485 to Houston →

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These were taken in a few different places but the majority were at another abandoned farm house (not this one). I also managed to make 10 bucks, though not by being paid but finding it on the side of the road as you can see in the 6th photo. 

The Power of the Sun →

This video demonstrates two incredible sources of power on the Sun, the magnetic field and gravity. You see in the video as a plasma filament explodes from the surface of the Sun only to be sucked back by the nigh unfathomable power of the intense gravity. 

The future of the Lithium battery? →

ArsTechnica has a great article on how scientists at Toyota are working on improving the batteries that power most of the electronics we use every day. Here's a fun snippet from the article:

“One of them is a crystal with the rather complex formula of Li9.54Si1.74P1.44S11.7Cl0.3. This turned out to be very effective for high current applications. Another material, Li9.6P3S12, was better for high-voltage cells. Both of them were chemically stable, and neither involved any expensive raw materials. The authors determined their structure, which revealed that the new materials provided a three-dimensional grid, allowing ions to move in nearly any direction.”

Bruce Sewell: 'The Tone of the Brief Reads Like an Indictment' →

The Department of Justice and FBI appear to have started to try and smear Apple. Not only that but they seam to be threatening Apple that if they don't cooperate and create "GovtOS" that they'll sue for iOS source code and their SSL certificates which is utterly ridiculous and an even worse idea.  

An excerpt from the DoJ brief. 

An excerpt from the DoJ brief. 

The Rhythm of Happiness

The difficult thing with social anxiety is that you are inherently scared of social situations but you still crave them.  We're just like everyone else, we still like to meet people and hang out with our friends. It's just more difficult. 

Hopefully if if you have anxiety you're able to find something that lets you shed those fears at least in part. Something that lets you feel free. For me that's dancing.  

When I'm on the dance floor I can shed most (and sometimes all) my anxieties. It's not a silver bullet and it doesn't always work but the majority of the time it's where I'm happiest.  

While this is all and good we can't be content with having one place that we're free of the fear that chains us. With time and effort we can slowly break those chains to free ourselves. While it might seem that once free of one chain there's just one more we are more free than we were before. One less chain, one less fear, is holding us back from the life we want. 

Take your time and don't push yourself too fast but you can make progress. You can have the life you dream of if you work towards it. I'm not saying you can have a fairytale ending but you can live without fear. 

The new AppleTV →

Christina Warren at Mashable did a great review of the new AppleTV that came out on Friday. It's a fun and easy read, I'm looking forward to getting mine in a couple days.  

How we relate to others

The other day I was driving and it was pouring down rain. I was driving more carefully as the weather demanded it, but not everyone was.  I got frustrated with the people that were driving fast, tailgating or rubber necking at accidents. And this was a long three and a half hour drive in the rain so I got frustrated a lot. Then near the end of my drive two police cars zoomed past me with lights going. I instantly thought "Some idiot driver probably wrecked, maybe even got hurt" but it wasn't a sad thought. I was mad and happy that the person might have gotten what I thought they deserved. 

This kind of thought isn't uncommon for most people, at least not as uncommon as we might wish or even think. As humans we evolved to care and relate to what we could see and touch. We relate to the people around us but if there's almost any kind of barrier, real or perceived, our brains switch modes. And this is an all too common thing these days, we're exasperated by so many things that can also bring us together. 

I'm not proud of what I thought and it shocked me that I could be so callous about someone's life. That I HOPED someone got hurt, someone that is someones friend, coworker, son, daughter, husband, wife, parent. We all have instincts programmed into us by tens of thousands of years of evolution that just don't make sense in society today. This is just one instance of something like this happening. We all need to consider our thoughts and actions carefully. 

It's easy to dis-associate with someone but not as easy to relate to them. But we need to more of the latter not the former. On the internet it's easy to see something and to immediately assume the worst but we wouldn't do that near as much face to face with people. Or to say things we'd never dream of saying to someones face. I know I'm late to the part in talking about this subject at least in the tech community with Gamer Gate being over a year old but this is a topic that should never die out and should always be on our minds. 

