bouncy body

thanks to kseb.net for the link to the bouncy body physics demo thing. if you click on the body you can drag it around. lots of fun!

the beginning of the end

during a recent windows update at work, i noticed it was trying to figure out if i had a pirated copy of windows. so, the rumers two months ago WERE true: MS is chopping off support for bootleged copies of XP. this can only enlarge their black eye: yet more boxes will be security risks. who thought this up?

ruby

for quite some time i've considered spending some time learning RUBY.

Ruby On Rails may push me over the edge as I venture forth into the continued persuit of a flexible CMS that can be given to our churches, hosted here, and extensible enough to handle the future while standardizing on xhmtl.
their 15 minute quick demo at least has some cool ideas, like using the field order in the database to control the actual presentation for dynamic forms. i'm liking it.

hackAday

checkout hackaday.com
it appears like yet another source of ideas.

mutant

this grape stared me down during lunch. i thought i'd share it with you.

psi, psig, psia

not letters of the greek alphabet
not odd names people pick for their kids

they are pressure abbreviations. pressure seems to be something that needs a lot of units for whatever reason. SI unit: pascal (Pa)... oither units: bar, pounds per square inch (psi), barye (ba), atmosphere (atm), millimeters of mercury (mmHg), inches of mercury (inHg), millimeters of water, centimeters of the water or mercury, torr... almost endless it seems.

well just in case you ever end up seeing some odd deviant of psi check out wikipedia on psi. apparently psig is just what the guage reads. you can get more specific and say if the guage is reading relative to a sealed chamber at 1 atm (then it would be psisg, for sealed guage) or relative to the pressure around the gauge (then it would be psivg, for vented guage). the psig doesn't specify vented or sealed. oh ya and psia is guage pressure plus local atmospheric pressure.

MSN in the map business

somehow i feel like a carteographic wannabe seeing how my posts seem to be about maps these days....

msn has jumped into the mapping world with virtual earth. there are a couple of things that make this service nifty. first off i figured out you can zoom using your middle scrolling wheel. i love the wheel. (did you know you can open a link in a new tab in firefox by clicking the link with the wheel?) it is slightly slow, but a good use of the wheel in my opinion. second is a service that google maps also has, but i didn't realize it had it until i tried virtual earth. you can overlay the road map with the satellite image. pretty cool when you overlay new construction since the roads aren't there on the satellite yet. google maps is still better in the contrast on the satellite photos though.

Google Maps Expands

wow check it out. now you can plan your next trip to the moon. doesn't seem to be any local services but check out what happens when you zoom all the way in on the image.

Jeremy in Kabul!

thanks to jeremy for posting a link to his blog on campion97.blogspot.com. Here Jeremy talks about his impressions of Kabul after being there for 1 month. he's a civilan contractor.

Zombie Survival Guide

from amazon.com get your very own Zombie Survival Guide!

Top 10 Lessons for Surviving a Zombie Attack

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don’t need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

house update

we've been seriously looking for 2 weeks. of the 5 houses i've really liked, only 2 have been on the market when we got there. 1 is pretty risky (BAD STEEP HILL) and the other is a bit more then i wanted to spend but we could swing it and it's not in the neighborhood where they show up to steal your tv - this neighborhood is upper crunch where they show up with a semi truck to take everything in your house and load your bmw up on the way out.
the mls for a house across the street from the 1 we just signed an offer on: mls 25017229

the house we just signed an offer on: mls 25017054
windermere link

the shake roof has about 4 years left on it (we'll verify this in the ispection) and the gates and fence post caps on the deck are leaving with the current owners. that is the ONLY thing bad i found about the house. open floor plan, valted ceilings, nice master with jetted tub and seperate shower next to the crapper. Awesome yard that meets alodia's desires (the selling point) and 11.1 miles from work with about 8 of those miles on the interstate - and less then 1.5 miles to church. end of a culdesac with LOW traffic neighborhood in the elite neighberhood of spokane 'south hill' where stuff has always been selling at a premium. i view it as a safe investment even if I don't end up there forever, but someplace that would meet my needs and desires if I were there longer.

our agent put up with us reading ALL the paperwork we signed for the offer. I don't think anyone has done that to him before. I asked him if he'd be comfortable not understanding the fine print when 1/4 of a million $ was at stake. he said he was. i was not.

we offered them about 2% less then the just reduced asking price, possible pushing us out of the running. We stenciled in some more stuff we wanted them to leave in the house (fridge, washer dryer, window blinds) - we'll see how it goes. IF God want's us to have it, it should be a shoe-in.; if not, there is still plenty of places this could get dropped and we're happy to move on.

A Better Blue

those of you who are worried about getting a new storage technology that will let you back up your entire hard drive , worry no longer. blu-ray is just a slightly better implementation of dvd that will hold back progress a couple of years, it isn't actually cutting edge at all. after the market has played with that they will start marketing 3-d holographic storage. C&E News ran a very interesting article in the june 27, 2005 issue on data storage in 3-d. it isn't that far off. in fact they are already talking about taking over the tape market for long term backup storage stuff. and with these specs, backing up a hard drive looks like it will become possible again.

from inphase (spin off of bell labs)
200 GB per square inch
first generation avail. 2006: 300 GB disk
target 2009: 1.6 TB disk
transfer rate of 27 MB/s demonstrated (initially first generation for sale at 20 MB/s plan on achieving 120 MB/s for the 1.6 TB disk)

from aprilis
200 GB disk available
200 MB/s data transfer
already shown to record & retrieve at 1 Gbit/s

do not call

DON"T CALL ME! some idiot sold my contact info and has now called with a voice recording for a cruise to the 'mexican riverira' if you get a call from 800-662-1366 dont' waste your time. I wish I had written the contact info down from the message but I deleted it. they have called AT WORK on a hard line, and ON MY COMPANY CELL PHONE. some info about the phone number on kvia.com news site says they have been targeting cell phones in el PaSO, TX

update*
a little more searching has turned up this website which may help me track down the return number that they said to call. i've gone through some of my scraps of paper, and i THINK the return number to call was 575-5596. i'm not sure if this was 888 or 800 prefix. maybe they'll call again.

these guys called the wrong person for a fri afternoon.