qpmarl blog

Here you will find videos from the National Archives vault - including the Apollo 11 moon landing, a bunch of WWII videos and a lot of other stuff from the 30's, etc.

Or is it Weird Wild Web

Anyways, I'm going to just start calling it "The Wild". I've been trying to think of a better name for a while because I hate "Internet" - it has too many syllables - doesn't flow off the tongue. "net" is not specific enough - it can mean any type of network.

"Wild", I believe, more accurately captures the essence of the internet - the network itself, the people on it, and the data available. It is uncontrollable. It is wild.

This is pretty cool. It's google hosted videos. The have everything from free home-made videos (some funny, some not) to commercial shows/movies that you can buy or rent for a day(all online of course).

I bought a couple of Twilight Zone episodes.

You have to be online to watch the stuff you buy though, so that's kinda lame.

I don't read your junk, you can stop sending it to me. I don't even read the sender or subject fields anymore, I just go into my spam folder (with about 107 new spams), select all and delete. I trust my spam filter. It does a pretty good job, so you can stop wasting your time and internet bandwidth sending that junk.

It's fairly certain that I'm going to Jamaica for a time. I can't say any more than that.

from Tom:

Of course the geodesic dome isn't used much for housing. What do you do with those corners at the bottom and that small space at the top?

Yeah. They had some strange floor plans and stuff. In one design, the floor of the dome itself is just dirt - perhaps with plants and stuff growing in it - it could be landscaped or whatever. Then for the living area, you got these modular, triangular floor panels that can be connected together in just about any shape you want - they are pre-formed fiberglass/styrofoam or some junk and they have electrical connections built in so that when you connect them, they form a continuous electrical circuit with outlets built in to each. You'd have a lot of basically unused space around the circumference of the dome and the top of the dome.

It's been at least two days since I've pulled my laptop out of its bag and for about a week before that, just a few times to watch a movie.

I just finished reading Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility by Michael John Gorman. It's sort of a Biography, but not about him so much as about his designs (most notably the geodesic dome). The guy had some pretty crazy ideas, most of them too radical or impractical to become reality (like sky cities floating in the air inside giant geodesic domes). His Dymaxion transport - intended to be a car/plane with inflatable wings that would be deflated and stored for "extended taxiing mode" - was sort of constructed. Three Dymaxion Cars (they had no wings) were built. They had two big wheels in front and a single small wheel in the back which was used for steering - the idea was that planes and ships are steered from the rear and automobiles should be as well. In practice it wasn't much good.

One design that has persisted is the geodesic dome, which never reached Fuller's expectations. His idea was that it would allow cheap, easily erected, mass produced housing. It has proven rather problematic as a dwelling structure.