snow driving

so we are getting a little snow, which turns my 1 hour commute into a 1.5 hour commute. [each way]. today, I was driving through a small town and some suzuki sidekick or something very similar was driving about 5 car lenghts in front of me in the fast lane. I was in the slow lane (imagine that). there were two lanes going south bound, and two lanes going north bound. we were going about 40 mph and no divider to keep us out of oncoming traffic. so this guy just locks up his tires, never lets ups, and skids at about a 30deg angle into oncoming traffic. a truck (chevy tahoe?) in the oncoming fast lane had to pull into our fast lane to get around him. VERY CLOSE to a headon collision. this jerk ends up in ditch on the other side of the road.

Things we can all learn from this.
1) Be prepared. see Studs article
2) leave plenty of room. had I been behind him I would have got hit head on.
3) if your in a slide, use a little common sense. I know not everyone has taken a mechanical engineering class so let me clue you in. you only have so much friction. if you want to waste it all in a skid, be my guest, but a better thing to do is let up a bit on the brakes so you are no longer skidding, and use what little traction you have to STEAR YOUR VEHICLE. luck, experience, and common sense all play a part in how much stopping you will need and how much stearing you will need, but next time you find yourself in a skid into oncomming traffic think about it.

run jen run

the blog run jen run (notice the all lower case like another jen I know) had a great piece on no adjustment necessary

cow tipping

I went on over to snopes.com with high hopes that I could prove or disprove the legend of cow tipping. Unfortunatly its either a bad night for searching, or they just don't have the info. I stopped by wikipedia.org and looked at their Cow Tipping They seem to be of the mindsent that cow tipping is indeed urban legend. do you guys think cow tipping is for real or not? lets get some first hand accounts, or maybe even, "i once had this friend..." comments.

accidents

have you ever heard it said that '80% of car accidents happen less than 5 miles from home' or some other rediculous claim? well it may not be all wrong. check out what chase has to say about it HERE

Christmas gifts!

post your best and or worst christmas gift. if you don't have a worst christmas gift for this year post your worst from years past.

christmas stockings

without using the internet... why is it tradition to put an orange in the toe of the christmas stockings?

art

today we stopped at the museum. I asked the security guard if I could take a few snapshots and they said it was fine as long as I didn't use a flash. so, I got the following. my question to you nerds is WHAT IS THE WHITE THING WITH 2 RED STIPES? you see, all of us are convinced we know what it is and it is two VERY different things so the only way to settle this is the good ol' democratic way. highest vote wins. after I get a few guesses i'll post what we think it is. I don't want to bias the responses upfront.

Time consuming but freaking funny

You know all those stupid Nigerian email hoaxes flying around inboxes everywhere? This guy, Brad, decided to have a little fun with them.

Sewing machines

listen up nerds. my mother-in-law is making another dress for my wife. the dresses come out AWESOME. however, since she last sewed for my wife she has sold her sewing machine and will be purchasing a new one for this project. I know some of you sew (admit it kev) so give me a rundown on whats good, and whats not, and what I can get in probably the sub $500 (maybe sub 300$) range. thanks.

title - monster

i'm taking a snapshot of that right now for archival puposes.
that is one huge title.
i'm assuming sarah granted us that! (based on the use of YAY)


we all use to be students together but have since graduated [most of us] and moved on in life. the posting group is comprised of an Electrical Engineer (Professinal engineer certified), a Computer Engineer (NOT certified), a chemist that is about a year away from PhD certification, a business/computer expert (BS), a mechanical engineering student 4'th year(projected BSME), a biologist that just graduated with her MASTERS (yay), and even a professional librarian turned web developer!(AS in graphics arts) thus the term 'nerdy tales'. Repeat readers that don't always post include, A teacher, a professional assistant, and of course all the nerds that write. Feel Free to inject a comment either ontopic or off as it makes it lots of fun! We especially like insightful comments, witty comments, and comments that prove our assumptions were/are way off.

Google revisited

Since I know that you all love Google as I do, I thought you might like the Google Doodles:
This Christmas
Last Christmas
The one before that
The one before that one

Athens Olympics
Salt Lake Olympics
Sydney Olympics

4th of July
Aliens

cell choices

so jen and I are thinking of getting cell phones. KEY WORD THINKING..... we are leanging towards att, but who knows. what cell service do all your guys use or IF you were to get a cell phone who do you think you would go with so if I get free M2M (mobile to mobile) I want to know who I could talk to unsafely when I should be driving.

Fun with geography

Fun, fun, fun! Test your geography skills (I sincerely hope yours are better than mine...).

warioInc

I got jen a new game (GBA) for christmas.. well, kinda new, no one had it in the store so we saved 5$ and got it for 25$ at a used shop. the guy was really nice and I'd be surprised if he wasn't the owner. just the right amount of interaction with the customer without being 'pushy' or 'overwhealming', so I'd definatly go back.

the game we got? Wario Ware, INC. yeah.. I think its been out for about 1.5 years now, but it seems like it should be fun. a nearly complete guide can be found HERE.

bomberman

free networkable bomberman

Google sets

have you nerds check out Google Sets yet? the idea, or best I can figure anyway.. is to give it a few things and see what it predicts will be in the set.
Car, Motor home, Motorcyle results in a PIRATE SHIP
Plastic, wood, metal, glass results in TOILETRIES
Visa, Mastercard, Discover results in YARDAGE MARKERS

those all make pretty good sense to me. whats the best you guys can find?

Don't Bid on Old Food

they let it rot in a safe... just hilarious!
truffle goes home

Cat Scan

So, to follow up on Jen's radiation post... I got more x-rays today and bought a copy of my cat scan that was done about 2 months ago... it cost $5 and came with the same software the radiologists use :)... here are a couple of snap shots (oh and keith you can see the screws are poking in my body... all but one of the screws went into the vertebral body. One did not, and a couple went through the respective verterbral body.







And a cool animation on spinal surgery :)
Cool surgery animation

abusive car

My car has taken so much abuse and it only has 92,000 miles on it so far. by abuse I mean the verbal kind, not the dented kind. first dan insulted it by citing some obscure reference to the golf as being 'the gayest car on the road'. now while not the most politically correct, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. now It seems I got stuck on a thread on bad drivers on geek.com and someone said according to NPR the jetta (basically the same as the golf in my book) is the most recless vehicle on the road.

Dave!! (dice): nice to see you check into the blog! you gotta email me and let me know what your doing for christmas!

blog whats due

over on bearcatenglish it shows a good example of a teacher blogging to the students what is due and expected. do you guys think that is a good use of technology or is that expecting too much.
cons:
*not all students have internet, so its unfair
*teacher could be publicly scrutinized for the method used
*what if teacher doesn't update, does that mean what was said in class is not due?

pros:
*parents know FOR SURE what was assigned and how to direct the children
*all students get the same expectations, no 'special assigments'
*students cant say they lost the assignment
*teacher isn't called at night to be asked what the assigmnet is
*teaches use of modern technology as well as the subject at hand

is it good or not?

lightweight validation: google style

go to labs.google.com and choose Google Suggest, which is still in beta.

i thought it was an rpc call.
turns out it's a bit more: read allinthehead.com's take on it.

google labs is cooking up some pretty cool stuff.
check out the auto complete 'search' tool they are working on.
very fast, very lightweight, very cool.

drivers?

so What kinda drivers are you guys anyway? I myself use to drive exclusively in the right lane (except for lane changes) but after 80,000 miles of commuting to work I find myself in the left lane much more than the right. where do you guys drive?

Patents

not as cool as ibm's (i think it was them?) old site where you could look up all patents, but perhaps cooler in its own way.
fresh patents. basically watch new stuff just before it gets approved or denied. kinda cool, i think i'll have to add it to my stuff that i am supposed to read but sometimes don't get to (i have about 70 table's of contents in my e-mail that i should read right now).
now can someone explain rss to me?

from k2h: check out xml.com RSS

HyperPhysics

slow brain day... so i was downstairs staring through the microscope trying to reconcile some things about polarized light for specific colors since the substrate i used seemed to circularly polarize the light and i was trying to figure out how i could use the analyzer to determine the structure of my sample. ahh..ya don't ask me to explain.

anyway i got stuck thinking too hard (late school board meeting last night impeeds thinking) so i popped on over to hyperphysics (found via google since web address is too long to remember) to get my energies and wavelengths straightened out. and what a cool chart i found (i got distracted by all the cool stuff on the site after i answered my questions). it is a chart on radiation and the body, that's pretty cool to refer to for those times you just can't remember if those x-ray eyes from a super hero are supposed to hurt someone =).

clik the nerd

I noticed that Jen did this and I wondered how many of the rest of you were in the dark on clicking Nerdy Tales? If you are reading the comments on a post if you scroll to the top of the page and click on the header (Nerdy Tales) it will bring you back to the main page.

Made in China

Everyone is complaining about the outsource to china innitiateves. so to show that not EVERYTHING that comes from china is crap how about everyone post the first thing they come across that says made in china on it and after awhile we can see if it is crap or not. (it has to say MADE IN CHINA on it, usually on the back)

i'll get things started. I have a Casio FX-115MS $15 calculator. I actually like it better than my 150$ HP calc (the HP-48G probably costs $99 now ,but who knows). the reason is that its cheep, and simple. to do more complex calculations I just use my computer.


jen's made in china item (not crap at all, it is my work buddy)

Meteor Shower

Theres suppose to be a good meteor shower tonight. 60-120 an hour during the peak time. this is called the Geminids meteor shower. Last years show was tarnished by the crappy moon, but this year it is setting earlier or something so bring on the burining rock! check out msncb.com that seems to be a straight rip off from space.com

k2h fixed the title

Poor guy, must have had a splitting headache...

segway (mild curse)

first off i'll explain the mild curse... the only encounter with segways i've had is with one exceptionally stupid lady that 1. ran into the table that i was eating at outside (yes into the table with the velocity increasing rather than decreasing) 2. rammed into the door when she came to 'fix' a problem with the computer in a classroom. so my only experience with the things consitutes needing and airbag.

anyways, i was looking at some of the pictures on somethingawful.com and came across some that were fake games.
this then reminded me about the guy who took one from washington to massachusets. now that's a good use of technology!

photoshop contests

photoshop contests rule! check out somethingawful.com
heres a sample

$1 car wash

theres a place on my way into work that is a doityourself car wash for $1.00. that buys you 4 minutes of time. options are the sprayer that includes at least 3 kinds of soaps, wax, rinse solution, water rinse, and then theres the brush scrubber option. so you can mix and match anyway you want for 4 minutes.

with one person my results were mediocre, but since I don't wash my car but once every few months I did notice an improvement. If there had been another person to run the brush while I ran the sprayer (or vice versa) the results would have most likely been more impresive.

This whole experience got me thinking that next time I need a little extra cash i'm going to put a sign out in front of the doityourself car wash and offer to wash peoples cars. maybe do it for 2$. 1$ goes to quarters, and 1$ proffit. if you worked non stop for an hour that would be a proffit of $15, assuming you could get a line of cars. now that may not sound like much but if kev and I put on a good show (like we always do when we do stuff like this) i'm sure the tips could tripple our takehome.

who wants to help me make $50 in an hour?!! any takers?

naked sandunes

one of my coworkers spent the t-day holiday in the dessert like he usaully does but this time he was 'lucky' enough to hook up with a similarly minded person and get naked. now he actually had proof of such a thing and volunteered a website with photos that he had taken. being a kind soul I helped him clean his cache/history and memory of this happenins since the girl no longer returns his email. this guys like 50 years old so today I made the comment "you must have meet elvis!" and he said.. "na.. but my sister was in a movie with him" so when he remembers what the name is (he's old, it may be a while) I'll have to watch it.

Rand Corp haox

remember kev posted awhile ago that submarine exchibit was touched up to look like a computer? seems common people arn't the only ones to fall for it. check it out on geek.com Sun microsystems CEO fell for it. kev was way ahead of the curve on reporting this to us. way to go. crap. I thought it was kev. now I can't find the blog entry. who found this awhile ago?

ok.. ok. i'm calmed down. i found it here on our very own nerdy tails and it was kev.

free cms

I desire a free/open source jump starts to a strong website, mostly php based.
content management systesm.

check out cmsmatrix.org for some ones in development and for comparisons.
then visit opensourcecms.com for some live demos.

I'm currently harbering a little rebel project and tryhing to see what i can cook up for FREE on my own time that runs in open source (for distrobution reasons, and largely becuase of dan's influence) so we can re-program our website into something remotely mangaged by the in house users/audience and the core may be useful to churces/ other conferences.

i've liked mambo, cpg-nuke, phpwcms, typo3, xoops.
anyone have any suggestions or war stories?

i really need to manage files, have security for those files and usergroups with varied permissions. a calander that can filter based on context (public or private, department, ect) and web-managed dynamic forms if possible (a huge problem, people wanting info but not wanting to manage email, dynamic webforms would be nice so we can just scrape it outta a database)
a forum would be nice with layers and users, but is not essential for .1 release.

OUT OF THEIR MINDS

if dans posting we know things have gotten lax. contrary to popular belief I actually DO work and have been busy. thats my excuse. the other excuse is that its just a plane old slow news day! I've got nothing much to say.

if you guys ever see farscape episode 2-09 OUT OF THEIR MINDS jen and I got a big hit out of the cross gender plot. yeah.. yeah.. call me a sick-o but it was funny. a full review here, but it lacks the humor of some of the scenes. you'd have to see it to appreciate they always say....

off to the QNX RTOS class/sales pitch.

3D Projection for GPS data

Okay, I haven't been too active on the blog but I came across this really fun software that creates 3D projections from GPS data, so take your latest epic adventure track and look at it on a 3d projection. It's a little slow and quirky but definately worth burning a few hours.

http://www.gpstrailmaps.com/map3d/index.html

Daniel

Domestic Engineer

heres a small insight into what its like to have an adventure as a domestic engineer (housewife). I think I have a bit more respect now.

"I didn't pay this on time because my husband chased me around the house with a meat cleaver and tried to cut off my head."
Before I could add, "No, really, I just didn't have the money," I heard the rattle of keys typing and then the bill collector said to himself, obviously bored,
"So, I'll just put that under....medical."

cat digging

whats the best thing your kitty has ever dug up? jens mom had denise bring in a snake and play with it in the toilet (thats a fun surprise). our kitty brought in a woodpecker and let it go in the master bedroom at 6:30am. nothing like waking up to a bird flying through your hair. our kitty also brings mice in from OUTSIDE. you'd think it be the other way around but its not. today I talked with a guy from work that said his cat dug a 'floater' our of the toilet!

Congrats to Janell

Hurrah!! Janell passed and I deem her nerd of the year!

boulder....

now jen, why can't you act a little more crazy, act like your origins!
the source will remain nameless less a certain individual be persecuted.

The University of Maryland claimed to have mustered no less than 553 naked students to streak three miles one evening in March 1974. This beats the record claimed by the University of South Carolina of 508 a few nights earlier. These efforts, however, are paltry compared with the 1,000 claimed by the students at Athens, Georgia, or the 1,200 claimed in Boulder, Colorado ("Economist", March 16, 1974)

Hoodia

Hoodia i think is a diet pill made from a cactus.
any takers?
it's saying there are no side effects - which makes me think of eating glass marbles. also a natural substance that would produce no side effects. It may be technically true, but what if a marble were to crack?

Just wanted to say...

Rabbit rabbit!

firefox refresh: on windows

not sure how this works on other platforms, by my windows firefox flavor does not tend to do a full refresh when i hit f5 or [refresh icon].
upon reading about this annoyance, SHIFT+[refresh icon]Click grabs the page from the server, not the cache during the refresh. odd. i though that was the pupose of refresh.
at least now i can see my posts!

ye olde home computer

Picture from 1954 Popular Mechanics' Magazine....

Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

This was sent by a coworker via email, so I sent him a link to the discussion on snopes.com and he said 'well done watson, i expected as much'.
google comes through again.

Free Credit Check--Really

Finally, there is an annual free credit check that doesn't involve signing up for a service temporarily or something. Lucky to be in the west this time since we are first on the list to get the service.

Go to http:///www.annualcreditreport.com it doesn't like people to go there via a link so you'll just have to type it in with your little fingers =).

symbiasm

A corporate email about our staff visioning day concluded that "Our goal is to have symbiasm." - and yes, the word was bolded in the email.

i replied to the author and asked:
Can you define symbiasm?
www.dictionary.com is not sure what it means, and tries to improve the spelling by converting it to symbolism.

this was the response:
A new word that a great person coined about a year ago.
Symbiasm is the miracle that happens when more that one entity is working in such harmony that all entities are somewhat dependant and strenthened by the working relationship. The root work comes from the word symbiotic.
There you have it.
By the way, you and -your boss- are a great example of symbiasm.

so, what do you guys think. Are we allowed to just coin buzz words?

flying free

at the winnemucca flying j and there is free wireless
hello to all you peoples up there

motorcycle signaling

on the way to work I saw a motorcycle rider that didn't quite know what to do. He made a left hand turn by signalling with his RIGHT hand and pointed right. half way through the turn he changed to signalling with his left hand, but instead of pointing left he pointed up (the right turn signal). COME ONE PEOPLE. get it together! I know its only 25degF outside, but thats no excuse.

snow shoes?

to those in the know (those in I 'da ho (like u the ho)) am i packing my claws on a deck (snowshoes) or not?

nonModern fire.

I read about a home modified knife which talked about a firepiston in the survival kit. in reading about old ways of making fire here, i learned about the fire piston.

i see this piston as having many inturesting properties. many being it's simplisic and roboust design, not to be outdone by the fact it actually makes fire.
i smell a new project coming on.

surgical tubing

heres my crappy info on surgical tubing. I really don't know where to get it but heres some ideas i've scrapped off the net

*Archery/hunting shops carry a black rubber tubing used with peep sights. Often you can even find this in the archery section in Walm-mart. It works just as good as surgical tubing.
* Dive shop
* aquarium air hose?
* Home depot, plumbing section?
* bungee launching gliders
* pharmacy
*tubing from doityourself
*I use 3/8" latex tubing from Lowes Hardware
* Many marine fishing supply stores sell the rubber bungie
****Walgreens has it as does any surgical supply house...

Related projects
*ENGR 162 project
*Soak the Teach
* some kinda launcher
tips: I use 4 strands of latex surgical tubing, 3/16" inner diameter with a wall thickness of 3/32". I have found that using many strands of small-size tubing works better than using a few strands of large-size tubing. Apparently the thinner tubing contracts faster when it is stretched and released, so the bolts come off the rails faster. When I switched from two strands of 3/8" tubing to three strands of 3/16", I added about 12 yards to my range. I added a fourth strand later just for more range.
* funelator
* surgical tubing as a paintball paint grenade

bring games

everyone traveling for Turkey day needs to bring games! or bring something that you wanna do. anyone have any car racing games to bring?
types of games to bring:
Card
Board
Computer
outdoor (gps? snowshow?)

maybe I should rephrase this to bring an activity.
I will be bringing
2 laptops
snowshoes
gps
comealong for dans slingshot (if i remember to buy it)

armagetron

armagetron seems to be a decent opensource multiplayer game. seems simple (tron like) but actually does have some tactic to it. I propose we play this crappy game at thanksiving as we will all be of equal skill and all crappy computers MAY be able to render it? not sure....

Welcome Dave

just a quick hello to dave who was actually finally able to click on the link and join us over here at nerdy tales. hopefully he can find time between classes and his potential girlfriend to say hello back every now and again =).

java game

I was looking a tyran over on sourceforge. very cool. a nice little RPG that fits in your browser. it even has the ability to SAVE. i played for awhile but I suck at it... plus I don't have the patience. so I'm continuing my quest to find a game I don't suck at and one that doesnt require patience.. maybe i'll find pong.

secure tunnel

This talks about how to setup a secure tunnel and use putty. someday I might have a use for this.... until then its fun to read about

GhostZilla

GhostZilla WAS a program that allowed you to surf the net from inside outlook, word, excel and what not so that it gave the illusion of actually working. I've never used it, nor have the need to (there are very simple ways to setup this up with tools already in windows) but I find it amusing that the author printed a RETRACTION for his work! he's ashamed, or at least thats my interpretation any way. the ironic thing is even though its retracted it goings open source.. so now you see it, now you don't, now every one sees it. hmm.....

google scholar

google scholar (beta) is a search engine targeted at finding academic information. now when I cheat on a paper i'll have reputable sources. I did a search for my last name, thinking someone wrote a paper, but acording to google scholar she did not =(. instead I found a Ms. Michelena with my last name that is affected by Mitochondrial disorder. I wonder what that is? I hope its not to bad, and if it is I hope its not genetic. if your otherwise inept... here is a link to the google scholar faq....

legal threats

check out pirate bay legal threats. just linking to them is probably gonna get nerdytails blown up but them theres some good reading.... =)

Muahahahaha... or not

Okay, so quite possibly you all have seen this before, but I hadn't, and it made me laugh, so there you go: the Evil Overlord List

tank milage

I have a 2000 VW TDI Golf (4-door, diesel). The tahnk is rated for about 14.7gallons. and posted milage is 45-49mpg.

There is a small switch inside the nozzle where you fill the gas tank. if you push the switch it lets air out of the tank and you can fit more in. with this method I have been able to fit almost an additional 2 gallons. I average around 48-49mpg and my current record is around 730miles on a single tank. I will probably break that record on the way home tonight (that, or i'll be walking)

so how does your vehicle do? whats your MPG and total tank distance?

Thanksgiving stuff

Okay, so I know you boys have a separate post regarding what you want to do for this years project (and oh, just a reminder, last year you beat the stuffing out of a recliner, among other things), but I'd like to talk logistics. When do y'all expect to arrive and depart? Any thoughts regarding food? Kaleb and Tammie Knauff (formerly Tammie Hood) and Tammie's mom are probably coming for Thanksgiving dinner itself (and Tammie wants to do the turkey, to which I give my glad blessing). I'm thinking that we'll probably go fairly low-key again but wondering if anyone has any thoughts they'd like to mention.

who killed the sidebar

who killed the sidebar? did one of you morons delete it?

hack da hack

I can't believe the programmers among us don't step up to the plate, instead you gotta let an EE do your dirty work.. firgures.

so I"ve incorporated my first hack over on k2h. I added the TIME to the recent posts in the form Date-HourMin

a tad ugly, but it gets the info across. maybe if I care later I'll do a quick function to limit the string length so some lines arn't longer than others and if the string is longer than what can be shown I'll replace the last 2 characters with .. or something. w3Schools.com was a good reference. you guys want me to hack this or you guys gonna step up and do it right?

Kmart @ $110

Did you guys see that kmart (Kmrt) is now trading at over 110$?!!! I could have sworn a year ago they got delisted cause they were at 25cents or something. I also thought they traded under KM. now either i"m crazy, or losing it, or both, but I'm really confused. when you look at the history of Kmrt it never shows it below like 8$. WHAT HAPPENED? (and wheres my 1000% return when I need it)

trailers...

How small is your trailer? it seems that around here if your trailer is 'small' enough it doesn't have to be registered. It probalby has something to do with if you can see the tail lights on the vehicle or not. does anyone know the geometry required to get away with not having to license it? You (or i should say I) see this alot on construction vehicles that are towing a generator, cement mixer, or barby house.

thanksgiving project

the following is a proposal for our anual thanksgiving project. I'll recap on the projects so far:
*water rocket launcher
*water rocket with deployable chute that marginally worked (kev)
*? it seems I can't think of a third thing

proposal:
how about we dig up a starter and a 12V battery and make some kind of motorized go-cart / scooter thinggy. somone at work said a starter may be capable of 40mph so I'll bring my motorcycle helmet. if we got real fancy we could build a variable pulse width controller and run it through a huge FET (or bunch of transistors) for speed control.

kev, you stripped the starter off of the beater when you gave it to the junkyard right? =)

picking up pennies

for those who don't believe in picking up pennies (which is none of the current readers probably) check out this story about cashing in pennies.

then check out the coinstar faq's to find out that they charge 8.8% (they note that this means about 9 cents for every dollar for those who are incapable of understanding percentages, which makes you wonder how these people tip at resturaunts). so for all this man's work of picking up 3.5 tons of pennies over his lifetime, coinstar made $922.25.

so which is better, picking up pennies or finding a business where people will pick them up for you and then you get a cut of the profits?

*extra *extra

read all about it. I changed the comments history to 15, but its only showing 10 for some reason.. I think that was within the range of the sick ones request.

xor pop quiz

heres a little something to get your nerd minds cranking..
The following is the truth table for a 2-input XOR gate where x and y are inputs, f is the function output
xy f
00 0
01 1
10 1
11 0

Question: What is the truth table for a 3-input XOR gate? and no cheating in a book or using the net.. give me YOUR answer.

you want fries with that?

I recently got an award at work, the 150$ night on the town, you guys might of read about that earlier, but jen and I are starting to spend the money on various things. the first thing was the incredibles. so that set us back about 20$. tonight i'm hungry and jen aint home, so that means I get pizza. thats about all i 'cook'. I called up the local take and bake pizza shop, pappa murphy's, and order me up one family size olive and mushroom pizza. with the coupon that comes to 9$. since it is a food 'entertainment' expense I think this will fall under my 150$ night on the town for when I turn all my receipts in. so its paid for. I called and ordered:

them: you want a drink with that?
me: no
them: you want bread sticks?
me: no
them: you want a drink with that?
me: uhhh.. no

so after we got it all straight that all i wanted was my pizza they said it would be ready for pickup in 15 minutes. so I drive over.

I go to the cashier and say i'm here for a family size mushroom and olive. so she starts to take my order down. I was looking all over for one wiht my name on it (I gave that when I called in) but didn't see it. so then somone says.. 'oh.. he just called'.

cashier: you want breadsticks with that?
me: no
cashier: you want a drink with that?:
me: no
cashier: ok.. you total is 8.99$, do you want anything else?
me: no, JUST THE PIZZA.

wow, I wonder how much stuff they slip in? does ANYONE actually not know what they want? i'm thinkin dan would fall for this.

