Got this message from Google Voice today:

and received this handy transcription:

It’s not a matter and I want to make a single. But I think the rest of the not. If you’re not. You’re gonna.

Unfortunately, Google Voice didn’t recognize that the message had been left in Spanish, and so the message makes no sense. What’s really funny is that while it bears no relation to the sense of the message in Spanish as the Spanish speakers among you will recognize, Google Voice did a great job of making sense of the sounds assuming the speaker was speaking English!

For many reasons Pennsic 39 was a wash out for me this year. There was still a possibility that I’d be able to go out alone for the middle weekend, but that shriveled like my manhood under the gaze of a woman who would not be scorned. So, instead of simply sitting around drinking beer and sulking, we decided to sit around drinking in our tent and sing instead! Good Times were had by those who attended our mini Pennsic, I think. The “event” started for me on Thursday night, myself having taken off Friday to prepare the yard. By Friday afternoon the tent was set up and skulls and candles were in place for night time festivities. That night was nice, with only one friend and his kids making it out for a little pre-Pennsic party. Most of the fun happened Saturday afternoon into Saturday night as several of my similarly Pennsic-pitying friends showed up to share story and song supplemented by fine food and strong ale. We found many analouges to Pennsic in my back yard, though the town runs were much shorter and we didn’t have to wait for the honey wagon to clean Mr John. We all commented on how what we really missed about Pennsic the most were all the people who are really almost extended family who we miss very much. We also enjoyed star gazing and the Perseid meteor shower as the night grew older. I spent almost all Sunday out in the tent listening to Ceol na nGael with Eileen Ivers as guest host which made for an absolutely fantastic show and a perfect cap to my personal Pennsic. Finally got the tent down and stowed tonight after work

Now that smartphones are everywhere and seemingly everyone is hooked into the social web, there are a number of different ways to keep tabs on whats going on at Pennsic in real time even from afar. I’ll keep poking around for new links and updating this post as I come across them.

• Pennsic twitter feed
• Most recent Pennsic photos posted to Flickr
• Pennsic Independent RSS feed
• Pennsic parties page on Facebook
• Pennsic War on Tribe
• NOAA weather page for Slippery Rock, PA
• Live Weather Channel Radar for Slippery Rock, PA
• Pennsic Party Calendar
• Latest Pennsic Hits on Google

Just a short note to my military friends. Doubtless you’ll be hearing about this soon enough anyway, but just in case you do not: Tom Ryan is due to present a talk at the upcoming Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas about the dangers of revealing too much information on social networking sites. According to reports on computerworld, FOXNews, and Armed with Science [dod.mil], Ryan ran an experiment to see how much sensitive information he could glean through social networking. He created the ficticious persona of “Robin Sage”, a good-looking twenty-something, hacker grad from MIT who claimed to be an intern at Naval Network Command. In the month Ryan ran the experiment he was able to build a considerable number of social networking connections on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with active duty military personnel and officials and through these connections was able to glean military intelligence. The simplest and most obviously dangerous example of leaked information should be of immediate concern to military folks:

For example, one of Robin’s soldier friends posted a photo of his unit on surveillance duties at a mountain outpost in Afghanistan. That inadvertently exposed their location, because the photo contained GeoIP data from the camera.

A friend and I were kicking back in easy chairs in my home office recently, sipping some wonderful Cream Ale that my friend had brewed when the girls burst into the room pointing at the window. “Look! Look outside!” one yelped, “I see our next door neighbor with a camera!” said the other. A bit groggy from the ale, we forced ourselves out of the comfortable chairs and stumbled to peer out the window. “What is it?” I asked. I saw nothing out of the window, but the clamour in the front room told me they were probably seeing something out front now. Making our way in there, we were lucky enough to spy the object of the girls’ excitement – a male Indian peafowl (a peacock) strutting around on the lawn. Peacocks are the national bird of India and Pakistan, and while there are a few in sanctuaries on the Island, as far as I know there aren’t any communities living in the woods hereabouts. Grabbing our cameras we caught some images of this most impressively arrayed fowl, but weren’t lucky enough to see him fan his brilliant plumage.

A visit to the county farm nearby revealed that while they weren’t missing any of their own peacocks, they had heard tales of at least one peacock in our neighborhood last year. Perhaps he’s being taken care of by someone or taken up residence in the woods.

Reading about Peafowl I was interested to read:

Many of the brilliant colours of the peacock plumage are due to an optical interference phenomenon, Bragg reflection, based on (nearly) periodic nanostructures found in the barbules (fiber-like components) of the feathers

but I admit mainly because another one of my friends is named Bragg.

The girls were pretty excited about the turkeys that were strutting around the yard last year, but the Peacock holds high honors now.

