tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-316786782024-02-21T02:31:25.886-05:00A Candle in the DarkPhilosophy, Science, and ReasonAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.comBlogger573125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-74352852468212062072019-08-27T11:27:00.002-04:002019-08-27T11:27:23.310-04:00Give Me Warranties or Give Me DeathIt happened. The latent "old man" genes have become active. Very soon I will be wearing open-toe sandals with socks up to my knees and my testicles will hang about six inches lower. That's in the near future, though. The subject of this post is my newfound obsession with warranties and product reliability.
The gene activation was triggered by an environmental stressor, as I assume is common. I Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-60073331081060761632019-08-27T00:49:00.002-04:002019-08-27T00:49:36.777-04:00Finding PurposeI am trying to get back into photography. It was such a passion for me for so long. I would go out during the golden hour--I especially loved dusk--to photograph flowers and foliage. If I had been in possession of the funds, I would have spent perhaps tens of thousands on gear.
Life intrudes, as it often does. Financial failure, family pressure, deaths and sickness. It stripped my pleasure from Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-43279442802906284402018-11-11T16:44:00.001-05:002021-07-04T15:34:58.458-04:00Welcome BackHi everyone.
And by everyone, I mean the no one who has read this blog in forever. Indeed, I am writing this more or less for posterity than anything else.
I started this blog years ago with the... Need? Drive? Desire?... I don't even know what term to use. I started this blog simple because. I felt that my words should be out there, no matter how half-baked they may have been. I am happy that Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-2415853392570261702014-11-29T21:55:00.000-05:002014-11-29T21:55:14.638-05:00Ultra Mega Super Turbo: A New CafeI am Kickstarting a new cafe. I need your help. I need this cafe to be scattered far and wide. I want as many people as possible to know about it. This is my shot, and I'm damn proud of it.
You can go directly to the Kickstarter page here.
Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-79380819316610232742014-11-29T17:51:00.003-05:002014-11-29T17:51:51.307-05:00Documentary Night: American Experience - 1964
PBS.American.Experience.2014.1964.720p.HDTV... by HDDocumentaryAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-42092854767284234632014-10-23T14:18:00.000-04:002014-10-23T14:20:09.002-04:00Documentary Night: Frontline- The Trouble With Antibiotics
Well, this is all horrifying.
This is a preview.Watch the full video at PBS' website.
Bonus: Anderson Cooper discovering that his ancestor was a slave owner who was beaten to death by a rebellious slave.
Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-43621543149438083492014-05-31T17:20:00.001-04:002014-05-31T17:20:36.796-04:00The Root Of Conservative Action: Prejudice
One of my most frequently-trotted-out attacks against conservatives is that they rarely understand their own history. They rarely understand that what they are arguing for today is the ideological legacy of maniacs who have come before them, the same maniacs who argued for things that no rational conservative would try to argue today for fear of appearing too much of a maniac. Thank God we Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-86997627861375296812014-05-22T23:16:00.000-04:002014-05-22T23:16:38.525-04:00We Must Always Remember: The Police Are The Bad Guys
Rodney King, post-beating
Not all cops are bad. Some of them are good. Some of them are great. Some of them are the kinds of people who will rush into dangerous situations to save people.
But many, possibly most, of them are not, and society must treat police monolithically. Because all police can shoot us and suffer few consequences. All police are protected by the court system. All police Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-70148137944908842292014-05-22T01:47:00.000-04:002014-05-22T01:47:30.403-04:00So, I Saw Godzilla.
And it was a huge disappointment. I won't go into details, since I could easily do a scene-by-scene analysis explaining why the film is something of a train wreck in spots, but I will point out some of the bits that most annoyed me.
First, Aaron Taylor Johnson is a human potato. Whenever he is on screen the film drags to a near stop. I don't know whether it was him or the director, but a Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-71492339209899278392014-05-20T01:11:00.002-04:002014-05-20T01:11:27.678-04:00I Received A Copyright Notice Today
I recently received a copyright warning from my ISP via e-mail. They said that my IP had been associated with an illegal download of a movie. In this case, the movie was I, Frankenstein. This is the first warning of such kind that I have ever received. And yes, I did indeed download I, Frankenstein from Pirate Bay.
First off, I was pissed. I was pissed because contrary to what Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-26099144288995504602014-04-12T12:51:00.000-04:002014-04-12T12:51:44.492-04:00Documentary Night: Faster Than Sound
This is an older episode of Nova. It's not a "classic" episode. I don't think we can call anything after 1990 "classic" just yet, but it's old enough, being from the 97-98 season. Of course, you probably already knew that from the hilariously mid-1990's CGI applied to every logo at the beginning of the show.
Oh, 90's. You loved your CGI text.
Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-51518785749828343682014-03-07T01:27:00.000-05:002014-03-10T13:55:38.655-04:00Tablet And Cell Phone Sales Are Slowing, And That's A Good Thing
UPDATE: I didn't realize this when I wrote it, but Samsung's current ad campaign IS "The Next Big Thing". That's hilarious to me.
