Politifact

Politifact
Politifact

I heard about this site while listening to an interview on NPR. In this interview the host asked thier guest some questions as to why “they are so angry” at thier local senator. The guest replied that he is a liar and signed bills to allow a rediculous measure in an unwanted bill. She was irate at the situation, what was interesting is how the host then turned to a guest from Pilitifact who seemed to have researched the case and found taht many of the angry protesters points were driven by rumors as the references to documents they made were unsubstantiated. Now I am perfectly aware that Politifact is yet another level of abstraction from the “real truth” just like any other news agency.  What is interesting to me, after I browsed around thier site is the fact that they give you thier opinion and consolidate every reference and statement into linkable sources on the right hand gutter of the web page. It’s like having your own senate secratary gathering the facts for you so you can make your own informed descisions on a topic.

Fact-o-meter Ex.
Pants on Fire

They give a summary of statment or claims made by our politicatns and then exmine their refernces and sources and rate how true the statememnt is on a “truth -o-meter”.  Their meter varies from basic true or fals all the way down to “Pants on Fire” for those claims made that are not only exagerated but baseless.

Pulitzer
Pulitzer

They also show you links to all the references and sources they reveiwed so you can digg into the claims yourself and form your own opinion. The site definitely fills a need and will ecome popular enough so that our politicians are more careful when trying to exagerate claims just to gain the viewers attention. ALso a nice reference for Politifact is thier wininnging of the 2008 pulitzer for national reporting after only being luanched in 2007.

Boxee

Boxee
Boxee

Isaac just demoed a great peice of software for the mac or PC called Boxee. Boxee is loaded on your computer and plays online video from hundreds of sources including videos from your local hard drive, hulu, youtube, and digg. Simply hook your computer up to your TV and watch these shows and click through options and menus with your remote. Best of all its an open source project so downloading is free and you are able to improve the product or add your own video modukes as you please.

Since Boxee allows you to login to your favorite social networks you can see what friends are watching while you watch and more. The bads: since it’s open source and downloaded software when a web site  that boxee pulls from is changed those interfaces in Boxee fail as well until you download a newer build. Its a great tool and relly merges computer with tv experience, definitly a project that has been needed for a long time and meant for the open soure community.

See more about what Boxee can do below:

The Night

Nights are so off putting at times. The complete lack of sound and motion. You are left to you own thoughts and there are not very many ways to allow your mind to discern what is real from what is abstract and what is soley ones own consciousness.  I’m not talking about hallucinating or a type of day dreaming, although I could see how easy it would be to fall into a state of delusion, but I’m talking about basic thoughts of life, self, interests, problems etc. The mind begins to swirl and there is no rock or benchmark to bind your mind to as it begins to float away from its dock. When there is no community or bustle around you to remind you that the sun will indeed come up, people must obey the law of gravity and you are not alone, then your world all resides within your own mind and the mind has no bounds.  Your empty and dark surrounding becomes the perfect home for you mind to extend into, the world becomes an extension of your consciousness and it becomes less and less clear as to what is in and what is outside your thoughts.

Are the problems of the day as major as they seem? Why after I fall asleep and awake to the morning sun does the intensity of my thoughts or their urgency fade?  Maybe the night provides the perfect backdrop for the mind to begin to set itself free and take over the consciousness and drive it into the surreal. Its dark, quite, and no one is around to challenge its attempts to break free.  Right now time seems endless and my worries are loose ended and indefinite, however logically I know that tomorrow all will be back to normal and all i need is some sleep.

It is amazing how difficult it is for my day-self to completely understand the emotions of my night-self  is experiencing and vice versa. A scary movie in the woods at 2 am is not the same at 2 PM but it is the same woods and I am the same person. Who needs drugs to escape reality when reality is so volatile already between night and day. A man jumps off of the top of the building and commits suicide at night, if he only waited till day break would he be far from those thoughts only hours into the morning? More importantly how much of what we think is fact is nothing more then a delusion, our hatred for another country or race? Do we at times of fear and pain fall into our own versions of these dark and lonely nights, where our minds ever  so subtly break away from our cast to reality? Only 2 years ago Iran was full of  anti- democratic people, stocks had no ceiling, houses were an easy ticket to personal wealth and so on. Did day just finally break? How often are our minds pulled from reality because of the darkness of rhetoric, and media.  If I didn’t remind myself of the day on a night like this I would surely be lost. Lesson learned Descartes, lesson learned.

Screw Microsoft

PC Frustration
PC Frustration

Okay so only a year ago or so I was a PC MS guy. Since then I have adopted apple like many of you out there for various reasons that I soon shall post, but mostly for iPhone development needs originally. Since then I have set up 3 mac mini’s and 2 imacs. One of the mac mini’s i set up as a remote machine that i screen share to that works as a server for our company. I havent had a single problem and was able to screen share, transfer files, share music, and use any usb or network basd periphreal from printers to ipods to itunes. I was even able to transfer files onto my PC laptop instantly and it  took much longer to do the exact same process from the laptop to the mac.

Broke as a joke
Broke as a joke

I havent really thought to much about it until tonight. Tonight I installed a new PC for my parents becuase 1) They wanted it cause they are use to it and 2) It was under $600. This one machine has taken me hours to set up, and I am so frustrated right now beucase printing was erroring out, not the pronter but the print option would hang. Installing and startng up the machine felt like an eternity and honestly $1500 does not sound so expensive when i think back to how easy all of my other mac based installs have been. I was ready to punch a baby in the face after this MS/PC set up process. Maybe I;’m spoiled by the MAC and I should be more patient with the PC/MS version of computers….or maybe having to be patient with your computer is f’en dumb. Oh, one more thing is it the PC’s fault or is it MS’s. I wonder what would happen if I installed the OS X on this hard ware, is it all in the software all in the hardware, or both?