Andrew Ferguson
Rejecting Your Reality and Substituting My Own Since 1986
Shared Items for the week of February 7, 2010*
- Boing Boing: Fun with punctuation (February 4, 2010)
- The Official Google Blog: New imagery of Port-au-Prince (January 20, 2010)
- Daring Fireball: Is the United States Senate Filibuster Rule Unconstitutional? (January 12, 2010)
- Daring Fireball: Man of the Day: Jimmy Kimmel (January 15, 2010)
- Daring Fireball: From the DF Archive: ‘And Oranges’ (February 1, 2010)
- What I Learned Today: Check out Obama’s 2011 Budget Proposal in an NYT… (February 3, 2010)
- Daring Fireball: Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress (February 3, 2010)
- Daring Fireball: Facebook Introduces HipHop, PHP to C++ Cross-Compiler – Andrew also says, “Holy smokes.” (February 2, 2010)
- Signal vs. Noise: It’s not a promise, it’s a guess (February 2, 2010)
- Boing Boing: ATM skimmers: man, these things are scary (February 1, 2010)
- kottke.org: Trippy morphing time-stitch video (February 1, 2010)
- S p e a k L i k e A G e e k: “Now, let me get this straight…..We are going to pass a health care plan written by a committee…” (January 12, 2010)
- Download Squad: Should Americans go on a data diet? (January 9, 2010)
- All Articles: Top ten ways to distinguish a freshman from a senior (January 31, 2010)
- All Articles: A mission trip to Haiti in 11, 12, 13, 14 days (January 31, 2010)
- [daily dose of imagery]: shooting people (January 28, 2010)
- Download Squad: Sikuli uses screen shots to run scripts, is amazing (January 30, 2010)
- Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2: That Star Wars Opening Credits Make it to Earth (January 30, 2010)
- Download Squad: Analysis of 32 MILLION breached passwords shows people use stupid passwords (January 21, 2010)
- Aerospace News: Get your Boeing 787 flight-test fix here (January 29, 2010)
* Q: Wha? A: Every week I go through about 1000 posts on my RSS feed. These are ones that I thought worth sharing. You can find previous Shared Items here.
Tags: feed, Google Reader, RSS, shared items
For the week of 2010-02-06 in Tweets
- Uploading 2.83GB of photos from Haiti…this could take a while. #fb #
- Haiti photos are currently being uploaded to here: http://bit.ly/bmGmQw Also be sure to check out the map: http://bit.ly/cVuTah #fb #
- Haiti photos are here: http://bit.ly/bmGmQw Also be sure to check out the map: http://bit.ly/cVuTah #fb #
- Going to bed. It's been a long day for all the good reasons. Happy Birthday to me. #
- The World: So what do you need? Besides a miracle. Me: Coffee. Lots of coffee. #fb #
- @moniguzman I bought the device. I own it. I can do whatever the hell I want with it. Yes. in reply to moniguzman #
- This is a dangerous game: http://bit.ly/3SDP2q #
- @kel_m The Perks of Being a Wallflower in reply to kel_m #
- @SAASAlumni CC is D1?? in reply to SAASAlumni #
- this is supposed to be Friday…but it feels like Monday. Good thing tomorrow is Saturday, right? #fb #
- Sunny Day Sweepin' the clouds away #fb #
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Valihist: The Productivity Medicine
There’s a cabinet at work that has some basic medications: Motrin (ibuprofen), Aleve (naproxen), and Valihist.
Valihist is an “Antihistamine-Stimulant for allergies, colds, [and] runny nose.”
The back of the package lists the the ingredients as: Acetaminophen 325mg, Caffeine 45mg, Phenylephrine Hydrochloride 5mg, and Chlorpheniramine Maleate 2mg.
How many medications contain caffeine? 45mg is about what you get the average can of soda[1].
There’s a little note at the top of the package: This medication is made for occupational use, to keep people on the job, safely and productively. Yea, caffeine will do that for you.
Tags: acetaminophen, caffeine, chlorpheniramine maleate, phenylephrine hydrochloride, Valihist
Mission Trip Haiti: Epilogue, Part 3
I’ve spent a substantial amount of time trying to figure out what to make of everything that happened; or perhaps more precisely, in light of what happened, what am I going to do now? Sure, I returned home to Seattle, went back to work, and have even told my story (hence you reading this). In a bigger sense, I ask myself what am I being called to do. Is it different than what I’m doing now? This, of course, has various theological implications about what a calling is and how one discerns God’s will.
The problem with mission trips, and really anything else that thrusts a person into atypical situations is that it exposes you to what looks like the greener side of the fence without showing you all the weeds. The typical reaction to this feeling, I think, is to change everything in ones life all at once; there’s a huge push to become a better person, but at what expense? My approach has been one of timid toe-dipping: make small course corrections now, nothing that will list the ship. It doesn’t seem like much now, but in one year (or five, or ten) the trajectory change will be substantially noticeable.
I still have more growing to do.
In the beginning, I wasn’t sure how I was going to process everything. I would have just liked to have sit in quiet meditation for a couple of days, but I’ve never been one to sit still for very long and my responsibilities in the real world were calling me.
I spent several hours (over twelve) editing the photos and probably another five or six hours writing (and linking photos). I really wanted to avoid a telling a serialized string of events, so I stuck to recalling events that stood out in my mind, even if that meant skipping over some things. My goal is that I could use the picture to compliment and supplement what I wrote[1], and in that regard, I hope I was successful in telling, more or less, the entire story.
I also wanted to avoid having this be all about the earthquake. This has probably been the most difficult issue to deal with. Initially, I felt like a survivor without a disaster. But as the shock of the entire situation has warn off, I find myself wonder what our status really was. Were we evacuees of a natural disaster? What sort of danger were we really in? I’ve tried to push myself to tell a fair story, but it’s a tricky balance.
If you were to ask me to sum up my experience in one sentence, it would be this: Greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city[2].
Tags: discernment, Haiti, mission trip, photos, Seattle
Mission Trip Haiti: Business as Usual, Almost – Part 2
Everyone was shocked; I hadn’t even once considered that the epicenter could be Port-au-Prince.
My first reaction was untempered, “Let’s go! People need our help!” However, Bruce kindly and patiently explained our position: a group of white people, with no experience in disaster recovery, who can’t speak French or Creole, and don’t have place to stay, food to eat, or water to drink. Of course, Bruce was right; we would have been more of burden than anything. I guess that’s the kind of insight one gets after working in Haiti for twenty-five years.
Life continued, more or less, as normal. Bruce was working overtime trying to coordinate relief efforts with his organization, CrossWorld, and we did what we could for the people of Port-au-Prince from where we were by praying. The only real impact to us was that our days were a bit shorter since Bruce had so much going on.
18.0 mm || 1/250 || f/3.5 || ISO200
70.0 mm || 1/320 || f/4.5 || ISO200
38.0 mm || 1/400 || f/4.2 || ISO200
Continue reading Mission Trip Haiti: Business as Usual, Almost – Part 2…
Tags: Alex Suk, Amber Evanson, American Airlines, beach, Boca Raton Community Church, Bruce Robinson, Cap-Haitien, Cap-Haitien International Airport, church, CNN Headline News, Creole, CrossWorld, DC-3, Deb Robinson, disaster recovery, earthquake, evacuation, Florida, Foison, Fort Pierce, French, GPS, Haiti, iPhone, Miami International Airport, Missionary Flights International, N400MF, Newsweek, Port-au-Prince, Port-de-Paix, road trip, Satellite Internet, soccer, Susie Day, Thanksgiving, Time, Toyota Land Cruiser, Tri-Rail, Turks and Caicos, vacation, water, World War II
Mission Trip Haiti: In Words and Photos – Part 1
Editors Note: Sorry it has taken so long to get this post up. The last several weeks have been hectic, at best.
I wrote this as a stand alone blog post for a variety of reasons. One of which is that I was asked by my college newspaper, The Oredigger, to write guest column – which I was more than happy to do. The original plan was to take a blog post and then repurpose it for the newspaper. As it turned out, I did it the other way around.
Below is an expanded version of what I wrote for The Oredigger.
For those who aren’t majoring in History, here’s the quick introduction to Haiti, courtesy of the CIA World Factbook:
From www.cia.gov:In the early 17th century, the French established a presence on Hispaniola. In 1697, Spain ceded to the French the western third of the island, which later became Haiti. The French colony, based on forestry and sugar-related industries, became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean but only through the heavy importation of African slaves and considerable environmental degradation. In the late 18th century, Haiti’s nearly half million slaves revolted under Toussaint L’ouverture. After a prolonged struggle, Haiti became the first black republic to declare independence in 1804. The poorest country [and also perceived as the most corrupt] in the Western Hemisphere , Haiti has been plagued by political violence for most of its history. After an armed rebellion led to the forced resignation and exile of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, an interim government took office to organize new elections under the auspices of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Continued violence and technical delays prompted repeated postponements, but Haiti finally did inaugurate a democratically elected president and parliament in May of 2006.
My involvement with Haiti is a rather curious one. Last spring, I was looking for a summer mission trip that would be able to use to my skills as an engineer. Although I pursued several different avenues, I didn’t find anything that struck a chord with me. Excuses will always be prevalent, especially in today’s society. Through an interesting set of short conversations with a variety of people over the fall, I decided that it’s high time I let my “religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” (G. K. Chesterton)
So there it was.
