Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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Gionvanni Grancino violin has been lost and presumed stolen

A Gionvanni Grancino violin has been lost and presumed stolen in
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on Friday, March 29th 2013.

European luthiers and the Interpol have already been informed and are on
the look out for it, but they would now would like to get the word out in
the US as well as a precaution, as the violin still has not been recovered.

The instrument belongs to the Jumpstart Jr. Foundation, based in the
Netherlands.

Jumpstart Jr. was founded in The Netherlands in 2006 and is the custodian of a unique collection of historical string instruments crafted by old masters and selected by leading baroque players. Jumpstart Jr. aims to identify the best young players who have already completed a musical education and are recognized to become leading performers.

I can pass on the email addresses and phone numbers of those involved.

Galerie 50 11 m

Riding the Catskills

Spring Route Roundup: Come on Up, the Weather’s Fine! | Riding the Catskills:

I just wanted to round up all the routes I’ve published for your convenience, dear reader. After all the effort this blog entails, I better see all y’all riding past my house this summer.

Just one note before we begin: If you make it up here, try to be super polite to the locals (of whom I am now one). This isn’t 9W, and I want cyclists to be welcome up here!

[Isn’t 9W? Ouch. I’ll have to do some of this this summer.]

Open Season

Open Season:

Google knew what it was doing when it made and marketed Android as an “open” system. It surely anticipated forks by handset makers as a manageable risk as long as Google kept advancing the system. But I wonder if it expected something like Facebook Home: an inside-out heist, made by a company after the same exact user data and advertisers Google is after. How it chooses to respond in the near future should give us an answer.

[Speed is feature. Simple is a feature. So is size. Facebook certainly has enough of the last one.]

Source: Apple Outsider

→ The Swansea measles outbreak

→ The Swansea measles outbreak:

It’s sad, and scary, that anti-intellectual, anti-science superstition about common vaccines has made it more likely that our children will contract and spread these diseases than when we were younger. Anytime we make the world less safe against easily solvable problems, we need to seriously evaluate what we’re doing.

∞ Permalink

[No arg, but this is a question of trust. And it proves just how little trust many people have that “everything is just fine”, when clearly for reasons not well understood something seems to have gone wrong. I can’t say and won’t whether there’s a correlation between autism and vaccines, or the preservatives used in long shelf life vaccines or anything else. But no one trusts them when they say “it’s fine” because in too many cases it turns out not to be accurate.]

Source: Marco.org

Forecast

Forecast:

Rather than cram these things into Dark Sky, we decided to do something grander: create our own full-featured weather service from scratch, complete with 7-day forecasts that cover the whole world, beautiful weather visualizations, and a time machine for exploring the weather in the past and far future. You can access it from all of your devices, whether it be your laptop, iPhone, Android phone, or tablet.

[Dark Sky has been amazingly accurate. And this looks like the the online weather forecasting service I’ve been waiting for… well worth the visit to Forecast, and dropping it on your phone or browser. For those of you who do stuff in the outdoors this will ease the planning burden… (the open source Skycons is a nice touch as well.]

You know better, this is inexcusable

You know better, this is inexcusable:

If Gruber’s going to call Lynch a bozo, if you’re going to double and treble down on it, then where’s the articles calling Schiller and the rest of the Apple executive team, including Jobs, “bozos” for supporting shitty products like the Moto iTunes Phone? Right.

It’s not just Gruber. Jim Dalrymple, someone else who knows how shit works in a corporation should start checking his kegerator hoses for mold for agreeing with Gruber on this in his piece, “Bozo”:

John Gruber giving his thoughts on Apple’s newest VP Kevin Lynch. There is also an Exhibit B. Like Gruber, it concerns me that Lynch kept beating the Flash drum for so long, even when it was clear it was dead.

Oh come on Jim, it most certainly does not. You’ve been a part of a largeish corporation before, you know how shit works. The both of them do. Kevin Lynch wasn’t doing anything that anyone else in his position, including Gruber wouldn’t have done. He was supporting a major company initiative in public. That’s not the sign of a bozo, and Gruber needs to stop pretending otherwise.

[The latest sign of the apocalypse is holding everyone to a different standard than the one you hold for yourself.]

Source: bynkii.com

Reading devices

Reading devices:

Would I be permitted to be productive at all, or is only consumption allowed? Could I write? Code? Draw? Compose? Run some reports? Reboot a server? Why specifically make an exception for reading with everything our modern devices can do?

Last year, the agency announced that an industry working group would study the issue. The group, which first met in January, comprises people from various industries, including Amazon, the Consumer Electronics Association, Boeing, the Association of Flight Attendants, the Federal Communications Commission and aircraft makers.

Oh. (Emphasis mine.)

[Surprise!]

Source: Marco.org

The Small Town Volunteer Fire Department

The Small Town Volunteer Fire Department:

Unincorporated population centers in a NJ county were often assigned to the nearest township. For Newfield that was Franklin Township, which still exists today. By 1924, the residents of Newfield were very unhappy with the services being provided them through Franklin Township in exchange for local real estate taxes so they petitioned to become a NJ Borough with an elected mayor and six member council, and the state government granted that request.

The residents of Newfield, which had its own bank, school, fire company, grocery stores, carnegie library, etc, felt least government was best. I smile and think of them as Libertarians long before such a movement existed. This was, of course, a bargain the town was making with itself to provide public services with minimal taxes through promotion of volunteerism.

This attitude and tradition has worked well. The School Board, the Ambulance Corps, the Cemetery Board, the Library Board, and the fire company are all staffed with unpaid volunteers. For the essential services of EMS and fire-fighting, these unpaid volunteers also undergo many hours of training to remain certified. In consequence, those essential service organizations are backups for other EMS and fire-fighting services in surrounding towns.

[Amazingly easy to screw things up…]

Source: inessential.com

Taylor Phinney: This Is Not a Story About Last Place

Taylor Phinney: This Is Not a Story About Last Place—Jason Gay – WSJ.com:

He had so many miles to ride. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said. “The race has gone by, and people aren’t really expecting one rider slogging along by himself.” Fans on the side of the road offered to push him up hills. But Phinney remembered a story his Dad had told him about one of his old Tour de France teams, making a pact to decline pushes.

Taylor would do the same. No pushes.

“He never lost his motivation,” said Fabio Baldato, an assistant director for Phinney’s team, BMC Racing, who was driving a car behind Phinney the entire route. “It was unbelievable.”

[Added to the file for my own challenges. No pushes.]