Search Results for “youtube” – Page 12

June 12, 2008 / Environment

Forget Biofuels – It’s Air All the Way, Baby!

Check it:

What’s sad is that, but for human greed and short-sightedness, this could have been the path for the automotive industry beginning over a century ago.

Oh, but you can’t make nearly the money on compressed air as you can on selling fuel, be it gasoline or biofuels or hydrogen. So yeah, all those corporations and selfish assholes who happen to control the means of production are going to sabotage these technologies, or poison our perceptions so that, in the end, money continues to line the pockets of the already obscenely rich.

Cynical? Who me?

Nahhh.

May 8, 2008 / Politics

McCain Watch: Is A Holy War So Wrong?

Can someone explain to me why Obama gets dragged over coals because of his association with Reverend Wright and McCain proclaims this jackass a “moral compass” and the mainstream press just skip merrily on past the hypocrisy of someone like McCain pandering to a dangerous, religious ideologue who probably has more in common with Osama bin Laden than with Christ:

Of course if you want to see America become embroiled in a holy war against all of Islam, then by all means, vote McCain. Just don’t be surprised when the economy tanks, all of our constitutional rights are flushed down the toilet, and our use of violence breeds millions of enemies who see the US as a bully and a rogue nation.

June 10, 2008 / Blogging

New – Old Look and the Aesthetics of Blogging

Recently, I’d done a major change to the look of LtL:

Picture 1.png

And I liked it, I really did. I was proud of the background and how it integrated with the header image, and I liked the header image too – the colors really pop and provide a cold luminescence that is both bright but also gives the sense of something gritty. But after only a few days I’ve returned to a very simple and clean look because, in the end, the experience I want to offer on this site is primarily one of reading. I mean, sure, I’ve got my music and sound design pages, and I post YouTube videos on a regular basis to share neat stuff with friends, family and the few strangers who stop by, but the main purpose is to communicate thoughts, ideas, essays, stories, half-baked arguments, crazy theories, daily minutia, etc. I found the new design to be overly aggressive, distracting from the main point.

I’m glad took the time to play around with the CSS to the level that I did, and I may very well clean the theme up and post it on the WordPress themes site for others to use. I’ll probably use the background over at my Sound Design site LtL Sound. For now, at least for Living the Liminal, I’m sticking with an aesthetic that highlights the text and the entries and offers little to no distraction. I’m even going to leave the header sans image for now, until I find something I feel fits the aesthetic that I’m going for.

I want to give Ash Hague a big thanks for his simple and clean designs. I’m actually using them on both LtL and Letters to Lost Friends. I find that I tend to tweak the fonts and font sizes a bit, but other that that, his themes are simple, clean and elegant (and though rounded corners would be cool, my recent experiments with themes over at Letters showed me how tricky those can be).

April 22, 2008 / Music

Life on Mars Still Kicks Ass

Listening to Radio Paradise after uploading the new episode of Letters to Lost Friends, and David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is playing. Damn but this is a good song:

March 29, 2008 / Environment

Turn Them Lights Out, Bubba!

Today, hundreds of thousands of people, and hundreds of cities across the world are participating in Earth Hour. From 8 pm – 9 pm local time, people all over the world will be turning off their lights. In homes, businesses, city & state government facilities, the lights go dark as a way to raise awareness of energy consumption and conservation.

From their website:

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.

Will you be doing this today? If so, drop a comment with some ideas of how to use that dark hour. I’m contemplating Scrabble by candlelight, possibly listening to some audio fiction through the iPod, writing letters to friends that I haven’t talked to in too long a time, or, maybe even just sitting quietly and contemplatively. How odd would that be?!!

Link

March 28, 2008 / Humor

Music & Funny

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for turning me on to Mitch Benn:

There’s more over on YouTube, but these were my favorites.

March 19, 2008 / Politics

Why Obama is Not Just about Rhetoric

I just finished watching Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech and can already imagine the media and conservative spin on it boiling down to the notion that he can sure talk pretty, but there’s no substance behind his words.

