Website to FaceBook Ad in under an hour

Got surprised today.  I was looking at a tent on w00t.com today.  I wanted to see if it was a good deal, if there were reviews, etc on it.  One of the links was on OverStock.com.  Less than an hour later, I'm looking at facebook and I get the following:

So in less than an hour, the browser cookie from OverStock.com has been correlated to me in Facebook. In theory, now OverStock, who had no idea who I am other than a web user, now knows as much about me as facebook can sell them.

I guess the linking doesn't surprise me that much, it's just the speed in which it was done.  It was faaaast.  All my banner ads are now for tents as well.  The future is now... and it's CREEEEEEPY.

The other side of the Human Rights Watch story in Rwanda

I visited Rwanda in March of 2010.  More specifically, I visited my friends Alma and Richard Johnson who were living in Rwanda at the time.  I had a fantastic time and it is an amazing country.  Even more amazing considering the genocide that had occurred 15 years ago.   I've done a little bit of reading about the issues pre and post, but my friend Rich has done a lifetime's worth.  He has written a very well researched paper on the role of the organization Human Rights Watch and the country's healing process. Anyway, I would encourage you to give it a read if you find African politics interesting. The paper is titled: The Travesty of Human Rights Watch on Rwanda on his blog created specifically for this topic.  Hopefully he can share more insights on the issues in the future.

Renewed interest in Light Strike guns...

A few interesting things have cropped up lately.  One, Hackaday had a post about Hacking laser tag and building custom guns. Which takes us to Brad's blog and his cool stuff about hacking the Light Strike line of guns.  He's gone much further than I have.  He's taken a Teensy Arduino board and can now encode (shoot) and decode (be shot) with his unit.  Read more about it in his blog post, but it's a great start.

So now it seems I need to learn arduino and all the lingo that goes with that world.  Why the heck is it called a 'stamp'?  Dunno, but I'm going to find out.  Hopefully I can pick it up quickly.  Assuming I can duplicate, to some degree, the simple targets (change color when shot) I would like to try to get two targets to talk to each other, or saving that, have all the targets talk to a central score board.  Then you can have all kinds of senario battles, such as capture the flag, rescue the hostage, etc.

Anyway, we'll see how far I get, my history with following through on things like this isn't too good.

RSA Animate series

I just got turned onto the RSA Animate series by a co-worker.  Very interesting stuff. Similar to TED talks.  The first in the series is below.  If you're so inclined, I'd head on over to the YouTube page, so you can get the playlist of all talks.

Mountain Vista, er I mean Mountain Lion

So I've been running Mac OS 10.8 'Mountain Lion' for a little over a week now and I am not impressed at all.  Fortunately it's only $20, but So far I have yet to utilize a single new feature in it. Messages plain ol' doesn't work for me.  I still have an @mac.com email address for my apple ID so there is all kinds of no-joy for messages.  I use Outlook for work, so I don't need reminders, and I use Evernote, so Notes is superfluous for me (and rather crappy to boot).   So far this is the Windows Vista of upgrades for me.  It added security, which is annoyingly getting in my face, it seems slower on some things (I get more beach balls than pre-upgrade) and of all the claimed new features, I don't touch most of them.  Yup, it's vista.

Worst part of the upgrade to me is that my trusty old 2007 MacBook Pro isn't supported anymore.  It's had a reasonable run, but it's sad when a still viable device is left behind like this.  Oh well, I guess Apple can't hit it out of the park all the time.

Got back into LightStrike for a day...

We hadn't done much with LightStrike for a few months.  It had pretty much turned into a NERF battleground here instead.  I was modding out my nerf guns with voltage upgrades and upgrade kits from Orange Mod Works.  Then out of nowhere, I hear that familiar sound of a LightStrike Gun turn on from one of the cubes outside my office.  It quickly escalated into an impromptu battle in the office.

While I was on vacation I got an interesting comment posted and a google+ comment.  The post comment from Michael Kröhnert on my first light strike mod post is about replacing some blown capacitors on a non-functional gun, interesting read, check it out if your into the internals of the guns.  And Bernd Kammerer wants to try and make a Light Strike compatible gun. So I'm trying to reply to those today and probably fire up my guns again and start another skirmish.

Photos from Istanbul!

I've put up a few photos from my trip to Istanbul!

This is the view of the Blue Mosque from our hotel.

This is the Aya Sofya, an amazing building!

There are some more photos in the gallery here:

2012 Istanbul, Turkey