Ivan's Social Stream

Masters on Flickr.

When it comes to sound, we don’t mess around.

untitled on Flickr.

In a double dose of weird, not only is it still somewhat light out, but foggy too! #MNWeather

It lives! on Flickr.

We now have a workstation with not one, but *two* 30” monitors running on it.

seanreidy:

…aaaand Tom Hanks has his hand caught in a pickle jar.

“You have to let go. No, let go of the PICKLE.”
“But I want a pickle.” 

#sometimes i remember that tom hanks exists and the world seems a better place.

I come back from vacation and this is one of the first posts I see. Everything is going to be alright.

The world always needs more Tom Hanks.

(via gunsandrobots)

(Source: fyzombieland, via radiocolin)

(Source: radiocolin)

And now I take a break from my usual droning on about cats and tech and fighting with Avid to bring up something a bit more important.

gryffindork:

I just spent about an hour at my local plasma donation center going through the necessary requirements to sign up to be a plasma donor. After signing up, having a blood sample drawn, having my vitals analyzed (where I was deemed healthy enough to donate) and sitting through an extremely long questionnaire, I was told that I could not donate plasma because I “am a man who had sex with another man since 1977.”

I was informed that the plasma I would be donating was going to be used to make medications for “extremely sick people.” That is, people who have little to no immune system, and apparently could die if exposed to homosexuality.

This is not the rule of the plasma donation center, so I do not fault them. This is a Food and Drug Administration regulation that is old and outdated. This regulation is saying that gay men (and probably some straight men out there too…) are inherently unhealthy. This is a regulation that has been in place since 1983. For 30 years we have been turned away from donating blood, even when the need for blood donation is so outstanding. 

Think about those 30 years, think about how far we have come in SO MANY other situations. Gay men are allowed to get married in 9 states now, in addition to Washington D.C. (Hell, they are going to start performing same-sex marriage in the National Cathedrallater this month!) Gay men can serve openly in the military. We have a President who openly supports same sex marriage. But we are still considered unhealthy a federal department.

I know there are plenty of gay men who still give blood, and simply lie on the questionnaire. And perhaps I should have done just that. I know I am a healthy man, I do not have any viruses or diseases. But, I just didn’t feel right lying about something like that. 

I know I’m not the first person who has tried to do something about this, and I certainly hope I am not the last who will work on this, but I really feel that I should do something, and I hope you will too. This is the FDA’s contact page. Go there to send them messages telling them that Gay ≠ Unhealthy. Their address is 10903 New Hampshire Ave. Silver Spring, MD 20993. Send them letters telling to update their way of thinking. Their phone number is 1-888-INFO-FDA. Call them and tell them that gay men deserve to be treated fairly.

I hope you’ll do something. If nothing else, share this post. Reblog it, share it on your Facebook and Twitter. Get the word out there about this archaic regulation. Make our voices heard until people can’t ignore them anymore.

Probably worth mentioning that if you’re bi, pan, or any other flavor of queer this applies to you too. And while I can’t say that’s an experience I have shared (from my experiences donating blood, the Red Cross is considerably more efficient at this, and considerably more tactful) it doesn’t change the fact that the FDA’s policy is out of date, especially compared to that of other industrialized nations, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. I should also issue a brief correction here: the permanent deferral on men who have had sex with other men, or MSM (as it’s technically referred to) has been in place since 1985, not 1983.

And for what it’s worth: the American Red Cross, American Association of Blood Banks, American Blood Centers, and American Plasma User’s Coalition all support lifting the lifetime deferral. So if you cannot donate blood, please do donate time or money to these organizations, as appropriate.

It’s 2013, and this year’s CES is the year of “Ultra HD,” or as it’s been known up until this new, consumer friendly buzzword was invented: 4K (for perspective, 1080p would be equivalent to 1K). And let’s be honest: no one wants Ultra HD. Really. It’s been argued since 2007 as to whether or not, at a typical viewing distance, most people could tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. Certainly no one will see the difference between 1080p and 4K (I refuse to use that buzzword) in the living room. Debatably it’ll be impossible to see on a tablet either, with the iPad 4 pushing 2048 pixels at 264 dpi and the iPhone 5 running 326 dpi. Unless someone is pretty much eyes-on-the-glass close, I doubt that anyone will be able to perceive the individual display elements on those screens.

But is this a surprise? Since 2010, CES has been pushing 3D TV. I know a grand total of one person with a 3D TV. And they didn’t buy it, they won it. They don’t use the 3D features. When they eventually got a PlayStation 3, they didn’t opt to set up the 3D hardware. And no one really wants 3D tech. Between the high cost of the TVs and glasses (and those with passive glasses receiving disappointing visual marks), it’s not a particularly compelling sell. 

What else was CES obsessed over? Smart TVs. Smart TVs that people may own, but don’t really use. In fact, you have to go back to 2009 before you find TV tech that people actually paid money for, and used, namely 1080p and plasma display tech. There were also small things, like HDMI-CEC, which most people didn’t really know about, but heard in names like VieraLink, and does handy stuff like changing the input on your TV when your turn on a device, or turning the device off when you switch the input. No one bought a TV just for HDMI-CEC, but it’s in a lot of TVs now, and I haven’t heard of anyone complaining about it.

Now, we could make a lot of hay over how CES always introduces gadgets we don’t want, like the cell phone to babies, and the dozens of tablets, e-readers, speakers, phone chargers, food cookers, solar batteries, connected car tech, and so forth. And those products end up dying a dignified death at the hands of the free market system. Some of them are products we didn’t realize we actually wanted. Take tablets, for example: we had zero interest in Android tablets until the Kindle Fire came about, but everyone and their brother was promising one. Connected GPS units and advanced wireless technologies were also bandied about, and are now common place.

But the one technology no one thinks needs much improvement is the one they keep trying to cram down our throats, and it’s TVs. Most people don’t want their TV to go on Twitter, or project 3D images into their heads, and we certainly don’t care about 4K. It’s debatable if we care about ≥120Hz display tech (personally I hate it, and I don’t use that word lightly). It’s all part of what seems to be an effort to turn the TV market into something like the cell phone market, trying to push forward the march of obsolescence, and convince us we need a new TV every couple of years. But truth be told, we just want a big ‘ole dumb screen. Most of us have cable boxes, game consoles, and some of us have DVRs and streaming boxes. We just wanted our colors to have a bit more pop, the bezel to look nice, and to have enough inputs for all our junk.

I miss the kitschy gadgets and the “who would ever want that” whizbang doodads. You’d have thought that after the lackluster performances of Smart TVs and 3D TVs that manufacturers would have wised up, but I guess not. At least Qualcomm, despite their oddly assembled and sometimes insulting (as someone who was, apparently, “born mobile”) keynote, didn’t put all their money into 4K, noting that a lot of advancements in mobile tech is going to be behind the scenes in faster, more power efficient technologies (and really, what we care about there is power efficiency, because smart phones still have only so-so battery life), and doubling down on the coming data explosion with an expansion of connected devices and an Internet of (every)thing(s) with more intelligent routing, network management, and use of spectrum. They focused on some real, important, concrete things that will shape what happens with the devices of tomorrow, and only dipped into this year’s theme of “Ultra HD.”

Pudding by the gross on Flickr.

Yes, this is how I prefer to buy my pudding…

Number 4 on Flickr.

Number four and number one! #Nashville