Welcome to Jamaica, Have a Nice Day


Crane barges are a sign of how busy this port is. Most of the big ships that come in never even tie up to shore–there isn’t enough space. So they anchor in the middle of the Bay here and these crane barges come up and tie along side. Sometimes two or three of these will tie up next to each other, and they will offload the cargo from the ships into the barge’s hold or pass them along to smaller Pearl River freighters for trips into China. And of course, sometimes it runs in reverse. The barges and smaller ships actually tie up to the shore, speeding the whole process of unloading a ship that comes through Hong Kong. These cranes are easily 150 feet high, they just look smaller when I’m looking down from 430 feet.]]>

Podcasting Directory

Internet Radio Appliances one of the ideas was to create a customizable feed of content, such as local traffic, news, weather, etc based on your interests, delivered to your PenguinRadio when you woke up. Along those same lines comes podcasting, delivering podcasts of content to your Ipod every morning so you have something different to listen to on your way to work. I have to confess I am getting a bit tired of my library of music (700 songs) so I started playing with podcasting as a way to get fresher music. podcastdirectory.com is growing, slowly but surely. What I hope to do in the next few days is build not just a directory of podcasts, but of the actual shows they have produced, and then make that searchable through some database I create. XML is nice to pass data around, but it really isn’t the best database format out there (it’s not really a database format for that matter). Now it’s just a matter of parsing XML and OPML to MYSQL and moving forward from there into some search functions and classification capabilities. Ok, time for bed though. It’s 11:00 and, well I have work to do tomorrow on this…]]>

Where Video Games and Military Policy collide

The Synergy Summit is being put together by some friends of mine down in Florida as a meeting of the “entertainment and video game industry” with the “government and military community.” As simulation become a greater part of modern military training, it appears more and more that the services of entertainment and gamers are meeting the needs of the government. NATO is speaking there, and it should be a pretty interesting event, if I can just find the time to go.]]>