Pinging stuff I care about.
Alton Attorney Accidentally Sues Himself
Alton attorney Emert Wyss thought he could make money in a Madison County class action lawsuit, but he accidentally sued himself instead. Now he has four law firms after his money – and he hired all four.
Via Fortean Times.
CNN.com – Ex-hostage: ‘I wanted to gain his trust’ – Mar 14, 2005
And at one point, he said, “You know, I’d rather you shoot — the guns are laying in there — I’d rather you shoot me than them.” I said, “I don’t want anyone else to die, not even you.”
Talk about nonviolent communication! Who knows how many people’s lives (including her own) this woman saved by talking to this man — who had just shot and killed several people in cold blood — like he was a human being?
Via the nvc-parenting yahoo group.
Jack OS X is a real-time audio driver system for OS X. I first heard of Jack in a Linux context. Linux sound is often painful to deal with. The inclusion of ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound System, “Advanced” in this context meaning “Not Sucking Completely,” seemed to take forever. It’s there now, finally, in the 2.6 kernels.
Now there’s an even spiffier thing than ALSA, called Jack. It’s supposed to be all “realtime” and “hyper-efficient” and “low latency” and stuff. But my emotional scars from trying to make sound work on Linux in years gone by prevented me from seriously considering trying to make Jack work on Linux.
So when I heard about Jack OS X, I thought, “what’s the point, doesn’t OS X already have a perfectly functional audio system?”
Point is you can do neat stuff with Jack on OS X, and it has a pleasant little GUI that doesn’t make your head hurt.
With Jack, you can suck the sound output of any existing application, and pipe it into the input of any other application. And you can keep going like that — suck the output out of the second app and put it into the input of another. Or you can “split” the output of an app between the input of one application and the speakers of your computer. It’s like piping text in unix. Like you’ve got a series of little sound funnels to shoot it different places.
An obvious application of it is to suck sound out of say, Realplayer, and pipe it into an audio record application, like I did last night to make an mp3 copy of Ellen Langer’s Diane Rehm interview.
How sweet is that?
(BTW, this looks like it might help unconfuse me about the current state of Linux audio.)
Google Maps – “ed heil” grand rapids, mi:
That’s strange. I hardly ever go to Kava House. When I do it’s that one though.
They’ve got Jim pegged though.
I’d been wanting to be a successful author my whole life. But when I finally did it, I was like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she’d been chasing all her life — metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn’t alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn’t feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, in the same way only your own blood type can sustain you. It had nothing that could slake the lifelong thirst I had for a little immediacy, and connection.
So from the wise old pinnacle of my 49 years, I want to tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you. You’ve heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can’t buy it, lease it, rent it, date it or apply for it. The best job in the world can’t give it to you. Neither can success, or fame, or financial security — besides which, there ain’t no such thing. J.D. Rockefeller was asked, “How much money is enough?” and he said, “Just a little bit more.”