18.0 mm || 1/40 || f/3.5 || ISO800
I left for Haiti on January 8th. It was an arduous journey to get there (or so I thought), leaving in the early morning from Seattle, flying to Chicago, and then to Miami. Miami only offered a short reprieve (I think we spent more time trying to get to our hotel rooms than we did in them) before we had to be back at Miami’s International Airport to catch our flight to Haiti.
18.0 mm || 1/40 || f/3.5 || ISO1600
18.0 mm || 1/100 || f/3.5 || ISO1600
18.0 mm || 1/40 || f/3.5 || ISO1600
Continue reading Mission Trip Haiti: In Words and Photos – Part 1…
Tags: Bruce Robinson, Convergence, Deb Robinson, earthquake, Foison, Haiti, Miami International Airport, Passe Catabois, Port-au-Prince, Port-de-Paix, Poste Metier, Toyota Land Cruiser, University Presbyterian Church
Shared Items for the week of January 31, 2010*
- Life On the Wicked Stage: Act 2: That Star Wars Opening Credits Make it to Earth (January 30, 2010)
- Download Squad: Analysis of 32 MILLION breached passwords shows people use stupid passwords (January 21, 2010)
- Aerospace News: Get your Boeing 787 flight-test fix here (January 29, 2010)
- Boing Boing: How to report the news (January 28, 2010)
- Aerospace News: White House confirms no moon shot but more money to NASA – Andrew also says, “It will be interesting to see what the private market does.” (January 29, 2010)
- What I Learned Today: MackeyCare Begins – Andrew also says, “There’s a NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance)?? You have got to be joking.” (January 28, 2010)
- Scobleizer: Corporate Bravery from Google (January 12, 2010)
- Boing Boing: Visual representation of global aid to Haiti (January 26, 2010)
- Download Squad: Rainy Mood helps you relax with the sound of RAIN! (January 26, 2010)
- Signal vs. Noise: VIDEO: The Most Amazing Cinematic Car Crash Ever. Via Cartype. – Andrew also says, “Final Destination is one of the only movies that gives me any resemblance of nightmares.” (January 26, 2010)
- Signal vs. Noise: LINK: “Where one studies has no correlation to entrepreneurial success” (January 26, 2010)
- Daring Fireball: Doonesbury on The Tablet Announcement (January 26, 2010)
- Betanews: Data encryption tool maker: Antivirus has become ineffective – Andrew also says, “Interesting thoughts.” (January 26, 2010)
- All Articles: Top Ten: Super Bowl parties (January 24, 2010)
- Weblog Tools Collection: Matt Mullenweg Launches WordPress Foundation to Support Open Source (January 21, 2010)
- Photojojo: Turn a Disposable Camera in to a Reusable Flash Slave (January 8, 2010)
- [daily dose of imagery]: reflecting eye (January 21, 2010)
- The Big Picture: Faces of Haiti (January 22, 2010)
- What I Learned Today: Isn’t it ironic.. (January 25, 2010)
- kottke.org: Video panoramas (January 22, 2010)
* Q: Wha? A: Every week I go through about 1000 posts on my RSS feed. These are ones that I thought worth sharing. You can find previous Shared Items here.
Tags: feed, Google Reader, RSS, shared items
For the week of 2010-01-30 in Tweets
- Things I'm not eating for lunch today: tuna fish sandwich (although I was tempted) #fb #
- is editing photos from haiti…this could take a while #fb #
- @apinkphoenix, @k_hack, @jessegamble i did make it home okay on thursday, including a ride on a DC-3. thanks for all your thoughts & prayers #
- should have called it the iPADD http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/PADD #
- me and steve jobs wear the same shoes http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/photogalleries/businesstechnology2010905161/3.html #
- Round one of Haiti photo editing is done. Went from 1472 to 655. Now for round two. #fb #
- Exporting Haiti photos…. #fb #
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For the week of 2010-01-24 in Tweets
- Back from Haiti and are now safe and sound on US soil – in Florida. Have I got a story for you. #fb #
- AA 1763 to ORD. AA 425 to SEA. #fb #
- Back from Haiti. All safe and sound. Thank you sooooo much to everyone for your prayers while we were gone. Keep praying though! #
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Back in the United States
Good news everyone! We’re back on US soil, solid ground so to speak. I’m currently at the Miami Airport waiting for our flight to leave (AA 1763 to ORD, AA 425 to SEA). We get in at 6:35pm local time. I’ll have more of an update when I get back and I’m not using an iPhone.
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