I think anyone who dismisses Obama as nothing but a good speaker is missing the point of his speech. The fact that he talked about race in a thoughtful, balanced manner, the fact that he addressed the real fears and angers that are within the poor white communities as well as those within the black communities, the fact that he did not play politics as usual with this issue and refused to separate himself from his church and his pastor while clearly demonstrating how and why he does not agree with Rev. Wright, and the fact that he spoke truth about the complexities and difficulties facing our country tells me that he is not simply a politician, but a leader.

Can you honestly see Clinton giving a speech about something as complex and charged as racism in America?

Can you honestly see McCain giving a speech that both speaks truth and offers a vision of hope and progress?

(And I’m not even going to go into the problems with McCain’s religious associations – associations which are certainly to being scrutinized to the same extent as Obama’s but which are just as, if not more, incendiary. You can find some good coverage of those issues here and here.)

Enough with claims that Obama supporters are cultish and fanatics and that the man doesn’t have enough experience to be an effective President. He has the experience that it takes to lead, to offer up a vision of hope and justice and he has the experience it takes to find the best and brightest people to advise him . . . something our current President was never very good at and, when he did (Colin Powell comes to mind) he simply ignored good and true advice to pursue his own messianic and vicious agendas. You want to talk about cultish? You want to talk about fanatic? Let’s talk about the people who still support Bush after he has wrecked the economy, sanctioned torture, created a more fertile ground for terrorism, lost us a city, lied to Congress and the American people, involved us in a disastrous war with no plan for peace, and stolen our constitutional rights. Those are the people who are drinking the kool-aid, not the Obama supporters.

March 1, 2008 / Mac

Links Today

An exciting development in the fight against HIV/AIDS:

Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, says his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus.

“When we put this gene in cells, it prevents the assembly of the HIV virus,” said Barr, a postdoctoral fellow. “This means the virus cannot get out of the cells to infect other cells, thereby blocking the spread of the virus.”

(Link via Slashdot)

Last week, EscapePod.org ran one of the best stories they’ve published so far. It’s called “Edward Bear and the Very Very Long Walk.” Even if you aren’t particularly into science fiction, I highly suggest you take 45 minutes, make a nice cup of tea (or coffee or a nice single malt scotch) and give it a listen. EscapePod is a great audio magazine and has run a number of wonderful stories, even though the quality of their readers is sometimes a bit spotty. (As much as I love the site and what they do for audio storytelling and science fiction, I’m not the biggest fan of Stephen Eley’s reading style – in particular, his voices for women always feel forced, breathy and stereotypical.) That said, however, please take the time to listen to “Edward Bear” . . . If you end up feeling like it’s a waste of your time, I’ll buy you a tea (or a coffee or a nice single malt scotch).

(Link)

I Am Fuel, You Are Friends is a really great music blog and Heather Browne’s tastes are eclectic and excellent. I don’t head over there nearly as much as I should, but I notices that she has the final night of Wilco’s five night residency at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago–where they played, over the five nights, their entire catalog! The set includes Andrew Bird playing violin on a number of songs. If you’ve never heard Wilco play live, you’re missing out on a truly great band! Give ’em a listen.

(Link)

This one’s for the Mac users out there: I’m a huge fan of Quicksilver and, like all those other fans, feel like OS X without Quicksilver is sorta like a bicycle without wheels. The creator of QS has a new program that helps reveal a number of hidden preferences called “Secrets. I haven’t tried it out yet, but some of the things you can do with it include setting the login window picture, showing unsupported disks in Time Machine (read: Airport disks that should damn well be usable with Time Machine but still aren’t), and various dock preferences that are hidden from use non-unix, non-terminal hack people. Of course, messing around with some of these settings might be asking for trouble if you don’t know what you are doing, so be careful!

(Link)

Jim White has a new album coming out which deserves it’s own blog entry. In the meantime, a kick-ass song from his album No Such Place: