Paul Binnings of Carson City, NV recently passed away. He was a life-long jazz musician, (my) grandfather, and all around cool guy.
How do I feel about it? Pissed off. I'm angry because I have been meaning to spend time with Paul and catch up. Next time I'm in Nevada, I'd tell myself. I wanted to have a long chat with him about the history of Jazz in the US. I'm not sure he knows how much I respected and looked up to him. Bummer.
In a sad attempt to regain some pieces of Paul, I've been looking on the Internet for some history of his career. There isn't much out there, since the Internet is so new. Here are some links, which are a work in progress...
Paul Binnings the Jazz Musician
Paul Binnings on JazzIndex, a swiss Jazz history site.
Erika Paul's site, who was in a Jazz Trio with Paul more recently.
Intrade is an online futures market where people can speculate on things like "Is Britney going back into rehab this year", or "Who will be elected the US president?". Since there are many people, putting their money where their mouth is, it is a fairly accurate predictor of events.
PORTLAND, OR - Aug 12, 2008. Researchers at the Fabbri Baby Institute today released the results of their week-long study of input and output behavior of newborn infants. The scientists made a surprising discovery when one of their test subjects, baby Adria, produced some mass in her test diaper while simultaneously consuming test milk.
We've discovered that infants, in general, are often born with the amazing ability to consume food, and at the same time expell waste. This was determined by our elite supercomputers, when their algorithms detected simultaneous "slurp" and "poot-ra-toot-poot" sound patterns in a recording of the test subject.
Researchers explained that this phenonoma of being able to input and output at the same time is known as being "full duplex".
We've known about this behavior in the past, but only in the context of computer networks, where having the ability to input and output at the same time is known as "full duplex".
Identify Full Duplex Infants
Scientists are urging parents of full-duplex babies to appropriately label their children by purchasing and using official "full duplex" baby clothes, available below.
Anyone who has gotten into brewing beer at home has probably read the bible on the subject The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing by Charlie Papazian.
In the book, Charlie introduces a new phrase "Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew". He even has a bumpersticker on his glass carboy (used to ferment the beer):
I've recreated this now-retro bumper sticker and you can buy one here.
Today I was trying to find out which compact refrigerators are the most energy efficient. After some searching, I ended up at the Energy Star site, where they have a spreadsheet listing Energy Star fridges along with how much power they use and how big they are.
I took this spreadsheet and sorted it by kilowatt-hours (kWh), so the fridges at the top use the least energy. Surprisingly, the most efficient fridge listed is not a compact fridge but a decent sized model by Sun Frost. The two most efficient compact fridges were the Samsung SKR1373* and the MicroFridge MHRA-4E.
You can download my sorted spreadsheet as a PDF here.
Not only have these people made a video about rescuing poor abandonded shopping carts like they are majestic wild beasts, but they've made a whole website about it, and bought online advertising to promote it. What pointless sillyness. Bravo.
This fake George Carlin chain email serves as a popular example of false information that is passed in chain emails for years. I even see people quoting it in their blogs.
I find my self continually hitting Reply All to chain emails people forward to me. I do this to explain that the story people are passing around is a lie, a con, a chain letter.
Today, Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP announced that it is filing a class action suit against Isilon Systems. The suit is filed on behalf of an investor who bought Isilon stock at hyped-up IPO prices, and then lost money when Isilon subsequently missed quarter expectations.
As we'll see below, while some of the complaints may have merit, some of the claims are BS (in my humble opinion).
The press-lead rush to widen a freeway into Portland fails to make incentive for more scalable and sustainable transportation and lifestyle choices. In fact, it subsidizes the opposite. More single occupant cars honking into the city, slurping oil (ah, the expensive teat of Iraq).
On two recent mornings, I've woken up to read articles posted on the Oregonian online which tell us of the urgency in widening the Interstate 5 freeway in North Portland.
There is a choke-point here, we are told. Commuters' nerves are at stake! What will happen to the economy if trucks can't get through!? (Maybe they'll travel at night when the commuters have gone to bed in Vancouver?)
A new remote storage and offline backup site, adrive.com, recently launched and is offering 50 GB of free online storage. From the site:
ADrive ... leads the free online data storage community, offering the largest amount of free storage on the Internet. We provide our users with secure solutions for storing, backing up, and accessing files from virtually anywhere, at any time. ADrive serves as an online, centralized vault for all file types including: music, videos, photos, documents, and more.
This site is currently in the beta phase, so we can expect them to be rolling out new features in the future.
In case anyone else signed up for Paperless Billing on their American Express card gets a late fee this month, there is a problem with their servers which is causing alert enrollments to fail.
Image One. I select payment due alerts, and click Enroll.
Image Two. A window pops up but fails to load properly (server reset). Going back to alerts page shows that enrolling for the email alerts failed. I tried multiple times (I'm using Firefox v1.5.0.3).
Mohini (id 79480) with American Express Online Services, confirmed that there is a server issue and I should retry in 24 hours. I did get a late fee as I did not pay on time (didn't get the usual email that reminds me to), but American Express was very courteous in reversing that fee.
Paul Binnings of Carson City, NV recently passed away. He was a life-long jazz musician, (my) grandfather, and all around cool guy.
early in 2008 and it has been rocking me since. I can't say enough good things about this album.