SG-1 Season 8

SG-1 Season 8 TOTALLY SUX. I am posting this here (as to not tarnish the image of k2h) in the hopes that one of the producers from stargate will actually see the folly of their ways and revert back to the ideals and scenaries of the previous seasons. things wrong:
*jack now leads the SGC. he is the best comic releif so why limit his role?
*Teal'C has hair, and is now acting more human. the strength of his character was in his formal, solid methodology. just like data in star trek. you could always count on a known response. now I dunno what to think about him.
*flashbacks, I've seen them throughout the shows, this doesn't necessarily talk about season 8, but STOP DOING FLASHBACK EPISODES. I hate watching an episode just to have 90% of the content come from something I've already seen. you don't even use a different camera angle or something, its STRAIGHT COPY. what, did the actors go on vacation? how many episodes do you guys make around 20 a year? so thats 2 weeks an episode. was somoene gone a month? CUT THAT OUT, and give us origional stuff.

Nudity

so there was the whole thing about the super bowl "special" which i thought was kinda funny. perhaps i wouldn't have in the past, but i do now. personally i think balancing it by showing the male streaker would have been even funnier.
anyways, i listened to "wait, wait... don't tell me" this sunday, as i usually do, to get my laughs in.
there was a rather funny mocking of these airport scanners they have in the UK now. apparently, they show people pretty well nude. the wait, wait people said that could be an ugly job, look at the people traveling--they aren't so pretty in general.
so people are mad about this nudity and others say its better than hand search.
i'm not fond of showing my body parts but this would certainly go a long way in preventing some weapons than metal detectors. so far, hijackers haven't needed to be smart about using non-detectable weapons, but i suppose they could get smart eventually.
i guess they aren't going deploy this in the US until they find a way to "mask" sensitive body areas.... what in the world? don't men typically hide guns in the groin when they are really looking to hid things? and don't women hide things in their bras? ya masking is going to improve security.
would i voluntarily go through one of these things? probably not. if it was that or hand search, i'd probably go for the scan. unless i travelled a great deal, then i'd start to worry about my lifetime x-ray exposure.

Baby Carrot Hoax

someone told me awhile ago that some 'baby carrot' manufacture got in trouble for wittling down normal carrots and selling them as baby carrots? jen, was that you? the reason I remembered this is one of my coworkers came in today with 2 huge carrots and told me that big carrots were only 70cents a pound and baby carrots were $1.50 a pound so he bought the big ones (and then promply threw the big end of one away cause his mouth wasnt big enough)

chronicles of riddick

So have any of you losers seen chronicles of riddick yet? its pitch black part 2. actually pretty good but since the first one was more origional I think it was better. part 2 has more action and was well done but the story just didn't jump out like me like the first one did. in pitch black if you look real close it seems that they changed the story in post production. after you watch the ending a few times just sit back and think of how many ways you could string those shots together and make it into a completely different film. first time was cool, second time was ok. third time I saw it I tore it to pieces, so now i guesse i'll have to watch chronicles of riddick as many times so I can pick it apart as well. everyone would probably like it except for jen, alodia, dan, and possible janell.. welp.. ok.. so I know kev and I will like it =)

on that note, if the rest of you never post to nerdy tails I'm gonna rename it to chronnicles of keith. don't even PRETEND that you losers actually work through lunch! dan: since your in a corporate enviroment like me I know your encouraged to take a real lunch and do something different (to ease your large mind) so take a second and clue me in on how good/bad something is!

burn my fingers, cold in the middle

Jen made these awesome burritos this weekend. they have sweet-potatoes mixed in with the beans. sounds disgusting right? well, its actually very tasty. the sweet potato tasts alot like cheese (and kinda looks like it too).

so in keeping with my cheep tradition, I took leftovers to work today, the leftovers where one of the burittos. this time instead of putting left overs in the fridge, jen put them in the freezer. so now I sit here eating my burrito that has been totally analyated by the microwave. the shell is tuff, the beens burned my hand on the way back from the break room, and its still cold in the middle.

nickel papers

there is this free paper called the sparks tribune or something like that. its just another one of those 5cent papers as far as I can tell but its fun to read the adds and if I ever have some good crap to sell I'll list it there. on friday one of my friends at work saw that someone had a lathe for sale for 100$. we looked up the model on line and it looked like a nice benchtop one. so after work we headed over to check it out (fully thinking I would be bidding against this guy to get it). turns out this thing was a MONSTER. the motor alone was about 2 feet long by 10 inches in diameter. 15A 3 phase power. WAY to big (need a crane to lift it) it was still fun to look at. it must have been sitting in his yard since world war 2, cause even the tarp it was under had disentegrated.

usb keychain linux

check out linux on a virtual private USB keychain thing. might be something kev could use.

date problem

we were having some problems with the recent posts hack. Thanks for the feedback from the author!

Hi k2h,

Thanks for commenting on the errors you are having. I'm glad you like
the hacks.

The reason you are getting the strange NNaN's is that you haven't
changed your timestamp format in your blogger settings to include both
the date and time.

The first step in the installation is to go the the Formatting section
of your blog settings and make sure that the Timestamp Format is set to
mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss (09/23/2004 8:37:08 PM). Don't forget to save your
changes.

The NaNN comes from the Javascript's failed attempt to parse your time
into a datetime that it can understand and use to determine which
comments are the most recent.

Hope that helps,

I wish I hadn't done that

post your picture of things you have done to your car or other expensive items that you wish you hadn't done.

i, for instance, was sitting at a stop light and not paying as much attention as i should have. the suv in front of me started going forward and stopped way before i expected it to and now i own a jeep bumped with a straight line problem


'fess up you all and learn to laugh at your own stupidity!

Sarah (it won't let me post an img in a comment): How about things done TO me?


Sarah: A special present for Kev

Kevin moment

I had a Kevin moment yesterday it was a little disturbing. I went to a doctor's appointment at St. Lukes Meridian (the new hospital by our house). My surgerywas done at St. Lukes in downtown Boise 10 days ago. They hand me a full stack of forms to fill out again. I was like "what can't you fax them over"... "um well we already have your chart but "they" want an update". Who are they and do they realize that nothing has changed. So I filled out the forms and started picking them apart, they were very non-normalized. For example birthdata:_____ age: _____ why ask the age it can be calculated from the birthdate. Then on all the family history stuff which I've filled out a few too many times now I got a little punchy and when they asked for current health status I started putting rotten and the like for the dead ones.

888

Anyone know how to find the origin of an 800# without calling it? I missed a call on my cell yesterday and am curious to where it came from but haven't called it back... I searched online - no luck. Am thinking about calling back on a pay phone.

Great time wasters (also, cool applications of code)

Okay, so I've been pretty caught up in my NaNoWriMoing and pretty useless to this blog, but I stumbled across several cool sites this morning:
WORDCOUNT
10x10

inventor of X

so jens article spawned a good discussion over the wall with one of my coworkers. he is adamant about how the net was 'invented' in the 60's between universities. I said.. "thats like saying Alaxander grahm bell invented the cell phone" yeah. there may have been some ground work, but the technology is totally different. I agree technology needs a starting place, but there is a time when NEW TECHNOLOGY is introduced and it becomes even more than the origional designer ever invisioned.

with that said, even tracking back when the HTTP standard was written (1989?) in stone still does not tell us who invented the internet, or when the internet we know today was 'invented' because it is build on all kinds of technology.

Internet Fame

i love/hate how everyone keeps claiming who invented the internet. htis morning i was reading a book on the way from my car to the chemistry building, as is my practice, and found that "a short history of nearly everything" (an okay book, interesting but some of the facts are a little off) makes the claim that, "There are practical side eggects to all this costly effort [CERN building its Large hadron Collider]. The World Wide Web is a CERN offshoot. It was invented by a CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989."
i think my favorite claim was al gore's claim, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." which was blown out of proportion into him saying he invented the internet.... gotta love how things get all messed up.

..moms...

Does your mom bring google to its knees? check out the article. I really enjoyed the writing style.

google start page

You have all seen the plain google.com start page, but have you seen
google.com/firefox (I like the fox)
google.com/linux (I like the pengiun)
google.com/bsd (gotta like the devil)

for the life of me I can't find a complete list! I've heard about the firefox and linux pages, I found the BSD page myself. what else is there? see what you can find and post.

shop4tech.com

Shop4tech.com has some awesome dvd media for what was bout 22cents a disk with a coupon last time i ordered (100 of them).
enter the coupon code "Thanksgiving" up throgh Nov. 26 and get 10% off storwide and 30% off 2nd air shipping (not worth it)

check out the Sonic DVD-r 1x-4x bulk media. i think that's what I got and have had only 1 bad disk in the 25 i burned. great price!

define work

check out Wired's The Geek Guide to Kosher Machines which i read last nite.
1. define work. is this a physics thing? doesn't the human body consume energy?
2. review the 4th commandment. it does not discuss machines.
3. if industry is going to persue nitche markes, where is my stylish LL Bean bullet proof, knife resistent vest for inner city school kids?

