Drinking whiskey clear!
As always, from the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending March 4, 2012:
1) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
2) Madonna – “Girl Gone Wild”
3) Saint Etienne – “Tonight”
4) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
5) Ashbury Heights – “Smile (Marsheaux Remix)”
6) The Ultrasonics – “Perfect Girl (Marsheaux Remix)”
7) Sleigh Bells – “Crush”
8) Marsheaux – “New Life”
9) Marsheaux – “Summer”
10) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
– You might have heard that the FDA was planning on requiring tobacco companies to include large and graphic warning labels on cigarettes. On Wednesday, a federal judge declared the rule unconstitutional, as it interferes with the tobacco companies’ first amendment rights to commercial speech. The tobacco companies argued, perhaps correctly, that no other product for sale in the United States was required to dedicate 50% of its packaging to graphic images of the consequences of using the product. However, I think it might be cool if all products were required to use such images. Imagine if table saws and nail guns were required to have pictures of severed hands and nails in skulls on the box! It sure wold make Home Depot trips much more interesting!
– Neowin is asking the question we all have: is Google+ a ghost town? Sure, G+ can claim to have over 100 million users to Facebook’s 845 million… but according to digital business analytics company comScore, Facebook users spend 7 hours a month on the site, while Google+ users spend (wait for it!) three minutes a month on the site.
– Speaking of Google’s failures… how’s Google Music working out? Not very well at all, which is shocking given that Google has a ready-made user base of over 200 million Android users. Google has a long history of starting a dozen half-baked projects, waiting several months, then keeping only the few that stick. This won’t work in the Big Content game, and Google has to know that. The Big G is reportedly working on Google Music specific hardware (uh, don’t you guys have 200 million tablets and phones already?), but analysts think Google may have to pull the plug on Music before the devices (whatever they are) are ready for market.
– Is it possible that the first Native Americans came from Europe instead of Asia? A group of archaeologists seem to think so. They’ve discovered European-style stone tools dating back 19,000 and 26,000 years at various sites on the east coast of North America. Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian, and Bruce Bradley, of the University of Exeter, have released a new book called Across Atlantic Ice, which might re-write the history of North America.
– NASA snapped a cool picture of an underwater storm. It looks a bit like a hurricane, but it’s all happening under the surface of the water. A boat traveling across the water wouldn’t even know the storm was happening. Properly called an “eddy“, such storms are common where two currents meet.
– Ever wonder why progress bars suck so much? It’s because your computer is pretty crappy at predicting the future. Because that’s what progress bars really try to do. Read this blog post at Popular Mechanics for more.
– Guess what, Skype? Vonage is coming for you!
– Ever heard of the “Fan Cost Index”? It’s a survey done every year by sports information company Team Marketing Report. The FCI is the cost of “four tickets at average price, two small beers, four small sodas, four hot dogs, parking, two programs and two adult caps” at each NFL stadium. Guess who “wins” for the most expensive fan experience this year? The New York Jets, whose FCI is a whopping $628.90. I’m turning 41 in a couple of weeks, and I’ve caught myself thinking or saying the old “candy bars were a quarter and concert tickets were $15 when I was a kid” chestnut… but DAMN! $629 to take a family of four to an NFL game??? I know it’s Noo Yawk and all, but back in 2002 I paid $100 less per month to rent a nice 1BR apartment in Alpharetta! Incidentally, the New York Giants, who play in the same stadium as the Jets, have an FCI of “only” $592.26. Read more here.
Just a heads up: I’ve done some pruning to the categories. The “Time Warner” category is gone, and all posts that were in that category have been moved to “Geek Stuff”. I also killed the “Life On Mars” and “Hotel Babylon” categories and moved those posts to “TV”.
– Jim
The ACC released the official 2012 football schedule today, and I’ve created downloadable versions of Georgia Tech’s schedule that work with both Microsoft Outlook and Gmail or iTunes.
If you follow college football, you probably know that game times and TV coverage aren’t sometimes known until a couple of weeks before the game. So, unlike my famous Steelers schedules (which include the kickoff time and the network airing the game), this schedule has the games starting at 8AM and lists the location of the game instead of the network (so, “Bobby Dodd Stadium, Atlanta, GA”, instead of “ESPN2”). A reminder is scheduled for 13:00 (1:00PM ET) the day before each game.
The download is available two formats: the traditional CSV format (used by Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Calendar) and the iCalendar format (used by Google Calendar and iTunes\iPhone). So be sure to choose the correct version when you download!
The CSV version of the schedule is compatible with Microsoft Outlook 98 or later. It might also work with Google Calendar or any other calendar app that can import calendar events from CSV files. However, it has only been tested with Outlook 2010.
The iCal version of the schedule has not been tested at all. I used this handy online tool to convert the CSV to iCal format, so if you experience any problems with it, please take it up with the converter’s webmaster and not me! I did, however, open the iCal file in Outlook and it appears to be correct.
