Author: mark

  • Dymaxion Map – we're all connected

    Here’s a new way of looking at the world. It’s called a Dymaxion Map or Fuller Projection, invented by Buckminster Fuller in 1946. This particular views shows all our land masses connected – it makes the world look as small as it’s becoming.

  • Quote of the day

    “Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.” – Drew Carey

  • Time's awesome archives

    While Googling a quote from Aldus Huxley, I came across this article announcing a new painkiller called Soma. I noticed the date was 1959. It seems Time Mag has put their entire archive online dating back to 1929. How totally cool. Their search UI is horribly buggy, but I managed to dredge up this interesting pre-McCarthy tidbit titled Rough on Russians.

  • A Big Fish

    The biggest freshwater fish caught by a woman record in the UK has been smashed. This old man was safely released after having his weight verified by the lake bailiff.

    Details on “A Welsh View”.

  • Muckleshoot Indian Tribe mass harvesting salmon out of Lake Sammamish

    I rode my bike down to this little singletrack that leads to Issaquah creek mouth today on South Lake Sammamish and it’s nuts down there right now. The Muckleshoot tribe is doing their yearly salmon harvest. The whole south of Lake Sammamish is covered in gill nets they’re using to harvest the salmon – courtesy of the 1974 Boldt decision which gives them rights to half the salmon catch every year.

    I chatted to one of the tribe members and they’re allowed to gill net from today until Friday (3 days). I have a bit of a mental block about gill netting because it’s highly illegal to do it in the ocean where I come from – but for different reasons. When a gill net breaks free from its anchor it becomes a death trap until it biodegrades. Fish swim into it, they die and become bait that attract more fish which swim into the net and the cycle continues for years.  River and lake gill nets are different assuming they’re all recovered by their owners.

    I did some research  into how safe it is to eat the salmon from Lake Sammamish and it’s perfectly safe. According to the WA dept of Health you can eat more than 16 meals per month and still be OK – based on toxicology levels for PCB, DDT and Mercury. Here’s an extract:

    Sockeye salmon had the lowest levels for all contaminants tested in this
    study. All calculated meal limits were above EPA’s unrestricted level of 16 meals per month for
    a 60 kg person (Appendix C, Table C9). Consumption rates were not calculated for chlordane
    because of the low detection frequency (no samples were above the detection limit).

    In case you’re curious, Safeway seems to be buying most of the salmon from the Muckleshoot tribe and you should see a few specials on Salmon at Safeway in the next couple of weeks.  I’m probably not going to support them – there’s just something wrong about seeing the whole of Issaquah Creek mouth and the south lake covered in wall to wall gill nets.

    I think I need to re-think my fish eating policy in general. I think the same thing is happening in the Ocean – I just don’t see it first hand.

  • Bring it!

    This is taken about 50 miles from where I grew up in South Africa. It’s from one of my favorite documentaries of all time “Air Jaws”.

    We have big fish back home.

  • Feedjit on Techcrunch

    Feedjit made Techcrunch this evening and Michael has installed both our widgets on the blog entry, complete with his own personal color scheme “Arring Town”. We also rolled out a new version that adds a pretty cool (if I say so myself) ajax widget customization interface. Now you can choose your own colors – a much requested feature – and you can adjust the traffic feed width.

    If you have any questions, bug reports or comments, please don’t hesitate to email us at support@feedjit.com or just leave a comment here.

  • Otis Taylor – Blues God

    I watched Shooter last night. Besides a few badly done slow-motion-macho-manly-walking scenes, it’s a pretty good flick. The titles at the end had this awesome blues song that I had to Google. It’s called ‘Nasty Letter’ by Otis Taylor. The man has an interesting history. He left music in the 70’s to become an antique dealer and then picked it up again in the 90’s. I bought his album ‘Truth is not Fiction’ on iTunes and it’s full of incredible gritty meaty blues.

    If you’re looking for music to sip a peat and seaweed 10 year old Laphroaig single malt whisky to, then this is it.

  • FEEDJIT New version released

    I’ve released a new version of FEEDJIT with the following improvements:

    • A real-time traffic feed updated every second on the home page
    • We’ve upgraded to a 64 bit platform that is handling a lot of traffic. Watch the real-time feed to see some of the traffic we process. However, we are currently only at 2% capacity, so if you have a high traffic blog, BRING IT!! We can handle well over 1000 hits per second.
    • We now show landing pages in your real-time traffic feed so you can see where your users arrive on your site in real-time.

  • Calling all Faith No More fans…

    Here’s a clip my bro pointed me at from Mike Patton’s new project Peeping Tom. If you have a very wide range in musical tastes (from BeeGees to Tool) then you’re going to love this: