I upload my photos to my own site and have for years. I have no desire to start using flickr, or smugmug or any other photo site for that matter. I would if i were starting fresh, but I’ve just put too much time in to it to switch. A few weeks ago I found the Facebook feature that allows you to import you blog as notes. Pretty nice, but since it will only allow you to add 1 rss feed somewhat limited if you want to say, import your blog and a feed of the new albums you put in to your gallery. I coded up a trivial script the other day that proxies the KEXP Song of the Day podcast and fixes some really annoying posting date problems they seemed to have introduced as of late. (for some incomprehsible reason they don’t use a standard format in the date string and don’t even use something that is easily human readable.)

Anyway after playing around with that code (3 lines of it) I hit upon the idea of creating something similar to merge two rss feeds. There are plenty of services out there that will do this for you, but all of them I could find required me to sign up and go through a lot of process. Granted that would of been easier than writing a script to do the merge myself, but a lot less fun. So I sat down tonight to watch a couple episodes of The Wire and wrote a simple script to do what I wanted. It can be found at http://neces.com/merge_feeds.php and so long as people don’t go crazy with it anyone is welcome to use it. All that’s require is passing in a list of feeds in the url query string, something like http://…/merge_feeds.php?feeds[]=http://the-first-one&feeds[]=http://the-second-one/… Anyway seems to work reasonable well. I’ve only tested it with the two feeds I wanted to get in to facebook, but it seems to be working. It grabs the data for both feeds and then merges them in chronological order keeping things as intact as possible. The feed titles, links, etc. are kind of funky, but there’s not much that can be done (in an automated fashion) to merge all of the feeds’ individual metadata. Anyway, enjoy…this post also serves as a test of the system and it’s being slurped in to fb.

So I’d been wanting to see a Cirque du Soleil show for a very long time, probably going on 4 or 5 years now. I think it started when I watched a tv show on the making (engineering, costume, acts, etc.) of one of their perminent Las Vegas shows. I took a trip to L.V. a while back, but unfortunately couldn’t snag tickets for any of the shows there. A few months ago I got an email from ticketmaster or something like that saying that Varekai was going to be in the Seattle area. I decided to get tickets and managed to get a pretty good set, nearly dead center about halfway up. Fast forward to yesterday…

I’d asked a friend of mine, Riani, to accompany me. It is for the most part unrealted, but we went out to dinner beforhand to a really really good Indian place, Taste of India, probably the best I’ve been to not that I’ve been to that many. Anyway it was a rather dreary evening and as we were driving across the 520 bridge it started to rain and by the time we made it over to Marymoor Park it was raining rather hard. Luckily I had my big fold umbrella in my truck which came in very handy, but we still got a bit wet walking in. So fast forward a bit more and we get to the show itself…

The show started without any announcement and kind of blended in with other things that had been going on beforehand. It slowly built up to an opening number/theme song. The whole feel was really cool and interesting. You couldn’t really pin down the exact influences, but there were definitely Eastern European and Brazilian parts to it, an interesting combination.

The acts were standard circus with a twist and intense artistic flair. One of the things that struck me the most was the detail. While a main performance was going on there were always other characters watching, dancing, interacting. Weaving in the central story to the current act.

At any rate, this is long enough already so I’ll stop leaving it at: We had a great time and now I want to see their other shows.

I’ve actually sat in traffic before thinking about why things are annoyingly stop-and-go. There’s normally no reason for it, if all of the cars can fit on the road all of the cars should be able to go 60 miles per hour together (though i suppose depending on indivitual driving skill that may not be all that safe.) Traffic can be thought of as fluid and stop-and-go traffice as pressure waves in that fluid. According to this article even a single persson smoothing out the waves can help to aleviate the stop-and-go, if not speed things up overall. I’ve tried it before it at least helps me pass the time playing around in traffic, I don’t think i’ve ever been in traffic bad enough to really test out the theory (I do my best to avoid it.) Interesting read though.

