Election Maps

I find it really interesting to look at the election maps that are split down by county (zoom in to get the county results). The locations of pockets of blue in seas of red and vice versa are fascinating.
What makes a town primarily blue or red? Does it have to do with the industry that was originally there? Or maybe it's the landscape?
I like finding states like Idaho, where the entire state is fairly red (~72% McCain to ~26% Obama), but there's one county smack dab in the middle of the state that's pretty blue (~66% to ~32%). None of the major cities in the state are nearby, and I think the highway might be outside or on the border of this county, Blaine County. So what's the story with this place? I read a bit in wiki and the only thing of interest was the fact that the median cost of a home was about twice the state's. Why so costly?
Or how about Park County, Wyoming? Oh, this is where Jackson Hole is, and Grand Teton National Park, almost half of Yellowstone. And it has the second highest per capita income in the US at, not quite $100K a year; beaten only by Manhattan. I thought rich people loved republicans? Or is this year an exception? And why is their income so much higher?
This next one was totally unexpected. In a sea of rather hard red (65% McCain to 30% Obama) there's one hard blue county. Sioux County, North Dakota. It's 100% an Indian reservation, and it only has a population of 4,000.
If I ever decided to move randomly, this is probably partly how I'd do it. I think I like my pockets of liberalism, and I'm not quite sure I would want to give that up.

Here's another interesting map tool with tons of data to visually explore with. The interface isn't as a bit clunky though.

Worlds Craziest Data Center

Looks fake, doesn't it. It's real though.

"This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb."

Here's the deets and more pictures.

The Sound of Harddrives Failing

I couldn't help myself. I really think this is cool.

I ran across this page that is the various sounds of hard drive's failing, and the description of what's happening. Pretty cool!

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

As a side, apparently Google can predict flu outbreaks about two weeks before the Centers For Diesese Control can because they get a spike in people seaching for "flu symptoms" and other search phrases. They've made a website so you can know when the flu makes an outbreak near you!

My Bubble has Finally Burst

I suppose I should be thankful for the over two solid months of pure and unwavering love I've experienced for my iPhone. Well, those days are over. I will probably soon be hesitantly in love/like with my iPhone for the foreseeable future, assuming we can repair our broken relationship.

Today I left work and as I was walking towards the bart I was planning on entering that cookie purchase I bought in the afternoon. (I've been tracking where I spend my money using Quickbank.) I quickly discovered that I had lost 4 pages of apps and all their data at some point during the day. I walked back to work to take a look at the iTunes there and it was empty, which was expected. I've always had the sync turned off there and only used it to recharge my battery. I didn't reconnect my phone on the off chance that somehow Apple support could help me.

I came home and went down to the Apple store only to be told that they had no appointment's open for their genius bar and instead I now have one for tomorrow. The guy I was able to talk to suggested there really wasn't anything I, or they, could do besides sync it. So I came home and reconnected it to my computer here to resync it. It has thrown a total of 7 red exclamation errors, one of which complaining about not being able to find the disk (!!). This is not a good sign. The extra odd part is that the phone works fine, and my contacts are fine too. So it is actually working, in some ways.

I can't express how sad this makes me because I really loved my iPhone, but it sure is a different thing when you know at any moment you can lose all your notes and other data you use every single day.

I hadn't been able to get my backup onto the phone or my apps that I could see in iTunes yet. But I shutdown iTunes and rebooted my phone again. Then I restarted iTunes and turned on my phone and there have been no red exclamation points yet and it's still syncing. Wish me luck.

My honeypot wanted me to mention his $300 ipod from several years ago (that's currently sitting on his desk) that lasted about a year before it died. Needless to say, he's not a fan of Apple. Or as he says he's "disappointed in their product robustness."

In other news, last night I randomly searched on "stella the cat" and this blog came up about a cat named Stella that looks startingly like my Stella. Coincidence? I think not. She must come from a long line of Stella's. Meow.

Cough, Cough

I might be patting myself on the back a little but..
I'm pretty excited about how far I've made it in the updates, rebuilds and overhauls of our computer systems. The first step was getting a much faster pc, and I did back in mid Sept. It can handle so much more than my old machine. It's great. Then there was moving everything over from the old machine to the new Vista machine, getting all the backups working and tested again, and finally moving my scripts for BASH. I also took this opportunity to tidy up some of my data too which always takes time.

A perk in all this is that I figured out one of the hard drives was very loud. And all this time I though it was the power fan. I got rid of that and now I can actually sleep with the office door open. It's really nice to not have the office sounds potentially affect my sleep anymore.

In the past couple weeks I've rebuilt the old machine with Ubuntu - which I'm pretty happy with. I'm such a noob. I know how to do stuff, and I just have to look up the correct commands, but doing anything is soo freakin slow sometimes.

I got our home network switched over to a new 802.11n router. This things is freakin fast. 160Mbps+. We can stream video through it to our living room. It's awesome. No more network cable in our living room!

My last step is to put OS X on the second harddrive of the ubuntu machine so I can start playing with iPhone development. I'm pretty interested in that and I have some ideas with it. Wouldn't it be cool to make an app that everybody's willing to pay a couple dollars for and tons of people use it? That would be pretty cool.

I did get Grub installed tonight so this weekend I'll work on OSX on the second harddrive. Wish me luck.

The picture above is one my honey took in the past couple of months. I like it, so I'm sharing it.

Right-Wing Slippery Slope Fantasies

I don't remember where I found this link, but it's pretty hilarious:

http://focusfamaction.edgeboss.net/download/focusfamaction/pdfs/10-22-08_2012letter.pdf

Basically, Dobson pretends that he's reporting on the state of the country in 2012 if Obama wins the election.