Lee.org

KOIT switched to Christmas programming today. I bumped and jammed to Bob Seger’s Little Drummer Boy, Frank Sinatra’s Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and Sarah McLachlan’s Happy Xmas for about 2 hours.

Ok, I’m done.

Bring on the Arbor Day music.

Holding Flame was at Burning Man 2009 and I missed it.
wow. Built by Poetic Kinetics.

Oo OO! Look!

They built those giant flowers too!

check out their photo gallery on their site. They’re amazing, ten times so in person!

Julie Bernstein took many photos of lasertag this weekend. She’s a really good professional photographer.

Here’s the whole set of lasertag photos set.

Update 11-16-09: Be sure to read the comments before assuming this post has all the info you need.

from the CDC on their page Key Facts About Seasonal Influenza (Flu)

Every year in the United States, on average:

• 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu;
• more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and
• about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes.

From the Associated Press and The Discover Channel

SWINE FLU COUNT: 4,000 DEAD, 22 MILLION ILL

The fall flu season has only just begun and already thousands have died from the H1N1 virus.

Estimates of deaths caused by the swine flu have grown to nearly 4,000 since April, roughly quadrupling previous estimates

To borrow from TJIC’s (and the creator of the ONOZ OMG avatar)

But wait. How deadly is the Swine flu really? Let’s see…. four thousand divided by twenty two million is…
4,000 / 22,000,000 = 0.000181

Swine flu AKA H1N1 is 0.018% fatal
Ok, so how deadly is the average flu?

From the CDC stats above, roughly 10% of the US population gets the flu each year… that’s 30,400,000 people. And 36,000 people die from it…

36,000 / 30,400,000 = 0.00118

The average flu is 0.11% fatal

Comparing the two…

0.0011 * n  = 0.00018

n = 6.1

The average flu is 6.1 times more deadly than swine / H1N1 flu.

WHAT????

You’re kidding, right???

Someone is making a lot of money by causing an unwarranted panic. I’m betting it’s the maker of the influenza vaccine and influenza test.

Since I installed NoSpamNX, I get far fewer comment spams in my Akismet spam box… like 5 per day and they are all from the one spammer who has so far figured his way around the plugin. The plugin blocks about 100 comment spams per day.

Now there are so few spams in my comment spam box that it’s possible for me to review them by hand weekly. Today I found a false positive in the Akismet comment spam pile. This would have been impossible without NoSpamNX.

If you have a WordPress blog, you should install NoSpamNX. No, wait. If everyone does it, then the spammers will all write smarter bots that get around this defense. So… umm, everyone use a different method! Don’t use NoSpamNX. This one will be used only on my site!

I liked it a lot.

I was blindsided with the surprise ending. Don’t learn the spoiler before you see the movie. It’s kind of Fearless meets The Crying Game. No it’s not. I liked it anyway.

Last week I got to attend “From The ‘Hood to the House”. This year,  the Glide Church annual holiday festival was held at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on the 12th. It was quite an affair with Maya Angelou, a huge church ensemble singing, dancers, musicians and Cecil Williams celebrating his 45th anniversary running Glide Church.

I have to thank Cindy for inviting Charlotte and I to volunteer for the event. We got to help folks (I helped Cindy in the office much of the day), see most of the show and try a zillion tasty foods. :-)

Saturday I played lasertag with Ziggy and 30 friends in Junipero Serra Park in San Bruno. It was great fun!

I love that expression. I used it at Maker Faire… check the last 10 seconds of the video I made. But I got it wrong, sticking the “and” in there. It’s actually:

“Fly! Be Free!
[Mork tosses the egg in the air. It makes a quick and unfortunate decent to the counter top, smashing]
Well I guess we’ll have to have a quick burial at sea then.”

You can find it 38:18 minutes:seconds into the pilot episode of Mork and Mindy. This is hopefully still a link to the pilot episode of Mork and Mindy.

It’s amazing how individual moments get captured and amplified. I last saw that episode like 20+ years ago.

Last month Charlotte and I saw Robert Cameron’s photo show at the Metreon. It was pretty fantastic.

Yesterday Charlotte told me that he died. That’s the bad news. The good news is that… well, let me grab snippets from his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Three months ago, Robert Cameron was hanging out of a helicopter taking pictures of Lombard Street.
…
He was 98 and in the midst of his last show – “Environmental Journey: Robert Cameron’s Aerial Photography of our Pacific Rim,” which is on display at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco.
…
Over four decades, Mr. Cameron produced 15 coffee table books in the “Above” series, with 3 million copies in print.
…
Mr. Cameron, who was by then married to his high school sweetheart,
…
In lieu of services, the family would like people to attend “Environmental Journey,” Mr. Cameron’s show at the Metreon, scheduled to be up until the end of the month. It includes 59 giant photo murals highlighting green practices and environmental themes from across the Pacific Rim. The window display on Fourth Street is his last photo of Lombard Street, colorfully made over for an anniversary celebration of the board game Candy Land.

“He regarded that show as his legacy,” Tony Cameron said. “He wanted to be able to show at the end of his life the kind of work that he did.”

Go to the show.
Live life.