Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Author: fish1964

  • Pleasant Afternoon at the DMV

    No, really.  I had to renew my license. I made an appointment online. It told me all the documentation I needed. I got a bar code emailed to me to print out and bring with.

    I showed up and the place looked fairly chaotic:

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    But I scanned my bar code and got a ticket. They said listen/look for your number. It was called in less than a minute. I went to window 13. He checked my documents quite thoroughly, then handed them back with another piece of paper and said go to window 26 to get your picture taken and then come back. I walked right up to window 26 and my picture was taken. I came back to 13 and waited about a minute while he helped someone else. Then he took my credit card payment, handed me a temporary license and told me the real one would be in the mail in about 2 weeks. I was there for 15 minutes.

    Much better than the Zootopia DMV…

     

  • Tree 2400706

    This is our tree. Well, it’s the tree right outside our building. NYC has a map of almost every tree in the five boroughs. That’s 678,674 trees. It’s fairly amazing.

    The most  common type is a London Planetree (13% of the total) but ours is a Ginkgo.

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  • Origami Risk – Best Place to Work

    This is just getting repetitive. Origami was named by Business Insurance as one of the best places in insurance to work. Again.

    So to recap:

    ‘nuf said…

  • Food and a Room

    Via smbc of course…

    This is one of those comics that I mostly mean to just be funny, but will be interpreted as a direct political statement.

  • Best Day of the Year

    OK, exaggeration. But we look forward to the Atlantic Antic every year. It is unofficially the oldest and largest street festival in New York City and it’s right in front of our place (we live on Atlantic in the Ex-Lax building).

     

    For me street fairs are largely about food, and the Atlantic Antic is better than other street fairs because this is a foody neighborhood. You can get the normal street fair stuff (nothing wrong with that) but also crazy awesome local stuff. There’s a Spanish church on Atlantic that shows up with crazy good food. I try to keep a running list of what I eat every year.

    This year I ate:

    There’s a local gumbo place that was serving gator and andouille sausage jambalaya, but I was too full to try it:

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    Of course, there was music and shopping and kids stuff and all that other stuff. I’m just too full to write about it…

  • Then & Now

    If you use Google Photos you have seen this, particularly if you have kids. Since Google can recognize faces, they have some sort of algorithm that tries to find a picture of your child X years ago doing something similar to a recent picture of them. So every once in a while you get a notification with a cute “Then & Now” combination picture.

    This is a pretty good example. If a human saw these two pictures separately, I’m not sure it would be clear that it’s the same kid. They are about seven years apart, with glasses and a bicycle helmet in the older picture. And the algorithm interpreted “climbing in a playground” and “sitting in fake dinosaur eggs at the zoo” as similar things. Which is a pretty fuzzy relationship for AI.

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    Makes a nice picture…

  • Ninja Squirrel

    Comedy Wildlife photo finalists via The Guardian. Click the link and check them all out…

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  • China, India and Everyone Else

    Via Our World in Data, A Map of the World Where the Sizes of Countries Are Determined by Population.

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    At first I thought Canada was just blocked by the map title, but no, it’s that tiny orange stripe. Russia is also quite small compared to its land size.

  • 28, Count ’em, 28 Trombones

    How can a 28 trombone version of Bohemian Rhapsody be anything but amazing?

    The thunderbolt and lightning section is around the 3 minute mark for those in a hurry…

  • Release the Dragon

    I guess I’m in a funky video phase. This is the SpaceX Dragon capsule being released from the International Space Station. It’s sped up and 4K so watch full screen. Nice lightning flashes towards the end…