A Twist of Citrus is the main blog of lemon-lime.org.
You'll find musings, interesting news of the day, photo galleries, trip logs, technical and site updates and more...
This article really makes me wonder why doctors and hospitals haven't been all over digital archiving of their records. Keeping paper copies of all patient files is expensive and I have heard dozens of stories of friend's and family member's records being misplaced or lost. It's unacceptable in this age.
I know it's not quite as simple as running your records through a scanner and shoving them on a hard drive. There are questions of patient data security, backups and the possibility of malicious tampering— but all these issues exist with paper files, albeit as physical risks instead of digital risks. The time has come. I see absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be a way of providing patients with their records in an open standard file format that can be used by anything from a patient's iPhone to their PC or a specialized machine used to track a diabetic's glucose levels. Where are you ISA?
Obvious humor factors aside, this horse race model is actually a really great way to visualize the GOP primary candidates' relative standings over time. Nice, Slate. Nice.
In solidarity with sites like Wikipedia, Reddit and the Cheezburger Network, I have decided I'm going to take down my entire site from Midnight on Jan 18th until Midnight on the 19th.
If you aren't familiar with the issue, SOPA and PIPA are very scary pieces of legislation. Everyone is familiar with China's great firewall, and the lack of freedom on their internet, and these two acts would go a long way in creating a walled garden in the US. Don't allow big media companies to strip the Internet of its free and open nature. This doesn't only affect the US. This effects everyone. I know I'm a small site, and people probably wont even notice that I've gone down for the day, but I think we can all do our small part to voice concern for what could be a very troubling future for US tech innovation.
Well, I inadvertently pushed some code changes I made months ago live today. I had actually forgotten I had redone the layouts for the blog and Scenes from a Future Memory, so that was a fun little surprise. The logo is going to look a little weird for a while until I have a chance to redo it again as a transparent PNG. I seem to have lost the original image, which is a bit of a tragedy, because I really like the look of the current logo.
As of now, the code running this site is about a year old, believe it or not. I imported the first blog post to my database on New Years day last year. It's been quite the year since then!
At the time, I was only a few months into my first job here in Australia, and feeling pretty lonely and homesick. Now, I am just starting a new job and last weekend I hosted a birthday party and was surrounded by friends I whose company I really enjoy. Jamie, Miguel and I had a great New Years Eve party as well, and overall I'm just really pleased with where my life is. I've been home to visit my family twice, and I'll be going to visit again in May when I go home to watch Jamie receive his diploma for his Masters.
I just finished my first week at a new job last Friday...I'm really loving it. The people are really friendly, and the "Cave" where they stick all the developers is anything but: It has wall to wall views of Bondi and the Harbor on two of the walls, a brand new shower room and it's attached to a truly massive kitchen with free food like apples and Nutella. I'm currently waste deep learning all about CakePHP and MongoDB for the project I'm assigned to, and I've already made some serious progress upgrading the project from Cake 1.3 to 2.0, so it's good to already have something to show for the last two weeks.
I'm really loving CakePHP so far. In fact, since I've been kind of avoiding updates to my site because of how much work it is to fix things, I'm thinking about scrapping all the current code the site runs on in favor of starting over with CakePHP and reworking it from the ground up. Obviously the database will stay, so all the content will still be here, and I won't let any of the links or anything change so most of the biggest changes will probably be pretty transparent to everyone.
What an incredible illusion. I'd love to try this technique some time. I understand working with resin can be extremely difficult if not very rewarding. Just look at these incredible works by Riusuke Fukahori.
Hah. What an amusing and instructive post by Business Week showing how easily charts, graphs and statistics can lead us to believe there are connections between data that may seem significant, but really are not.
In other words (say it together, children): "Correlation does not imply causation."
Don't hate me when you get the song stuck in your head for the next week. I was aware of a lot of these little tidbits of history about the famous Mahna Mahna sketch on the Muppet Show, but Slate has up the first article I've seen that connects everything together as a comprehensive history of the sketch, from its inception as a softcore porn soundtrack (!!) all the way to its reference on the UK version of The Office.
I am always very saddened to hear about high art forms like Kimono making are dying out because nobody in the younger generation is willing to put in the effort and patience to learn from the masters. These sorts of things are always on the precipice of extinction and it only takes one or two generation for the skills and knowledge to completely disappear, never to be seen again.
Slate put up a great article today talking about the psychology of less-than-lethal force when you're in the position of law enforcement officers. It's not that they are particularly evil for using things like tasers and pepper spray, it's that they are human. And humans are lazy.
The part that really jumps out to me, is that the data backs up the psychology. Introducing less than lethal force options actually correlates directly with a rise in in the rate of violent encounters during an arrest.
Not to mention the fact that people can and do die from being pepper sprayed or tasered. Less-than-lethal is a bit of a misnomer.
I just hope they don't come out with shellfish spray or I'm totally screwed.
Schools need to teach more songs about how to open your front door with the keys you can't remember you have in your pocket. Except that you can't remember your house number. Oh crap.
Holy crud. Okay, so I always thought the description alone of water boarding seemed about as close to torture as anything I can think of. Watching this "tough guy" being water boarded was horrifying. Torture is illegal and against human rights. It doesn't matter if the other guy is going to do worse to you first. We're human beings and we have morals. People who do this to someone of their own will have sold their soul for a what is likely to be a worthless piece of intelligence.