So… pick your poison:
GT 2012 Football Schedule (CSV format)
GT 2012 Football Schedule (iCS format)
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Outlook users may follow these simple instructions to import the schedule. Make sure to read the all the directions below before you begin, as there are some options you may wish to change before importing the calendar:
DISABLING REMINDERS: If you wish to disable the reminders, open the CSV file and change the value of “reminder on/off” (column G) to FALSE for each game before you import the Calendar into Outlook.
CHANGING “SHOW TIME AS”: By default, the entries will display their time as “Free” on your calendar. If you wish to change this to something else, change the value of each entry in Column V (“Show Time As”) from FREE to “1″ (Tentative), “2″ (Busy), “3″ (Free) or “4″ (Out of the Office) – without the quotes.
TROUBLESHOOTING: If you try to import the schedule but don’t see any of the games listed in your calendar, shut Outlook down completely (open Task Manager to make sure that OUTLOOK.EXE is not running) and re-open Outlook and try the import again. If you’re still having problems, leave a comment below and I’ll try to help!
From the home office in London, here’s the Top 10 song chart for the week ending February 26, 2012:
1) Marsheaux – “Ghost”
2) Marsheaux – “Thirteen/True”
3) The Ting Tings – “Silence”
4) Marsheaux – “Stand By”
5) Teddybears – “Punkrocker (feat. Iggy Pop)”
6) Marsheaux – “The Promise”
7) Two Door Cinema Club – “Something Good Can Work”
8) Marsheaux – “Radial Emotion”
9) Cheap Trick – “Dream Police”
10) Discovery – “Missing”
“The poor girl, Star, had been brought up by a stepmother with three children of her own, one an almost grown boy who had taken advantage of her in such dreadful ways that she had been forced to run away and find her real mother. Once found, her real mother had sent her to various boarding schools to get rid of her. At each of these she had been forced to run away by the presence of perverts and sadists so monstrous that their acts defied description. Thomas could tell that his mother had not been spared the details that she was now sparing him. Now and again when she spoke vaguely, her voice shook and he could tell that she was remembering some horror that had been put to her graphically. He had hoped that in a few days the memory of all this would wear off, but it did not. The next day she returned to the jail with Kleenex and cold-cream and a few days later, she announced that she had consulted a lawyer.
It was at these times that Thomas truly mourned the death of his father though he had not been able to endure him in life. The old man would have had none of this foolishness. Untouched by useless compassion, he would (behind her back) have pulled the necessary strings with his crony, the sheriff, and the girl would have been packed off to the state penitentiary to serve her time. He had always been engaged in some enraged action until one morning when (with an angry glance at his wife as if she alone were responsible) he had dropped dead at the breakfast table. Thomas had inherited his father’s reason without his ruthlessness and his mother’s love without her tendency to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and see what happened.”
– Flannery O’Connor
“The Comforts of Home”
My dad was in the Boy Scouts and the U.S. Army, so by the time I came along he’d done enough camping for one lifetime. To this day, the closest dad comes to “roughing it” is staying at a Courtyard by Marriott. And so, aside from a couple of grade school summers when my folks let me “camp” in a tent in the backyard, I managed to reach adulthood without camping before.
By the late 1980s, most Georgians who knew about Cumberland Island learned about it from local shows like PM Magazine or local TV sign-offs. Atlanta’s public TV station, WGTV, in particular had a sign-off which featured scenic scenes from around the state set to Ray Charles’ version of “Georgia on My Mind”. The once grand old homes, the wild horses and the beautiful, unspoiled beaches of Cumberland Island featured prominently in the sign-off, and so one day, in late 1990, I got the idea to go to there.
Of course, this was a lot more difficult then than it would be today. I had to send a letter to the National Park Service, who is in charge of the island. In return they sent me a form to fill out, which I returned. Several weeks later, I received passes which would allow me and two friends to spend no more than 72 hours on the island on Memorial Day weekend 1991 (it’s a nature preserve, so access is strictly limited). I went to the Georgia State University library to find a phone book for St. Mary’s, the town closest to Cumberland. I saw a hotel I liked and made reservations. Almost everything was done except the waiting.
As the date approached, I spent around $400 on a tent, ground cloth, sleeping bag, a nice flashlight\lamp combo, a camping stove, fuel, plates and flatware, an armful of dehydrated camping dinners, water purification tablets, a 5 gallon collapsible water jug, eco-friendly toilet paper, cans of insect repellent, a sweet Swiss Army knife, and a giant backpack to put all that crap in. Oh, and I got a shiny new pair of Doc Martens, too. I considered them “necessary camping supplies”, you see. And, to round out the ensemble, I had an of-age friend get me a bottle of tequila, since I was only 20 at the time.
Hi Folks!
Just wanted to let you know that I have updated the ShareThis options at the bottom of every post. I’ve changed the look from large buttons to small icons, and did so because I also added support for Pintrest, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, and the Google+ “+1” feature.
Note that you can choose from dozens of other sharing services including Orkut, LinkedIn, Digg, Xing, Technorati, WordPress.com by clicking the green “ShareThis” icon at the bottom of each post.