Mario Piperni dot Com» Stuff

Chart of the Day – The Age/Shit Continuum

mario piperni — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:14:29 +0000

Every once in a while, someone creates a graphical representation which captures one of life’s many complexities in the most simple and elegant of ways. Here is one of them. I don’t know who the author is except that it came to me via my buddy Gary DeSomber who always finds a way to send me at least one email a day that brings a smile to my face.

Beautiful.

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Newsmax and Me

mario piperni — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:50:05 +0000

Guess whose illustration made the May cover of a national magazine? Mine!

I’m quite sure there isn’t much Stephen Moore/Newsmax and I share in common as far as politics goes but hey, it’s not every day I get to do the cover art for a magazine – conservative or otherwise.

As a bonus, the people at Newsmax were a pleasure to work with which is always nice when working a deadline with a client.

Alright, going out now to purchase a few dozen copies of the mag.

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(The image of Michelle Obama is a Creative Commons licensed photograph by the US Department of Labor with rights to distribute and adapt the work. The image of Barack Obama is a Creative Commons photograph under the same terms.)

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Blog Stuff

mario piperni — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:21:01 +0000

The site is in the process of being moved over to a new (and dedicated!) server which means that sometime between now and the next 72 hours you might experience trouble accessing the site for a brief period. I’m told the transfer over should be seamless but I have my doubts. Fifteen years working as an IT systems analyst has taught me that few things in this biz are seamless. We shall see.

Happy Thursday.

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Blog Update

mario piperni — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:51:56 +0000

Taking one more day of R&R to help with the burnout I think I’m experiencing. Should be back on track Tuesday. I haven’t watched a news program or read a political story in the last three days. A quick browse this morning through a few of my favorite news sites indicates that I haven’t missed a thing so I’ll spend the rest of the day playing with the latest Photoshop release.

Later.

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Bad News. Good News.

mario piperni — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 17:18:41 +0000

Bad news:

Laptop crashed last night and in an instant my world became a dark, empty place. As I reflect on it, I’m not sure if the bad news is the loss of my beloved laptop or the fact that I would even think of writing that my world became dark and empty without a box of plastic and metal at my disposal. Both are equally bad and depressing, I think.

The truth is that being able to connect to the world in a flash has become an integral part of my life. We had a storm in the area a few weeks back and we lost power for about 3 hours. The first couple of hours were painfully long as I kept on hitting the light switch every few minutes as if my doing so would somehow return power quicker. I finally resigned myself to the sad truth that I had ~~little~~ no control over the gods of electricity (Thor? Edison?) so I made myself a cup of tea, picked up a book I’d been reading off and on for the last week and sat outside with the dog. Smart move. I made the conscience decision that the work projects I had going as well as this blog…the whole world, dammit!…could wait.

And so they did.

Good news:

My world won’t be dark and empty for long (it never really was…well, maybe a little.) I’m purchasing a new laptop. I was planning on getting one eventually so it’s just going to have to be sooner instead of later. The drag is getting the new one up to speed. I have a dozen must-have apps that need to get on it immediately and have to move about 200 GB of data from my backup drives to the new machine.

All that to say that I’ll probably be posting a little less than usual as I try to juggle work projects, the blog and setting up my new laptop in the next couple of days. And thank you to Joyce for the loaner I’m writing on right now. I owe you one.

Ok, so let’s see, if 1200 people each donate $1…

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Death Of The Encyclopaedia Britannica Print Version

mario piperni — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:02:17 +0000

My daughter, Cristina, with my set of Encyclopaedia Britannica

I found this to be a little sad.

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

I purchased my set back when I was a newlywed and still in university. Money was tight so it was not the smartest financial move I ever made but back in the days when the Internet was a fledgling newborn and the only source for information was books, having my gold embossed set of Britannica up on my bookcase was a comfort and a joy.

Through the years, my Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 100 pounds, followed me from apartment to apartment and house to house. And although I haven’t opened a volume of Britannica in the last 20 years, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get rid of them. I imagine they’ll stay with me for as long as I’m around in much the same way that my gazillion issues of National Geographic won’t ever be thrown out. I probably should but just can’t.

Time marches on and Britannica has ceased publishing the print version of its encyclopedia. What’s next? Kodak announcing that Kodachrome film will no longer be manufactured? Nah.

Which segues nicely into a musical interlude…

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The Opportunist and The Half-Empty Glass

mario piperni — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:51:48 +0000

Saw these words on Google+ and thought they were share worthy.

You might be able to extract a life lesson from those words. I certainly can. I think it goes like this: Sometimes, mario, just shut the hell up and do it.

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Then and Now

mario piperni — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 17:23:32 +0000

A friend forwarded the following as a reminder of the effect of 84 years on our world. It’s a 1928 auto repair mailer sent on a penny postcard.

I haven’t done the math but I’d guess that the prices in the mailer would equate to today’s prices, but how nice would it be to walk into your favorite saloon and tell your buddies that you got new brakes installed and the garage only charged $1.25 for labor.

Here are a few Model T facts:

The Model T was introduced on Oct. 1, 1908. It had a 20-horsepower, four-cylinder engine, reached a top speed of about 45 miles per hour, got about 13 to 21 miles per gallon of gasoline and weighed 1,200 pounds. It was the ninth of Henry Ford’s production cars.
It had a 10-gallon fuel tank and could run on kerosene, petrol, or ethanol, but it couldn’t drive uphill if the tank was low, because there was no fuel pump; people got around this design flaw by driving up hills in reverse.
More than 15,000,000 Model T’s were built and sold. A modest ceremony on May 26, 1927, marked the formal end of Model T production.
The car was introduced with a price tag of $850. The Model T later sold for as little as $260, without extras, because of production savings Henry Ford passed on to customers.
In 1914, Ford, with 13,000 employees, produced about 300,000 cars while 299 other companies with 66,350 employees produced about 280,000 vehicles.

I also dug up this pic of my grandad driving one of the few Model-Ts to be found in the town of Campobasso in southern Italy. As you can see, the man was way ahead of his time.

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Bloggers Pick Their Best

mario piperni — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:03:06 +0000

Batocchio over at Vagabond Scholar, carries on the great tradition of Al Weisel in asking bloggers, the big and not so big, to submit their favorite post of the year. The list is a great way to catch up on writing you missed, or more important, to get introduced to some talented political bloggers you never knew existed.

I was fortunate enough to have been asked to submit a piece and I did so with no real idea what to send in from the 1000 plus posts I wrote this year. In any case, check out the 2011 Roundup. You might very well discover a gem or two. There’s a big world of wonderful bloggers out there. And feel free to write up and link to your favorite blogs in the Comments section below.

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Ask Not For Whom The Dog Barks. It Barks For Thee.

mario piperni — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:20:49 +0000

I need to get out more. I had no idea there was a whole world of smartass doormats out there.

You can find them here and here and here.

(h/t: Gary DeSomber)

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