general musings

The Brake Equation

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Driving in traffic the other day I was trying to name all of the instant warning signs on seeing another driver that will cause me grief on my drive. I know it's not a true mathematical representation but I thought it might be fun to present my findings like the Drake Equation, the equation designed to calculate the number of extaterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. 

 


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No User Serviceable Parts Inside

When I was a kid, before anything electrical was thrown away, I was given the opportunity to tear it apart with a screw driver: alarm clocks, cassette decks, record players, VCRs and appliances. I realized that my own kids haven't had that kind of experience. Everything is composed of integrated circuits these days. If you tore apart a modern day alarm clock you'd end up with a circuit board and an LCD. Boring. Crack open the iPod your sister ran through the washing machine? A circuit board and a battery. Yawn. 


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My thoughts on the distributions of the retired shuttle fleet.

Let me begin with: NYC, really?

I was hoping that Seattle would be a recipient of one of the flown, retired space shuttles, but with nearly 30 museums competing for, in reality, just three orbiters (NASM was a guarantee, KSC was a shoe-in), it was going to be a tight competition.

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Wired Geiger Counter!

 A number of years ago, much to my wfe's chagrin, I purchased a 1960's era Civil Defense issue geiger counter. It was only $15, so what the heck, right? Well with events transpiring in Japan, I thought it might be fun to wire the counter to the web. So, you can see it at http://geiger.bahneman.com. Seattle's only live geiger counter online. It is a pretty rough site, but it does work. I'd like to add an automatic way to count the ticks using some sort of audio analysis, but by the time I did it, interest will have passed. 

Check it out: http://geiger.bahneman.com

 

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Emerald City Comicon

This year, for the first time, Jenn, Cohen and I attended the Emerald City Comic Con, a comic-centric Con in its 9th year, but open to all forms of scifi, fantasy and gaming genres. Our two prime areas of interest Firefly and Fringe. This year, John Noble ("Walter") and Jasika Nicole ("Astrid"/"Asterisk"/"Asteroid"/"Kick Ass-trid") were going to be on a panel and the fan-film "Browncoats Redemption" was going to be shown (Jenn waslooking forward to this).

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Mac's back in town

 

The mind-meld work, the other MBP protected my work and kept me working while my computer was repaired. I will say that I was a bit nervous sending away my notebook like that, but the company came through as advertised, and for $325, she's as good as new. In fact, it finally recognizes all 4GB of ram and not just 3GB. 

 


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My Macbook Pro died!

 

My faithful MPB, on which I do all of my source code development and photo processing went to sleep and never woke up. And, like most people, its been much too long since my last backup! The source code was safe, as it was all stored on a source code repository, but my photo editing data was on the hard drive. 

Under normal circumstances, I'd be panicked, however, I was confident that the data on my hard drive was safe, and that the problem lie in the logic board (motherboard). So how to get my data back? Why with an Apple version of the Vulcan mind-meld:

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Messing with the new Facebook layout

Facebook has notoriously contrained customization, which is a good thing, however, there are a few ways to exploit some personalization in the way your profile page looks, without going the direction of Myspace.

A few weeks ago an artist posted one of the first adaptations of this customization below, with various other styles showing up.

This is my second take on it, using a photo I took on January 1.


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My Social Networks

I've been integrating more with Twitter lately and I realized that there are several layers of self-censorship (self-control?) depending on which social medium I use. Currently, there are 5 or 6 major components to all the social networks that I currently use, in no particular order:

Facebook

IRC


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In retrospect, the week in review

This week, the week of the "mystery missile" non-event in California, turned out in a way that I could never have imagined. What started out as mild curiousity turned in to a desire to put to rest a "mystery" that was so obviously unmysterious to me.


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