Stefan Hayden

Hey. Mike Viola has a new album out. I’m pretty sure that’s the girl who played with Mike when we saw him open for Fountains Of Wayne in one of the best concerts ever. And hey Kelly Jones seems pretty awesome (myspace), so I just picked up her most recent album.

Bespin updated and they seem pretty excited with the project. I was excited with Bespin when I first heard about it but it has yet to really solve the problem I was hoping they would tackle. I really wanted a TinyMCE or FCKeditor replacement where I can just drop some JS files in my webroot and then plug Bespin in to textareas on forms. There has been a ticket to do that for a while and it seems like they have written it but didn’t seem to make it out this build.

Bespin is still young and has a lot of growing to do. Right now their focus is on developer tools and making Bespin very customizable. I’m sure this will give Bespin a solid foundation to move forward with.

I hope that they shift their focus from education developers how to customize to educating people who make webpages how to easily get Bespin up and running and why they would want to. Some easy things to do would be to offer a download of just the needed scripts to run and not a tar ball with python generators. Or even have a big download button instead of a small link that leads to a server generated index of files.

I always think jQuery is a great place to look. They put a lot of focus educating people how easy it is to use but also build what seems like a strong community of developers. Bespin is awesome and I think I just needs to better focus it’s marketing message.

The current numbers for the amount of oil leaking in the gulf before June 3rd have just been updated to up to 40,000 barrels a day. That’s a large number but I really think it’s hard to put in to perspective.

A good way to put that in context is to compare it to the amount of oil the USA uses a day. The US Energy Information Administration says the USA in 2009 used 18,686,000 barrels of oil a day (chart).

(18,686,000 / 24) / 60 = 12,976 barrels a minute

40,000 leaking barrels a day / 12,976 = 3.08 or 3 minutes and 4.8 seconds

So while that’s a lot of oil, it’s only a small fraction of the oil we use a day. Even over the whole 47 days between April 20th and June 6th only 2 hours and 25 minutes of oil were spilled.

I’m not saying that it’s not a catastrophic disaster but every day we pollute by several magnitudes more and it’s good to keep these things in perspective.

Awesome new mini-series with some of my favorite actors. sadly no rss feed.