Sarah finally got me a blog

Well more like she found a topic I might actually blog about and I thought it sounded like fun.

http://www.happyhumans.com/daniel/

sonoluminescence

sonoluminescence is achieved by using sound waves from 20-40khz to implode bubbles. the result is very high temp and light.

chicken how you want it

alodia found http://subservientchicken.com/

i told it to hump
and to lay an egg
and to peck.
what can you make it do?

Am not!

Since some of us nerds tend to lean toward argumentative, I thought Thirty - Eight Ways to Win an Argument from Schopenhauer's "The Art of Controversy" might be enjoyed.

scrape

my day trader friend has cool analysis tools, but wants a bigger hammer.
he wants 6 months of daily's (open, hi, low, close, volume) for all stocks on the nasdaq so he can filter ALL stocks for current trends and then only have to study the top 10 doing what he wants in a given day instead of relying on someone else giving him 'ideas'.
this seems easy enough, especially given http://finance.yahoo.com/.

who'd of thought google suggest is actually built on a tool that can be used as a screen scraper?! after some reading about ajax i discovered the Microsoft.XMLHTTP tool i was using to do the scraping actually met with some very good reviews (recent magazine i read) as MS started the foundation for making the ajax stuff possible.

so, when your own IIS server at home fails (don't ask. i've never seen one not work except this one), hope on over to http://www.pablosoftwaresolutions.com/ and get baby web server 2.6. this baby does asp out of the box! awesome. give me an ado connection string for an access database and some regular expressions for some fancy parcing (thanks dan for the heads up) and now we're getting somewhere!

everyone likes to see cool colored code, so in the absence of patience to install a real developement environment at home, i opted for notepad ++.

about 70 lines of code and i get CLEAN histories of stocks i can cram into a database. i love regular expressions. i don't understand them, but that sure is not going to keep me from using them!

i thought this was going to take me longer to 'prove' (get a working beta with all major functions done) - but it only took about 3 hours. maybe i'm actually becoming more tallented?

if anyone wants the code, the server, the notepad++ all rolled up into one nice zip file for playing with on their own, let me know.

midwest, south, etc?

I've recently received much flack for what I consider east, west, midwest, far east, etc.... check out this Question and answer from goegraphics names information system a US governement entity.

25. I need to know the official names and definitions (extents) of regions. For example, what is “the Midwest,” “the South,” etc?
There are no official designations for regions at any level of government. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which is responsible by law for standardizing geographic name usage throughout the Federal government, is often asked for official names and boundaries of regions. However, there are none officially. Regions are application driven and highly susceptible to perception. Sometimes, people might agree on the core of a region, but agreement deteriorates rapidly outward from that core. The criteria or application would have to be defined, such as physiographic (this would include parts of States, but there is more than one system); political (definite disagreement based upon perception); cultural (unlimited variables); and other applications. Generally, geographers use four (4) generic requirements for a region to be formed: area, boundary (or transition zone), at least one factor of homogeneity or sameness, and a process to drive the region or to keep it functioning as a region. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has taken the same approach. One can be sure that if anyone or any organization announces standards for regions, it is only their own based upon their own needs or application.

It's New, kinda

i'm sure most of you have seen the "roach coaches" around some cities. you know, trucks outfitted to be a movable taco vendor or something like that. well now you can order a pizza that is cooked while it drives to you. mobile pizza doesn't actually seem like an idea that is that innovative, but kinda innovative at the same time. it is interesting to note that they use a computer program to divy up the orders based on where the trucks are and what other orders are already being cooked. and the driver does everything. wow.

McGurkin

See (and hear) the McGurk Effect in action. This is totally weird. I found it in O'Reilly's Mind Hacks book. This will take 30 seconds or less, though you'll probably think about it for longer and show co-workers even longer than that.

Earthquake Map

i noticed on unr's website that there was a release of a new earthquake map for the area where i live. surprise! i live in an area that actually has a pretty high potential for an earthquake. i thought we were only moderate. the map is pretty cool and worth a peruse.

sets

who wants to play sets with jen and I? you maggots need to logon and play, you know you want to.

125 MPG

did you know harbor freight sells something that gets 125 Miles per Gallon?!! well.. kind of
see here

v180

company cell phone finally arrived. I had trouble changing the number with att customer service (611 on the phone). I didn't know the billing address (its a company phone) so customer support basically hung up on me. one of my coworkers was able to coerce the address out of a CSR, so I was able to change my number to a broader region. (cool) actually save the company some money too. the phone looks like this

alias intro

The disection of the alias intro is posted HERE so the main page of nerdy isn't too cluttered. which alias do you use?