Right, so the authorities thwarted a terrorist plot where said terrorists were planning on using liquid explosives to blow up some airplanes, and now all liquids are banned from being carried on the plane.

A couple of things spring to mind.

• My eye doctor insists I use eye drops while flying, once an hour.
• Considering all the security measures thus far, and considering the ease at which security measures are breached, my being able to see is about the only thing banning all liquids from airplanes is going to stop.
• Please, universe, let’s all at once describe every possible method in which an airplane can be evaporated midflight. Not because terrorists haven’t already thought of it, but because if it happens to be that I’m on that flight, I’d like it to be a clever surprise.
• Solution: full gastrointestinal cleansing via wheat grass shots prior to flying, everyone flies nude, serious mouth inspections and a thrashing with reeds. Judges determine your level of nudeness acceptability and seat you with those of similar acceptability. No alarms, no surprises.
• Thinking more about the nudity and gel (which is a new thought entirely), everyone should just get cozy pods filled with some explosive proof gel. Don’t ask how it’d work, this should be plenty to get your mind figuring it out (take note, also, of the nudity acceptability class I’d be sitting in):

In the hopes that I will write less words more often, I’ve changed the visual format of the site. Please don’t get lost, and do say hello from time to time.

For the curious, I’ve also switched to a new server, and new blog software. It’s not that I don’t like MovableType, because I do, I’m just ready for something new.

Last night over dinner at around 8:00pm, Rael and JDD and I were talking about earthquakes we’d experienced in our lives. All of us had either grown up or lived in California and felt our share of them, enough to produce rich and certainly exaggerated stories.

Ten minutes later Rael gets an SMS from Ev through twttr saying “Did you just feel that earthquake?”. The dinner party was rightly freaked out. Because part of me is prone to considering apocolyptic circumstances from the smallest seeds of an idea, I had thought during our earthquake conversation that it’d be crazy if, during our conversation, an earthquake hit the long overdue Southern California or SF area. It nearly had. At 8:08 a 4.4 quake hit Santa Rosa, just north of the bay.

Later on that night (or rather, very early this morning) as Rael and I were in the process of deploying a new version of stikkit.com, our building began to shake. We had indeed felt a 3.3 earthquake at 1:39am, just a few miles north of us.

The first things out of Rael’s mouth were “Is that a bloody earthquake?!”, “What do we do?” (to which I said “nothing man”), then “We are never allowed to talk about earthquakes again!”

Worth of note: Rael and I get some sort of ultimate geek badge. During the middle of a deployment an earthquake hit, and our concern was far more in favor of finishing the deployment than it was to duck and cover. !

I’m selling my old school Samsung Uproar mobile phone on the cheap. It was the first phone to play MP3s (and I think it held that distinction for nearly five years, come to think of it). It still works well, I’m just cleaning house. Spread the word.

Sometimes, a few days before a presentation where you show fine audience participants how to build a multiplayer web based ajax game, you find a tiny little bug in your code. And then you begin to think the code doesn’t look that fashionable, so you rewrite it all, going from a game that had squares and edges to nodes and connections. And then it ends up being 1:30am the next morning and you realize that you’re actually further behind than when you started because of the rewrite, and that you might as well show the code with the bug and just zip past that one slide very fast and hope no one catches it.

Of course, now I’m obligated to show the good stuff I’ve been rewriting, having outed myself at 1:30am.

I’ve been performing ninja moves on my personal finances lately, chopping costs down. The first big change might come as a shock.

I traded my Subaru Impreza WRX in for a Honda Civic Hybrid. Yeah, crazy eh? I used to talk about my WRX like it was a third child or something, but it was chugging the gas. I began tracking what kind of real gas mileage I was getting as I drove into downtown Portland every other day, and it was shocking. My averages were between 12 and 15 miles per gallon. Seriously. And that wasn’t cheap gas either – the WRX requires gas with an octane of 92 or more, which means I was going premium on every fill up.

The monthly cost to simply fuel the WRX was about $200 bucks, and that was if I restricted my driving just to my normal commute. Factor in insurance for a nearly 300hp compact car with turbo, and the payment, and you have yourself a pricey ride to work.

Despite 4 month waiting lists and people spending several thousand over MSRP, I managed to walk into a Honda dealer this last Saturday and pick up the model with voice activated GPS navigation (worth every penny, and then some) and my monthly costs are looking to be significantly cheaper. First, there’s the gas. Compare 12 miles per gallon to the 52 miles per gallon I’ve been getting. That’s insane. Completely stunning. In fact, I’m getting better mileage than the EPA estimates, which is completely opposite of what you can normally expect.

So, where I was once paying nearly $800 a month with gas and insurance for the WRX, I’m now paying around $350 for gas, car payment, and insurance. That also doesn’t take into account tax breaks totaling nearly $3000 for the purchase of a hybrid. With the tax break, that’s roughly $8000 that stays in my bank account over the course of a year.