It doesn't matter what you think of terrorists, or if you think they are subhuman anyway. It should be illegal to do this to an animal, let alone a fellow human being.
Water boarding is torture. Bachmann and Cain and anyone else who thinks it is OK to do this to someone because it "keeps us safe" or it "works" are incredibly off base. They say they are Christians, but I can't think of anything less Christian or less human to do to someone. Gay marriage is against God's will, but he's AOK with torturing people?
This article I read on Slate tonight is really striking. The first two pages are so are mostly depressing, but also empowering. But, it's the half the article that moved me the most.
Can poverty make people happier? I think it can. Some of my most favorite activities have nothing to do with spending money. I love writing, here on my blog, and with my friend Olivia on our story, and I love taking photographs with my digital camera (no film or developing costs!). I love spending evenings down by the pool and at the beach with Jamie. We don't own a car, and I take the ferry and bus to work every day. I wouldn't even think of trading my beautiful commute across the Sydney harbor, and it's loads cheaper than paying for a car and parking in the CBD.
This weekend, a coworker has invited me to a birthday picnic at a beautiful nature preserve right near my house. Board games, chats with friends over a glass with wine, watching the sunset over the harbor or the moon rise through the harbor bridge. These are all things that don't involve money but, on the whole, are really what make me happier. Sure it's fun to go to the movies, but it's not really a social activity anyway. I can bet you that if I had a video camera and friends who were game to be silly, I could have way more fun trying to make movies with them than going to see a big budget Hollywood blockbuster.
Maybe having less money doesn't make us happier, but it definitely seems like it helps put things into perspective. It gets us out of the cycle of spending more for short term pleasures and helps us focus on what really makes us happy. Each-other.
Have a read and tell me what you think. Does money distract us from what really makes us happy?
This guy has to make the craziest animations ever. They are always really weird, but definitely also interesting. Every single video also has something to do with geometry and patterns and recursion. See if you can spot the patterns.
Been listening to a lot of music this week, so I'd thought I'd share some of my favorites.
Let's start with The Gossip - Heavy Cross. I love the lead singer Beth Ditto. She's got miles of sass to go around and she makes no oppologies for having a different body type that you typically see in the music scene. We need more Beth Dittos on in front and center. This song is 2 years old, but it's not even close to as far back I plan to go today.
Next up we got some Tommy Sparks. He totally appeals to my video game music loving inner nerd. Good stuff.
I promise this is the last indie song I have for today. This video is actually fresh off the press, people. Foster the People - Call It What You Want. I am absolutely 100% convinced the guy floating in the hallways is an intentional reference to Royksopp's music video for What Else Is There, and I won't believe anyone who tells me otherwise.
Finally, I don't know how this came up last night, but Jamie and I randomly both started singing If I Can't Have You. And then proceeded to argue about whether Yvonne Elliman's version is the original or a cover of a BeeGees original. Wikipedia reveals... The Beegees cut a demo, but she was picked by the BeeGees to record and release the song for Saturday Night Fever, and their demo was never released. Yvonne has a nice full voice, and I love that she's from Hawaii. We really need more Hawaiian pop stars. So pretty.
I told you we'd be going way back, baby. I think that's enough for tonight. I can't believe I didn't try to push any Scandinavian electronica on you guys.
Don't let the ghosts or ghoulies get you! For halloween, I was a Lego man! (That's me showing off my MASSIVE BICEPS behind Jamie. LOL.)
We had a really really fun time out on Saturday, and it was especially cool to see all the reactions from children around the city. We rode the ferry past Luna Park on the way to Circular Quay, and there was a giant cascade of squeels as all the kids waiting in line for the ferry started crying out "Look at da LEGO man!"
Sadly, we put our heads down for a few minutes to go dance at one of the clubs while we were out, and some drunken revelers must have run off with our lego face pieces because they were nowhere to be found.
If I had been smart about it I would have taken photos of the whole construction process to blog about later, but we were in a big rush to make sure we weren't late for Kristine's party.
Basically, we found two giant lego head toy buckets in a toy department and cut the crap out of them until we could just barely fit our heads in them without cutting our jugulars on sharp plastic.
I don't know why this is supposed to be so shocking. So pink is just a combination of other colored light. I think what this really shows is that the color wheel is misleading when you use it for light. It's really only meant to be used for additive color mixing like in paints.
I know I'm super terrible with posting videos and pictures and not actually posting any journals. I've been writing a lot for Scenes from a Future Memory which has sapped me a little of my blogging energy.
Anyway, here is a hilarious Muppet video with a Halloween Theme.
Today I was blessed with not one, but THREE Robyn related videos in my twitter feed! Two came from from Ellen DeGeneres and the other came from Robyn herself.
The first I'll share with you was a beautiful cover of Call Your Girlfriend sung by a a few members of a Swedish all girl acapella group called Erato. Did anyone else play the cup game they are using to produce the rhythm for the song? I remember it fondly, but Jamie has never heard or seen it before.
The second video is of Robyn performing Dancing On My Own on the Ellen show (I love her hair!). She also performed Call Your Girlfriend as well. I'm very excited for Robyn, this is her first performance on Ellen, which in some ways, I find a bit shocking. I wonder if this means she's officially mainstream now that she's appearing on daytime TV?
So much Robyn in one day. I could only be so lucky every day!
