Thai Airport Protest

You got to hand it to these protesters, they make the MTA strike look silly. The sit-in at the Bangkok international airport has gotten the world's attention and their leaders in a panic. They are estimating an 85 million dollar loss for the country each day the airport is closed down- which is massive in an already stressed economy.

To alleviate some pain for the stranded tourists, the Thai officials are offering roughly $40 USD per day to cover the costs of food and accommodations. Not too shabby if you don't have a job waiting for you back home. Not so great if you do.
They are saying even after the sit-in its going to take a week to get planes off the ground due to security concerns.

Vegan Mousetrap

Recently we found signs of a small houseguest and being that we are animal-friendly home, I wanted to figure out a way to rid myself of the unwanted visitor as painless as possible. After some surfing I found a site with this nifty no-kill trick.

Here is what you need for your Vegan friendly mousetrap:

1. One toilet paper tube
2. A tall waste bin.
3. Peanut Butter
4. 2 Quarters

Take your cardboard tube and flatten the bottom so it doesn't roll. Tape your quarters to the top of the tube, about center of the tube. The quarters add the extra weight necessary to make sure the tube falls once the suckers takes the bait.

Put some peanut butter at the bottom end of the tube and balance it on the side of a countertop where signs of the houseguest may have appeared (poo). Put your waste bin directly under the tube and go to bed.

In the morning, if all went as planned you will hear a desperate little furball jumping in an attempt to escape his plastic prison. (I used a can with a top on it to make sure they don't jump out during transport.) Marshall out your prisoner to a safe location where you can both go your separate ways.

It really works, and the photos prove it!. Thanks to this instructables.com article for the great idea!

Where in the world? Google globetrotting game!

Wow! This is soo fun! Google combined their picasaweb online photo sharing with google maps and created a fun little game called "Where in the World?" where the goal is to guess the location of where the photo displayed was taken.

Some of these have very little to no information in the photo to guess where they are from, (a blond baby? Germany? a spotted dog? UK?) but its amazing how sometimes just the smallest detail can give it away. Others are quite obvious, like the Great Wall of China, but could you find it on a map? I had trouble - even with that whole "can see it from space" legend. [sigh]

Points are based on how close you are to the actual point the photo was taken. I got lucky on blurry photo of historical churchy looking building that I felt might be from the Czech Republic. I had 2 major cities on the Czech map I narrowed it down to, and guessed the wrong one, oh well, I still scored big for getting it that close.

I love photos and I love maps, so add this to my list of new huge timewasters! Check it out here.

Online magazine reader! Oh, and it doesn't suck!

Like magazines? Me too! I never felt like surfing content on the web ever fully nailed that feeling of flipping thru a magazine. Case in point: Wired. I have probably visited wired.com like a total of ten times in ten years, yet I read the mag all the time. Web sites and magazines don't play well together for me. (I think I'm having a chocolate and peanut butter moment, excuse me.)

I just stumbled across http://issuu.com/ and these guys have managed to virtually recreate the experience of reading a magazine - but online. Sounds like a web page, huh? Well its not! On Issuu you can toss pages back and forth, move them around zoom in and out like you were holding it. The scans are super high res and fly around like magic on my rig. The magazine experience has been so closely recreated that any magazine lover will appreciate it. It's actually harder to get around the site as a normal web page than it is as a magazine. Weird, I know, but you will just have to try it to know what I mean.

Now don't expect to find Wired, or many other big publishing house moneymakers, 'cause that would be a little TOO good to be true. But I think you will be thrilled to find what is available and discover a host of new rags to flip through. As if you didn't waste enough time at work already, right? Well, don't say I didn't warn you.

AND The best part is its free! Go check it out - http://issuu.com/

Watching Iceland

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I have been paying close attention to Iceland since the world economy has taken a nosedive. Iceland, a small European nation just northwest of mainland Europe is in a fiscal crisis unlike any other right now. The story of their situation is complicated, but in a nutshell they got into commercial banking and made a ton of money on deposits from other wealthy nations by offering huge yield savings accounts. Typical to the other world banks in the last 10 years or so, they got caught up with the mortgage trading, gambled and lost it all- including the deposits of these wealthy nations (such as the UK).

The problems for Iceland are like a perfect storm. They didn't join the EU, enjoying the high value of their own currency (it has dropped over 40% in value in 6 months last I checked) and they started importing everything. They achieved, in a very short amount of time, a raise in the standard of living to a level only few nations in the world have seen, quickly abandoning their past as hearty fishermen with some of the best fishing waters in the world. Now they owe more money than their country is worth. Their greed and refusal to join EU in the past is making it hard to get loans (bailouts) from their neighbors and friends. Their cash is becoming so invalued that other countries are reluctant to trade with them. The people of the nation, most of them fairly blameless of the situation, are up in arms, and finding it difficult to afford common staples such as groceries and fuel.

The reason I am paying so much attention to this little country that nobody seems to care much about, is the 'what if' factor that could be applied to the US. The US is the biggest importer in the world. We rely heavily on the production of other nations for almost all our daily needs. What if our currency was no longer valuable, due to economic collapse, and these production nations stopped exporting to us? What if out neighbors and friends decided to turn their back on us due to our greed and an unwillingness to work with them on common ground issues? Would we bounce back quickly? Would we beg for help?

