soapbox

I’m going to steal Michael’s thunder a couple of days early (sorry, buddy!) and remind everybody to take some time out from good times and good company over this holiday weekend to reflect a little on the reason for Memorial Day. Regardless of our individual political dispositions or perspectives on armed conflict, acknowledging the sacrifices borne by our military and their families should be an essential part of our privileged duties as a citizens.

To facilitate things, allow me to direct you to some appropriate reading. Many of y’all are already familiar with McRae’s “In Flanders Fields” and the subsequent association of poppies with the day. I can still recite most of this one from memory, due to a 6th grade english class assignment.

In the end, I always find myself returning to Binyon’s “For the Fallen”, as it strikes the perfect tone. Particularly, the verses known as the “Ode of Remembrance”, which I will leave you with here:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

With all of the fuss about Vista and Windows 7 – and there’s no denying that MSFT could have done a better job over the past few years – there are a couple features that are actually pretty cool.

Of particular note is something called readyboost, which allows you to use a USB flash drive as an instant RAM boost. The thumbdrive serves as an additional memory cache that can be accessed much more quickly than data on a hard drive. I don’t know how much of a long-term solution this is, but it’s pretty slick, given that it would take me a LONG long time to do the same thing with a linux box.

Speaking of flash drives, and this is specifically for Ryan Johnson, it’s time to eat your corn flakes:

a hi-tech band embedded with a 1 Gigabyte USB flash drive pre-loaded with exclusive Star Trek content

… you just need 8 UPC codes from specially marked Kellog cereal boxes.

In light of yesterday’s re-affirmation that the California proposition system is a dumb one, y’all need to take advantage of your enfranchised status and vote! Or just peruse the samples, and if you’re feeling photo-critique-y, then contribute your expert opinion.

When the blocks of granite in Franconia Notch that formed the Old Man in the Mountain’s face (finally) broke off the cliff face in the spring of 2003 (how’s that for a run-on sentence?), there was a lot of discussion about what to do.

One idea was to re-build the face, but instead of using concrete or granite, architect Francis Treves suggested using glass: “the grand metaphor with this piece of glass on the mountain is it’s not really a piece of glass, it’s a piece of ice,” Treves said. The Old Man, he added, “was sculpted by the glaciers; the ice gave it birth.”

When first proposed, Treves’ idea was met with considerable criticism – perhaps the “loss” was too recent to have any satisfactory solution? Anyway, I was intrigued by the sheer scale of Treves’ solution, if skeptical of the actual implemented result.

Personally, I miss the Old Man, but I am doubtful that any attempt to actually rebuild/replace the original formation would be satisfactory. My understanding is that they will/did install some carved rock blocks down in the parking lot, has anybody been to the Notch since ‘07?

Given the popularity of W7 RC, there has been a lot of concern that all current Windows Vista users will be orphaned, abandoned by the Redmond giant.

A “Save Vista” campaign has been organised by InfoWorld. “We detected a deep anxiety over Vista among technologists and consumers alike,” said editor Galen Gruman. “We decided to do something about it, launching a petition drive to ask Microsoft to keep selling Vista after the planned October 23 end-of-sales date.” The petition has already gathered over ten signatures. “‘Seven’ is just sucking up to latté sippers. Like Hummer, like Chrysler, like Edsel, Vista is a great American name that shows the might of full-sized American industrial production. It’s a monument to everything that makes us the country we are.”

Several industry leaders have added their voices to the effort:

“I fully support this initiative. My computer business employs 200 people; the best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues and goes forward.” – M. Shuttleworth, London

“I can’t tell you how much Vista has done for my business. So many people depend on it.” – S. Jobs, Cupertino

“Vista is the one thing that will keep people seeking out and using systems that are at the forefront of technology. It’s been the best thing for all of us.” – L. Torvalds, Portland.

This post is half for Nathaniel, but also directed to others who have friends who may have subscribed to the Soapbox. We have 16 listed subscribers, some of which I suspect are spammers given their .ru email suffix, but we also have some more legit-looking ones, such as accogypeall ‘kat’ mail.health-ua.com or the user “bombiafepaine” who has a gmail email. Any insight?

We have gotten a few spam items sneaking through the filters, but I just realized that subscriber-spam might be sneaking through the nets.

Does anybody in this small Dartmouth blogosphere know who the victim of the Illegal Aliens on top of Kitt Peak story is? I’m dying to hear the Dartmouth side of the story. I just heard the Ohio State side of the story, but apparently the person at the 2.4m was a male grad student from Dartmouth when stuff went down. Does anybody even know what I’m talking about?