I want to write a well formed reply to wired and see if it'll be published next month.
any ideas on how I should word it?

free magazines

when I lost one of the cube mates at work he took all of his magazines with him. they were free magazines, but still fun to read and every now and again they actually had something interesting to say about the industry.

I have found a place to get TONS of free mags if you are so inclined
http://www.reed4success.com/

you never know.. you might learn something!

so I filled out a few free subscriptions with my work address. for job title I put SENIOR ENGINEER, which i'm not but I'm gonna see how long it takes for someone to notice since we have a comunal mail drop.

suitcase worth considering? nah.

in looking for a rebuttle to keith's unfounded watch ad observation, I found descriptions of a 20,000$ suitcase with more info here. That baby had better come with a build in ice-maker that gets it's water from vapor in the air and a desalinator for the ocassional executive plane crash or i'm gonna feel jipped.

10:10

I thought 10 after 10 was the best time for se.... ahh. you get the idea =) but it didn't even make into the article!

Shill Bidding

so I read an article on geek.com about shill bidding. this is the process of artificially inflating the bid amount on a product. I have mixed feelings if this should be legal or not. I'm kinda thinking it should be LEGAL. you represent yourself... the auction house or person represents getting the most money for a product that they can. if they find a good way to sucker you into it then you were too weak to begin with! what do you'all think?

cube crap

I sit in a cube that has 4 spots. that is if each person gets a corner which is pretty typical in this day and age. we had one person transfer across teh country and another person transfer to a different department (temporarily or so he claims) so that leaves 2 of us in one cube. We are much enjoying it. no one plays stupid music anymore, we waste less time in a day because there arn't as many people to talk to. all in all it just a better deal.

the problem is there is some extra desk area. so my cube mate and I have been using it off and on for some of our projects but about 1/2 of the space in the cube is unused. so a different team broght their crap to the cube for me to play with. after I was done playing with it they wouldn't take it out, because they don't have any room. so I just got a big box, dumped all the crap in. now the desks are back to clean. if they want space they can get their own. my desk is not their space.

halo 2 released

Halo 2 reviewed here is released today. it's going to be a good evening.

Blender

check out blender.
after reading about the game engine keith found, this seemed like a logical extention for making the graphics (as several of the developers are using it)
it's got more math and options then i'd use. maybe i'll start with a box or something.

*disclaimer*

I found this on Adventure Game Studio web site, it is an SDK to help you write your own game. I love the disclaimer....

NOTE: AGS is not for everyone. To make more advanced parts of a game, such as cutscenes, you will need to be prepared to learn the scripting language. It is recommended that you have at least a basic knowledge of computers before attempting to use AGS - such as, you know what a PCX file is, you can think logically and you know the difference between your hard drive and your RAM.

nation wide walki-talki

talk about FREE advertising. I am totally sick of the phones that you can use as a walki-talki (sp?) that are very loud and anoying. if it wasn't bad enough that everyone and their dog is now on a cell phone they now have to make a public display out of it. the best part was when one of our coworkers had an argument with his wife in walki-talki mode and the dept. got to listen in. you could her it half way across the building it was so loud.

then today I hear someone basically reading the paper into one.

please STOP!

I can't wait until the perfect thought based communications so I don't have to be invovled in everyone elses absent personality. they are there (in person) but mentally they are 100/1000 miles away with the person they are talking with. its like walking past a bunch of zombies.

Posting on Dan's behalf

Now imagine it inside.

ghost for linux

I spent a little time awhile ago looking for a ghost like tool for linux and came up with limited answers.

DD
some command that can be used to copy an entire partition.
pros: copies everything?
cons: copies entire partition or disk, cna't remember, so if you didn't 0 pad your disk your backup file will be HUGE.

partimage
a rudimentary partiion backup tool that runs on linux, its part of knoppix so you can take a look. i'm not sure how well it'll work with NTFS. mayabe one way around this is to use FAT32 so that its much easier to backup with opensource tools?

as you can see I need someone that knows backup for linux to post a comment!

office xp and a lost key

the pastor who had his files recovered last week is now doing a full reinstall.
he purchased his computer a few years ago from Dell as a refurbished notebook computer and got a software bundle that included office xp at a premium price.
He managed to save everything except the box and the keys for office (on the back of the origional sleeves, which he did not catch) because he did not have to install anything: all preinstalled.
2.5 years later - NOW he realizes no keys.
so, 2 hours on the phone with dell, they conclude he should call micorosft and also give him a key that does not work.
20 minutes on phone Microsoft concludes it's dell's problem as they can't generate keys with out the volume liscening information (true) so we call dell back and they say to talk to microsoft. we escellate the problem to 'supervisor' level and they conclude that they can only give us the origional key as that is the ONLY key that will work with those disks (odd, ok, considering they already gave us another key, AND a key I had worked - AND the key I cracked in the time we're on the phone worked) - so they just wanted to give him a key for ms word, not the office suite - AND just give him 100$ office 2k3 discount coupon (good if your a nonprofit - but who knows if dell honors that during software resale)

so, he is prompted to go home and fax them documentation demonstrating that he purchased office xp from them. I told him to put the disks on the scanner as the origional receipt probably just says 'software bundle' just like dells records.

translation - don't loose your keys.

oh yeah, the key crack took about 6 minutes using 75omhz.
sad when google can get you stuff faster then legemite customer support.

I'm Home

Last night I got released from the Hospital. That was very good since they didn't expect me to go home so early. It still hurts pretty good when I move around and I won't take more drugs that I really need to take. Speaking of which I slept well last night and didn't wake up needing drugs. I should be able to be back at work parttime next week. Once there I also should be able to do more than 'think' about what I can do and we should have first si on the first mobile ddr product coming out. (mobile ddr = ddr for your cell phone). I got to keep the hardware out of my back it looks pretty cool and is fairly light weight (aka titanium). I need to go find my tools and finish putting it back togather and get some pics online for you all to ooogle at. Many of the nurses were impressed by the hardware they pulled out.

My back is still stiff and hurting but hopefully I'll be up to snowshoeing and stuff by the time t-day rolls around. Since kevin was probably wondering there were lots of warnings on the release forms about engaging in sexual activity before you should.

Dan

Cheap ISP

Every so often it can be useful to have dial up access. I was pointed to access-4-free by this financial advice from Modest Needs. Pretty straightforward, a one time setup fee of $4.95, and then it's free up to 10 hours/month. After that it's $1/hour up to $10, with $10 being the maximum monthly rate (which is still less than most ISPs). The beauty of it, though, as I see it, is that you can sign up sometime when it's needed, use it, and then forget about it until the next time. You don't have to worry about cancelling it because there's no fee for less than 10 hours/month. The other cool thing is that it's high quality, offering v90 and v92 in most places with virtually no dropped connections. Oh, yeah, and no ads.

Pi

I looking for my birthday in pi, i stumbled across a slashdot article discussing some flaws with using Pi as a springboard for compression. I've concluded it's not very likely it would work, but it sure is inturesting to think about.

dans slam

my rebuttal to DANS SLAM

way to work in a slam in the PS.

unlike you I haven't become a trator to test yet. there are alot of people that have become trators and I'm glad to see your one of them! =)

it seems just when people start to learn what is going on and are able to be productive they pack up.. pull up roots and move! usually they get a raise too cause the pay in test SUCKS.

someday I too may pull up stakes but I'm happy where i'm at.

as for not working at work? did you miss the post where I talked about writing a teest for a guy that did what took him 2 days in 3 seconds? (it took a few hours to write the test) but 3 seconds is ALOT better than 2 days..

i'm not defending my actions, just pointing out a case history of NOT being a slacker. at times there really is nothing productive to do, or more likiely the brain is too fried to work much out. most would just do something and then redo it the next day. I prefer to sit and think for awhile, and then do it right the first time (the next day) and we actually have management support for this method.

I quote: "if I come by and you guys have your feet kicked up on the desk looking into thin air I'm just going to assume your thinking about something in your head".

so...... we think in our head alot.

oops, oops, oops ... my bad.

a coworker described to me at lunch how he'd been to an airport a while back, and noticed one of the little tractor/trains baggage train loose a suitcase. it sat there for a moment until another tractor/train came along and Darin describes how he thought the driver may go around it. It didn't work out that way - the tractor hit it at full speed and each traincar went over it too.

fog lamps -installed

got the fog lamps installed. bailing wire comes through again making it only necessary to drill two holes (one for each lamp) to secure it to the bumper.
I went cheep on the install and did everything under the hood - only comes on with brights, and no dash indicator lite - maybe on version 2. but the circuit is self contained and fused and requires the ignition and brights to be on in order to trip the relay - so it should work.

keith sure does know how to pic spontanious gifts.

once I get the factory fogs working, that baby'll be all light and i'll get to watch the deer splatter accross the hood instead of wondering what it was.

