The internets are good for something.

It is late in the evening (early morning) and before I headed to bed, I thought perhaps it would be cool to check out some early dawn shots of the volcano that is erupting in Iceland.
A buddy had sent me a link to an Icelandic internet communications company that has 3 webcams that are trained on the Eyjafjallajokull volcano and all I can say is that I am not disappointed.

I remember from some science class way back in the day, that the ionizing particles of an ash eruption will cause lightning bursts. So I thought I would capture one of those in a screen grab, and share it with you. While I did manage to capture one lightning burst, I got to bear witness to some giant plumes of steam and ash as they exploded forth in the webcam images.

Add to the coolness factor the fact that you can watch natures fury remotely, the feed is semi-live. The images update every couple of seconds.

If you would like to check this out for yourself feel free to visit http://eldgos.mila.is/eyjafjallajokull-fra-thorolfsfelli/

But here is what I managed to capture so far:


This image is from roughly 12:50am EDT
big thick black plume of ash in the pre-dawn Icelandic sky.











Then I managed to capture one lightning burst
you can see it near the rim of the volcano.













Now it gets interesting:
Here at about 1am EDT I see the black cloud dissipating, and then BOOM! Up comes this violent burst.












How wicked cool is this:

Now two webcam shots at once. This is from about 1:35EDT.

I highly recommend this experience.



Sometimes I think perhaps I should have become a vulcanologist. Well maybe not.

Happy volcano watching. Hope those flights all over Europe aren't grounded too long, but from the looks of things, I don't think its going to be very soon.

Culinary Derailment

● Special Note ●
This is a blog entry that never got posted. I guess my mind was too many other places to remember to finish the post and hit "publish." Since time is relative, and the internet is kind of forever, I might as well go a head and post it anyway right?
Enjoy

Post Originally Started December 12, 2009

Ok, so have you ever baked something, or tried a new dish and it didn't come out quite right? Well what if you take that uncomfortable feeling and channel it into actually doing it on purpose? Yeah, you might end up with a wreck.

That was the idea behind a party some friends of mine that decided to throw. Based around the concept of the website CakeWrecks.com. (seriously check this site out to see what some "professional" decorators do) So we are not to make something that was inedible, but maybe a little suspect, or just letting the brush of garishness fly. Or freak flag fly, whatever.

Now a story about our little cakey-cake and its journey to derailment

1) Baking of the Cake

Our master baker H2 found a lovely box mix that she promptly whipped up and baked into a lovely molded cake pan, with the shape of a santa character. And since it was a lovely light cake mix, it promptly adhered itself to the pan, even though we adequately greased and floured the pan. Needless to say the cake lost its face, and we had some issues with keeping the cake in one piece.

2) Repairing the Cake

So with the baked cake in multiple pieces, I needed some sort of "glue" to help hold it together. So I came up with a solution of raspberry preserves to help hold it all together, and then used blue colored icing to fill in the gaps, and level out the surface. Of course any extra chunks of cake were happily eaten.



3) Decorating the Cake

Since the original idea was to have the santa face on the cake, I took the mold portion and filled it with butter-cream frosting. Needless to say it was a nice fat chunk of frosting goodness. Then I got down to covering the rest of the cake, with just not quite appropriate colors, but ever tasty frosting. This IS supposed to be a wreck remember? We added two mismatched eyes to give that little extra... creepiness.




4) Displays of Wreckage.

So we all convened at our soiree and everyone displayed their wrecks. There were several inspired cakes, and about 95% were all home-made. There were cakes ranging from the, "Sorry your dog is dead" cake, with fresh (chocolate) roadkill dog, to a fantasy unicorn cake, inspired by one of those internet airbrush jobs(know the kind), to the "birth control" cupcakes, one for every day of the month with genuine placebo pills.



After admiring everyones handy work, our host got us down to the business of eating and judging the cakes. After eating many different concoctions, everyone was beginning to enter a sugar induced frenzy, and it was at this point we voted. Since coming down from that sugar high, I forget which cake won for best wreck, but I do remember that the winner for the best tasting cake... was "The Urinal Cake" I was a very good cake, and had a nice light orange flavor to it. It was the standout, since almost everything else was chocolate.

The Winner!!

Huskers vs Oklahoma Sooners

Ok folks get ready its down to the wire and we need a win! Help support the Huskers and watch the game tonight on ABC. Oh what's that you say, you can't watch the game because your region is forcing you to watch Cincinatti vs Connecticut? No worries friend, just watch the game on ESPN360.com. They have live streaming of games that are shown on any region for ESPN, and ABC.
I get this a part of my ISP contract. I believe if you have Comcast or Verizon for your ISP, you get this for free otherwise its a subscription service.

Of course you can listen to the coverage over the interwebs too, just see my previous posts for information on that.


GO HUSKERS!!!

Huskers vs Iowa State

Doing a little bit of soul searching, Nebraska will see if they learned from the big loss against Texas Tech. Listen to the game from Husker.com

Listen to link: http://www.huskers.com/newMediaPlayer/console.htm?type=live&id=372860&oemid=100

I have found that it is best viewed on IE, for some reason I have been having issues with listening to the game using Firefox or Chrome.



Gooooo Huskers!

