TomS Words of Wisdom

Is meta dreaming and sleeping (dreams about dreaming and sleeping) a sign of deep intellectual self knowledge or just a sign that you need more sleep?

After several weeks / months of hacking around with Debian GNU/Linux trying to get my sound card working, I finally gave up and tried a Debian derivative called Ubuntu. I first downloaded a "live CD" version that allowed me to try Ubuntu without installing it. When Ubuntu booted off the "live CD" it recognized the sound card and correctly configured the network connection. So I downloaded the install CD, wiped out my previous Debian GNU/Linux and installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu version 5.10 "Breezy Badger".
It took longer that the 25 minutes they claimed, but it was still much faster then a full reinstall of Windows, especially since OpenOffice and Firefox are included in the Ubuntu dirtro.

Roast Turkey
Originally uploaded by TSayles.

Cooked roast turkey for myself and my housemates. Also made Tom safe cranberry sauce, peas & pearl onions, mashed potatoes and fresh pineapple. Tried gravy, but the consistency wasn't quite right. Guess I still need more practice with gravy. More photos on my Flicker page.

Today I got around to listening to the November 20th edition of the Chris Pirillo show where Ponzi was interviewing Andru Edwards, about the recent inaugural Mind Camp. Near the end of the interview it occurred to me that many of the participants at this and similar events, like Gnomedex and the Portable Media Expo, would probably enjoy getting together more frequently even if it was on a smaller scale.
Thinking of my own geeky friends, one thing many of them have in common is that the like to cook and/or eat gourmet food, so we occasionally gather for potlucks. This lead me into thoughts about combining regular gatherings of intellectuals for shared food with some collaborative problem solving around particular topics.
The resulting fusion is an idea I call Potlucks4Progress, Social Networking to Solve Social Problems. What I have in mind is a website, probably Potlucks4Progress.com, where registered users can:

• Suggest problems that social networks of smart folks might solve that would include
• Limited length problem statement
• Links to supporting documents, optional
• Closing date for judged awards, optional
• Offer prize(s) for judged awards, optional
• invitation(s) to judge solutions, optional
• organize a potluck, by
  
• inviting a just few or whole bunch of friends
• mapping location(s) of potluck(s)
• RSVP to an invitation
• Suggest / assign dish(es) to be brought
• Announce what dish is being / was brought
  
• Submit solution / potluck reports, including
• limited length summary of solution(s) proposed
• links to supporting documentation, optional
  
• links to pictures from potluck, optional
• list of guests attending, optional
• list of dishes served, optional
• Nominate proposed solutions for various awards including:
• best solution
• most practical solution
• most humorous solution
• most creative solution
• most tantalizing menu
  
• most humorous menu
• best photo
• most humorous photo
• most diverse guest list
  
• other user defined awards
  
• Sponsor prizes to be associated with various awards
• Vote to confer unjudged awards to specific proposed solutions

At this site anonymous users could:

• Browse problem statements and solution summary reports
• Subscribe to RSS feeds of newly suggested problems
• Subscribe to RSS feeds of proposed solutions
  
• Browse information about Potlucks4Progress.com

I'd like this to be a self supporting website taking in revenue from ads for gourmet food, cooking and hospitality supplies. Perhaps with a major sponsorship or two from a recipe sites or cooking supply chain, it might even be able to support me, as I'd love to quite my day job.
As always if you're interested in working on this or otherwise supporting the effort, please drop me an e-mail.

Ed & Laura --

The amount of water a horse needs depends on the horse, what they're eating and how hard they're working. But five to fifteen gallons a day is typical. You can probably measure what your horses drink by checking the water meter just before you leave and just after you get back from a weekend away.

Assuming 20 gal/day for the two horses and other animals, and 2 gal/day/person, you're looking at a minimum of 420 gal or about 1600 liters or a little over 2 cubic yards of water to last two weeks.

A third or more of your 140 gallons for five people are probably in your hot water heater. You just have to remember to protect it in the event of a major earthquake. There's also water in your toilet tanks, again if you protect it after a quake.

If any of your neighbors' pools survive you can use that water for both humans and livestock, but you'll probably want to remove the chlorine first. Easiest way is to pass the water through a carbon filter, though you can also use aeration or chemical precipitation or boiling. Again this is a supply that may need to be protected in the immediate aftermath of a major quake. Fast action with a big sheet of plastic might save several hundred gallons of water for later use.

