the water washed away everything
but the chance to begin again
so we came from cities & towns,
from long golden fields
& we stood side by side
until we made a bridge to dry land,
back to a place
we have promised to hold safe
for each other's children,
back to a place
called America
the situation:
- water rising well above the 500 year flood stages. flooding on all fronts.
- buy a massive amount of sand (actually something that looks more like kitty litter)
- buy a massive amount of bags (burlap, plastic, etc.)
- buy a massive amount of plastic ties to tie off the bag openings
- put up 20-30 stations of sandbag manufacturing, each station consists of:
- two saw horses
- a wood panel with 3 holes cut out
- three traffic cones turned upside down in the holes
- the bagger: the bagger sits in front of an inverted cone and places an empty bag beneath the cone opening
- the digger: shovels the sand mixture into the inverted opening of the cone
- the finisher: twists the bag and ties it off with a plastic tie
- the pitcher: throws the completed bag into a forklift so that it can be loaded into a truck for distribution
- large machinery, dump trucks, forklifts, etc.
- heavy gloves
- lots of gatoraide, food stuffs
To quote that modern day poet, Sean Paul, "An pan we fi waan you to shake dat ting" [reference]. word. shake indeed! the Mars Phoenix explorer has successfully managed to shake dat ting! Not quite ready to move to the wet chemistry (see Britannica.com ref) analysis though yet...
read an interesting post about the architecture behind the professional networking site, linkedIn.
features: tomcat/jetty, mysql+oracle, spring, lucene, straight JDBC (no hibernate, etc)
Site Statistics
22 million members
4+ million unique visitors/month
40 million page views/day
2 million searches/day
250K invitations sent/day
1 million answers posted
2 million email messages/day
more at:
http://cookiesareforclosers.com/blog/2008/06/linkedin-architecture
oh, and here is my public profile on linkedIn :-)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepolyak
Mars Phoenix is finally ready to do its soil analysis. For more on this amazing planet, see what Britannica has to say about Mars
really pleased so far with my macbook air (MBA)! my main machine at work is my ubuntu (hardy heron) dell 3GHz and my main machine at home is my Mac Pro. aside from being a perfectly capable machine in its own right (e.g. doing xcode iPhone sdk development, java-eclipse development, making keynote presentations) the MBA has quickly become my portable, always with me gateway to either machine via xwindows or remote management. as a bike commuter i get a little smile every time i slide this slim guy into my messenger bag. the keyboard feel great. i got a blue tooth mouse for longer work sessions. i also got a laptop case for it that was made from a recycled billboard sign. with the sling player it has become my portable television as well. yes, i am officially an apple fanboy now :-)
here is a compilation of my online profiles/data at claimid.com.
a wonderful little piece from peter norvig...
http://norvig.com/21-days.html?foo
i have a lot of interest in online communities and collaborations. this latest news from second life (linden labs) and IBM caught my attention. i think the idea of attending a virtual meeting is compelling. this is a natural extension beyond the confines of webex and opens lots of interesting possibilities.
Recent Comments
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Steve Polyak said:
see more details at: http://bikelibrary.blogspot.com/2007/11/bike-vs-car.html read more
on bike vs. car -
Jay said:
Where did this happen and what did the driver say? Glad you're alright. Sorry about the Pinny. read more
on bike vs. car -
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Steve Polyak said:
yeah. i'm ok though. i was back on my bike commute to work today. i'm probably gonna get a new... read more
on bike vs. car
bike library link read more
on bike vs. car