christian ross

Draft Sully

That didn’t take long. Less than 24 hours after Capt. Chesley B. Sullenberger III saved 155 lives by setting his plane down on the Hudson, you can purchase apparel promoting him to a new position.

Draft Sully for Secretary of Transportation

Which kudos do you give for that? Capitalism? Technology?

Social media amazes me

Before I saw a single news headline or heard anything about it, I saw a flickr image of the plane in the Hudson today taken from a camera-phone by a person on the boat sent to rescue the passengers.

It made it to Twitter and then copied to Flickr within minutes and spread like wildfire from there.

Kudos to the pilot for saving lives. Kudos to the photographer for the shot and the share. Kudos to the net for changing the way I consume and learn.

Oh Muxtape, how I miss thee

Or this post could also be titled – Hey Autumn, I found a Muxtape alternative

I’ve actually know about the open source Muxtape alternative called Opentape for a while but it wasn’t until this evening that I actually sat down to set it up.

While not having the fantastic ability to jump from favorited playlist to playlist, it does capture the simplistic nature of the original.

Opentape is self hosted, meaning that all of the files are on my server thus potentially not running as efficiently as Muxtape once did. While it will never fully fill the hole left in your heart when Muxtape was overthrown, let me know if you’d like your own Opentape set up to share some songs and I will get it ready for you.

http://christianross.net/muxtape

Note: Let me know if you see an error on first load. It has something to do with the Flash player behind the Opentape and not the Opentape itself. If you hit the continue button it should go away and the tracks will play fine.

Zune fail

Thankfully my life is full of less Microsoft products than it used to be.

I once thought about picking up a MS Zune mp3 player on woot, thankfully I talked myself out of it: http://gizmodo.com/5121311/reports-30gb-zunes-failing-everywhere-all-at-once

To summarize: If you have a 30GB Zune this morning, it doesn’t work anymore.

Bringing (clear) sight to the world

I wear contacts daily and glasses in the evening when my eyes wear out for the day. I can see without them but I wouldn’t say it would be the safest for me to operate a vehicle or similar machinery sans lenses.

For some reason, as a kid (and as an adult, I suppose) one of the things that seemed to always choke me up a little was when I saw a young person whose glasses got broken or were “mended” somehow. Not exactly sure why, but I assume it had to do something with knowing how much glasses cost and the fact that I didn’t grow up in the most affluent of areas.

Seeing clearly is one of the things we take completely for granted and one of the reasons I stretch the life of my contacts far longer than the doctor/box recommend. I am fortunate enough to be in the position to afford to see things as they are but know worldwide there are many who cannot claim the same. Which is why the following article caught my attention this afternoon: (more…)

Jingle Bells, microwave style

If you’ve ever contemplated writing music with the ding’s from your microwave, you can now stop. It has been done and its more than likely better than anything you or I could produce.

from AKQA (via Blankenship)

Back in business

I noticed this evening that my feed wasn’t updating for the site. Of course it bugged me. Took me a couple of hours of code searching, bug hunting and racking my brain to think what changes I had made in the last 48 hours to finally figure out that a small piece of code I had implemented a day or two ago was messing everything up.

The ironic part is that it was code to make my feed a little better. I had implemented a little code to put a delay on my feed by 3 minutes from the time of publishing since I have a tendency to poorly proofread until after I hit the publish button. Go figure. So, back to the old and my apologies for any typos in advance.

One other note, it isn’t perfect but I have implemented some fixes for IE6 users. It’s pretty normal that some things don’t line up but most everything is at least close. The sidebar at least sits on the side now and not at the bottom. I still have about 10% of my visitors using IE6. I don’t love any of you less personally, just technologically. I promise you’d feel better if you browsed better.

I can only think of two reasons why are still using IE6.

1. 1. You can’t upgrade your browser due to company policy
2. 2. You don’t know what browser you’re using or even how to check

Sorry, I can only help with #2. Go to Help -> About Internet Explorer. Now go download the ‘fox.

Shaq on Twitter

As my wife acutely pointed out, “he even tweets in Ebonics.”

Only a week or so into it, he’s already amassed almost 11,000 followers: http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ

I love the internet.