check scare

slashdot links to a nice little article telling the story of how an author has offered small checks to readers that find errors in his [technical] books. for reasons of check security [or lack there of] he is no longer doing checks.

based on that, these are my uninformed recomendations
1) don't use a checking account as a savings account
2) don't tie an overdraft from a checking account to a savings account
3) keep only what you need in the checking account
4) if you invested in getting rid of global poverty, you wouldn't have to worry about losing money in your checking account.

...oops had the throw that last one in there. i'm in global poverty this fall at school.

heywhatsthat.com

I was browsing over at the google map directory and found a nice little tool that warrants much more playing with. heywhatsthat.com is a tool to plot the horizon (and name the peaks) from a location of your choosing. you can account for the curvature of the earth, and will also predict how far you can see from a particular location which makes it an ideal tool if... say.... you wanted to build a communications tower. check it out, you'll be impressed.

after you have picked your point, be sure and turn on the 'visibilty cloak' so you can see where you can 'see' on the big map. so cool.

I took the time to add in the view from Mount Rose for a friend.

wallstats

White Castle

Some time ago I saw Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a film that makes up for its lack of morals with increased laughs, and was totally convinced White Castle was a fictitious place. I was on business travel again this last week (Saint Louis this time) and we actually found one of these places.

Now picture with me the best fast food burger in existence (arguably In-n-Out here on the west coast) and prepare yourself as I did for the White Castle experience.

I should have known something was up, in-n-out is bright colors, happy, fast paced, where as White Castle is dull, drab, mundane, and slow (ok, it wasn't that slow, but the comparison sounds better). Burgers (without cheese) were 59-Cents or something, that too should have been a clue.

My coworker actually finished one, I could not (its only about 5 bites). I am convinced (and later told my wife) that dirt tastes better. When we returned the rental car across the street, we actually made a comment to the rental lot girl and she said "oh.. but did you get the ones with cheese? you have to have them with cheese, their the best that way". we politely informed her that no amount of cheese could have possibly made any difference and when we asked her if she had ever had in-n-out, she actually had the audacity to compare it to not being up to snuff with White Castle. wow.... to each their own.

If you ever run across a White Castle, just keep on moving. There is a nice little story of starting in 1916 with an iron griddle, and old shoe store, and a smashed meatball. to bad it looks different almost 100 years later, but still probably tastes about the same as a shoe store and a smashed meatball.

TinEye.com - image search

Visit TinEye.com and login (use http://www.bugmenot.com/view/tineye.com for a nice 'trial' membership) - to link/upload an image and have this beast search 1,000,000,000 images and show you 'similar' images.

I tried it with an image on a corporate website that had an image that appeared doctored from stock photography, and what do you know. it was.

biology diesel

man..I was just getting use to the idea of bio-diesel, now it looks like we are going to be turning to the biologists for our next form. you read it here first, i'm going to call it biology diesel. (sugar cane + yeast + gene splicing )

paint

I don't watch TV, I Just watch internet, so I don't really see commercials any more. you'all have probably already seen this one, but if you haven't, here it is in the original sound. if you like this one, the bouncy ball one is pretty good too.

reliablility

yup.. windows may be MORE reliable than the last, but anything less than 100% is still rubish in my book. I have no idea if this is real or not. someone needs to fire up the internet time machine or find a really old copy of nt4 and see if its on there.

scripting languages

I'm starting to get a reputation at work for solving problems with the crudest of tools. i'm not sure if thats a good reputation or not. I hate the idea of smashing an ant with a freight train, in my opinion a smallish bus is more appropriate. I firmly believe that everyone has a super-computer on their desk and refuses to acknowladge the power we all have right in front of us. you do not need to spend more money and time to release the beast, just open up a comand shell.