We (the human race as a whole) won't change overnight or in a year or in a decade or in a hundred years. We've made enormous progress as country and as a planet over the past hundred years in how we treat different races sure but we have so much further to go on so many fronts. This is a fundamental problem that transcends race or culture or click in high school. We all have to fight to find ways to relate to those around us. Start small. Life doesn't have to be black and white, not everyone has to be like you, everyone means something to someone else and what you say and do means something to the people you say it to no matter how you express it.

I hope that where ever those police cars were going, that everyone ended the day okay. 

iPhone battery saving tips →

This is a great post that gives you a few tips on how to get the most out of your iPhone's battery.  They even address my pet peeve as a bonus tip: 

“Bonus tip: Stop flicking apps away!

I see far too many people flicking apps out of the multitasking tray thinking it saves their battery. It actually does the complete opposite. iOS automatically saves states so apps can launch as they were without having to restart completely. Flicking them away and then restarting them actually consumes more battery.

Compare this process to putting your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down and restarting it each time. Which method do you think uses fewer resources?”


I have friends

This morning a co-workers car wouldn't start so I gave him a ride. No biggie, nothing any normal person wouldn't do in my place. Sure I was already at work at it was almost 8 but what was I going to say, "no"? 

So 2 o'clock rolls around and he's asks if when I drop him off I can jump him and follow him to Auto Zone to get the battery replaced. Me being a self made hermit with no plans I of course said yes. I mean it beats sitting on the couch wondering what show I should watch or sadly swiping away in Tinder. 

After work we get back to his car and I get out my jumper cables while he goes to get his socket set. I pop my hood and then realize I don't have a clue where the release is to let me lift it up. so I grab my cars manual out of the glove compartment and flip through the pages feeling silly. Finally finding that information I get the hood up and grab my jumper cables (obviously my first time using them).

He comes back socket set in hand and motions for the cables. But then he looks at his car and his and I ask "want me to do it?" to which he replies "yeah, I haven't done this before." So I hook up the cables and he tries to start. Nothing happens. Tries again. Nothing happens. I leaf through my car manual again to make sure I didn't do anything stupid and low I followed the instructions correctly. 

I check the connections on my battery, I check the positive on his. They're all good. Then I wiggle the negative and instead of hearing a metal on metal sound I hear a metal on plastic sound. This dunce tried to ground to plastic (which looked a lot like all the metal) so moving it to a proper ground and we were off to the races. 

Drove over to Auto Zone and after a fair bit of work to get a cross bar out and some bolts out of very tight spaces we pulled out the battery. 

He goes and get the new battery and we go through the whole process backwards getting the damn thing in there. Of course the new battery has no handle on it so it's just that much more difficult to work with. But we get the battery back in, cross bar back in and everything nice and tight. I'm not even going to get into how we had to buy tools to get the new battery in because the terminals protruded from the back and we couldn't get the ratchet in the space. 

All that done and the car comes to life. our hands are dirty and we're starving. So he offers to take me out to dinner. I ask what he likes, he says this hibachi grill. I'm down for what ever since he's buying. And man was it good, friggin delicious. We finish eating after talking a bit and enjoying the show. When walking out he slows down and says "I'm going to introduce you to a tradition" and plunges his hand into a huge basket of mints. These aren't normal mints though they're like the red and white peppermints you'd normally see but they're  brown and green. And man were they weird tasting, like an Andies mint created by a man with no sense of taste only having heard them described. 

All this to say as we were driving away I realized he's my friend. We aren't best friends are even very close friends but friends none the less. I'm not as alone as I think I am at times. I'm sure many of you, like me feel alone from time to time or maybe more. But I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact that we make ourselves be alone by being afraid of trying, afraid of doing. It's easier said than done but don't let your fear control you, even if you fight it a little that's a small victory and small victories can turn the tide of a war.