In a disaster situation you can make carbon filters with rinsed charcoal, probably from wood you burn rather than out of a bag. The effectiveness of carbon filters is dependent on chemical reactions so it's proportional to surface area and contact time. Depending on the source of water, carbon filters should generally be used in conjunction with particulate filtration and disinfection. Household bleach, without any laundry additives, is a very good water disinfectant so you want to have plenty in your earthquake supplies.

If you want to be self sufficient and prepared for the worst, you should probably look into getting one of those shipping pallet tanks. They typically have a nice steel cage that protects the tank. You might also look into lighting it with a mercury vapor lamp so the UV will keep stuff from growing in it. If you plumb it in right, you can probably flush the tank a couple of times a year with water you're now putting on your lawn. You also want to make sure that tank's valves are closed most of the time, as you don't want to loose the water if the tank breaks loose from it's plumbing.

Another option would be to plan on evacuating the kids and/or horses to some place with more water after a few days. It's much easier to reopen one or two lanes of a road then it is to repair major water systems.

TTFN
Tom

Edward wrote:

How much water do horses need a day? I need 140 Gallons for people, plus all the animals. That’s a lot of water. That’s 265 two liter bottles just for the people for two weeks

---

From: Tom
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2005 9:30 AM
Subject: Re: Why God will Destroy Los Angeles and San Francisco
Mom --

The recommendations I recall for SoCal are two gallons per person per day for at least two days and preferably until the water systems are fixed.

Some of this can be from sources like your hot water heater and toilet tanks, but some of it should be stored in a place you can get to if your home in condemned and you can't go back inside.

If the aqueducts break, the estimates I recall are two weeks to fix. I think most of Glendale's water is from wells, so assuming that the water tables don't shift too much they shouldn't be down more then a day or two. You might have to go a few blocks to get water in Glendale and will probably have to wait in line, but it should be available.

The recommendations are a bit less here in Seattle as much of the year we can collect rain water. Still I keep emergency food, water and shelter in my Jeep.

TTFN
Tom

Carol wrote:

now that's not humorous at all is Jim right do I need gallons of water

Tom wrote:

Mom & Others --

Call me a profit if you must, but God will also destroy much of the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco by earthquakes for pretty much the same reasons.

TTFN
Tom

This is an idea I've been kicking around in various forms for almost 15 years now.

Basically I want a device with a bar code scanner that mounts near my kitchen garbage & recycling containers. As I use up a product and throw away the package, I would scan the UPC code and it would be added to an online shopping list. In up-scale markets this could be linked directly to an on-line grocery delivery service. But in most market areas (including mine), users should be able scan their preferred customer / club / reward card at a kiosk and have a shopping list print out of a receipt printer. A clever independent service provider could even perform price comparison and list display / update through mobile phones.

There are several way that such a Home Shopping Scanner could be designed. The easiest for consumers to install would probably be a stand alone wireless Ethernet device. Cheaper to build, but harder to install include, connecting via USB to a fridge mounted or under cabinet PC.

While I'm ticked off at the "Bible Thumpers" and feeling prophetic, I'll throw out a few more choice original quotes.

The Bible is a history book that hasn't been adequately revised in almost 2000 years.

God's truest testament is his creation, the universe. Its laws of physics are his commandments and evolution is one of his most basic tools.

In the KJV, Matthew 5:5 has a typo and should read, "Blessed are the Geek: for they shall inherit the earth." Supporting evidence can be seen in by fixing the same typo in Psalms 25 & 37. Think about it. Persecution. Celibacy. Bill Gates. It makes sense.

One of the primary goals of the GUSoHuC would be to showcase those areas where there is a strong consensus.

Another, but less prominent goal would be, in cases where there are significant and diametrically opposed values/belief systems, provide a forum for discussion and consensus building. In these cases, GUSoHuC, will/should do the following. First, much like how Wikipedia handles controversial articles, acknowledge and tag that there are opposing points of view. Second narrow the scope of the dispute as much as possible using formal consensus techniques. And finally present concurring and dissenting points of view in a structured way that uses social networking techniques rank the arguments pro and con.

Call it divine inspiration or maybe just the logical conjunction of several disparate concepts, but last week I began formulating the following idea:

Humanity needs a living document in which to collect the combined wisdom from the various world religions and branches of sciences.