I read an article over on slashdot about 6 new[ish] scripting languages (well, some are really compiled) and theres all kinds of fun things, like other languages that compile in java byte code (groove) and ones that take pride in being compact, with a slogan, do it in 1mb, not 200mb. (Rebol, its not in the list of 6, but in the worthy mention section)

FPU in your GPU with CUDA

I read a little summary over on toms hardware of the cuda interface to nvidia graphics cards. i was intrigued by a post over on gizmodo about the GPU being used by -russian- hackers to break WPA and WPA2.

if you don't want to read all of it, i'll summarize: for certain things, a GPU can be at least 10x faster than the CPU.

Melodyne

Melodyne is software I got very excited about. It allowed us to take source material from anywhere, in our case from the natural world, and turn it into MIDI control data that would allow us to manipulate musical instruments, so we could have birds playing cellos or horns, or the wind playing strings. This is what we did in the film Rabbit Proof Fence [aka. The Long Walk Home]. I still think there is a lot more that can be done with it.

Melodyne is a wonderful piece of software. It allows me to do things I'd always dreamed of.

Peter Gabriel

The music from the video is from ninadeli

NAS backup

I was reading over on slashdot at some ideas for backup software, and it looks like bacula may be pretty high up there on the useful scale. I'm not sure if I could set it up to work on a network attached storage, but maybe we could set it up to mirror across some of the nerdytales computers? anyone interested? 500gb is what, $50 now?

German Qwerty

Wikipedia has a nice little writeup on qwerty in which you can clearly see the trouble I had today when I went to use a 'laptop' from Germany. its close, but not close enough. check out the 'z', 'y', loss of the '+' and '-' (in the standard locations). you don't have any idea how much of the expanded characters you use in day to day windows navigation until you've tried to use one of these baby's.

couple that with my inexperience in vista (and office 2007), and the fact that vista lost the 'run' ability from the start menu, and hyperterminal is now missing in vista and that made for one exciting unusable computer. oh yeah, no com port either. its strange how modern machines become increasingly less useful.

The fact that the OS was in german was only a minor inconvenience given the rest of the problems I had with the machine, OS, and office.

Tetraphobia

4

Your word of the day is Tetraphobia. I have no idea why cultures are so tied up in numerology. its the modern era, move on people!

At work, the main product has a developer logon PW with a lot of 8's. heres why

T-Day Plans

Seeing as Sarah is planning on being about 37 weeks pregnant we are not planning on traveling (I'd rather not have to tell my kid they were delivered at mile post 382 on the interstate).

We are happy to host anyone who wants to visit though. Especially those who want to cook yummy things :) or go hiking.

electrocute your diesel

some 'snake-oil' plate differential has claims of 20% increase in mpg or power. i say snake oil because it may have some validitity to it. it made it to slashdot, and was scoffed, but its actually been published on acs.org. and we know those guys are all snakeoilly. read the paper here

as a side note, now i don't feel so bad that i use paint for technical illustrations.

canada and back

A week ago I had a discussion with my manager about my work responsibilities. The discussion didn't go so well. We weren't seeing eye to eye on much of my responsibilities. The next day I was asked to fly to Canada for a spur of the moment FAT (factory acceptance test) to conclude a 4 month demo. A Canadian customer had a unit and wanted some modifications made, and I was the best qualified that was able to travel.

This last week, I flew up and spent almost the entire week up with the crazy Canadians. (yes, I did ride a horse, and yes, the saddle fell off, and yes I did end up on the ground). The trip was an awesome success (mostly luck). I spent a day and wrote a report on the new configuration and sent it back to the factory. When I got back, the plant gave me a raise and a new job (doing more of what I want to do).

not bad for missing 2 nights of school. well worth it I think.

putty puzzle games

weird little puzzle games from the maker of putty, which now has serial support so i'll be giving that shot. you guys can enjoy the games.

all the games appear to run in a browser window in java, so no need to install anything. i tried the tangle game and 'beat it' in a few minutes. it made me very proud.

Unscrewed Leg

They took the screws out of my leg... Lots of fun, got to meet some nice people in the hospital. I really like the guy holding the mask right before the lights went out, it all seemed quite pleasant.

headtracking