Things to do at Church

Here is a picture of my new game console at church...

http://www.mackie.com/products/sr56-8/index.html

(actually we have the sr40-8), but it looks about the same. We also have an effects module we run on an aux send and comes back on an Aux return so you can send some poor vocalist their own voide (made into a chipmunk) back on their monitor where no one else can here it... lots of fun things to do. We also have a bunch of mackie 450 speakers each of which is capable of nearly 120db without distortion and two large subs. Granted the system pales in comparison to what we saw at the Steven Curtis Chapman consert last night, but it's still fun and I'm actually starting to understand what is going on with all the sound stuff. Oh and we have something must churches never consider... an audio compressor. This is a really good thing, so when your vocalists decide to overrun the mix it just compresses them back into reality :). The compressor is setup for 8 channels so well run it on the sub group mixes with the insert send and return hoookups on the board. See the sr56-8 manual if you don't know what an insert send and return are. I finally got it through my head, took me a few months to actually get it straight which knob to turn in a reasonable amount of time to have the desired affect. (i.e. vocalist (unnamed) says hey more keys in my monitor... I search for the appropriate knob and they say "that's good"... I'm thinking wow that's some imaginary amplifer 'cause I still haven't found the knob yet...)

Anyway when you guys are here for t-day we'll have to stay later and play with the board a little.

p.s. Keith maybe you should try "working" at work, helps the time pass better. I have started to get board with test, too much production stuff (it's interesting but not relavent to any other company in the world) and too little new learning, so I accepted an offer and moved to PE... same pay, but now I get to interact much more with product issues and learn more about semiconductor crap and less pressure to resolve production issues. My official title (which will probably change in a few months) is "Semicondutor Product Engineer" sounds fun and I get a slightly bigger cube. Oh another difference from test... money, I have a wintel pc basic p4 2.8ghz, but they're gonna get me a linux box (since Cadence has ported all the design tools to linux ....) and they just mentioned casully oh they usually put a decent amount of memory in them (like 4GB). I guess that is and isn't impressive since I've logged into some of the solaris rnd severs and they have around 30GB of memory.

happy halloween

happy halloween to all you reading bumpkins (or is it pumpkins).




these three pumpkins survived my gardening skills, amazing huh?

kitty, frankenstein, pumpkin head

What does a kitty, a frankenstein and a pumpkin head have in common?



They were all lying dead on the cafeteria table! these minni cushball things were lying around. at about 1/2 tall, they are alot of fun. we took them to church.

10k words

I'm about the break 10,000 words according to my blogger stats. I just thought I better inform the lot o' ya.

stats since I know the rest of you are way to lazy to click something

Sarah: 104
dan: ?
forkev: 2572
k2h: 9198
Janell: 678
palegreenhorse: 52,278 (da big cheater)

math games

okay so criticize if you want. keith and i play games or do something slightly distracting during the sermon so that we don't criticize our pastor too much. we understand that the last pastor offered everything we wanted in sermons but that many people didn't like those sermons; so now it is those people's turn to have a pastor they like. so instead of getting all mad, we just try to pay attention enough to get something positive out of the sermon and not enough to be able to deconstruct the sermons since we don't like how information is presented (or sometimes the information itself).
today we played math pattern recognition games. as in fill in the next number (or in two cases item) in the sequence or just give the pattern function. so here they are for all you other nerds out there if you want a stab at them.

4 12 132 17,292
1 1 2 3 7 16 65
1 1 2 10 12 22 111 210 1021 (you've seen this sequence before just not in this way)
O | (insert picture of a square)
H He Li Be B C N
1.5 3 1.5 (not 3, ask keith for a hint on this one)
4 3 7 7 (think cheap calculator)

maricle on Casper st.

i get a call last nite at 6:15 pm (I was not home yet) that said the pastor's notebook had died and was no longer booting. I call him aback around 7pm and sure enough, it won't boot. so he's brining it over as the last backup was 4 months ago.
i go to boot it - and it's missing some core windows files. inturesting. he says he may have allowed a virus to run on it by clicking the wrong button in norton antivirus. no big deal.
throw in knoppix 3.3 and bloom - knoppix can't load - fatal error or something. strange. never seen that before - maybe it's some non-standard ide interface or something (oh yeah, and the cd was in a firewire cd drive)
SO - i install windows on top of it's self knwonig that the user accounts will be untouched.
right as it's finishing, John says "oh yeah, i had a password on my account"
i'm thinking - how bad can it be, it's windows xp home.
so it loads, we click on the old profile and 'error accessing folder' , ok, so it's encrypted. i just need a tool to feed it his old password and we're off and running, right?
WRONG - read this. i found a hairy walk through on recombining both keys (lost the link) - but home does not have all the tools. i stole one from xp-pro, but the other would not run.
i was conviced we were pretty much screwed and gave him a generous 35% recovery estimate possiblity - and sent him home at 10pm.
I started banging on google learning more windows security terms and came up with this which pointed to this. a close inspection of the win xp home demonstrated nothing fancy with keys. wow, it can't be this easy.
i almost didn't try it, but figured i'd nothing to loose.
it worked!@ - and 3.8gb was recovered. flawlessly.
i called him back at 11:10 so he could sleep easier and burned him a dvd around midnight while watching some sermons i found in his stuff. good sermons.

jen fixed something!

so since i took keith's laptop (and now he took mine to run knoppix which is looking pretty good) i added a log in for myself so i wouldn't trash on keith's special desktop. (it consists of random icons randomly spread on the page and still has the nasty compaq wallpaper.) so at home i couldn't figure out why the wireless card would work on keith's log in and not for mine. keith was saying something like i needed to clone his account and move all my stuff over to the cloned account. first off, he couldn't figure out how to do that with windows xp home. second off, that sounded like a lot of work when shouldn't there be a setting somewhere. indeed there was a setting. and i found it. in keith's account i looked at the properties of his wireless connection and he had set it to only work for his account! see on my old laptop (now keith's new one) i always installed things for all users even though i had only one account on the computer. it took a while for me to consider that keith wasn't that smart =) hehehe. okay he is way smarter on computer stuff than me and i am just happy that this once i was able to fix my own computer, see as i am so good at destroying them as of late.

alodia? dave?

so do alodia and dave think that they are too good to join our group blog? or did they just not get thier invites?

its my car syndrome

I've often wondered if I'm the only one, but it seems no matter what car I own, I actually see MORE of them on the road. If I have owned it, I am more often to notice it, if I"m currently owning it I deafinatly notice it, and admire how somone as intelectual as the other driver made a good choice like I did in choosing the car.

am I the only one here? or does familiarity make a person notice it? this could bring me down a slippery slope and I"m sure kev will blaze the trail for this is the reason that all men notice pretty women cause there 'familar' with them? yeah.. lets get an argument on that.

nerdy tales

something epic

it's back!
instead of working this morning i am doing random things, well i am kinda working i am waiting for crystallization and cleaning my frit. anyway i was just curious about sarah's blog and its current state because nanowrimo.org didn't have anything new to read and i was in the blog reading mood. surprise! something epic is back in a flush of pink. don't let the color turn you away though, it is suitable for all genders. =)

New Halloween Puzzle

okay so i set myself up for kevin figuring out the last puzzle; but i learn from my mistakes. this time i didn't name the files with the answer. it is still halloween related but i won't say how unless you nerds can't figure it out after a handful of tries. all three molecules do the same thing, but not in the same place. also note these are just the active sites, the whole thing would be way too big for this.



have fun kiddies.

nano rhino

a fello rimo for youall to readabout.

sidebar gone astray

jen thinks it not her pictures fault that nerdy tails sidebar is screwed up. let this serve to show that I have to disagree wtiht that. which one of you losers changed it? any takers? I thought not.

The Google Calc

Whats the strangest thing you can come up with to solve with the google calculator? a long running joke is furlongs per fortnight as in something is going VERY SLOW, so I went ahead and verified that
30 furlongs per fortnight = .011 mph

exactly how fast is a knot? my coworkers guessed around a mile and they were right
knot in mph = 1.15

why I had google open my coworkers began to gather, so I asked exactly how deep is a fathom? my cube neighbor over the wall spent 8 years in the navy and he replied about a mile.
fathom in feet = 660 ft (jim was a bit off)

now another coworker began to explain to me that he was going to get something fabbed on a .14 micron process. well that doesn't mean jack to me cause all the specs I read give it in nanmeter
.14 microns in nm (ok, so this becomes obvious it is a prefix conversion, but still...)

130lbs in kilos for all you drug runners out there

it even knows pi to more digits than the babolonians!

so whats the best you guys can work up / compute with the google calc?

ssh and vnc

gnuWinII is kinda cool. inturesting stuff.
I'm trying to get some tools together so I can standardize onto a vnc flavor on a windows environment that is encrypted (hippa compliant crap) for support.
i'm thinking open ssh will help me out.
does anyone have experience with vnc over a reflector or port mapper in a windows environment?

winLinux

i'm getting fed up with people just pushing windows or linux.
common. use the right tool for the job.

