Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

On Sunday morning I left Denver for Sioux City Iowa. I drove northeast for a few hours then dropped the hammer through the flat flatness of Nebraska. I arrived sometime after midnight at the home of my elementary-school-era neighbors Tom and Noni. Tom directs an impressive tri-state air ambulance service and Noni hops from city-to-city [...]

Tessah’s friend Jenna gave us an impromptu tour of the Brady Arts district. As expected, it was cold at the center of the Universe. Oderkirk Trivia Tessah saves those little dessicant packets from shoeboxes in case she ever drops her cell phone in the toilet.

Ahoy St. Louis. I’m aiming for a late lunch @ Alex’s Pizza Palace in Rolla, MO. This message is brought to you by the General Packet Radio Service.

I had a nice leisurely morning today – waffles, some meditation, and a swim in the hotel’s pool. I like this pace. After a ham sandwich lunch, I listened to Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”1 as recommended by John Udell in an insightful piece about trying to sip from the firehose. The snow [...]

I coaxed my iron horse onto the road today at 5pm. Packing for a month of travel took a bit longer than I expected `:]` I plan to… Visit my sister and Jared in Tulsa. Check out a school and meet up with some folks in Denver. Potentially visit Sioux City and Omaha. Jet back [...]

My Dad ordered a Dell Mini 9 netbook recently. I took some photos of the unboxing. Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts: You know how IE plays that little “mouse click” sound when accessing a new web page? It’s not so bad except for the fact that it often happens a second or so ”’after”’ [...]

A group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology recently published the results of their survey of OpenMoko community members. I’ve graphed their data on survey respondents’ country of origin: I’ve thresholded the output at 1% i.e. countries whose respondents accounted for less than one percent of the total are omitted from the graph. This [...]

The webserver that is serving you this page isn’t running on a real physical machine. It’s running on a virtual Xen CPU in a Dallas, TX datacenter that is operated by RimuHosting, my VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. I’ve been really pleased with RimuHosting’s technical support, especially their response time. Here’s an example: 11:39PM EST [...]

I recently decided to rip all of my music CDs to a more reliable medium: my hard drive. One of the software tools I’m using to do this is called cdparanoia. It’s a solid little app from the venerable Xiph.org multimedia project with an entertaining but informative console interface. An excerpt from `cdparanoia(1)`: OUTPUT SMILIES [...]

If you’re in the mood for a really thought-provoking 20min talk on neuroscience, grab this ~70MB 480p version of Jeff Hawkins’ 2003 presentation at TED. In it, Hawkins describes a new theory of the brain which focuses on the predictive powers of the ”mammalian” brain’s neocortex. He contrasts the theory with the traditional input->processing->output model. [...]