Late last night we were looking for another bar and decided to try Google Voice search.

Where are the bars bitches first turned into Mr and Mrs; the second time it came out as Handlebar Switches.

It wasn’t much use but we did find a new way to create rhyming phrases. 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Other Favorites

• We must live together as Sisters and Brothers or perish together as fools.
• In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

Earlier today I received an email from a friend who lives in the Bay Area and who after hearing of a friend’s death in Norway put together a video remembering his accomplishments.

Her friend was a famous Norwegian mountain racer, but she wasn’t expecting the response she received.

Shortly after she posted the video on YouTube it was running on Norway’s main TV station, embedded in variety of local and European newspaper websites (one of the sites), and thank you notes from people she had never met started streaming in.

She wrote me to express her amazement and to thank YouTube for helping her connect to others.

While this story has a tragic start, it’s still fascinating to see how fast the world is flattening and it’s inspiring to be a part of a product that is so global. 

The office can be fairly quiet during the holidays and occasionally people forget to remove themselves from calendar invites for meetings between Christmas and New Years.

I had a meeting like this last week… not wanting the time to go unused I still experimented and brainstormed. 

Here are the meeting notes:

---

29 Dec ‘08: Meeting Notes

attendee: Jasson

Brainstormed and Experimented

• Successfully created a Higgs particle!
  To reproduce…
  • Create a Higgs field between the VC monitors by setting the contrast to high on one and low on the other
  • Remove the VC camera, point it at the monitors, and set it to emit gauge bosons
  • Dial the VC unit into itself
  • That’s it!  [video]
• Solved Goldbach’s conjecture that every even number larger than 2 is the result of adding two prime numbers
  • [see conference room whiteboard for proof]
• Experimented with cold-fusion… no luck  :(
  • Apparently mixing cold Earl Grey tea, Trident, and shredded post-it notes does not produce excess energy as most people would think
• Pondered the Sorites paradox
  • Is a search results page still a search results page if one removes an item from the list?
• Internally brainstormed ideas for YouTube

Open Questions:

• Where is everyone?

The Buffalo Niagara International Airport (BUF) is apparently part of the United States “border” and is staffed with border agents… even for domestic flights!

After getting my boarding pass, I headed over to security only to find two border patrol agents standing in front of the standard security screening.

They ask to see my ticket and ID and after a few random questions they ask my citizenship. In my head I thought, “What? I just handed you a US issued passport, what do you think my citizenship is?” but not wanting to hold up the line of holiday travelers, I only responded with “American”, grabbed my ticket, and walked through.

The airport is at least ten miles from the US-Canada border… what the hell are there border patrol agents doing here? (FYI: “International” was added to the airport’s title a few years ago because they now fly to Toronto… a two hour drive away.)

Constitution Free Zone

The ACLU has dubbed this the Constitution Free Zone and has pending lawsuits against the issue, but this was my first time experiencing it, and I have to say, it’s infuriating. Since when do I have to provide paperwork to travel within my own country?

The security at our airports is nothing but a bloated theatrical productions and if it wasn’t such a hassle, I’d probably never show my ID. Why not take that money wasted on these productions and spend it on something useful like education, infrastructure, research, et al.

This is getting ridiculous… I truly hope the new administration and congress work on these Bush inspired constitutional issues.

Related: Your papers please: TSA bans ID-less flight

Just read a post on 23/6 that brought up some good points about the Secret Service and the Iraqi shoe throwing incident:

Questions That I Have for the Secret Service – Jon Friedman

1. Shouldn’t you have jumped in front of that shoe?
2. Shouldn’t you have jumped in front of that second shoe?
   more…

Through small progressive changes by outside forces the sketch on my whiteboard has slowly evolved into this:

Someone carved JASSON into a tree in the woods near the family farm. I say ’someone’ because I don’t remember doing it. The tree is fairly large, so I may have done it as a kid but I really wasn’t the type to run around carving my name into things. 

The lettering has warped a little through the years and its hard to make out all of the letters, but through the magic of Photoshop I tweaked the photo to make them stand out.

Whoever carved my name into the tree, it’s nice to know that I have a “monument” to my name… even if this one is deep in the woods of WNY.

Here’s Michael Scott talking about his initial discovery of YouTube:

update

Hulu took down the video click