Cooperative Linux (coLinux) claims to run linux inside windows - giving you the best of all worlds (no vmware, no wine)

anyone want to try it out?

itch

i know this is not nerdy, or much of a tale, but here goes.

there is this guy at work (who for the purpose of me keeping my job will remain un-named as he's above me in the corporate food chain) whom i've noticed itching his butt several times in the past few days.
now. this leads me to several reactions.
1) why am i watching/ noticing this?
2) LOOK AWAY!! (YET can't)
3) what could be so itchy?

I've concluded i'll try to avoid him so i dont' have to poder this too much.

this reminds me of church last weekend where alodia and I noticed this girl who kept pulling her underwear out of her crack during song service. alodia thought she could have used a better time to do that, like during prayer. oh yea, and she was in the 2nd pew. we all had a looksee.

maybe next week will be people wearing mismatched sock week, or something, but as far as this week is concered, i do cristen it butt week.

what do you get?

gotta love halloween...all kinds of little kiddies getting hyped up on sugar and (at least most of the time when i was little) freezing body parts, all while dressesed up as spongebob square pants or power-puff princess.
something else that will probably be seen that night is made of the following chemicals. can anyone guess what it is?

Dump Truck parker

There was this dump truck parked on our street for about 3 weeks. It was very close to a stop sign and it was hard to see around it . I was wondering how long it was going to take to get ticketed. I drove past this thing every day as its on route in and out of the neighborhood. so after 3 weeks it gets funny chalk marks on the tires. TOTALLY chalked up. not just a single line or anything. wait.. maybe I remembering it wrong. maybe one day it had a single line on each tire and then the next day it was chalked up.. yeah.. that sounds better. it makes for a better story anyway.

so this guy shows up while I'm working in the backyard and starts it up (smoke everywhere) and drives it around the block about 5 times to try and get rid of the chalk marks. He started to slow to park it by my house and I Just glared at him so he fired it up and kept on moving.

He parked it across the street AT THE PARK. now I was sure that wasnt going to last long. When he parked he opened the door and looked at the tires so he could park it where the chalk marks wernt so obvious. he didn't make enough laps around the neighborhood.

sure enuf. after about another week it gets a bright orange ticket on the window. now I was SURE he was going to move that sucker outa there but he never did. 4 days later I think it got towed. I would have liked to see that.

Burnt Spicy Mustard

I wrote this in regards to the marylaw blog.

How does one go about answer the question of what burnt circuit board tastes like? Well.. I can assure you when you stick your head really close to something and it blows up in your face it lets you get right down and personal with it on so many levels. you see the sense of smell is directely tied to the sense of taste. I think the passages may be connected as well, but I can't get my finger all the way in to verify. From this level of personal diagnostics I have determined that my exposure to burnt circuit board is sufficent to make the claim that the BURNT SPICY MUSTARD we had at that chineese restraunt was for sure made out of BCB (burnt circuit board). in china they must route the recycleing program to the back of the restraunt.

Knoppix

Dave and or Kev told me about knoppix awhile ago. I have version 3.3 ISO on my HD and when I can't find the cd I just burn out a new one. some day I'll actually start writing what is on the cd ON the cd so I know what is on the cd... ok.. nuf of that.

anyway.. in the never ending qwest [kevs phone company] to get jens laptop back up and running I first start with a data backup. seems simple enough right?

welp.. xp 'recovery' console is about as worthless as it comes. maybe you can do alot in it, but I'm not one to waste my time and find out. I can't figure out how to see network stuff from recovery console, and i can't figure out how to see external USB drives from recovery console, so short of actually recovering anything, theres nothing I can do with it. since I was UNABLE to get xp to start back up (despite a manual uninstall of SP2 from the console) I have turned to Knoppix.

yeah.. I suck at linux, some day i'll learn, we picked up the phone, called neal and he gave me a quick rundown on how to connect across the network with samba shares. worked like a champ. heres my notes for when i have to repeat this in a month when the laptop crashes again.

from within the console of knoppix
see if I can see the XP box
Type: ping 192.168.0.5
view my network settings
Type: ifconfig
To make sure we have samba services stuff
Type: smbclient
To see what we have mounted
Type: Mount
for a little different view use
Type: ls -la /mnt
Change directory to MNT
Type: CD /mnt
To view what we got
Type: ls
Make a new mount called network
Type: mkdir network
This didn't run because I didn't have the right access
so we need to act like we have root access?
Type: sudo mkdir network
View that we made it
Type: ls
Mount our network share
Type: sudo mount //192.168.0.5/shared ./network -t smbfs
now we see its in the mount list
Type: mount

To view our new mount point in the graphical environment, open a browser and for the URL
Type: file:/
and now we get to browse our mount points.

for some reason i don't have root access when knoppix starts up. when I try to write to my network share it says I don't have rights. I know the sudo command works at the shell window, so I use that to recursive copy to network share
Type: sudo cp * /mnt/nwhd/jen -r


a quick comparison to DOS helps me learn more.
http://www.satlug.org/~dubose/linux_basic_commands.html

Studded Snows

I just had a 'debate' with a coworker, defending myself as to why i'm not a loser for using studded snow tires. according to him the only people that should use them are people that live in heavily snowed upon climates like lake tahoe. His argument was that the studs TOTALLY DESTROY the roads and make for terrible commuting times because the roads are getting resurfaced because a few people use studded snows.

At the time I didn't have much of a defence. I muttered something about how I only use them after the snow has set in (will probably put them on in november) and that I take them off early in the spring. I don't run the whole season with them. THen i said something about how studded snows have kept me from sliding through intersections.

His response was I was going too fast.

My new defence, since I've had time to think about it.
* my car weights 2900 pounds. studs are small, and last 30-40k miles. tell me again exactly how much damage i'm doing to the road?

* america is still free. you have the right to drive a jacked up F350 and never haul a load in your life. You get 10 miles a gallon, polute the environment, make tons of noise, and hog the road. you risk killing someone when you crash. I have the legal right to run studs. I also pay for it just as much as you do with my tax on my (current) $2.35/Gal Fuel.

* studs are something I can do to increase my safety and those around me. it is a cost almost entirely on my shoulders since the cost of my studded tires probably way exceeds the 'damage' i'm doing to a public road. don't make me whip out a calculator cause I could probably prove it.

In conclusion:
I've never meet someone so passionate about me recking THEIR road. wow. I hope the guy that slides into him doesn't have studded snow tires so he can be proven correct by his own ignorance.

Sony QRIO Robot

ok.. that sucks, if I change where to post my thing in BLOG this it erases what I wrote. stupid interface.. so AGAIN, i type it all over again.

if you guys haven't seen the sony QRIO robot your not really geeks. it seems to be jam packed with geeky technology that makes us all drool. To bad its going to put the 3rd world counties out of work, the very people that assemble its little mechanical hart. see it try to fall here.

nerdy tales

NTale, Ntail, Entrial....

its kinda like a little rhyme. lets all sing it together!

NTalel, Ntail, Entrial......

N-Tails

a Nerdy Tail is an extra long tailbone with glasses

nerdy tales vs nerdy tails

i was browsing k2h and decided to head over to nerdy tales to see what was up. it was interesting becuase just before the page loaded i realized that keith had spelled it nerdy tails. now that's a mental image for you.

keyboard rundown

Sarah.
Give us the rundown on the pda keyboard.
Working yet?

the recording

I got a copy of my credit report from the big 3. score 774 (excellent) - lowered probably 'cuz of my 2k in credit that i hardly ever use and never carry a ballance.
I called to cancel my account with privacyGuard after getting my info, and got the song and dance about identity theft, get a report for someone else in your home for more money/time - track usage of you SS# - 10$ per month.
i finally convinced them i was happy without their service. they asked me if I wanted a free 25$ gift certificate. I said 'well, ok' (the words of a fool)
and was transered to a *recording* about how i'd get this 25$ cert. if i paid 1$ and activated another account.... and then it asked me at the end "Does that sound good to you"
I thought out loud and said 'not really' and it asked 'why'.
Amazing! that speech recgoniztion sofware is really moving up in the world!
I then thought for a split second,and realized someone had been READING this all to me,and there was actually a person on the other end. I had to do a bit of backpeddling to justify my answer so the PERSON could understand - and here i was just expecting to press 1 or something.

new shoe

This here is my new pair of shoes. $22 from sierra trading post (kev, they arn't from the goodwill). The toes are kinda square. a bit hideous actually. perfect for work. to the trained eye it looks like i'm stylish and to the rest I look a bit odd. just the way an engineer should.

dead laptop

jens laptop won't startup. I'll have a looksee at it tonight but it may be another awesome warranty RETURN. hahah... if people would just make quality stuff we'd consider keeping it! oh.. btw, it is a bottom of the line compaq.

