v.. To move a tall, flat bottomed object (such as a bookshelf) by swiveling it alternatively on its corners in a "walking" fashion. [After the book by Thor Heyerdahl theorizing the statues of Easter Island were moved in this fashion.] source: LangMaker.com. Aku Aku also has another meaning: a spiritual guide.
There's a little dive pub (turns out actually not a dive anymore) I'd been meaning to go to for years, and finally stopped by a couple of weeks back. I love checking out the old San Francisco spots that persist through the decades and ha...
Well I finally found something worthy enough to bring this blog out of its 7 year hiatus.
YOU GUYS, DID YOU KNOW SHARKS GET GOOGLY EYED WHEN YOU PET THEM?
This is a GIF-grab from S02E04 of Tales by Light on Netflix. This episode is part of a two part series where the Bay Area's own Eric Cheng sidles up to a couple of fearsome animals and show they are beautiful in their environment. E03 was about anacondas.
We only watched these two eps, as we're fans of Eric after we bought one of his earlier prints in 2006 of a baby sea turtle that we named Charles. Ever since, Charles has adorned our children's wall. So Eric is like family to us, in a wholesome creepy stalker sort of way.
I recommend both episodes, but the segment where Eric and crew are all like WHO'S A GOOD SHARK? YOU ARE! YOU'RE A GOOD SHARK! is the best part.
I've started a new gig working with
Lumos Labs.
They have a web site Lumosity which provides
Brain Training (aka
Brain Exercises or
Brain Games)
that keeps your thinking muscles in shape. I worked with them earlier as a consultant but it looks like I'll be switching to full time Director of Engineering in April when Mie, Tesla and I get back from South America
(I've alread arranged great apartments in
Lima and
Buenos Aires).
The vacation is a last blast before descending back into the regular full time employee world that I haven't been in since
quiting my startup company in 2004.
Anyhow, the brain games are pretty fun, and there's a lot of science behind their efficacy. You should check them out.
My favorites are Raindrops, Word Bubbles and Memory Match. The games are designed to improve four cognitive areas: Memory, Attention, Processing Speed and Cognitive Control.
It's nice to know that there's some healthy stuff going on, but they are also fun to play and enough of a challenge to give you real satisfaction as you improve.
This is my new desktop image on my workstation: Brain storming.
I grew up in a Marine Corps town, instilled with a fierce sense of patriotism. I was proud to be part of the United States of America, the greatest nation on Earth. Not great because of our military power, but because of our values. We stood against tyranny. We stood for human rights. We rescued the world from the Nazis. We aided victims of disasters caused by either Man or Nature. We would gladly suffer ourselves to right a wrong, to help others. We were the heroes. From a very young age I believed we were perhaps the most morally evolved people humanity had ever seen. I still tear up when I hear patriotic songs.
As an adult I know that the pure version of that fantasy was false even before I was born, but what I felt inside myself was real. If I felt this way, so also some of my fellow countrymen did as well. The fantasy isn't wholly impossible. We can, as a nation, approach these high ideals and behaviors. We can evolve morally in a more just, a more heroic direction. It hasn't turned out that way though. Today I don't tear up with pride when I hear patriotic songs, I tear up with grief. I am ashamed to be an American.
This film from Amnesty International shows a performance artist subjecting himself to a typical CIA enhanced interrogation technique, called "stress position." Prisoners are forced to stand for many hours in positions that cause extreme muscle fatigue. They are told that the floor is electrified, or that they will be shot if they fail to stay in position. The man in the video is not acting, he actually did this for six hours and his response is real. Two more films showcasing other methods are forthcoming. Ask yourself. Is this who we are? Is this what you asked your government to do for you?
I've put out three new loans on Kiva.org. These are small amounts (about $25 each this time) pooled together with other lenders to constitue loans that range from a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand. The loans are given to small business people in developing countries and paid off over a year or two. Here are my recipients this time around:
Hannah has a plantation business in Samoa. She got a $475 loan to buy equipment for the business. If all goes well, she plans on getting another loan after this one is paid off to help her daughter go to University.
This morning I tried signing up at three Virtual Assistant companies. These are companies that will do pretty much anything you can do over the Internet or on the phone. Prices range from $7-20/hour. Usually the tasks are completed by English-speakers in India. At two of them (AskSunday and GetFriday), errors on the website prevented me from signing up. This doesn't give me much confidence in their abilities or professionalism. The third (and most expensive, as it is more geared towards business research) is Brickwork India and their sign up process seems to be OK so far.
Update:Steven Ludmer, a co-founder for AskSunday, wrote me back in about an hour to thank me for alerting them to the problem and to let me know it had been fixed. I've completed the sign up process now and will report back sometime on how I feel the service is working out. They have a referral program, so if you decide to sign up be sure to put my name (Dav Yaginuma) in your referral field.
HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available.
I've been posting to a separate blog over at Vox for a few months now. It has seemed to have evolved to where I tend to post technical and more pensive matters here at AkuAku and use the Vox system for quick postings of random things.
I like Vox. We would have gone to the launch party if Mie had checked her email in time.I wish it had more advanced user features, but it's very good as a hassle-free blogging system.
Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that for those handful of folks who would be interested in more fequent postings from me, there's a better site to watch. The feed is http://dav.vox.com/library/posts/atom.xml
I got a letter addressed to my corporation a couple of weeks ago. It looked like a very official California state government form entitled Annual Minutes Disclosure Statement CA-FORM AMDS-03. It requested to be completed and sent back in along with $150 and a copy of my annual minutes. I started to fill it all out, but I became suspicious. Sure enough, it's not something actually required by California. It's just a company that charges you $150 to keep a copy of your minutes on file (something you can of course do yourself).
Be aware, the address for the company is:
California Corporate Headquarters
Compliance Division
2443 Fair Oaks Boulevard #539
Sacramento, CA 95825
A few months ago I got a new passport (since I got a new name). The first thing I did was throw it in the microwave for 20 seconds. Why? Because the USA is starting to embed RFID chips in new passports, and in case mine had one, I wanted to fry it. Here's a nice article that explains why RFID in passports is a bad idea, and in fact the last line of the article recommends doing exactly what I did.
At a pair of security conferences here, researchers demonstrated that passports equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be cloned with a laptop equipped with a $200 RFID reader and a similarly inexpensive smart card writer. In addition, they suggested that RFID tags embedded in travel documents could identify U.S. passports from a distance, possibly letting terrorists use them as a trigger for explosives.