Saw a powerful and thought-provoking film today on NetFlix called 180° SOUTH by Jeff Johnson which is a film record of his journey to Patagonia in the footsteps of his heros Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia, Inc. the outdoor clothing company) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face and co-founder of ESPRIT). Environmentally-aware, these guys are self-described “dirt bags” who would spend most of their time in the sixties hiking, surfing, camping, and mountain climbing in the great wilderness areas of the west and eventually built businesses around what they loved to do. Their successes eventually allowed them the resources to help create and preserve huge tracks of land in South America even as the countries there were building dams and paper pulp mills and power plants to fuel their fledgling economies. Jeff’s trip (by boat) gets delayed when they shipwreck and are forced to detour to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) to re-mast. The lesson of the deforestation of Easter Island by islanders driven in competition to build ever larger status Moai is not lost on the film-maker (there is still disagreement about this in the scientific community). The film’s name comes from a comment that if progress up a mountain brings you to a cliff does it make sense to march into the chasm when you could instead turn 180 degrees around and take a step forward? Beautiful scenery, interesting characters, important social issues, awesome soundtrack largely by Ugly Casanova (Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse) and James Mercer, though the haunting melody sung by Mahoke, a girl Jeff meets on Easter Island and decides to take the journey with him may rank as my favorite song in the film.

My wife has been reading books on her palm pilot for years but when the prices began to fall on the e-ink e-readers recently I urged her to get one of those instead. The e-ink screens aren’t backlit, so you have to read them in a lit room or outside but they’re reflective (like real paper) so they’re much easier on the eyes than what is, on LCD screens, essentially staring into a glowing lamp. We looked at the Amazon Kindle, the Sony e-reader and the B&N Nook. I’m a long time Amazon customer, so it seemed natural that we’d go for the Kindle, but the Kindle doesn’t support the electronic book formats that our library uses and I’m not a fan of vendor lock in like that. Also, we were afraid that we’d end up spending a lot of money for Amazon content that we weren’t planning to do because it would be so easy. Sony was out because I’m a rabid anti-Sony person – I won’t buy anything made by that company for multiple reasons no matter how great it might be – don’t get me started. The Nook runs Android, supports our library’s file format (ePub, an open but DRM-able format), costs less. While I don’t like the idea of the separate touch screen, at least it doesn’t have a bunch of stupid blackberry-like buttons on it, so we decided on the Nook – here’s some quick first impressions:

There are two models of the Nook, one with 3G and one without. We both discussed whether we really needed a 3G connection and reasoned that having 3G would make it too easy to buy things on a whim, and that most of the time it would be used, wifi would be available anyway if needed. Opting for the wifi only version got us a Nook for only $149. The local Barnes and Noble didn’t keep these models in stock so we had to order it.

She received her new Nook yesterday and got it connected to our wifi (an Apple Airport snow) without issue. She was also able to transfer ePubs from the library to it from her computer easily since the Nook appears as an external drive when plugged in via USB. The Nook is a nice size, and comfortable to hold in the hand, though I’ve read its heavier than the Kindle. There are a couple buttons on the left and right side which can be used to turn pages, but the main way you operate the device is via a color LCD touchscreen at the bottom. My wife prefers to use a finger gesture (a downward swipe) on the touchscreen (which remains unlit yet accepts the input) to change pages instead of the buttons. My first impression of the separate screen wasn’t good. The e-ink screen isn’t backlit, so you need some kind of light to see it – but even sitting near a lamp the smaller LCD input screen was so bright it draws your attention and then blinds you. It might just be the contrast of the grey and easy to read e-ink screen with the brightness of a typical color LCD screen, but its distracting and I can imagine it sucking the battery dry fairly quickly. I don’t know if there is a way to reduce the brightness of the 2nd display or not yet.

My wife had the wifi disabled (set to airplane mode) to save battery life, so I enabled it to test the web browser (which is marked as in beta). The menu selection interface of the LCD screen was well thought out and fairly intuitive – I was able to turn on the wireless and launch the browser in seconds. Personally I don’t read novels. I do read history but most of the things I’m interested in are pretty obscure and not generally available electronically or are out of print. The only thing I’d want to use an e-reader for is reading articles posted on websites and trying to do this on the Nook was disappointing. Since the e-ink screen on the Nook isn’t a touchscreen, you can’t use your finger to select links directly or scroll, you have to do your input on the smaller LCD screen. This means that for browsing for something of interest, you’ll end up having to look at the bright input screen a lot. The e-ink screen can only display about half of a normal sized webpage, and the LCD screen can only show a tiny portion of that, leaving you navigating around in about 20% of the page (and not doing so directly, but by proxy on the LCD screen). I realized then that my perfect e-reader will have a touch screen e-ink display *and* a web-browser.

I looked at an example ePub and it was displayed very nicely on the e-ink screen, very readable – so if you’re content with loading novels (which is what my wife intends to do) then the device should serve the purpose well.