Jzoe Blog

Ok, this is something I need to start looking at and working through-

http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/housing/publications/BerkeleyInventorySubsidizedHousing2002.pdf

I just thought this was worth blogging about; there is an asteroid headed to the earth. It’s name is MN4.

There is currently a 1 in 45 chance that it will strike the earth in about 25 years. If this thing strikes, it will have approximately 25 times the energy of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. The impact will be about like an 8.something on the Richter scale. The asteroid is about 1300 meters long, and would strike the earth at about 13 km/s. If it hits an ocean, Tsunami will be a bad time for anybody on the coast- anywhere along that ocean. If it strikes on land, the fireball will cause second degree burns on the skin of anybody outdoors within 50 miles.

Freaky, eh?

All I want for christmas is a wheelchair accessible apartment.

Oh, I gave some cool gifts this year, but I still need that apartment. How about it, santa?

Are any of you band nerds out there? I was just listening to an MP3 of the Cavaliers doing Mars, and that moment of silence between the opening and the first triple forte still gives me goosebumps. I’ve definitely got to see a band play that again some day.

I think that contacting large, professionally managed apartment complexes really is a great way to find a wheelchair accessible place. Enough of this small-scale crap! I received a call and an email from a woman in Oakland today, and she was interested in helping me find a place. I told her to email with more details, and she sent an email about a place that she said has a ramp for the entrance, and an elevator. Also, at the end of her email she said they would be “totally willing to add bathtub bars, etc”.

So! I guess that could be good.

Have you noticed the rise of nerd/geek culture? During the dot-com boom, a lot of these computer gurus made big piles of money. Money can change a person, but only so much… Nerdiness became associated with getting rich young, and it became the new cook. Geek chic, I think they call it.

It’s cooler than ever to play video games, know about computers, read about math for fun, Lord of the Rings(!)- and the geeks are proud to be finally get out of the closet. They wear shirts with snippets of code, or put bumper stickers on their cars. Thinkgeek.com is a huge example of this.

This is all just an idle observation, but I would like everyone to take a moment to mourn for any baby who’s recently been named “Linux”. Because seriously- you know someone’s done that. Who could do that to a baby? Geeks, that’s who.

It’s been fun, I’ve got hits from:

Canada
Japan
Netherlands
Denmark
United Kingdom
Australia
Italy
Sweden
France
Hungary
New Zealand
Brazil
Germany
Austria
Belgium
Estonia
Finland
Lithuania
Poland
Romania
Israel
United Arab Emirates (?!?)
Argentine Republic
Switzerland
Chile
Czech Republic
Ireland
India
Mexico
Philippines
Singapore
Thailand
Turkey
South Africa

It looks like I’ve at around 17,000 unique visits in the last year- but I’m not sure how accurate or valid that is. I don’t have any way to know if many of these are robots, or if these people were really looking at Lauraklinkert.com (which I also host) or what. Anyway, once Kendra moves out here there will probably be more happy smiling photos of us- and that should bring in all sorts of new visitors

It’s official, I’m past my peak

I guess I’ve been updating less, and I haven’t been posting photos for a while. I think that people really come here to see the pictures. Is that right?

Ok, ok… this might be dorkier than segways.

Unicycle basketball

Today I saw my first Segway “in the wild”. If I had to describe it in just one word, it would be “dorky”.

Take a look- http://www.bayareaseg.com/News.htm

Later I will post the photo I took, but now I will just talk about it. The woman I saw riding this thing was wearing a lime green construction vest and a bike helmet. She was traveling in the bike lane along with traffic, and wow was she slow. I mean.. wow- I can run faster than that! Bikes travel a lot faster than these things. Based on the speed she was traveling and the width of road space she was taking up, I would say that she should not have been on the road. She obviously didn’t need the helmet for the reason a bicyclist needs a helmet- she needed that thing in case a car hit her and sent her flying. I would feel silly as hell if I wore a helmet when I went out for a jog (just in case a car hit me) and I would feel silly riding a segway.

The two redeeming factors I see in segways are- ok, three of them are- First, it’s a really cool bit of engineering. It took some big brains to work out the control system. Second, it may just bring down the material cost of more advanced wheelchair and assisted mobility systems. (it always seems like ten times the money is spent on silly shit that’s either supposed to kill people or get some fat debt ridden americans to put another charge on their card) And finally, the last redeeming quality for the segway is that there is somebody out there that is WITHOUT A DOUBT a bigger dork than I am. Oh, and LARPers. Those folks are lame.

Also, furries are really creepy. I never got weird vibes from Disneyland before i knew that there are actually folks who get off on wearing those big furry costumes.