Internet isn't WW3 proof

two cables that route traffic (internet and other telecom) from india and the middle east have been cut. the interesting thing is that right now people are not saying anything about terrorism. with a weak economy in the states i wonder how cutting our connection with india will impact the economy. we still depend a great deal even for the internet on corporate owned pipelines in a few key areas and so it seems to me the real terrorism would be to bring down key things. like the computers that control domain names.

Call Me Crazy

i'm not super at economics, finance, that business stuff (though i do manage our money so i'm not totally clueless... well close) but i was checking out how much the fed rate cut impacted home loan rates and found the following.

someone please tell me how the apr can be lower than the rate for a home loan because that isn't really making sense to me.

Drink Your Reclaimed Water

yes you don't have to say goodbye to that water from flushing the toilet! in our world of droughts and controlling water resources with tight fists all so we can keep a lawn green with drinkable water while other people can't even find drinkable water we are finally making good progress. here's two articles on water purification.
a recent southern california reclamation project
an older article on a nasa project

stepper motor intro

digikey rocks.

stepper motor introduction flash presentation.

Qtrax -free p2p music

anyone remember the gnutilla, morepheus, or try this one, napster? they all have this little bit of stomach acid associated with them. you have to throw up a little when your forced to ponder the ethical problems associated with ripping of other peoples hard work. theres a reason some artists are starving they are ugly they care more about art than money. at any rate, prepare to hold your stomach acid in when at 12pm tonight (estern standard) a new name gets added to the famous list of has beens and tried tos. meet qtrax which promises to be all that, and so much more.

google master plan

I'm a huge fan of google and their technology. its about time for a little video like this to come out and warn us of what we are all getting ourselves into (yeah, its pretty close to skynet). see a 3 min. vid. at http://www.masterplanthemovie.com/

ring of infinite sorrows

strap on your stupid and visit this video and then see the corresponding ebay page.

Pay Compare

I thought i'd give everyone a 10sec writeup on pay structure, that is as compared between a very quickly growing startup and that of corporate america.

* corporate america
pay interval: 14-18 months, average pay increase 3-4%. the only way to beat the system is take a job transfer and hope you time it right so it doesn't screw up your scheduled increases. if your unlucky, you change and they pull in your increase and only give you another few percent, and you sign yourself up for another 16month wait. it takes a lot of work to change jobs, and this ultimately forces you into something you are neither good at, or enjoy. way to go corporate America.

*successful startup
pay increases are YEARLY and directly line up with reviews. there is good profit sharing (stock options). you can take on new responsibility and be recognized immediatly and have your pay adjusted accordingly. I got my first raise/promotion at just around the 4 month point.

risk/return
it goes to show that there really is a direct correlation between risk and return. I figure the startup is probably 5-10 times more risky (yeah, i made that up, i have no idea how to measure that) than corporate America in terms of job stability and long term employement. but the potential return is astronomical. as always there is talk of an IPO, and i'm so happy to be in on the ground floor.

Fix Your Own Problem

so for the past year i have been disturbed that my periodic table i print out for the g chem tests is hard to read because the print is small and the font is thin. so then i thought hey i can fix this, i can make my own periodic table. then i thought if i am going to make a table i'm going to make a good one. one i can resize, control, make beautiful.

so i eventually figured out enough in latex to build my periodic table dynamically. so if i decide to change a font size i just change one thing. if they update the weights i can write it to my array and rebuild my file. its not perfect but bigger and better than my old one. here is my updated version below. you can download the file, it looks better downloaded.

proxylord

I was going through the logs again (its actually kind of fun) and found a connection from http://www.proxylord.com/ i'm not sure what the extension .DE is (dutch) but if you need to surf from that side of the world (anonymously) give that one a shot. i'm wonder who felt the need the visit nerdy anonymously, strange.

tomorrowsauce

If you ever had a yearning to own a piece of the future, there’s no need to kill a unicorn and make tomorrowsauce out of his horn.

I found the quote on an auto blog and felt it may help bring meaning to all your weekends.

How to Survive an Encounter with an Ostrich

now i know most of you don't have an ostrich, but they do exist on farms and it is always good to have another animal survival skill available. so read up and live. plus the how to cites theodore rosevelt, hey if it works for a president... well...

What does it mean to be top of a field?

here's a really good obituary (or mostly good, the ending was a bit weak in my opinion) from the new york times on bobby fischer. it was striking to me that he was clearly at the top of his field and had a high IQ yet was so clearly on the bottom of the field of happiness. i don't think that being happy and being intelligent are somehow mutually exclusive or something but there are times that i think the 'less intelligent' by our IQ measuring (and even by our subjective observing) are happier. i know that my observations are highly skewed and i only remember the things i want to in order to support that opinion so i'll try to discard that thought for now and move to what i found mind boggling about the obituary.

bobby fischer's mother was a jew. bobby fischer has a high IQ and plays the very logical game of chess extremely well. bobby fischer ranted about a jewish conspiracy against him and wanted jew's to be arrested. bobby fisher was part of a denomination that appears to have connections with sda and practiced many jewish customs.

the logical disconnect seems great from my end but perhaps in his mind not so much. why hate something that is so much a part of you, chosen and genetic. maybe we all hate things illogically but just don't show it to extremes to make it obvious.

yahoo media player

theres some strange work over at the yahoo developer network. i haven't used it yet, but something about an mp3 player for your computer that will play music off of your system and sync to your devices, but lives on the web? strange.. check it out here

pay in the end

TortoiseSVN

I've been using TortoiseSVN for about 6 months now for source control management/versioning. I don't know what I did without it!

painfully easy to use, fast - takes about 2 minutes to figure out - and could be useful for other things like image/picture archive to another machine - whatever.

old books

books that are being removed from the library at work. no one is taking them. why?

the truck for me

my kind of RV.

All Look Same

play some cool picture based trivias and read the site philosophy for some interesting internetting about asians. you can see how could you are at identifying the difference between chinese, korean, and japanese people, food, artitecture... it's pretty fun. i score average =) alllooksame.com

postsecret poll

i know its not nerd related, its more a sad state of human culture, but who all of you nerds tunes in faithfully each and every week to view postsecret? jen got me going on it, and i can't stop. am I the only one?

socialized music

www.thesixtyone.com

"
thesixtyone is a music discovery game that rewards those who help others listen to good new music. Any artist can add their music to thesixtyone in a process that's fast and simple.
"

like dig, for music. very cool, and well thoughtout.

exploder

from here