http://www.jasminecola.com/blog Just another WordPress weblog Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:22:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Over at Live Reckoning (nee DreamingReal, nee Heresies & Blasphemies, etc.) Steve turns us on to the free Verisign VIP app for the iPhone. He correctly points out that it's a fantastic replacement authentication token for the bulk PayPal football. While Verisign still claims it's in Beta, the Personal Identity ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/31 Social media is evolving quickly these days. Self-contained blogs are becoming a thing of the past. Social sites are cross-pollinating, and Google is not about to fall behind. In the spirit of Disqus comes Google Friend Connect, a suite of tools for bloggers and site owners to incorporate Google-based social ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/27 A while back I read Bruce Sterling's novel Distraction. I wrote about it on Goodreads at the time, but I've had more time to gather a few more thoughts and observations. 1. Reading it I pictured Nathan Patrelli from Heroes in the role of Oscar. 2. Throughout, when they referred to Oscar's ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/25 Time to break out of that cocoon. Been in a funk. Been distracted. Been elsewhere. Been on twitter, but have thoughts sometimes that exceed 140 characters. Compiled a poetry book to give CreateSpace a look-see. Been curious about print-on-demand for a while now. For a long while; years ago when the ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/23 So it turns out that my computer speakers, which uses a number of analog jumper cables from the output to the amp built into the subwoofer, gracefully handles receiving a mono signal by playing it on both speakers. Handy trick if you listen to a lot of mono material. But ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/17 In Mr. Holcomb's AP English class, the capstone event of the year was the Literary Scavenger Hunt, an extra-credit tool that had the potential to bump the winner's grade by a full letter. Only the best performing team could claim the top grade bump. In previous years a Senior was ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/16 In retrospect, it was probably poor judgement to allow a classful of high school sophomores unchaperoned access to the streets of San Francisco. We bussed up to see Les Miserables performed at the Curran Theatre. 1990 or 1991. Got there early, an hour or so to kill before the doors ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/15 Played with PhotoBooth's animated background replacements. They're based on a difference key: you move out of the range of your iSight camera and it takes a snapshot of what it sees, then when you move back in frame it recognizes you as the difference, so it can composite you into ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/14 3dmark 2001 se 10946 memory bandwidth 2094/2093 dvd-rom index 2578 cpu arithmetic dry 4288 wet 1153/2696 cpu multimedia int 8782 fp 10686 61 db http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/13 Everything old is new again. But just because we have 1970s gas prices shouldn't mean we have to embrace 1970s climate science. Global warming contrarians, goaded by the puckish jockeys of the media slapping the sweaty flanks of Rush Limbaugh, are on cloud nine reading the recent study in Nature that ... http://www.jasminecola.com/blog/archives/12