3:18am: This is why I dont go to bed early

I went to bed tonight at 10:30 in preperation for a big day at the office tomorrow. I am going to get up at 6 to get there early. I woke up at 12:30 and havent been able to get back to sleep. Ive been tossing and turning thinking about work, girls, money, etc. And im hungry.

A piece of toast and back to the sack.

Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali, originally uploaded by Zack Sheppard.
Learn more about Diwali.
Learn about the Bhopal disaster.

Referential or experiential

There is a great entry on Jason Kottke's blog about the different types of bloggers. I have more experience with referential blogs (ex. Boing Boing). I love collections of new and odd things and am a spectacular researcher so it makes sense that my blog would be more referential. As much fun as this to me I would like to add more to the blogosphere and I endeavour to become an experiential blogger.

Many of my initial stabs at this will be boring, and trite. There may be potential in the experience but a failing in the text. This will sometimes be because of a lack of time but more often a lack of practice. Referential posts are a good place to start conveying meaning in a small amount of text. There is a difference between posting a link and making a post that makes someone want to click on that link and invest part of their day in exploring it.

Im excited to find my voice. I wonder, will i become a grammar Nazi? I have always been opposed to grammar Nazism. Especially on the web. Do we really need the ' in Im? We all know what we mean! But there is a point at which it's harder to read. I do enjoy being a contrarian but its like my friend Davis tells his son about giving high 5s, gotta have a reason.

Zombies Arrested

I previously posted about Zombies in San Francisco. A fun little event where people dress up as zombies and wandered around downtown SF.

Well the zombies in Minneapolis were arrested for counts as wild as simulated WMDs.

When we got to the 1st Precinct, Sergeant Ed Nelson said, "I don't give a goddamn about your f*king constitutional rights!"

bender

I am browsing through my "Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang A-G" to try and find a better URL than quikbeam. It's a fun book to browse through partly because of the fun terms and partly because the etymologies are awesome. I'll share at least part of some of them in posts and todays is

bender n. 1a. [poss. from Scots dial. bend to drink, esp. to drink hard or greedily...a draught of liquor', and bender 'a drinker'; see EDD I 244] a carousal; a spree. -usu. in phr. on a bender

1845 Corcoran Pickings 62: I was on an almighty big bender last night. 1846 in Lowell Poetical Wks. 176: "I won't agree to no such bender" 1847 in Dolph Sound Off 392:
At Buena Vista I was sure
That Yankee Troops surrender,
And bade my men hurrah, for you're
All going on a bender

The definitions and etymologies go on to fill a whole column.

You're watching Let's paint, excercise, and blend drinks TV. Im your host John Killduf

I cant leave for the weekend without a new post. Here is a vid of a guy that does a little show in LA called "Let's paint, excercise, and blend drinks TV"

Its entrancing he does everything the title suggests and runs on a treadmill the whole time. Oh yea, also, he takes called and apparently the only people up are gang bangers.

TaaAAake me, to the magic of the moment,

On a glooory night
(a GLORY night~a!)

Where the childern of tomorrow dream awaaayy,
in the wind of change...

So two weeks ago my old friend AG stayed with me for a few days before he moved out of town for good. I haven't really been drinking anymore but I only had a few nights with AG so we had a few together. On the second night he was there, a mysterious stranger dropped of a CD of the Scorpions "Crazy World" album featuring Winds of Change.

AG and I sang it a couple times. Then my brother called to tell us he got to shot a 50 cal. sniper rifle that day (and it was awesome) so we sang him Winds of Change.

Then we called AG's brother, D Double Bad Ass Dan, to tell him that my brother got to shoot a 50 cal sniper rifle. We talked about how fast the bullet flies, what company probably made it, decided that it was bad ass, and we all sang Winds of Change.

Then AG and I watched Transformers the Movie while drinking a couple beers and flipping our knives open.

Repeatedly.

I love GeoTagging like Ninjas love killing.

So I recently went on a trip to Southern California. I took some pics and GeoTagged them when I got back. This is a feature that both Zooomr and Flickr have that lets you place your photos on a map so people can see where they were taken.

I GeoTagged all of my photos from my trip and you can see the whole thing or make it more interesting by looking at certain places. For example, here are all the pics I took in Disneyland. Or for even more fun here are the pics I took while on the Lost Palms Oasis trail in Joshua Tree National Park. (map above)


You can actually see the trail in the satelitte images. In the pic the sucession of images (the pink dots) are the trail I was on. It's fascinating because I can actually see little landmarks I remember on the map. See the other trail that crosses mine in the lower right of the pic? I remember walking through that (when you are actually in it its easy to get lost and take the wrong trail) and used it to figure out where my pics were taken and how far I actually traveled in relation to those. Right after the crossing trail you can see a dark spot. This was a grove of trees that I passed though and came out on the other side to the start of the sunset and a pretty young cactus.

Zooomr uses Google Maps and Flickr uses Yahoo. Yahoo has much much more detailed images of rural areas so it is better for us Nevadans. Googles are better in urban areas and all of California. One neat side note is that they both have amazing images of Burning Man. Yahoo! has sat pics as the event is occuring (double-click map to really zoom in!). But Google's is even more interesting. The Burning Man event was actually moved slightly this year to help reduce desert scarring. On Googles map you see both an image from a previous year when it was being built AND an image from this year while it is occuring! (I better save that one in case they fix it). I wonder if they purposefully take a pic during the event.

For even more GeoTagging ideas check out the Flickr blog. They have geotagged maps like lighthouses of the great lakes, all the pics tagged with self-portrait, pics of the tube in London, etc.

P.S. Also, to check out one of the coolest sat images yet, Google's new pic of the Eiffel Tower

Peepers

Peepers, originally uploaded by Zack Sheppard.

I just thought this would look good here on black. My friend 'Peep's

Don't fucking call me tonight...

...between 9 and 10...

...I'll be watching LOST.

Ever wanted to go to Berkley?

I have gone into college bookstores and bought the books for a class that I wasn't in just because I thought it sounded interesting. I highly recommend books in Dr. Harvey's classes at UNR. A student of Marxist social theory, brilliant dude, and the best, most engaging instructor I ever had.

Well Berkley is bringing this to the web, its doing it for free, and it's doing it in style with RSS. Berkley is posting mp3s of lectures from some of its classes. Some of them look awesome "Drugs and Behavior", "Introduction to Non-Violence", and my fav "Physics for future presidents".

Gotta run, Im off to my Foundations of American Cyberculture class.

Note to self: From Dr. Harvey's profile it looks like he has been doing work bringing Chaos theory to sociology! I will have to contact him for some literature!