But that’s not all – the car is great. It doesn’t go from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds like the WRX, but you’d never know it was a hybrid with a 110HP engine. It’s fast, nimble, doesn’t feel heavy and chunky like the Toyota Prius, and with all the crazy electronics on the inside it feels like a full on luxury car. I simply utter “Temperature 72” and the climate control system automatically adjusts to 72 degrees.

I’ll miss the WRX rocket, but I figure if I just bank my savings over the course of five years, I’ll have a down payment on a house. Not a bad trade.

Together we managed to scrape enough money together to replace all my Mom’s camera gear. She doesn’t yet have the list of everyone who contributed, but will get it as soon as I get a chance to compile it for her. Thanks again.

Months ago I went crazy out of my mind trying to get my hands on the MacBook Pro and now, months later I’m still having a hard time getting my hands on it. The machine runs so hot that it’s literally dangerous to touch at times. There’s no doubt I could cook breakfast on it while checking my email.

As if the heat weren’t enough, the machine has a high pitched squeal which is obviously tied to screen brightness. The brighter the screen, the more intense the squeal. None of the tricks and fixes found on the Internet help. The only way to avoid the sound when using the machine it to use an external monitor and turn the LCD brightness all the way down (to off) or plug in some head phones. I wouldn’t be surprised if being exposed to the high pitch sound for the majority of the day is dangerous for my ears, and I’m guessing Apple will be defending themselves against a lawsuit brought on for the same reasons. It’s that bad.

I tried liking the machine, but in the past 2 hours I’ve had full crashes four times. No warning, no logs, no special screen, just full blown crashes. My guess is they’re brought on by the heat, and as far as I know, there’s no way to bring down the heat except by turning the machine off.

But the heat isn’t all. The Airport is stupid and wigs out when joining networks, even ones you’ve joined often. Video artifacts stick around on the screen and sometimes resolution independence turns itself on and makes all my menus gargantuan. The machine often gets in a weird sleep state where you have to wait for several minutes while resisting the urge to just power the damn thing off. It’s a mess of a machine and it’s totally not like Apple. If this is the machine they’re hoping Windows users will adopt, Windows users will feel right at home sweet trailer home.

Despite the issues, the machine is very fast and if not for the issues would be my perfect machine. I’m probably going to try getting Apple to replace the machine and hope for the best. I hate the idea of giving up the speed for my feeble iBook. But you know what – the iBook has never crashed. Never. And it runs cool, joins networks, has no sleep issues, is always stable and never gets weird.

I’m seriously disappointed.

My mom has been a lifelong photographer. Photography is her passion. Over the course of several years she earned enough money to move over to a digital SLR. Since moving to digital her photos have been making it to the Internet in higher frequency. Saying they’re good is an understatement.

On her birthday, my mom lost her hard earned digital SLR and a few coveted lenses, including the photos from her birthday gift, a hot air balloon ride.

The camera meant everything to her.

Without your help, it will literally take years for my mom to earn the money to replace just her basics. She raised kids her entire life, and now makes just enough income to live humbly. Anything you can pitch in will be extremely helpful and I have no doubt her gratitude will be overwhelming.

All contributed money will be used to replace exactly what she lost. The goal of $2500 includes:

Nikon D50 digital SLR
Nikkor 60mm Macro Lens
Nikkor 80-200MM Telephoto
1GB Memory Card
Lensbaby
Extra camera battery

Go here to contribute.

In the past few months, at some point, my automated bill pay service neglected to pay my natural gas bill because it climbed over some hidden threshold. Rather than get an email alert, I got a cold shower alert the day after the gas was turned off. It cost me a pricey reconnection fee, security deposit, and several months of unpaid gas service to get warm water flowing again.

Motivated to never let this happen again, I’ve been on a organization and conservation kick of, for me, epic proportions. I replaced most of the lights in the house with compact fluorescent bulbs to reduce my electricity and cooling bills. Carrie and I are making changes in the garden that should reduce our summer water usage. I’m considering retiring the beautiful, but quite costly to heat, cool, and keep replenished with clean water reef aquarium. We have a goal to go air conditioning free this year by practicing good window covering and opening strategies. I wouldn’t say I’ve become an environmentalist, but I am becoming a simplicitist.

A simplicitist, in my view, strives to reduce monthly burn of anything we (all of us) consider to be a consumable and fleeting commodity such as food, money, space and time.

And because my goal is to both conserve time and money, I’m organizing my internet life as well. I’ve cut down my blog reading to very few, and spend less than 20 minutes a day now hitting Digg and Flickr. Immediate, noticeable changes for my readers here include a forthcoming move to TypePad where I already pay for service, and eventually I’ll retire the server that runs this blog. The format of the blog will become simplified, and blog entries will be less restricted to the current format. I’ll be able to share a link just as easily as I will an essay such as this.

On a far more exciting and life changing note, I’m working on a project that is currently the secret brain child of Rael Dornfest, but has also been a dream of mine for over six years now. We’re working hard at making it what we have both envisioned and wanted for so long now, and we hope to begin revealing it soon.

So stick around and see what comes of the concentrated effort on simplicity. I’ll share what I can about the changes.