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.

Do Not Call

those of you that have cell phones may want to sign up your number on the do not call registry (www.donotcall.gov). last night i got a "you have won!" call on my cell phone. i didn't realize the telemarketers were getting deprate enough to try cell phones now. they also tried the lab phone at work last week. the most annoying part of the call was that it was an automated message and you were supposed to call back a number for information. lame! if you are going to waste my time at least give me the opportunity to immediately waste yours.

Earthquake

on sunday keith was working on the shed while i was cleaning the kitchen when i heard a loud thunk. i thought something had been dropped on the house. i dashed outside, "what was that?" i asked keith. he didn't know and was about to ask me what i had done. turns out it was an earthquake!

Awesome storm

check out this site (you may have to create a log in) for info on the huge windstorm that hit us Tuesday night. It was awesome! It got eerily dark around 8:00pm, and then the wind came along, and blew everything around. Trees fell over, lost limbs, broke in half, etc. One that was split (two tops) broke off and landed up our little road. On the way to work Wednesday morning, we saw remains of trees that had fallen on the main roads, blocking them. Our power was off from 8 something until 4:00am.

Click here for pictures on the windstorm.

Makes me glad our landlord had 7 trees around our place cut down just a few weeks ago. I have no doubt that at least 2 of them would have landed on our house had they still been standing.

kevs sick

I guess kev has been sick for quite some time. can someone give us an update on how he's doing?

dozer

oh where, oh where is my Dozer

MAC address's

I found the list of MAC address ranges assigned to manufactures. this is a unique prefix in the MAC system that designates the manufacure. I was glad to see my manufacture was legit and was listed
see this

happy birthday to you...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR SARAH, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU *sung loudly and out of tune*

EHS

Everyone Hates Stoners.. no wait. thats not it. its Employee Health and Safety! I noticed the lead EHS dude where I work was outside SMOKING. I wonder if his death from the cancer stick will be covered since he was injured on company property?

apple = intel

yesterday apple announced that they are switching to intel chips. yup that's right. check out the press release here and the commentary on cnet here.

pretty interesting. i think one of the most interesting things is the last part of the cnet article that says that some people will run windows on a mac, but os x and jaguar will always be run on a mac. seems like they are excluding some people that may concievably want to run a unix based os but don't want a mac.

houses

so kev, tell us how the house hunt is going! after the cruise we were pretty sure you guys were serious about getting into something with 4 walls and a roof that you can beat up and call your own (just don't spill oil on the ground or the EPA can take it from you).

I hope you find something good! give us the MLS links to your current options and the lot o' us on nerdy tales will help you decide!