Huskers vs Texas Red Raiders

In case you are having problems with Husker.com and want to listen to the game. Try this link.

http://www.huskers.com/newMediaPlayer/console.htm?type=live&id=372513&oemid=100



As an added plus this week, if you are out of Husker Country, you can watch the game on ESPN360.com. I get this a part of my ISP contract. I believe if you have Comcast or Verizon for your ISP, you get this for free otherwise its a subscription service.

Last Chance For Submissions

In my last post, which was forever ago, I encouraged people to take advantage of signing up for the Guggenheim Shelter Contest. The time is running out, you have until Aug 23rd. Yes I have been slacking too, but if you put your mind to it, you can come up with something neat, and submit it to the contest, I mean it is really just a little bit of your time, since all the software is free.

Is there anyone out there??? Sigh...

Photo By: Scott Liddell

Give me Shelter

The guys at Google are trying to get you to put your mind to work and think! And all you have to do is use free software you probably already have on your computer. That's right all you need is Google Earth, SketchUp(free) and an internet connection, and that is it. No it doesn't matter if you are a PC or a Mac.

On June 8 Google announced that they started a competition in cooperation with the Guggenheim Museum to celebrate Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday and the museums 50th Anniversary. You can submit designs until August 23rd, and you could win fabulous prizes, and have some of that coveted internet fame.


Learn more about the Design It: Shelter Competition by Google SketchUp and Guggenheim Museum.



I want to put this out there. I am interested in getting together a group of people where we would design our own shelters, and submit them to the contest. We would also judge each others shelters and have our own mini contest. Who is interested?

Can the economic meltdown be fun and entertaining?

The folks at NPR's Planet Money sure took a shot at it. Click the link below and you can watch the broadcast from KCRW.com




Give me some feedback, does anyone actually find any of this interesting?

Learning about the economy? NPR is a good place to start

I am not trying to depress everyone out there, and no I am not trying to be come a armchair economist, but I am continually looking for more information to educate myself, and in turn share some of the insights that I have learned. Forgive me if some of this seems scattered, it will all make sense eventually.

As most of us remember from our days in school, learning and understanding a subject is a process. During this process you need to do a couple of things, keep an open mind, and try to keep in check your preconceptions. After all I am not an economist, so this was going to be hard.

To that end, I must confess that during the end of the Bush administration, I thought that Henry Paulson was way out of control, taking a heavy hand in controlling the banks and that Ben Bernanke and the Fed wasn't helping the situation either. The TARP program was just throwing more money at bad problem only to make it worst. But at the same time there was still gnawing at the back of my mind, "Where did this all start? Was anyone paying attention to this growing problem? Why wasn't the SEC, or the other government regulation entities throwing up red flags?"

Now I understand that the country thrives on the free market, and in general it is a good thing, but ask yourself this, "if my checking/savings account wasn't FDIC insured (by the banks and government) how much of my money I would keep in a bank now?" So unless your accounts are stuffed with gold bullion, you might answer "none." Yes kids, FDIC insurance is a form of regulation, something that the free market hates, but sometimes accepts because it makes all of us more comfortable investing our hard earned dollars in their company. But I digress, sorry about that.

So to rewind a little bit, in July/August I kept hearing the news drone on and on about the crashing housing market, and the issues with Freddie and Fannie, and the uncertain future for many of the wall street banks. "What does this all mean to me?" I thought.
I knew little about the Bear Sterns debacle from back in March/April, and decided I wanted to know more. I started scanning through blogs and financial websites to no avail. Most of the blogs just pointed fingers at each other, the financial sites just talked about doom and gloom, and then saw what appeared to be Wall Street stabilizing a little, and didn't dig much more. Then upon hearing about the failure of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, plus watching my retirement portfolio loose almost half its value in a few short months, I figured I should try to start digging again. And this time the learning train pulled into my station.

I listened to an episode on This American Life called "The Giant Pool of Money" where they start explaining in fairly clear language what all this hub-bub of the sub-prime market means. Follow that later in October when they had another episode called "Another Frightening Show About the Economy." Well it finally looks like I found a new source of information that I could actually learn from. Plus it turns out that the special correspondents that did these episodes are now involved with another NPR blog called Planet Money.

Yea! new information. So for awhile now I have been reading Planet Money, and found the little gem in the previous post. Now its PBS' turn. (ok I found it through Planet Money) But if you missed it I think its a decent rundown of the meltdown with some additional insight in the extra content online.



After watching this, I do need to adjust some of my conceptions, and do some more digging, but that is another post. Let me know what you think

The Temperment of Credit and You

I have been doing lots of depressing reading about the markets and the general state of the economy over the last few months. During this survey of information, I have had a hard time finding a video that seemed to explain the "credit crisis" in a relatively straight forward, and nicely packaged form. That was until now! This video does what the networks could not with their dumbed down mini animations or sheets of paper on a table.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis.
Crisisofcredit.com

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
To see more about the thesis work visit jdjarvis.com.


Now I am sure that most of us are still wondering how do we get this country out of this mess. I know that I have some ideas, for some "small picture" things, but nothing earth-shattering. I am trying to voice some opinions/ideas to places that are soliciting them. For good or bad there is a stimulus package now in place, and while we all wait see whats going to happen, I try not to pay much attention to the Democrats bickering, and the Republicans yelling that this spending is nothing but "pork." However the reality is that my retirement fund is still cratering (though the bleeding seems to have slowed some) and I am worried about employment prospects for many of my friends, myself included.