect from the world from a while. You're on your own when you're on the water. In the winter, I love taking my shotgun out to the local gun club and shooting trap (clay pigeons.) Video games can be fun, and you can try and boot up the old "Duck Hunter" but all that does is give you more time behind a screen... you can pick up a shotgun for less than a PS3 and really get out some aggression trying your best to break clay.

Keep experimenting with different hobbies that get you outside and away from screens. With boating and shooting, you really don't need another person to do them with - which is nice when you just need a break from the world for a while.

Comment I'm in Chicago - saw a coyote last week. So what? (Score 2, Insightful) 222

I live in Chicago, the city - not a suburb, around O'Hare. I saw a coyote on my way home from work last week. It was about 5:30 in the afternoon, the coyote was watching rush hour traffic roll by standing on the side of the road. I've seen them around here my whole life, I'm 32. The coyotes have been around here far longer than us humans have, it's native here - not like introducing some weird outside creature. They aren't that big, smaller than the pitbulls around here, I don't see what the big deal is?

Submission + - Red Hat Sets Its Cloud Strategy (seekingalpha.com)

head_dunce writes: "From this article, "Red Hat on Wednesday took the wraps off its cloud computing strategy, which revolves around promoting interoperability and application portability. ... Red Hat is positioning itself as the open source cloud provider and as an alternative to Microsoft’s Azure platform. ... Given that Red Hat has many of the pieces for cloud computing the strategy positions the company as more of a Switzerland as other vendors pitch their IT wares." and Wall Street seems to really like Red Hat's plan as well, it's stock is way up even in this economy."

Submission + - Yahoo buys freelance news site Associated Content (yahoo.com)

head_dunce writes: According to Yahoo, "Yahoo Inc. is buying freelance news site Associated Content in a deal that will add a more folksy touch to one of the world's biggest Web sites." The whole thing humors me, an online news portal buying an online news portal. Just yesterday I saw some expert on TV who was quoted as an "Online Researcher." And I remember the days when teachers wouldn't let us use a web site as a reference.
Idle

Submission + - World's Smallest Hot Rod

head_dunce writes: "A new nanodragster has been built that measures about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair and going at speeds of up .0005 inches per hour while doing a wheelie! Maybe the NHRA should stand for Nano-Hot Rod Association?"

Comment Re:Get a motorcycle! (Score 1) 1354

Ha, bikes are for ugly people -- how many hot chicks do you see on Harley's? Unless saggy boobs and leather pitted faces are you thing... Get yourself a boat! I go out almost every weekend to places like Blarney Island here in Illinois, bikini clad women everywhere! And you'll find boaters are a whole group of fun party people.
Media

Submission + - Help on streaming the Hot Rod Power Tour in HD?

head_dunce writes: "So we've got a guy in our office that's going on the Hot Rod Power Tour, and we're sending him off with a 1080i Sony camera (HDR-SR11) that records in AVCHD format. We've got Adobe Premiere back at the office here, and he's going to be uploading video to us at night so we can convert it from AVCHD to Flash and he can post it on his personal blog (this is all just for fun.) Bandwidth is not an issue, and we want him to have the most killer video seen on the net, does anyone have suggestions on what we should be exporting the Flash files at? We're trying a few different formats, from what we've seen so far it appears that the video cards in the machines viewing the video is the bottleneck — wild since 25 seconds of streaming Flash video is about 7MB. We're not worried about everyone viewing the video since it's just for fun, we're more interested in most people being able to view it and hopefully with their jaws dropped — this has got to look a LOT better than what you can get on YouTube. Thanks for any help."

Comment Re:In a word... (Score 1) 1385

I live about 5 minutes from OHare airport. There's a small town that's about 10 minutes away that's currently a ghost town with boarded up houses - some of those houses were actually pretty nice places too - but they needed to expand OHare and that's where they are going to put it.

Chicago does have poor transportation within the city, but it's also poor between cities with exploding airports. Obama should be looking at high speed rail to connect the nation, it'll only help make it cheaper to improve city transportation in the end. GM should re-tool their plants to build high speed rails.
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Red Hat: Stand alone or get bought? 1

head_dunce writes: "So it seems that this economy has inspired a lot of businesses to move to Linux with Red Hat posting profits that beat everyone's expectations. Looks like there's a dark side to being a highly profitable company in a down economy though, now there is talks of Citigroup and Oracle wanting to buy Red Hat. For a while now we've been watching Yahoo fend off Carl Icann and Steve Ballmer so that Yahoo could stay independent, but the fight seems to be a huge distraction for Yahoo with lots of energy (and money) invested. — My question is, will Red Hat stay independent? And if there was a company to buy Red Hat, what company would make for a good parent?"

Comment You've already got the help - CPAN (Score 1) 137

I write in Perl almost everyday. They should build in a lot of the CPAN modules so that they will be documented better (with another camel) and I won't have to dig on CPAN for things a lot of new languages come with out of the box. Yes, it's easy to install modules, but many are almost standards at this point and should be brought into the language.

Comment Sunday and Monday (Score 1) 88

In ecommerce, it's Sunday and Monday that have the heaviest traffic days. Friday and Saturday are the lightest. Oddly enough, it seems although Sunday may be a heavy traffic day, it's not a day people like to buy on - they'd rather buy on Monday, which is why you'll see most of your spam marketing on Monday. This is unlike other non-ecommerce web sites I've worked with, when it's more of a browsing web site for information or entertainment it seems like Thursdays are better... don't take my experiences as science though, I'm just a small fish in big surf.

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