So I’m not a fan of Bush, but I’m even less of a fan of the total lack of political dialog in daily life. I’m not saying that people should constantly talk about politics or anything, but things have gotten to the point that it’s not cool to discuss it unless you’re in a group of people who are completely like minded. People are so blindly devout they can’t manage civil conversations on the subject. If you disagree you’re not just wrong, but stupid.

Michael Moore, so far as I’m concerned is the poster boy of the mindset. I personally agree with much (or at least some anyway) of his ideas, but I can’t stand him. Fahrenheit 911 wouldn’t convince anyone of anything. It’s preaching to the choir.

Enter The Power of Nightmares, a well done BBC documentary on the origns Militant Islam and Neoconservatism. It’s unbias, or at least doesn’t pick either of the above sides. It presents the information and doesn’t treat anyone, not even the leaders of the movements, as stupid. It’s worth a watch. I personally think the world would be a better place if more content like it was created.

A recent post on /. discussed a collaboration between Ford and Microsoft to create the next generation of cars.Articles are here and here. I point this out not because i find the subject all that interesting, but because of the extremely high level of irony.

Some choice quotes:

• Interstate Explorer
• Officer: Can I see your software license and registration please?
• “Format Or Reboot Daily” …. seriously, do you imagine having to reinstall Windows on a %#$@ car???
• You won’t need to re-install, just update the driver. Hmmmm….
• “You can have your BSOD in any color, as long as it’s black.”
• unfortunately due to a restrictive EULA you will not be permitted to sell it once you’ve used it, and you can be arrested for opening the hood.
• Will I have to pay yearly license fees to drive my car, or will it just one day swerve off the road if I let my licenses lapse? Can they catch a virus from neighboring cars at the parking lot? Will it come with Clippy? “Hello! you seem to be flying off the roadaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh” (car flies off road, rolls, and catches on fire).

That’s just a couple. You should really read the comments.

A post hit /. today about a LED dance floor created by students at MIT. The floor consists of over 1500 multi-color LED’s which can change at 30 fps. Now this may not strike you ass all that cool, it does me, but check out the video and then decide.

Man, it’s been a while. I’ve gotten really busy lately and blogging hasn’t really even crossed my mind. For some reason when i saw this post on /. decided to put something in here about it. Sony has just been granted 2 patents on methods for inserting false stimulation into the human brain via ultrasonic pusles. While you don’t have to have a working prototype or anything to get a patent granted i have to wonder what if anything they’ve done to test the idea out. It’s cool and scary at the same time. While it would be a neat addition to video gaming i can’t help but thing that it could be used in some pretty nasty ways. Imagine stimulating areas of the brain associated with particular emotions in order to get a desired response out of someone. You could possible, truely put the fear of death in someone without putting them in any real physical peril. while i can’t imagine this is a working prototype and would think that doing this with any real success would be extremely complicated i don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible. If not with this particular method with some other yet to be discovered.

A recent /. post pointed to an article on msnbc deatailing an astounding new use of sweat shop labor. Workers are actually being paid (though meageraly) to play MMORPGs all day long and acculilate virtual property to be sold on sites like e-bay. I don’t get into those games in the first place, but i can’t imagine having to play them all day long (and i’m sure they work more than 8 hour days.) While their may be an argument to be made about this being better than alternatives (textiles, etc.) i don’t think i would consider either situtions reasonable, but this one is rediclous for an entierly different reason. These companies are amassing virtual properties that have no inherent real world value, yet fetch real hard currency upon sale (up to $30,000.) where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?

The world is order, at least it wants to be, and in the end i believe really is. That’s not to say we can understand the order, just that it exists. Fractals are found throughout nature for example, the snow flakes which just happen to be falling outside my house today. While snow is interesting you can’t really see the fractals of each of the unique snow flakes due to their miniscule size. There are however, plenty of examples of visible fractals like these and this (best pic.) Those pictures are of Romanesco broccoli, they are not fakes the broccoli actually grows that way. If you want to learn more about fractals take a look at the wikipedia page on the subject.