Disqus - Latest Comments for cthompsondotcom

Re: Poorly Drawn Lines – Poorly Drawn Lines: THE BOOK

Chris Thompson — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 19:53:14 -0000

Ain't no one forget to make a button of Tiny Hippo. Ain't no one.

Re: Poorly Drawn Lines – Poorly Drawn Lines: THE BOOK

Chris Thompson — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 16:28:36 -0000

You made buttons and didn't include Tiny Hippo? Inconceivable!

Re: Outfit of the Week: June 7, 2013

Chris Thompson — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 13:39:36 -0000

I realize that it's considered stylish by some, but I have a particular hatred for rolled jeans. What it says to me is "I do not know how to buy correctly sized pants."

The rest of the outfit works well, though I'm twenty years too old and eighty pounds too heavy to pull it off.

Re: Tie It Together: How Guys Can Improve Their Neckwear

Chris Thompson — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 10:20:08 -0000

The key for tie length is that the widest part of the tie, the two side points, should rest right at the top of the pants.

My height is all torso (I'm six foot tall but only have about a 29-30" inseam) which makes this a bit hard, even with long ties.

Because of that I only tie a four in hand. Any other knot simply takes up too much length out of the tie.

Re: Wahl: Father’s Day Grooming Gift Idea – and a Giveaway!

Chris Thompson — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 09:24:01 -0000

You didn't say they had to be real.

This is a no brainer. Don Draper.

Re: Reader Question: Too Young to Dress Up?

Chris Thompson — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:07:01 -0000

Am I the only person who thinks that "halfway to 18" means that he's 9?

Re: Guy Grooming: Hair Removal For Him

Chris Thompson — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:55:50 -0000

I look ridiculous with facial hair, whether it's full beard or goatee. I looked into laser removal on my face but decided against it.

Laser hair removal, I discovered, is not as effective on light colored hair. While the hair on top of my head is dark, my facial hair has always had lighter hairs, and at my age it's starting to get some salt and pepper gray.

There was a chance that even if I had multiple sessions of laser removal, I'd still have to shave because light colored hairs wouldn't go away. Not worth it.

Re: Kit-A-Day Giveaway: MakerBot Thing-O-Matic (#2 of 5)

Chris Thompson — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:16:11 -0000

Do Want. Hook me up.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s New iPhone 4S

Chris Thompson — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:34:22 -0000

There is no verizon version. There's one model that does both GSM sim cards for AT&T and international, and does CDMA for Verizon and Sprint (and a few CDMA carriers in Brazil)

It's not supposed to be carrier locked in GSM mode if your primary carrier is CDMA.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s New iPhone 4S

Chris Thompson — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:29:09 -0000

So, it kills a battery in 3 hours, but that's OK because most people leave it turned off most of the time to conserve battery life.

The fact that you can't do this with an iPhone 4S makes it an also-ran, despite, you know, everything else the phone does.

Duly noted.

So yes, I guess I am an Apple apologist.

I am extremely sorry that Apple didn't shoehorn a demonstrably inefficient first gen LTE chipset into the 4S which would decimate my battery life unless I disable the demonstrably inefficient first gen LTE chipset.

Glad I have you guys to turn to so I know which way is up.

Re: Everything You Need to Know About Apple’s New iPhone 4S

Chris Thompson — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:26:24 -0000

People don't read, and don't grasp the obvious.

4G doesn't work on the phones that have it now. Samsung 4G phone on LTE has a three hour battery life. Carriers don't have it in any big amount. There's no way that Apple was going to release LTE today.

So apart from LTE for a largely nonexistant network, what exactly is it you'd like them to add? A5 and the dual core graphics are a huge upgrade. The new camera is fantastic. HSPA+ 3.5G data speeds. Unconfirmed but reported doubling of the ram to a gig. And all of this at 8 hours talk time.

So it looks like an iPhone 4. Who cares?

Larger Screen? It's just a number, a half inch larger diagonal to 4" isn't going to change a damn thing. Your Android phone is 4"? Congratulations. Does it do that at 326 pixels per inch?

So, maybe Apple is my pimp too. I haven't got a damn clue what else they could have added.

Re: How RunKeeper Could Become the Facebook of Fitness

Chris Thompson — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:48:31 -0000

Runkeeper the site is great, I have a street team full of friends, but also friends of friends I wouldn't know otherwise. The great part is that they provide the same sort of social accountability as my close friends.

Runkeeper the iPhone app, however, got used exactly three times, and crashed three times. These were one mile WALKS on a flat track and it crashed about 3/4 of a mile through every single time, losing the walk data.

When I looked in the support forums the answer seemed to be "Yeah, it does that" because I have an iPhone 3GS.

Now I use Walkmeter/Runmeter/Bikemeter for tracking and then at the end of my walks I export the data in GPX and manually upload to runkeeper. Inefficient, but stable.

Maybe when apple releases the iPhone 4S and I upgrade I'll try again, but until then runkeeper's app is a no-go.

Re: 10 Things You Should Know About Game of Thrones (if You Haven’t Read the Books)

Chris Thompson — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:01:26 -0000

Here's a helpful #11 for you.

11) Never, ever, assume that just because someone is a "main character" they can't be killed. Martin rather enjoys killing off characters that would be "safe" in any other book, and sometimes he does it in groups. Anyone who appears on screen can be killed AT ANY TIME.

Re: elastic threads

Chris Thompson — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:05:25 -0000

I have no idea how I missed that. I turned it on and it acts exactly as I wanted. Fantastic, thanks a ton.

Re: Buddhism versus creative visualization

Chris Thompson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:18:20 -0000

I wasn't sure if you wanted us to comment here or on the 2008 entry, so I'll comment here to keep it with the bulk of the content.

Your points are interesting, but each of them are ever so slightly misinformed.

The Dalai Lama is, as the Pope is to Catholics, the highest holy man to the TIBETAN Buddhists. But equating Tibetan Buddhism to all Buddhism is like equating fundamentalist southern baptists to all Christians.

Buddhism, in it's original form, makes no claims as to the nature of the afterlife, nor anything "supernatural". The closest organized form of Buddhism to this today is the Theravada school.

As the original teachings of Gautama Siddhartha spread out from their source, they became intermingled with the cultures they overtook.Tibetan Buddhism assimilated the reincarnation religion of the tibetans. No other school of Buddhist thought, to my knowledge, proclaims any belief in reincarnation. I've found that most Buddhist schools of thought take the original core tenets as stated by the Buddha and wrap them in some sort of dogma I can't fully agree with.

Also, your description of desire being the source of suffering is technically correct, but wholly misses the nuance that makes it sensible.

The second noble truth says that suffering stems from X. Translation is a tricky business, so there are several words used for X. You use desire. I prefer Attachment. Both are right, but there is a subtle difference.

I am not a fan of Koans, those enigmatic little sayings from zen buddhism that make no logical sense, but are supposed to make you think. (What's the sound of one hand clapping?).

But one koan in particular really cemented for me what the Second Truth means.

A monk asked Tozan, "How can we escape the cold and heat?" Tozan replied, "Why not go where there is no cold and heat?" "Is there such a place?" the monk asked. Tozan commented, "When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through."

Yes, gibberish. But it was an effective tool in helping me work through what it all meant.

If you're cold, standing outside in the snow storm, it's not the cold that's making you suffer, it's your attachment to it. You can have a desire to be warm, that's logical, and doesn't make you suffer.

But Standing there obsessing "Oh God I'm cold. So Cold, I wish I was inside. This is ridiculous, why am I out here in this blizzard when I could be warm inside?" is the suffering. It doesn't accomplish anything towards making you warmer, it just puts your mind in a "suffering state". If you just accept that you're cold, shiver if you need to, stamp your feet and breathe into your hands, but remain calm and centered, you are cold, but not suffering. I've tried it. By remaining centered and tranquil, the cold is infinitely more bearable.

For the record, I do not consider myself a Buddhist. Like you, I find the term has connotations of supernatural and dogmatic beliefs. I try to use the concepts of the original teachings of the Buddha in my life, combined with some Zen meditation practices.

I would recommend a book called "Buddhism Without Beliefs" by Stephen Batchelor. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... )

His approach is to take the original teachings of Gautama Siddhartha and present them in purely secular terms. The Buddha was not, and is not, a God. He was a man who lived, figured out something important, taught it to people, then died. It's a fantastic book that seriously helps offset the supernatural nature of "Organized" Buddhism.

Re: OpenID Support, Please

Chris Thompson — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:46:21 -0000

I signed up for Disqus today to comment on a blog. My very first thought was "Why doesn't this have OpenID?" This a critical fail.

Re: Update: The Cloud Computing Bill of Rights

Chris Thompson — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:18:06 -0000

"I think the customer can expect only that laws will remain within the constitutional (or doctrinal) bounds of their particular government, and that government retains the right to create law as it deems necessary within those parameters."

This seems wildly naïve. The current regime in the US has systematically circumvented, superseded, and otherwise navigated around core constitutional rights.

The recent debacle surrounding Warrantless Wiretaps alone should give pause. And while "Freedom of Privacy" is not a guaranteed constitutional right, it was a nearly as strong legal precedent.

It doesn't take a wild frothing dissident to be uncomfortable with the sticking power of any "constitutional (or doctrinal) bounds" as they apply to any cloud server located on US soil.

Has anyone seen my Habeas Corpus? I swear I just had it.