I thought you’d enjoy a couple of good videos about how voting in America works:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7236791207107726851
[via Techdirt]
The Insider (1999)
The Insider (1999), is a thrilling, suspense-filled movie depicting the events that surrounded the 60 Minutes Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Wigand, a former tobacco executive. He was the first to give public testimony that the addictive properties of nicotine were well known, and manipulated, inside tobacco companies.
I saw it last night, and it was my first time seeing it. All of the actors in it were really good. I understand that the movie fictionalized some of the events that took place, for dramatic effect, but the general gist of what went on is certainly portrayed.
This is a wonderful movie to watch, because it portrays one man’s struggle with his conscience. Should he do the right thing, and risk losing his job? Then, should he continue to do the right thing, and risk losing everything, including his family, and possibly incur jail time? Those were tough times for Dr. Wigand, and because he chose to do the right thing, people are much more aware of the negative health effects of nicotine. The backhanded tactics used by tobacco companies are now common knowledge, and consumers are safer because of it. Millions of people can probably thank him for motivating them to stop smoking, and this movie played no small part in that.
Check the minutes in your cellphone plan instantly
I’ve been trying out a Firefox extension that displays the minutes used in my mobile phone plan (I’ve got T-Mobile) since yesterday, and I’m really excited about it. Once you install it, you can configure it to query your plan and display the minutes used out of the total monthly minutes, right in the status bar, at the bottom of the browser window.
One note of caution: make sure you configure it to query seldom, not often (every two or three hours is plenty). It’s not polling a feed, it’s actually running a query on your provider’s database — this is because cellphone companies haven’t yet moved to the Web 2.0, so to speak, and aren’t providing feeds for the users. If you configure it to poll every 5 minutes, it’s going to be deemed excessive by them, and they might cut off your access. So be nice and gentle to their databases. 🙂
The same fellow who came up with this extension, Winston Huang, also wrote another extension to allow you to check your Verizon minutes used. There are also two extensions to allow you to check your Cingular minutes used. Here’s the first, and the second.
These extensions are wonderful productivity tools. You have your minutes used right there in front of you, the whole day. You can pretty much eliminate overage charges, and I’m all for that.
Fantastic fall foliage
If you live in a place where you don’t get to experience the wonder of nature called fall foliage, then you’ll probably enjoy the photos I took on two trips to Shenandoah National Park and its most prominent and well-known feature, Skyline Drive.
I wrote about our September trip to Shenandoah a few weeks ago. Ligia and I took a trip in October as well, and that’s when I got some pretty cool photos of the changing leaves. I think it’s pretty hard not to get good photos from Skyline Drive. The landscapes are just amazing. The road hugs the very mountain peaks, and you get to peer down into the valleys of Virginia and toward the peaks of the neighboring mountains. The overlooks are plenty and offer tons of scenic opportunities, although sometimes I wished I could just stop the car in the middle of the road to take photos.
It’s a gorgeous place! I’d like to take a week’s camping trip out there with a quality dSLR, batteries, lots of CF cards, and a good tripod, to see what photos I’d get. And maybe a good book to read in the quiet evenings, by the campfire.
Skyline Drive is shown below.
What’s wonderful is that one can see little villages and houses in the valleys below the mountains. I took these photos from various overlook points on Skyline Drive, and as you can see, the valleys below are quite picturesque.
Taking advantage of the wonderful zoom on my Kodak v610 point and shoot, I was able to get fairly close to the lake in this photo, even though it was quite far away.
Some of the slopes were just getting some autumn colors in them.
Some slopes were already fully colored, and they were quite a beautiful sight.
A short walk through the forest yielded even more beauty.
One of the other impressive sights was that of the lone peaks arising from the valleys adjacent to the mountain ridge. I found them quite unusual. In shape, they resembled hills, but they were as tall as the mountains we were standing on.
And with that I close. The Shenandoah valleys and mountains are quite beautiful, and I invite you to visit them if you get the chance.
Incidentally, the Shenandoah Valley is part of the story in “The Howards of Virginia” (1940), a movie about a colonial family that played a part in the American Revolution. The title role there was played by Cary Grant.
Microsoft Keynote Bloopers
It was only fair that I dig up some MS Bloopers after posting a reel of Apple bloopers yesterday. Unfortunately, there weren’t that many of them. Found the one below on YouTube, and another of Bill Gates banging his head on a camera, but that’s not really funny, it’s just an accident. You don’t laugh when someone hurts themselves, you laugh when the technology they tout as fantastic doesn’t deliver. So here’s a clip of an MS guy touting Vista’s speech recognition, only to have it fail miserably on the demo. It doesn’t help that he’s arrogant and hard to like, either. Schadenfreude, revisited:
Raoul Pop 