Jeremy Boles has put up somewhat of a challenge called Photography Calisthenics. It is a challenge to take 50 pictures a day for a week, trying new techniques, experimenting, and just getting out and taking pictures.

I have decided I will try to take 50 pictures a day and it is already turning out to be pretty tough. I take my camera with me almost everywhere I go but don’t always pull it out and take a picture. This will be a good exercise for me to stop being camera lazy and get out and take some shots.

Jeremy has started a flickr group called Photography Calisthenics (appropriately). Check it out and if you have a camera that’s sitting around, participate.

I have not made a political post in a while so I thought I’d heat things up a bit.

Israeli soldiers have begun to forcibly evict settlers in the Gaza Strip. Ariel Sharon has said that the pull out from Gaza will bring peace to the region, I beg to differ. I would wager a good sum of money that we will see an attack by one of the Palestinian groups (Hamas, Hezbollah, etc.) some time in the next 2-3 months.

This pullout, nor any of the future planned pullouts will satisfy Palestinian organizations. They will move into Gaza and then complain that there is not enough water or there is famine. To me it sounds like a personal problem. You wanted the Israelis out and you got what you wanted, now you are on your own.

Yes the Gaza pullout looks good for the short-term, but is anyone thinking long term? The Palestinian people will not be satisfied until Israel is given to them, which will not happen.

I was looking for a band on iTunes today and I could not for the life of me remember the name. I had looked them up on Sunday after hearing a sample on an indie website. Not being able to find the band really frustrated me and since there is no ‘Recently Viewed’ functionality with iTunes like there is with Amazon and eBay I still have not found the band.

So they lost a sale and I won’t be able to share the band with others. The name will more than likely come to me sometime next week and I’ll finally be able to buy the album but until then I’m going to be completely frustrated.

Sadly I have to give Jackson away. The house I am living in does not allow pets and the person I had lined up to take him suddenly backed out.

I do not know how to go about giving him up but I am going to call the vet and see if they know of anyone who was looking for a dog. If anyone out there wants to give a 1yr. old Terrier/Basenji mix a good home, e-mail me at s [at] badice dot com. He has a great personality, loves to go on walks, is house trained, and behaves very well. He loves children, most other dogs, and throwing ball in the backyard.

If you are interested just send me an e-mail and I’ll get right back to you.

I was listening to Mudhoney this morning and heard a lot of where the riffs on Nevermind came from. It’s weird to hear the intro from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on a different album, at a different tempo, and with different lyrics.

Just one of those weird things I came upon this morning.

I was greeted this morning by a guy here at work that I really enjoy talking to. His personality reminds me of my brother minus some of the antics.

We started chatting about how my application testing was going and I mentioned that I was getting ready to turn it over to a co-worker as I prepare to leave and he said “Maybe it could be a source of income while at school”… I do not know exactly what that means but if he’s wanting me to do this while I’m at school and pay me for it then I am fine with that.

I am going to try and talk to him some more before the day is over and see what he really meant. I would be willing to work on more of this application testing stuff. I have learned a lot about how the software works and how to apply it in certain situations and I now have intricate knowledge in how the application I am testing works so I know when some things are supposed to break (controlled) and when they just flat out fail.

It is an interesting proposition and if given the chance I’d probably continue to do it.

Americans may just be the most volatile people on Earth. The littlest things set us off. After a few weeks of driving in severe traffic I have learned to deal with it. Sadly, there are a lot of Houstonians who feel that their commute to work should be instantaneous and without incident.

This morning driving to work there was an accident on the outbound side of U.S. 59 that had that entire side of the freeway shutdown and traffic slowed on the inbound side. The wreck was one of the worst I have seen in a long time and two LifeFlight helicopters were on the scene. Yet people were honking at each other, trying to change lanes, and get going as fast as they could. They would then get angry, throwing up middle fingers, when the lane they moved to did not go as fast as they wanted it to.

I really wish people would just slow down and realize how small something like traffic is compared to other problems that life presents, like being in a possibly fatal accident. Everything is a race. The world does not move fast enough for people and it is obvious when you are in store and people get mad at a checkout girl because the price will not scan correctly. Someone speaks up and says something rude and sarcastic and the girls shrugs it off.

Maybe it is an issue of respect or lack thereof. My mom was in Starbuck’s and a woman brought a dog in. This was not a seeing eye dog, it was a little mutt that this woman just couldn’t leave outside for 2 minutes while she got her coffee. My mother made a comment to a Starbuck’s employee stating that she was allergic to dogs (she’s not but it was better than saying “The dog needs to leave”) and another woman spoke up stating that she was allergic as well. The employee asked the woman with the dog to take the dog outside, saying that customers were allergic. This woman looked over to my mom and had the nerve to respond with (and I quote) “Well, she’s just a b*tch!”. Excuse me? I told my mom that had I been there things probably would have gone down a little differently as I have no problem getting up and telling that woman to her face that she has no right to speak that way to my mother or any other customer. It is a respect issue. Take your dog outside, how hard is that? It is a health code issue, end of story. We just have a lack of respect for the people around us and it effects our everyday lives.

Just try and show some love or respect and see what kind of difference it makes. Let someone into your lane on the freeway, let someone cross infront of your car in a parking lot, or just say “good morning” to someone.

Does anyone else have problems with their iPod’s clickwheel sometimes not doing what it is supposed to do? Mine seems to work intermittently, sometimes not scrolling through the menus and sometimes not clicking. I have reset my iPod about four times since I bought it and I am probably going to take it in to the Apple store and get it looked at. I will probably buy the AppleCare Protection Plan as well, just as a safety measure for the coming years.

Another small problem I have been having is the iPod not updating the album art. I will rip a new CD, select all of the songs, right-click, choose “Info”, and add the album art. I plugin the iPod after doing this and it tells me the iPod is updating, then it gives me an error about the artwork. I have been unable to find the error on Apple’s website and I have not found any answers on third party sites. It is pretty frustrating but not super important, I just like seeing the artwork when playing a song or album.

AppleInsider had a write up on the possibility of the Playstation 3 supporting OS X. It is also reported that it may support other operating systems such as Linux.

I wasn’t planning on buying one but this ups the ante.

Today I talked to a few people who run the RTOC here in Houston and they mentioned some of their history. The RTOC monitors offshore oil rigs and their drilling operations in real time. This has been done for the past 10 years and apparently Shell was one of the first providers of broadband internet to people on the Gulf Coast.

The amount of data that is streamed a day is in terabytes so large “pipes” were needed to get the info from the rigs and to the monitoring stations in New Orleans and Houston. These pipes were so large that their excess bandwidth was actually sold to different telecommunications companies. If you have the available throughput then why not give it up and make a little money?

I had asked about the data they received because I was interested in whether they used a commercial data provider but was surprised to hear them tell me that they put down their own fiber and started up their own telecomm company.