Nathan Laredo

Babies - Movie Trailer

2009-12-18T21:32:00.000-08:00

I can't wait to see this movie about how babies in 4 different parts of the world spend their first year of life. The page on youtube says it'll be out april 16, 2010:

Sesame Street: Soliloquy On B

2009-08-17T23:02:00.001-07:00

Patrick Stewart at his finest.

Dear President Obama and President Bush

2009-07-07T17:19:00.001-07:00

Please stop by my house for some homemade hamburgers and to meet our new baby any time. (if only it were really this easy to chat with either of these two)

Inaguration Gigapan

2009-01-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

Click on the image for a large screen capture of a small part of the gigantic 1474 megapixel stitched gigapan photo created by David Bergman.

Jump right to Yo Yo Ma taking an iPhone photo on the gigapan site...

Using Google Chart Server for Election Maps

2008-11-03T21:21:00.000-08:00

I find myself wishing more people would take advantage of google chart server for election maps and maps of polling data...

No, it really wasn't photoshopped...

2008-10-16T14:39:00.000-07:00

Turns out the photos I thought were fake really showed up in the live video of the debate:

What kind of country do you want to leave your children?

2008-09-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

So, I realize older people aren't exactly the demographic that goes around reading blogs, but maybe there are parents and grandparents reading my blog that identify with McCain.

I like McCain. I voted for Bush the first time. I know plenty of people who vote Republican every election without fail. I too like traditional Republican values... lower taxes, smaller government, less regulation, free trade, and I even support Bush when it comes to immigration, but I didn't vote for Bush a second time, and I won't be giving McCain my vote either.

To the older people who know me, I wish you, too, would please not give your vote blindly to McCain. Why? Look at what the Republican party has done with control over Congress and the Executive Branch for a majority of the past eight years... our civil liberties are almost gone. We are all treated like potential terrorists in airports. We are treated like potential terrorists on our phone calls. If we happen to disagree with what the government is doing we are called unpatriotic. If we happen to want to retain rights we've had for years for an individual to make her own decision about her own body, Palin thinks the federal government should make that choice for you. In fact, if the Republicans really liked less regulation, they would stop wasting time trying to regulate who can and cannot marry and who can and cannot join the military and instead focus on national defense, taxes, spending, regulation of commerce, coining our money, and promoting progress in arts and sciences and whatever else happens to be in article 1 section 8 of the constitution.

If you'll indulge me for a moment, I wanted to share a few quotes:

"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries."

"For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:"

"For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences"

"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury."

The above quotes come from the Declaration of Independence, not from a "liberal" article about George Bush, yet somehow they seem oddly timely.

President Bush is a guy I'd love to have a hot dog with. McCain is also that type of guy. Obama seems like someone someone could actually have an intelligent discussion with... maybe over a nice chicago deep dish pizza. I think if the trillions of dollars the current administration has spent delivering us to our nation's current standing in the world have taught us anything, it's that it's time to put the smartest man for the job in the White House, not the man that you'd rather have a hot dog with.

So please, we need change. Don't blindly vote for McCain. Don't let the nation fall further into crisis by leaving the same people in charge that got us into this mess. You owe it to your children and grandchildren and any future great grandchildren not to re-elect anyone who put us into this mess to give the other party a chance to get us out. Give the Democrats four years. If they can't fix things by then, try another party... Libertarians maybe? Right now we need anything but four more years of Bush's current supporters behind the curtains pulling the strings. - nil

Donuts and Bacon: Taste we can Believe in - blue T-shirt

2008-09-27T10:45:00.000-07:00

Awesome graphic design:

Using a laptop from bed...

2008-08-31T14:00:00.000-07:00

I've been wanting to build something like this for a while, and thanks to some tools I got as a gift and a bit of inspiration from the price of the product at lapdawg.com and its apparent inability to secure a laptop at this angle, I created an earlier stand with an inverted T shape that wasn't quite as stable as this newer version where I moved the attachment point to form a nice stable A frame without any bolts anywhere near the bed...

Bobby Ore Beginner Stunt Driving Class

2008-05-12T13:47:00.001-07:00

It only took me five years to post the video of the stunt driving class I took....

Unboxing the Roland Fantom G8

2008-05-03T21:53:00.001-07:00

Raw footage of my first ten minutes with the Roland Fantom G8. The background music at the start is the demo song loaded when the keyboard is first turned on.

Power on is 4 minutes in. The first sound that comes out is a bit unusual. I would have expected a piano like the A90EX this replaced.

I'm learning how to use this thing as you watch, sorry it's so boring, but since there is so little other info on the new Fantom G, I thought others might be interested in the learning curve.

Why doesn't work my PC?

2008-04-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

Wow.

