Giant Interstellar Void

Giant Interstellar Void: "stuff that astronomers think exists, but hasn't actually been found anywhere, isn't there, either"

Mmmkay??

Me? I'm going to go look at a total eclipse of the moon at 5:30 AM Central...

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alec at wonderscope

mt vernon il

front royal virginia

Buzz About Wireless - First bill from an iPhone

Buzz About Wireless - First bill from an iPhone: "ATT and the iPhone - this user received his first bill at 15 (!) pages, totalling over $240 for his '$120' monthly shared plan."

Fancy.  How's your iPhone first bill been?

Route to Arlington

Going to Arlington VA one of these days - and I'm taking I-64 again. I must be a glutton for punnishment. The other (shortest) alternative was to run through Indianapolis, Dayton, etc. Tour the great industrial wrecks of america! Not.

SO, here is the google map for my route - click and check it out.

Fee you on the Slip Side...

W.


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Buzz About Wireless - EVDO at 120KPH?

Buzz About Wireless - EVDO at 120KPH?: "Using the RevA network, Cheung was able to play World of Warcraft, download videos from Youtube at 120KPH and use Skype to place phone calls. "

Cult of Personality

Kung Fu Monkey: "Mm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.": "This woman's just been caught out admitting she doesn't understand her oath of office to the people of the United States and that she's misplaced her priorities in a cult of politicized hero-worship ...and she's treating it like Myra from HR is harassing her about the damn TPS forms again."

Check out the video.  This is lovely...

U.S. Will Allow Most Types of Lighters on Planes - New York Times

U.S. Will Allow Most Types of Lighters on Planes - New York Times: "Federal aviation authorities have decided to stop enforcing a two-year-old rule against taking cigarette lighters on airplanes, concluding that it was a waste of time to search for them before passengers boarded."

OMG - The terrirsts have w0n!  

alec and gramma

alec

Creative Profanity

So, here I was rockin back from Chicago this weekend, and I had an idea for a weekly recurring feature for this blog: Creative Profanity.

We all have the usual motherfucker or craptastic swearwords; what we need is some new, unique and inventive swearwords and phrases.

To start: "Mudsucking Shitfoot". I know I've read that somewhere in a pulp sci-fi book, but I find no reference to it on Google. Daffynition to come once I think of one. . .

Any ideas?

Omaha Was Bombed During WWII - Omaha's 150th Birthday News Story - KETV Omaha

Omaha Was Bombed During WWII - Omaha's 150th Birthday News Story - KETV Omaha: "OMAHA, Neb. -- The year was 1945 and the United States was in the middle of World War II. Omaha seemed relatively safe until one night in April when a Japanese bomb dropped in Dundee."

Visual Hub, High Motion and H.264

Just a tip - on Visual Hub for the Mac, when encoding an MP4 file with lots of motion - my example was a series of photos at 15 frames per photo (2 per second) - it fails miserably even at high quality settings.  The fast frame changes just disintegrated into macroblock noise.

However, if I go into Advanced Settings, and check '2-pass' encoding, it clears right up, at the cost of 50% more encoding time.  (2 minutes to 3 minutes for a 2:10 video clip on the 2.33 MacBook Pro)

Another note - at the same settings, without the 2-pass encoding, the AVI Simple profile appears to deliver similarly excellent results.  Not sure what codec is used - Xvid / DivX I assume via FFMPEG.  Also a smaller file size and greater compatibility between Windows, Mac and Linux.

The AVI files can be seen at my KS HSTA site (no, not the UTube, below that!).

W.

fell asleep reading

fell asleep reading
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

Boy chose this book to read and ended up falling asleep. Too sweet. (he's still six isn't he?!?)

Safari 3.0 works with Blogger!

Finally!  The Rich Text editor works in Safari.  Now I can:

1. Stop using Firefox for blog posts 
2. Show my mom how to set up a blog

I've been running the new Safari 3.0 for, um, 90 seconds now and haven't found any bugs.  Nice.  Other neat thing - the built in spellchecker checks spelling in the 'edit html' view on Blogger.  

How to kill brown recluse spiders

Great publication on how to kill brown recluse spiders from the University of Tenn. Even names specific product names - Demon and Tempo are the highest recommended products.

However, the University of Kansas has found that nothing really works as well as good old fashioned glue traps - they use Catchmaster brand.

Gut Rumbles

Gut Rumbles : "If my blog does not meet your standards, then LOWER YOUR STANDARDS. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?"
Backwoods hill-scoggin who has a down-home folksy style of writing. Fairly offensive, but still a good read.

More photos from New Mexico

Welcome, eh?
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

I added some more photos from the Memorial Weekend trip to New Mexico - click the picture to the right, check the 'motorcycle touring' set. Enjoy!

W.

Photohosting, blogging

Funny bits - Picasa from Google now offers integrated tools to upload photos from your Mac, even directly in iPhoto. Very nice, very easy. But! There is no way to create a blog post from a photo in the Picasa web interface. Last time I czeched, Picasa and Blogger were owned by the same company.

However, Flickr by Yahoo! (a direct competitor to Google) makes it bog simple to post a photo, caption, story etc to Blogger from any image - yours or other peoples!

Just one of those odd things I've noticed...