BeigeJournal

Just a quick note that the Jabra BT 250v bluetooth headset works just fine with the Apple MacBook. The Mac Bluetooth setup wizard pairs it up just fine and it works with Skype as you’d expect.

Another item I discovered at Future Green is Pangea Organics “Pure & Scentless Organic Herbal Shower Gel.” I was attracted to this product by the ingredients list: Water, Saponified Coconut, Olive, Hemp & Jojoba Oils (w/ Retained Glycerin), Vegetable Gum (Guar), Aloe Vera Gel, Glycerin, and Rosemary Extract (all of which are labeled as “organic”). In other words, this soap consists, primarily, of…soap, soap being what saponified fat is.

Lots of products contain lots of ingredients that either serve no purpose other than sounding good on the label or else serve a purpose related more to marketing than function. Hydrolyzed silk protein enables the marketing people to put “Silk Protein” on the shampoo label, which sounds great, but I rather doubt it does anything, and if amino acids are useful there must be a cheaper and better source than silk, but silk sounds good. Lots of cleaning products of all varieties contain ingredients to generate the maximum amount of foam humanly possible. Foam isn’t actually useful, it’s actually sort of a nuisance, being a pain to wash away, but the marketing department loves it. I’m not so happy spending minutes trying to wash foam out of my ears, but I’m apparently considered to be in the minority.

The Pangea soap, as the “scentless” label implies, has only a faint, pleasant smell. It gets me clean, it leaves my skin feeling good, it doesn’t foam up, and it’s easy and quick to wash off. Rather than being greasy, it leaves a slightly sticky feel, presumably from the glycerin. I prefer it this way. I’ve tried a lot of shower soaps, looking for something that doesn’t have a strong smell and doesn’t dry my skin out yet isn’t greasy. This is by far the best I’ve found.

I’ve been purchasing some new towels from my local painfully organic vendor, Future Green located on 2352 S Kinnickinnic Ave in Milwaukee, an area that is a pocket of low-rent hipness these days, with a coffee shop, a Harry Schwartz bookstore, a bookstore called “Broad Vocabulary,” a nice little sandwich shop by the name of “Wild Flour Bakery,” and a bunch of other interesting places, like a small guitar shop. It’s a fun area, easily reached by bike from downtown.

The towels are from Under The Canopy, and are the softest, fluffiest, nicest towels I’ve ever had. They are made, of course, of organically grown cotton. The washcloth was $9, the big towels about $30. I honestly don’t know what good towels of the non-organic variety go for these days, but these are very nice and I’ve figured out that this is the sort of item that lasts for years, so I’m satisfied. Recommended.

Ezra Klein is a liberal blogger and, according to Google, pee expert.

If you want to buy cooler t-shirts, you ought to read Preshrunk, the cool shirt blog. It was there that I discovered this:

The Preshrunk entry says, “But when my girlfriend said that this design from B1 Originals is ‘so adorable that it hurts,’ I put aside the shirt I was going to run in favor of this one. But don’t think I’m running it because she lets me touch her boobs. No sir, I actually think she’s on to something.”

My girlfriend also thinks it’s just adorable. She also lets me touch her boobs. That said, I doubt anyone will let you touch her boobs just because you’re wearing this great shirt. But it can’t hurt. From B1 Originals.

I read Dave Slusher’s insight about David Coursey a while ago, the one in which he says, “he is like a street whore expressing incredulity about and contempt for those who would have sex for fun,” and I finally heard the interview he was referring to a week or two ago. That is a memorable way of describing it. Coursey seems remarkably down on the possibility that people would write or talk (or presumably, sing, paint, photograph, or code) for fun, even though it’s pretty easy to find lots of examples of people doing exactly that. I think though, that he really missed the point of RSS, and that feeds into it.

I think he used the New York Times as an example, saying that, sure, you can get an RSS feed, but why not just go to the web site with your web browser? I agree: for the purpose of just plain reading, an RSS feed from the NY Times, or Boing Boing, or CNN, or any other site that gets updated constantly, is not a really a big added value. If you wake up and wonder what the Times has to say, sure, just go to the web site. I guarantee they will have something up there that wasn’t there yesterday. What the feed is really useful for are the amateurs who only write (or record podcasts…) when they have something to say, which might not be very often. If I have to remember to visit Joe Intermittent Blogger’s site to see if he’s written anything yet this month, eventually I’ll forget about him, but I can keep dozens of very occasional feeds in Bloglines, or in my podcatcher, and every now and then a nugget of goodness will appear from someone who doesn’t say much but who I always want to hear from.

The whore thinks servicing thirty-five guys every night is too much work for anyone to do for fun. The professional radio guy thinks the minimum any one person can do is four hours of morning drive-time-radio every single frickn’ day, and no one would do that just for fun. If you had a broadcast radio transmitter and only turned it on for a half-hour a week at unscheduled times, you would not have any listeners. If you put out a podcast every other week or so, it is entirely possible for people to put your feed in their software and receive your show. There have been four “Live from the Formosa Tea House” podcasts in the history of podcasting so far, but I really like them all. I wouldn’t want to miss any of the occasional “Really Learn Spanish” podcasts. The feeds are in my podcatcher, and when something new is posted, I get it automatically. It’s not some sort of terrible burden on me that happens on an infrequent, irregular basis. You don’t have to put out 12 hours a day every day just to keep people from forgetting about you.

The vision of a bright podcasting future is not a thousand insanely dedicated people each putting out 8 hours a day, it is a million normal (kind-of) people, each putting out what they can.

Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe is back for another season on the Discovery Channel. Really, they could call it Mike Rowe: Poop Expert. If something/someone shits it out, Mike cleans it up. It’s not all poop: there was demolition, which by his standards would be a fun job, but mostly, it’s poop.

The Experimental Aircraft Association’s 2005 Oshkosh fly-in (the “Airventure,” as they call it) for 2005 was last week. My photos are gradually being added to my flickr page. I’ll set up a set for them someday. I have over a thousand digital images and a hundred or so still-undeveloped frames of slide film.

I spent the week camped there in Camp Scholler in what’s now my usual location, south of the West Camp Store. They changed the schedule from the former Tuesday through Monday to Monday through Sunday. I arrived on Sunday morning, a hot but windy day. With a strong wind blowing and a lot of time on my hands, I did a seemingly excessive job of tying down the tent with many tent stakes and lots of string. When the thunderstorms hit Monday night, it didn’t seem excessive at all. There is no such thing as too many tent pegs. The winds at times during the Monday night procession of storms were pretty impressive, and it rained all night. I’ve been learning, the hard way, how to set up a tent to survive rain and wind, and my tent stayed in place and didn’t leak at all. No mosquitoes this year, and no significant rain during the day. I managed the week without blisters or sunburn, either. Also, it seems like the water heating for the showers by the West Camp Store has been improved. The water was never cold, though the pressure does drop during heavy use.

Oshkosh isn’t Oshkosh without the fresh, hot, donuts in the morning (near Aeroshell Square) and lots of soft-serve ice cream. This year you can get waffle cones, root beer floats, and, at least in one place, chocolate soft-serve. New and improved.

Staying the entire week is sort of overkill, but for me it’s a chance to get away from it all and camp in a field and watch airplanes all day, so it’s a nice vacation.

I’m not sure exactly what the organization wanted to achieve with the new Monday-Sunday schedule, but somewhat to my surprise, I like it. I always liked the quiet Sunday night in the mostly-empty campground and a day of watching departures, but Sunday, to a surprising extent, is the new Monday. Saturday night is quiet and private, Sunday is uncrowded, and lots of planes are departing Sunday. It’s a more convenient schedule for me, and I get to enjoy Saturday night and Sunday with my girlfriend, who can only spend the weekend.

Besides the experimental aircraft at the event, Camp Scholler is filled with experimental ground vehicles. Weird carts. Every kind of strange motorized bike or scooter ever manufactured. Junk bicycles. Folding bicycles. Recumbent bicycles. Motor homes, trailers, vans, cars, motorcycles, ATVs. All operated erratically in the dark. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a properly lighted vehicle at night there other than the fully street-legal regular motor vehicles. Absolutely no one on a bicycle or motorized scooter has any lights.

This was a good year for odd and famous air/space craft. The Global Flyer was there on Aeroshell Square, as was Spaceship One and White Knight. Both the Global Flyer and the White Knight and Spaceship One did flybys for us. The Dornier Do-24ATT, a 1930s seaplane that was converted into an amphibian and re-engined with turboprops in the 1980s, was there, and flew with the more conventional trimotors during the airshows. The Honda jet made its first public appearance. There were numerous B-17s. The P-38 Glacier Girl was on display and flew in Heritage Flights with a P-51, an F-4, and an F-16.

Two Eclipse jets flew a showcase flight. The Eclipse tent, the biggest and fanciest around, seems to get bigger and fancier every year. I wonder if that endless music drove the Eclipse people nuts by the end of the week, though.

Rutan, Melvill, Binnie, a bunch of other Scaled Guys, Paul Allen, Sir Richard, and some others spoke to a large crowed about Space Ship One and Virgin Galactic. I have to wonder, when a billionaire comes to Oshkosh, he doesn’t stay in a tent in the far corner of Camp Scholler, right?

Overall, it was another great year.

OLN has given Bob Roll a bigger role in their coverage of the Tour de France this year. I have to say that I like the guy and enjoy hearing him more. He can’t exactly fill the shoes of Paul Sherwin and Phil Liggett (what cyclist hasn’t imagined Phil shouting “he’s dancing on the pedals” while grinding slowly up a hill?), but he is fun.

Also, the Specialized commercials with Levi Leipheimer are funny.

Now that I’m a Formula 1 racing fan, I’ve been buying F1 Racing magazine. The June issue wasn’t in the bookstores yet on Sunday, but I did find a copy on Tuesday, two days after the rather bizarre United State Grand Prix. It takes a long time to get a magazine together, print it, and get it to the stores, so the big topic of the latest issue is the San Marino race at Imola, which took place on April 24, two months ago. They were able to get a few pages about the Spanish Grand Prix of May 8 in at the back, and then at the very back two pages each for track maps and historical results for the Monaco, European, Canadian, and US Grands Prix, all of which have been run by now. It’s got to be really difficult to write for a sports magazine knowing that by the time anyone other than your editor reads what you’ve written, five more events will have been run and readers will be straining their memories to recall the events you are writing about.

The weirdest part, really, is reading speculation about the future when there is a five-race delay between writing and reading, and all the speculation is semi-distant past by the time anyone reads it. I’m not at all sure how I’d want to write under such circumstances, but the policy of F1 Racing seems to be to write as though readers would be able to read it shortly after it’s written, giving the same effect for the people who read it as soon as possible as those who stumble upon a pile of old back issues on a shelf somewhere get. I’m not sure I like it that way.

There is plenty of content that does age well, such as driver interviews. Those of us used to this new-fangled Internet thingie might be inclined to wonder if it would make more sense to just fill the printed pages with the things that age well and put the current events and speculation about the future on the web site, where the future will still be future when people read it.

(Leave comments at the Livejournal post about this.)