Remote control iTunes with a web browser

2008-02-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

If like me, you happen to share an office and have speakers hooked up to one computer playing music all day, it helps if everyone else in your office can skip songs, pause, control volume, etc, so I wrote a quick little app. It's still pretty rough around the edges, but it lets you connect to port 8080 of the machine running itunes and acts as a web server that lets you control it.

Wriststrong Bracelet and the Environment

2007-10-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

I guess viacom doesn't care much about the environment...

iPhone vs N95

2007-06-29T21:06:00.000-07:00

I arrived at the AT&T store in Mountain View to find about 15-20 people in line, so I thought I'd check out the Apple store at Valley Fair mall that Woz was supposed to be waiting in line at... It had hundreds of people waiting, so I left to check out the AT&T store in San Jose. I was probably number 54 in line when I arrived sometime between 3pm and 4pm. As it turned out, I was the last person to walk out of the store with an iPhone, and had I gotten there 8 people earlier -- which would have been possible had I not made the other two stops to check out the situation at the other locations, I would have even got my first choice model. I suspect most of the 4GB models that Apple sold were sold after stores ran out of the 8GB models.

Anyway, this is the first side-by-side comparison that I know of of these two phones, so I thought I'd share it and the story of the "drama" of getting an iPhone that fortunately only lasted about four hours total for me. Apple could have sold at least 100 more opening day had they shipped enough product to the AT&T store nearest their headquarters. At least one Apple employee was observed criticizing the entire operation at the AT&T store, giving the manager a hard time.

Update: At 4PM Saturday, it was possible to walk into the Apple store at Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara and walk out with a 4GB iPhone at 4:04PM. The iPhone launch is clearly not another Wii launch.

Ten Years of Kernel.org

2007-03-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

I just finished making the logo to mark 10 years since kernel.org was announced... Happy birthday kernel.org!

What's up Googlerz?

2007-02-17T00:07:00.000-08:00

And then after a long silence, there was more change... on 11 September 2006, I accepted a position at Google... after a quarter working at Google, I've still not made it to all of the cafes, but the least-often-mentioned benefit is that I finally work somewhere that requires no explanation to non-technical friends and family.

No relation to Villa Montalvo

2005-08-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

I started a new job today at a startup more secretive than Transmeta was when I started there. Basically the whole point of this post is that you shouldn't use my Orion Multisystems email address anymore.

Illegal Aliens

2005-05-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

I put the coordinates of Area 51 into Google Maps for "Groom Lake Base, Bldg 170" I found the July 2003 space imaging overview and detail images of Area 51 and created an overview and detail overlay for Keyhole 2. I'm also noticing that maps.google.com has certain areas intentionally pixelated or colored over (like the roof of the white house or the capitol building).

Moog Voyage

2004-10-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

Saw Bob Moog at robotspeak.com in San Francisco today. He demonstrated the Minimoog Voyager Anniversary Edition. I purchased the one he demonstrated on, and Bob was nice enough to sign it. I also got an Etherwave Pro Theremin the same day which Bob also signed for me. Bob told all sorts of stories of the history of electronic music. I put an mp3 of the event and a review of the Etherwave Pro on my website.

Cold Fusion

2004-10-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Purchased the cold heat soldering tool from Fry's and used it to add a FM transmitter to the pitch preview of my theremin. It's not very easy to solder with since you need to complete a circuit at the tip with the solder, but it did live up to its promise of not burning a hole in my carpet. I put photos of the operation on my website.

Solder without burning holes in the carpet?

2004-05-29T20:13:00.000-07:00

I just saw this Cold Heat Soldering Tool on tv while watching the secret life of machines, and it reminded me of how I used to burn holes in carpet (on accident) in my younger years. I'm so glad I work somewhere with professional soldering setups.

Kernel.org got faster...

2004-05-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

I finally finished updating everything on The Linux Kernel Archives so that it now uses vsftpd instead of proftpd, a 2.6 linux kernel, a more modern distribution than Red Hat 7.2 and I fixed up various graphics on the web pages to be more "modern" versions. We went from serving 150mbps at a load average of 200 to well over 300mbps with a load average of about 20. *whew* glad that's done.

Can you take a bad photo at Yosemite?

2004-03-22T09:41:00.000-08:00

Well my trip to Yosemite National Park is coming up Wednesday and I'm just noticing that today's weather forcast shows a 40% chance of snow Friday and Saturday, and the park service says that the recent warm weather has caused a lot of snow to melt and make nice waterfalls earlier this year, so I'm looking forward to my first trip there. I'll be taking all my camera equipment, so with any luck my photo page will be bursting with new images of everything I see. I plan to take 2.5GB of compact flash with me.

What would the smell-o-scope say?

2004-03-12T22:24:00.000-08:00

My new Futurama, Vol. 3 (1999) dvd arrived today, though amazon originally shipped it on the 5th. It was worth the wait... This is a show that should never have been cancelled.