If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like and cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?
David has some good ideas about sparking the creation habit. This post hit home because I find myself consuming more than creating. This year I will reverse that ratio.
Design team BRC Imagination Arts has proposed a roller coaster that would travel up a steep track at speeds of 100 miles an hour before beginning a controlled drop that would essentially put its passengers into zero gravity for eight seconds. Unlike normal roller coasters, the ride would be completely enclosed, giving loosely-buckled passengers the feeling of floating in a room rather than speeding through space.
I love roller coasters. I also love space. This is such a great idea, and while I still want to do some space travel before I die, this sounds like lots of fun.
Oh! Hey, kids. There’s no mention of a height requirement to ride.
This might make a nice little birthday gift and will be out just in time for mine.
In the Motherlode Blog on the New York Times, KJ DellAntonia writes about the spectacle of Penn State University students rioting in the streets:
Wednesday night I was watching ESPN’s coverage of the firing of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno (an event whose magnitude one announcer just compared indirectly to the Kennedy assassination), and wondering how I’d feel if my child was standing on Paterno’s lawn, or on the streets of State College, supporting a man who could hear a graphic description of a sexual assault on a young boy and then choose to walk away. I’d like to hear one of those students support the argument that the coach deserves “one more game.” And then I’d like them to tell me how they’d explain it to a 10-year-old.
I believe that the students of Penn State need to take a moment, forget about football and championships, and step back to ask themselves what they would do had they been in Paterno’s shoes when the incident involving Sandusky was reported to him.
There is a time for recognizing achievements, and there is a time to acknowledge that horrible things have happened, that children have been hurt, and that there are some mistakes that no amount of success can absolve. This is the latter, and that’s a lesson Penn State needs to convey.
Read the entire article, and give it some thought. Spanier and Paterno are not the only ones who will be leaving the Penn State University organization in the coming weeks.
In order to save others the mind-boggling level of frustration that can be achieved when attempting to troubleshoot Home Sharing between iTunes and your AppleTV, I want to highlight an item from Step 4 of the Apple support troubleshooting page:
Your devices are not using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), or that they are all on the same VPN. A VPN may isolate the device and cause connectivity disruptions.
That sentence does not tell the whole story. Not only should your computers that have iTunes on them not be running a VPN connection, but there should not be any device on your network that is connected to a VPN, even if that device has no iTunes installation.
I figured this out the other day when I hastily read the support article and overlooked this step as the computer with iTunes Home Sharing was not running a VPN. However, my work computer was on the network and actively connected to our company VPN.
After giving up on Home Sharing, I went into the office, did some work, and shut down my VPN connection. ‘Lo and behold! Home Sharing is suddenly working again. I hope this helps at least one other person because it took me a couple weeks — and the mistaken assumption that a recent AppleTV update broke the Home Sharing — to figure out what was really happening.