confusionAhem. <cough> A haiku:
I forgot my phone
In the living room at home
I feel so alone
Being separated from the instantaneous global communications and the soft LED glow of mindless entertainment is all well and good, even desirable, when I’m on vacation but annoying when I’m at work.
In June the family took a short holiday to the Gold Coast in Australia. Took the kids to Sea World and Movie World and whale watching. Not much for photo taking but the whales and the beach sunset on the first day were great.
During the whale watching we got to follow a few whales for almost 45 minutes, and we saw dolphins along side the whales and even a sea turtle. Unfortunately we didn’t see the whales breach but lots of surfacing for air – blow holes, humps and tails.
The beach was amazing, even in the southern winter the water was fairly warm – warmer than the air in fact. We played in the surf a lot, I think that Tori may have enjoyed the time at the beach better than anything else. The beach as Surfers Paradise — and in fact the whole town — reminded me of Gulf Shores and my granddads beach house when I was a kid. Wonderful shallow surf you could wade out in for a long way, sugar sand and all. It just had that small beach town feel, not like the mega tourist beach towns. I will have to take Tori and Livi back again just to play on the beach.
You can see the whole Gold Coast, Australia, June 2013 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].
This post [gizmodo.com] over at Gizmodo shows the official patch for the NROL-39 [wikipedia.org] satellite launch:
This comment from Mariani [kinja.com] sums it up best:
Any child who saw this logo in a TV show would immediately identify it as belonging to the Bad Guys. Who was the dipshit at NRO who thought this was a good idea? Or have they actually dropped the act and chosen this as their way of owning up to what they truly are, because buying revolving chairs and fluffy white Angora cats for every staff member to pet menacingly is just too expensive?
Yep, 80’s cartoons taught me that a giant octopus devouring the Earth is a bad guys wet dream.
I call bull shit.
According to this Associated Press story [ap.org], researchers are teaching an AI program common sense using pictures on the internet.
In mid-July, [the program] began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other.
I call bull shit because if it was really learning anything from pictures on the internet it would mostly know what strange sexual fetishes are.
The internet if for porn. ;-)
So, Adobe got hacked. I got a letter in the mail explaining this. Ok, fine. Thanks. And email would have been better. Why a physical letter? All the way from Ireland to Singapore.
It arrived a day after I got an email from Evernote telling me:
There were published reports recently of a security breach at Adobe that may have exposed private information, including Adobe passwords, email addresses and passwords hints of millions of users. The list of compromised Adobe accounts has been uploaded to the web. We compared this list to our user email addresses and found that the email address you used to register for an Evernote account is on the list of exposed Adobe accounts.
Now that’s what I call service.