Stray Poetry

  A short list of just ten people that I admire, the reasons are varied, but share a common theme of triumph of the will, and mastery of the mind. There is a spark of something in all of these people that I would like to have. An inner drive that is tough to define, yet either led, or drove them towards a form of immortality. They were not ‘normal’ people, they were freaks, and nerds before there were nerds.

Here they are; in no particular order:

# 1: Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983)

# 2: Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943)

# 3: Marie Curie (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934

# 4: Elbert Green Hubbard (June 19, 1856 – May 7, 1915)

# 5: Preston Thomas Tucker (September 21, 1903 – December 26, 1956)

# 6: Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988)

# 7: Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942)

# 8: Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955)

# 9: Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931)

# 10: Benjamin Franklin (January 17 1706 – April 17, 1790)

I plan to do a short biography of each of these in the coming weeks, explaining why I admire them so.

- Ezra Hilyer.

    I watched ‘I Am Legend’ last night, and I must admit that i was not quite impressed. True, the effects, and the feeling of utter loneliness in the middle of New York City are unmatched by any other movie, but that is where the film died. When the action heats up the plot cools.  It seemed short, and the diverging ideas were distracting. When another character enters the scene; there is scarcely enough time to get used to her presence before being taken on a wild-ride into the unknown.

   Don’t get me wrong please, I enjoyed watching it, but it could have been better.

-Ezra Hilyer

After a classic stage of resistance, I have finally signed up for Twitter, and also Jaiku. I wanted to see who the winner was, but since there is as yet no clear cut winner; I decided to try them both out.

My Twitter address is: www.twitter.com/straypoetry/

Jaiku is: straypoetry.jaiku.com

After a few days of playing with them both, I have come to like some of what each offer: they have each positive and negative points. Twitter is more a status update service, and since it doesn’t have the ability to respond to comments, it seems a bit more disjointed and somehow aloof. I like that it has easy integration to facebook, and wordpress via plugins. The general support for the API is good, and more uses for it are clearly in the works. I daily use a Nokia Internet Tablet, so there is a program I use to update Jaiku, (Mauku) is its name, and it allows me to see what I am doing on Jaiku, and also what others are doing and saying. I like that it seems to work like a chat client. In that I have the ability to browse and see other users, and open their threads up seamlessly.

For now, I will wait the battle out.

-Ezra Hilyer

I often listen to podcasts of NPR radio programs, I choose to get programs that I won’t have the ability to listen to in entirety in the car; The ability to start, stop and pause is vital because of how I live. When i want to listen to something that doesn’t take any brain power (just casual music listening for one) I don’t care if I am only paying half-attention, because it is little more than white-noise in the background. So my uses for an MP3 player are more for Podcasts than simply music.
Which causes me to wonder; what is the future of live radio? Does the whole concept of using radio for information fly out the window? More and more people are adopting PMPs into thier lives, and with this comes the ability, like the internet of getting whatever content is desired at the push of a button.
Copyrighted work is often avalible with a subscripton service, and even televison is moving over to simocasting online. So for a news service to offer their content free of charge online must inevitebly hurt the radio stations in terms of loss of subscribers and consequently lack of advertising income.
Will they cut out the middleman and simply sell advertising tacked on to the beginning, end or middle of the podcast? Certainly if the majority of listeners move over to podcasts this may become the case. Right now 90% of my radio listening time is in the vehicle. As a natural progression of technology; soon the radio in your car will be able to access your home WIFI connection to download shows and music while parked in your garage. Suddenly my radio listening will nearly cease and I will be imune from radio commercials. So capatilisim dictates that the advertisers will find a way to market to me - but what way will they chose? And again how does that leave the local station?
-Ezra Hilyer

On my ultralight Notebook, I have been running XP because of some programs that require that OS, but last week when I decided to go ahead and get ready to upgrade to a newer wide-screen laptop, in preparation for the switch, I have taken the bloated  XP (however XP still stands in my own opinion as the best OS Microsoft has released to date) off, and in its place installed Linux Mint Dryna, I wanted to put Fedora Core 8 on it, but since it has a slower CPU and graphics card, it was taking like 5 minutes to boot into Core 8, (Mint only takes about 1 minute, and I hope to shave that down some by compiling the kernel) Continue Reading »