Anonymization

Kevs google link WAS successful. it revelead a good list of anonymizers (from russia?, as well as a particularly fast one. but, you see the problem is, this blog does not take anonymous posts. I can't authenticate through the anonymzer (i tried). after trying I thought 'that was stupid'. cause even if it DOES work I just gave my logon to who ever runs the anonymzer.

in conclusion. Nice idea, but bad idea for security. thanks.

proxy this.

man... the smoking K2'er must be really good cause its blocked by the company proxy. speaking of proxy's. that is also the reason I am posting a post instead of a comment. the comment link is blocked by the proxy as well =( gotta hate proxys.

k2h... name

k2h is pretty unique: for a screen name.
yet if you stretch it a bit, you can find people in Minnesota.
I think this k2'er smokes regularaly. bummer.

fog lamps

keith got me some excellent 55w fog lamps a few years ago for the red beater for about 15$ - mine are like the qh-6cc.
i rescued them from the beater when it died, and still managed to net 60$ from the junkyard!
so, i'm gonna put them on my subaru, but want to do it right this time.
requirements:
1) the lamps be mounted out of emediate sight under the bumper (less ugly)
2) an indicator light must be in the cabin to verify the fog lamps are on.
3) the primary circuit (the one powering the fog lamps) is properly fused at 10A.
4) the source of the power is not coming from some other circuit (I don't make it cheap and just tap into the headlights)
5) there be no less then 3 options for fog lamps
a - always off
b - on, but only with high beams
c - always on (if ignition is on)

rough idea.
toggle switch: selects head lamps high beam or ignition as source of logic
toggle switch with indicator bulb: turn circuit on (and if lamps are on it lights up) else off.
single throw, quad pull 28v 5a (will run off 12v) relay to activate the circuit - found it in my grab bag
and then, of course, the two fog lamps.
anyone want to rough out the circuit for me?

community bonus pack 2

anyone play any of the unreal2k4 community bonus pack 1 or 2?
i think we played 1 last year, but i'm hopping to spice things up with 2 this year.
anyone game?

Frugal nerds

Given that I'm cheap and I know some of you are, too, I thought I'd share my latest bargain hunting tip. I get coupons online from one of two places (The Coupon Master or The Coupon Clippers) for a small handling fee. The beauty of it is that I find coupons for things I'm going to buy anyway and then they're mailed directly to me and I save a bundle (also, a boodle). So far, all members of the household have been pleasantly surprised... for instance, one order I spent $5 to get the coupons and we saved over $30 on the next shopping trip.

It's so umm like some one we know

I'm gonna name it Kevin!

massive WB launcher

A massive Water Balloon launcher! now thats an interesting idea. I think we should get one of those CHEEP ratcheting tie down straps from harbor freight (or similar cheep chinese import place) and use that as the device to add energy to the design.

the way I see it is we tie/staple/glue (or all 3) tons of inner tubes to a Y 2x4 frame or what ever dans genious mind works up and then use the cheep ratchet thing to pull it back. we use a string connection to the launcher and when its loaded someone takes out the biggest knife, hatchet, machette or gun and blows that string away.. thus releasing the full fury of the design.

Wow, is this what the internet has come to?

Hello all, life is good, next week I get time off of work. Granted it is for surgery but you take what you can get :).

Kevin, quit causing trouble for the poor sex workers... just accept that your number is out there now.

Keith, when you get some transparent aluminum bring it up here so we can see it (or not sse it). Just remeber if you do get some, where you set it down.

Oh, and for t-day I've been saving bike inner tubes and I was thinking about making a rather large water balloon launcher. Whose gonna bring the come-along?

Other possible projects include a van-da-graph generator seeing as we have an old food processor that sarah burnt the gears out on... motor still works, could be SHOCKING....

Good job to Jen for setting this up.

Fishing?

yup.. thats me at one of the stops on the motorcycle trip in canada. I wasn't able to catch anything.

StereoTypes

Stere0Types offers some fun. combine the top half of an image with the bottom half of another. and they all fit together so nicely.. maybe to nice. a little scary really.

forkev.avi

forkev.avi REALLY sums up what kevs life is all about. The part with the sheet on the head is particularly good.

alas... these are the problems we run into when we search for our names or nicks with google. its awesome when it turns up what you want and just plain embarassing when it reveals the truth.

almost transparent aluminum

Transparent Alumina and it's slashdot discussion wich conclude it's not new.

I read somewhere recently (was it popular machanics, scientific america, wired... i can't remember) that transparent aluminum had been created. Now, like the article suggested, my thoughts turned towards star trek 4 (themovie)

In reality it's not aluminum, but aluminia.

I brought up this topic at work - and some coworkers laughed at the idea star trek actually gave us some good ideas (they found it amusing, not in the context of making fun of it)
I figured i'd better check my facts as i'm prone to not always read correctly or spew 'facts' (I tend to entrepret more then recite) - and it appears I was right (as usual). there, have some of that, coworkers.

Ultimate Show -what?!-

Answering machine: Friday, 1120 AM

Veronica on ansering machine: Hi, Mr hebly, this is Veronica from The Ultimate Show Girls.
I, umm, see on here that you ordered a couple of strippers for tomarrow night at about eight o'clock.
We have to cancel your order.
If you'd like to give us a call, please call us at 1800ShowGirls.
Thank you.
(hick) -CLICK.

Alodia: I know why you don't want to go to the car rally tomarrow night, you had strippers comming over.

Kevin: What?!
Lets give 'em a call.
showgirls is not 7 digits.

Alodia: You just start dialing, and it goes through.

Kevin calls 18007469447:
(-crappy background music starts-- elevator anyone?)

OH, hi sexy, i'm so glad you called. you are about to be connected live one on one to one of my wild and hot friends who is ready to satisyfy your wildest fantisties. If you are an experiecned caller, you can enter your credit card number any time. Don't forget, if you are experienced ... as a caller, you can enter, mmmm, your credit card number at any time. Mastercard is the card of choice where you credit is instantly approved.
We also except Visa, American Express, and Discover. Or use your checking account by just pressing the # key. (-voice changes-) One more time, mmm, you can give it to me anytime you want. That's right just enter your credit card number at anytime during this message. This call will be billed at 1.99 to 499 per minute depending on menu selection and will descretely appear on your credit card statement as Fronteer or Network Telephone. A tollfree customer service number will be provided later in this message as well as on your creditcard statement. In most cases, we can help you emediatly, so please call us 24 hours a day if you have any billing questions. Each call has an access fee of 599. Take out your credit card and put in your nubmer so I can talk to you now. This is a hot, sizling adult line, so you've got to be at least 18 to join us.
Customer service time may be billed at the prevelaing permament rate. For customer service please call:

18007771249 or write to
6433 Topanga Canyon BLVD # 150
Canoga Park, California 91303

mmm, I'm waiting for you, stud (almost a whisper). Enter your credit card number now. If you hear the following tone (beep) then you've been approved for the SBS billing network. Should your credit card compnay not approve this transation you will be billed directly by SBS.
i'm sorry, please re-enter your card number now
i'm sorry, please re-enter your card number now
i'm sorry, we were unable to process the credit card number you entered, please re-enter you card number or enter a different card number now.
i'm sorry, please re-enter your card number now
i'm sorry, please re-enter your card number now
i'm sorry, we were unable to process the credit card number you entered, please re-enter you card number or enter a different card number now.
i'm sorry, please re-enter your card number now
i'm sorry, please re-enter your card number now

kevin calls customer service 9:30pm. and is greated by a message promissing quality.
Gloria answers.
kevin demands the number be put on do not call - she can see it on her caller id
she says they just handle billing, they don't even know who that company is.
she puts me on hold, tries to dial 1800showgirls number
a long time passes, she can't figure out the real number
i have to convert it for her (kevin's not too good at this sort of thing)
i give her the number, she calls, and verifies that they do billing for them.
i ask to be taken off their list. and how do i contact them directly
she says i use their 800 number - i say, but i don't want that phone number, i want to talk to person to get off their list.
she recods my name (wrong): kevin hebley - as it appears in the phone book.
i read her the message I received, and she said it sounded fishy - she said that their customer does not make house calls, it's done all over the phone. I said i thought so, and that i wanted to talk to that company directly to complain.
i read her the message verbatum, she tooks notes of it, and she recommend i call during regular business hours (customer service there) and ask for the Day Supervivors or Manager.
I pressed her for how to contact the Ultimate ShowGirls company directly, but she would not budge, only the recommendation I talk to someone above her during normal hours.
I thank her for her time.

Maybe i'll call them monday.

Moral of the story: Alodia will help you call porn numbers. Porn number companys are hard to get ahold of if you want to talk about something other then sex AND get them off your phone. It's turning out to be really cool that the phone company put our names wrong in the phone book - it helps us sort out junk voicemail and mail.