I realize that we are not a 300k person nation (Brooklyn itself has more people than Iceland) and we have a much different relationship to the rest of the world, history, friends and enemies, but it is still very prudent to pay attention to what happens when irresponsible leadership causes a country to simply implode.

This is why I watch Iceland.

For more information and to get the 'real scoop' on the common Icelander's life right now, I read the Icelandic blogs, and only skim the news. There is a good one in my bloglist on the right (in English) called Iceland Says, that is made up of community posts. Every post seems to get more and more dire. Check it out.

Picking Cotton to Picking Presidents...

Ryan pointed me to this interesting report that really makes you think about race and politics in America. This is a map of 2 merged mapped demographics. One is of areas of cotton production in 1860 (the black dots) and the other (the colored counties) represent the winning parties who voted in the last election.

It's pretty amazing to think about when you put it all together. To me it's a wonderful tribute to the power of a democracy and a triumphant victory in an ongoing of a struggle for equality.

Full article here

Blood Puddle Pillows

Quoted from the site:

THE GREAT SLUMBER a.k.a. Blood Puddle Pillows
The pillows are inspired by those suspenseful moments when a sleeping loved one is a little too still for a little too long. Using an irreverent combination of comfort & fear the pillows parallel sleep & death. Project goal: taking ownership of morbidly intrusive thoughts through humor & play.

Classic "Weird Al"

"I lost on Jeopardy!" By Weird Al Yankovic. Enjoy the weekend!

My 2008 Guitar Lesson Adventure

Starting in March I decided to learn guitar. It was a brave endeavor on my part having no rhythm to speak of and have suffered minor nerve damage in my hand since 1990. But I did it anyways and am happy I did. I just thought I would share a few tidbits of my experience that really helped me get started and stay excited about playing guitar.

My Guitars

The first guitar I purchased was a nice Yamaha acoustic model FG750S. I didn't actually research it, but after I purchased I discovered it was highly rated and plays extremely well. My intention was start on the acoustic to tough up my hands and strength before moving on to an electric. I used the acoustic until I had a good amount of chords under my belt and then bought my electric.

My electric guitar is Traveller Escape EG-1 which I bought to save space in my small apartment, and also to lug around with me if I wanted to head out to play in the park or something. Its tiny, but has a full sized jumbo fret board and a built in headphone jack. Kind of the iPod of guitars.

Best Learning Tricks for Learning Guitar

If I had to teach someone the basics of getting started I would emphasize a few important hurdles that helped me tremendously.

1. Learn some basic theory first.

Most instruction probably wouldn't suggest this, but if you are a geek like me it saves a lot of the "why do we do it like that?" questions that come up constantly. Music theory, the basics anyhow, is actually really easy to digest and there are some great "dummies" style books out there devoted to the subject. It also had the added effect of getting excited me more about music and wanting to participate in it.

2. Scales

Scales are way more fun than they sound (pun intended). I expected that cranky feeling I see kids on TV get when their parents force them to practice piano. That hasn't been my experience whatsoever. The best thing about scales (you know, "do re mi") is that you ALWAYS have something to play. And the guitar isn't so linear like a piano, so you can play scales all over the fretboard for a slightly different feel (like the distance between frets and using different strings). They may not sound so great to anyone listening, but the user can appreciate when they get a good scale going. Nothing like picking up a guitar and jamming out a scale!

3. Online Tutoring

There is so much online devoted to playing guitar now. You can google just about any song and somewhere there is a video of a person showing you how to play it. Watching other people play is extremely helpful. You can pick up the details of how to hold your pick, fix your strap, muting, bending, all from watching someone play. Especially slow and up close. Troll YouTube or pay sites like GuitarTricks.com for great video lessons. I used GuitarTricks.com for about 4 months before finding a teacher and by then I had all the confidence I needed to ask the stubborn questions I couldn't discover on my own.

4. A Great Teacher

Seems obvious, right? Wrong! It has been my experience as well as others I have talked about this issue with that teachers can either make or break the learning process. I have had a few music teachers over the years for various attempts at playing an instrument. I have discovered that how people learn can vary from person to person.

I am a huge dork about learning new things. I want all my questions answered in the order I ask them, not in the predefined way a book might teach you. Often times I end up down a tangent issue that has nothing to do with my current problem, but it keeps me interested in learning more and therefore worth it. Heck, its my money, right? I should be able to learn what I want, how I want.

If you are with a teacher and things are just not gelling like you had hoped - find a new teacher! I think most of us think, like we do with doctors or lawyers, that if the teacher does it one way, that must be the right way. Or we are just too lazy or worried about the teachers feelings to find a new one. Don't worry about it! Find the best teacher for your learning style. Its worth it!

5. Rhythm

This one has been the most challenging for me so far. Rhythm, even your basic "tap tap tap" does not come naturally for me. For this I can only say first learn what rhythm is, how its used and then come up with some techniques to practice every day. Stochastic rhythm is extremely important for learning the ins and outs of any music and having stochastic patterns to practice is really helpful, even if you are just muting all the strings.

6. Practice 30 minutes a day

I am obsessed with keeping a 30 minute schedule for playing. I have a whole theory of life improvement based around doing things in 30 minute intervals, and this is one of them. Try not to do more or less than 30 minutes. 30 keeps you in the game and doesn't burn you out and its totally easy to find 30 minutes, I don't care what you say. Matter of fact, I got 30 right now. BYE!