Monthly Archive for November, 2007

Coverage

Published on November 29, 2007 in blogging, forkolator and pi. 0 Comments

Some recent press/blogging about Forkolator:

  • Sandy Armstrong, a maintainer of the Tomboy note-taking app who I met at BarCamp San Diego, wrote up his response to the project.
  • That post showed up on Planet Gnome, prompting Colin Walters, who is a Red Hat developer working on Gnome Online Desktop to add his thoughts.
  • At which point the article got picked up by Jake Edge at Linux Weekly News, who wrote a lengthy (and great!) writeup of the project.

And this summer Paul McDonald of the Google Mashup Editor team weighed in. It’s exciting to see people talking! It certainly increases the pressure on me to keep things moving.

Beauty

Published on November 28, 2007 in Comics, beauty and love. 2 Comments

I just found some of Eleanor Davis’s comics. They’re just great. I read ‘The Island’ first and loved it. The woman is really beautiful to me, and it made me think about the way I depict bodies in my comics. It’s not really reflective of what I think about bodies, and it makes me want to draw bodies in a more conscious way. Heck, Davis’s comics make me want to draw more comics, period.

The end of ‘The Island,’ too, is a beautiful moment. It’s not so bad… sometimes you just realize you don’t want something anymore.

The rest of the comics are wonderful too. They’re personal and always a little queer. One woman with no nipples, another who smells like sour milk, both intensely desirable.

What’s wonderful is to remember that it’s not conformity that we want to curl up with at night, but beauty. It’s the supposed ‘defects’–the cracks in the walls and the strange lumps–that arouse our senses and remind us that we’re alive.

Cutout from Yolk by Eleanor Davis

Move your house on Google Maps

Published on November 21, 2007 in crowdsourcing, google, maps and pi. 0 Comments

Previously my house was a little off in Google maps.  If you searched for 1916 33rd St, you’d get the people about three houses down from me.  But Google just introduced the ability to tweak the location of your home.  Now the marker is spot on.  Find your house and put it in its place!

Sea Lion of Love

Published on November 20, 2007 in erik pukinskis originals, guitar, music, pi, singing and video. 2 Comments

My guitar strings have been breaking. A lesser man would replace the strings, but I keep on playing. (warning: a little bit of foul language)


(Sea Lion of Love)

My diction is a little bad, so for reference the lyrics are:

You can take it all out–
you can take it all out on me.

Because you’re the sea lion–
the sea lion of love.

Don’t ask what it means, or complain about the quality because I just wrote it five minutes ago for the three stringed untuned guitar.

And in unrelated news, these kids are wonderful:


(Lip Dub – Take me for What I am)

One turbine, two turbine, red turbine, blue turbine

Published on November 15, 2007 in energy, pi, renewable, sustainability and wind. 1 Comment

In the news today, I saw that Honda is going to start leasing a hydrogen powered vehicle in the LA area soon. Cool.

From there, a little random web browsing led me to an interesting page with photos of offshore wind turbine arrays, including the Horns Rev farm in Denmark, which has a capacity of 160 megawatts.

Which made me think… how much energy do we use in the US, and how many Horns Rev’s would we need to power our lifestyles? Apparently as of 1999, we were using about 100 quadrillion BTUs every year. That’s 100,000 million million, in case you were wondering.

But how many Horns Rev’s is that? How do you convert BTUs per year into Megawatt capacity? It’s easy… just do a little conversion:

US energy use equation thumbnail

You can check my units by crossing off all the unit pairs… the yr in the numerator cancels out the year in the denominator. The kwh in the denominator cancels out the kwh in the numerator, etc. Yay high school science.

So anyway, we in the US are apparently drawing 3.2 million megawatts in any typical moment… That’s 20,000 Horns Revs. Eek. That’s a lot. But Denmark is a little country. Maybe it’s not out of the question. Germany’s current wind power capacity is about 20,000 megawatts. So, we’d only need to duplicate Germany’s entire capacity 160 times.

Hey, that’s only two orders of magnitude! That seems doable.

Yo, congress! Can we get on this?