Apple and its investors are in a panic right now because tablet and cell phone sales are slowing. First off, I'm amazed that anyone is surprised by this. As soon as the Moto G came out, I knew that we were near the end of the smartphone explosion. And even before Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-77767298244491691122014-02-28T16:39:00.000-05:002014-05-20T01:13:58.689-04:00Lean Out, Lean In, Lean Out, Then Shake It All AboutSheryl Sandberg has been making noise ever since the release of her book Lean In which encourages women to be more aggressive in their social attainment. I have nothing against Sandberg and think that her heart was in the right place, but her Lean In movement is total horseshit and it has long since worn out its welcome.
First, let's ignore the white, hetero-normative, cis-gendered focus of her Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-31868713921405758622014-02-13T17:56:00.000-05:002014-02-13T17:56:26.785-05:00Documentary Night: A Short History of In-Home HeatingI get the feeling that this is somehow funded by a petroleum company trying to convince us that they "care." Regardless, Neil Oliver is awesome and even this five-minute short is worth a watch.
Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-47729099506372824222014-02-13T13:03:00.001-05:002014-02-13T13:12:46.141-05:00Texas Needs More People Like This
Texas has an image problem. Not as bad as, say, Mississippi or Alabama, but bad. A lot of it probably has to do with their sheer size and visibility. Texas is massive, politically influential, wealthy, and oil-rich.
Thus, when they do something stupid, everyone knows about it. For someone not living in Texas, it's very hard to remember that that stupidity is a product of only a subsection of Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-87128607033575133812014-02-12T14:06:00.000-05:002014-02-18T16:17:40.622-05:00Youtube's 1080p Option Is Unavailable To Me In Firefox
I have spent some time trying to track down a reason for this and, failing to succeed, I am posting the question here.
YouTube is a source of near-constant problems for people because cell companies and internet service providers hate it. They hate it because it's so popular and sucks up a lot of bandwidth. Because, remember, telecom companies are generally evil, and their ideal scenario is Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-60598556438586586322014-01-13T14:05:00.002-05:002014-01-13T14:05:45.170-05:00To Catch a Trader And My Mixed Feelings
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, these guys are a pack of assholes. They are masters of the universe, wealthy, mostly white, and almost all male. They have undoubtedly been part of the global economic crisis as we now know it and would, given a position of power, exploit and abuse that power. I would hate these people if I knew them. (Watch the full documentary here.)
On theAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-70035263833030143182013-11-29T21:38:00.001-05:002013-11-30T13:24:54.753-05:00Why Do We Regulate Pain Killers But Not Antibiotics?Two points: I just finished watching the PBS|Frontline documentary Chasing The Nightmare Bacteria; I also just read about a massive study showing that access to pain killers is poor. You can watch the documentary below.
The takeaway from the documentary is that we are charging headlong into a massive, global, health crisis the likes of which the post-war era has not seen. We are overusing Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-27039519503030529722013-11-05T12:06:00.002-05:002013-11-05T12:06:16.152-05:00Documentary Night: The Last Explorers- Thomas Blake Glover
Thomas Blake Oliver, rockin' the 'stache.
Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-77025614339882175812013-11-05T12:02:00.002-05:002013-11-05T12:02:53.554-05:00Neil Oliver Speech About British HistoryAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-20724013251283291682013-10-28T14:22:00.000-04:002013-10-28T14:22:00.357-04:00We Are All The SameAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-2630180472739782792013-10-02T22:15:00.002-04:002013-10-02T22:17:03.588-04:00Science Proves: Avoid Politics If You Care About Your SanityA study came out awhile back showing that politics kills your ability to effectively analyze data. For most informed people (and informed is a label that could be correctly applied to a very small percentage of the population), this was a total well duh! moment. Still, it's always good to have some rigidly-created data to back up anecdotal observation.
Every time I see something like this, I getAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-56152315904859949472013-06-10T13:47:00.001-04:002013-06-10T13:47:14.404-04:00This is Obama's Legacy
While I know that my voice is small and insignificant, while I know very few care about my thoughts, I feel the need to speak on this. I feel the need if for no other reason than to simply add one more spit of fuel to a fire that desperately needs to grow. I speak in the hope that this fire may engulf the nation and burn away that which needs to burn.
I never had hope. I never expected changeAaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-76380110958194763842013-06-07T00:12:00.002-04:002013-06-07T00:49:37.374-04:00I Have Stopped Reading The News
I give up. I'm waving the white flag. I simply can't take the punishment anymore.
I am, of course, referring to the news. I used to get my news via MyYahoo!, which actually provided me a degree of protection of which I was unaware. It did it by being a really poor product. Feeds would fail to load on a regular basis, refreshes wouldn't happen, and the overall speed was pretty slow. This Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31678678.post-58613392030469976702013-04-04T20:17:00.002-04:002013-04-04T20:17:52.499-04:00RIP Roger Ebert
I have been profoundly affected by the death of Roger Ebert. I’m finding it difficult to simply do things.
When someone who is so good dies, especially someone as iconic as Ebert, it's hard to believe that they will ever be replaced. It's as though the world has suffered an irreparable loss. Even though my rational mind knows that there will be others, at this moment, my emotions will not let Aaron Martin-Colbyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07160246744287286823noreply@blogger.com0