Tuesday, 31 July 2007

Linkage

Herding cats?


Found on the Environmental Studies site: Prototype for a GPS cat tracker.


where's the cat?A GPS receiver and a GSM modem with special software is incorporated into the Pet Tracker. Allows you easily and remotely monitoring the location of your cat via your cell phone/mobile phone anywhere in the world with suitable GSM coverage...

Simply call the telephone number of the Pet Tracker collar with your handy mobile phone/cell phone. The GPS receiver of the collar, estimates the position of your cat and sends the coordinates immediately as SMS (Short Message service) over the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) directly on your mobile phone display. The accuracy of the positioning of your cat amounts to the average less than 15 meters.


They say they're "not selling this product" yet, but stay tuned...

Meantime you could just give the cat a camera, and let him take pictures as he wanders the neighborhood.
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Thx: Sansserif for the tracker, and Sharon for Mr. Lee.

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Linkage

Orlando Murden and Ronald Miller


Not everyone cared for Frank Sinatra's habit, in concert, of crediting Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter and the other composers and lyricists of the songs he sang. And there were moments when even he seemed to acknowledge there was more annotation than anybody needed. A decade or so back, I heard him deliver the following intro:
Here's a marvelous song written by Orlando Murden and Ronald Miller. Whoever the hell they are.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee, as Mark Steyn tells you who.
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HT: Howard

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Rants

God forbid we might, y'know, be winning or something

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Monday that a strongly positive report on progress on Iraq by Army Gen. David Petraeus likely would split Democrats in the House and impede his party's efforts to press for a timetable to end the war...

Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be "a real big problem for us." -- Washington Post

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In Passing

Pro-jec-tion! (duh-dum dum) Projection!

Maybe the reason they're so eager to impute hatred to everybody else is because it occupies such a major part in their own lives.

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Monday, 30 July 2007

Linkage

No thanks, I just won't fly

And speaking of the TSA, Bruce Schneier has done an interview with TSA head Kip Hawley.  First installment (of 5 parts) is here.  Not very impressive.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 17:27:29 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Clipfile

No bet

"I bet Congress and others spent more time arguing whether TSA should be unionized or not than getting professional objective input as to how to best screen.”  -- "MD in Philly," commenting at Patterico's

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Sunday, 29 July 2007

Clipfile

Cilpfile: July 29, 2007

"I swear, if they made a movie version of Gilligan's Island today the first thing the studio would do is tell the director that the plot needed to be simplified and there were too many characters." -- Baseball Crank

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Saturday, 28 July 2007

Linkage

Foxy


"This brave fox wandered up on our porch. He's half cat, half dog, and all cute. When the fox first came for a visit we instantly named it "Freddy the Fox." But after we got to know it we found out Freddy is actually Frederica."
-- Rob Lee

72 images on Flickr®

Tnx: Susan at Wildrun

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 17:37:45 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Linkage

Somebody start popping the popcorn

Then we can sit back and watch...

..If the owner of a local business has gone through the trouble of specifically buying an ad on Fox News, it's because he wants to be there and he wants to target Fox News viewers. And such an advertiser more than likely has certain views about MoveOn. I can only imagine what the conversation will sound like when a self-appointed MoveOn monitor calls up Joe's Bait, Tackle & Hunting Supply to say he should remove his ads from Fox News. -- Ken Wheaton, adage.com [bolding mine - o.g.]
It'd be even more fun if MoveOn stopped by for a chat. Hee Hee!
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Background here (But read the adage.com post, too.  It must have been a slow news day at the AP.)
Hattip: IP.

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Friday, 27 July 2007

Rants

Where the money is

Next time some university-type starts inveighing against "the rich," remember this:

Colleges and universities are our nation’s richest — and possibly most miserly — “nonprofits.”

[They] are sitting on a fortune in tax-free funds, and sharing almost none of it. Higher education endowment assets alone total over $340 billion. Sixty-two institutions boast endowments over $1 billion. Harvard and Yale top the list with endowments so massive, $28 billion and $18 billion respectively, that they exceed the general operating funds for the states in which they reside. It’s not just elite private institutions that do this; four public universities have endowments that rank among the nation’s top 10...

These endowments tower over their peers throughout the nonprofit world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is America’s wealthiest museum. But the Met’s $2 billion endowment is bested by no less than 26 academic institutions, including the University of Minnesota, Washington University in St. Louis, and Emory. Indeed, the total worth of the top 25 college and university endowments is $11 billion greater than the combined assets of their equivalently ranked private foundations — including Gates, Ford and Rockefeller...

A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments’ value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations — which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually — average 7 percent spending. -- Lynne Munson, Inside Higher Ed
Many educational institutions (and their endowments) pay no taxes whatever at the municipal level, creating a tremendous negative impact on their host communities.  This is compounded as endowments buy up campus-adjacent properties "for future expansion," then turn around and rent them out in competition with tax-paying landlords.

Perhaps it's time for some adjustments.
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Article linked by Glenn

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