The Wikipedia is already doing this for human knowledge by applying open source technologies and techniques to the capture and documentation of facts in the form of encyclopedia articles. The time is right for us to begin similar work with human wisdom, probably in some form of scripture.

I'm still working on fleshing out many of the details and committing this idea, along with its associated ideas into words suitable for publication. Hopefully I'll find time to work on this among my many other activities.

With cheap used PCs running various flavors of Linux, inexpensive large hard drives and widely available broadband Internet connections, it ought to be relatively easy to set up Distributed Family / Home Backup Networks.

Basically I want to take a $75 used PC, throw a new $100 hard drive in it, plug it in to my home network and boot it off a Linux live CD. I'd like configure this system through a web interface, much like I configure other appliances on my home network. The main task of this system would be to automatically mirror data shared from my desktop and laptop computers.

I'd also like to install an identical node on my parent's home network to back up data from their computers and provide an off-site mirror of my data. (Okay maybe it needs two $100 hard drives.) Scale this up to a few more nodes, say a couple of friends and another relative or two, and we can start doing some RAID like economies by splitting remote mirrors across several nodes, with sufficient redundancy to recover the local node if a remote node or two is lost or off-line.

I think that the configuration parameters would need to include:

• Notification e-mail address and login password
  
• Unique host name (for use with dynamic DNS)
• List of local network share(s) to back-up
• Schedule for local network back-ups
  
• List of remote nodes to with which to peer
  including some sort of out of band encryption key exchange
• bandwidth throttling limits
  

Other interesting little details I've thought of include:

• Connections between nodes should be encrypted
• Provide optional encryption of mirror data on the remote node(s)
  i.e All data destined for remote storage would be encrypted before being sent. Only the local node would have the key necessary to decrypt. This should probably be turned on by default.
  
• Create small cross-platform applet to scan the local subnet and discover the newly installed back-up node(s) and launch configuration page in default browser
• Optional daily, weekly, & monthly statistics e-mail / web page.
• Optional merged mirroring for weekend commuters
  i.e. Two (or more) nodes could use a single list of shares to backup and a single two-way mirror set, ensuring that laptops that move from one local net to the other [/another] are protected.
• Nodes could optionally provide traditional file server functionality on their local networks
• Nodes could even provide file sharing services across multiple nodes. [Though this would likely get complicated as it would require a distributed real time locking system.]
  
• Node configuration data, including private keys, should be copied to a .zip file (or .tar ball) and burned onto CDs and stored securely (in say a home safe or safe deposit box). With any configuration changes the node should prompt the owner / admin to create a new configuration back-up file/CD.
  

I'd love to set something like this up on my own, but I'm still too much of a Linux newbie. So if there is anyone that would like to help me with this please let me know.

Once the software is up and running maybe someone like Linksys might be interested in selling a true appliance version off of retail shelves. Maybe a shoe box size device with power and Ethernet connections, hard disk, CD-RW drive, and a configuration CD.

linux
Originally uploaded by xxmoexx.

Sex sells, even for open source.

In a recent mailing list post about planning for Gnomedex 2006, J.D. Lasica exclaimed:

"Four-day conference?! What is this, Woodstock?"

My gut reaction and reply was:

Yes, this is our Woodstock. Announcer: "Don't upload big files." = Announcer: "Don't take the brown acid."

Upon digging a bit deeper, by Googling on "brown acid Woodstock" I found this page talking about the "new sense of community" seen demonstrated at Woodstock. It sounds very similar to what's going on at and around Gnomedex.

So if Gnomedex is the Woodstock of our times, does this imply any or all of the following?

• the hippie movement -- the open source movement
• drugs (medical and recreational) -- the Internet
  
• psychedelic drugs -- file sharing
• LSD -- Napster
• Timothy Leary -- Shawn Fanning
  
• Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Lawrence Lessig
• Civil Rights movement -- IP Reform movement
  
• "The Man" -- "Old Media"
• the Vietnam War -- the War in Iraq
• G. Gordon Liddy -- "“Scooter" Libby
• Richard Nixon -- George W. Bush
• Jimmy Carter -- ???
• ??? -- Chris Pirillo
• ??? -- Adam Curry
• ??? -- Dave Winer
  

I'm sure there are many more, but I'm tired and want to go to bed. So post them in the comments.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
History repeats itself.