Who is Bill - author of Ravioli at Lightspeed

This post to the MIT Humor mail reflector was written by 'Bill'.

Under enough pressure, ravioli behaves as a gas

Who is Bill? I'd love to properly cite this article in my .sig; I'm misattributing it to Nathan J. Williams now, who posted it to the MIT mail list.

(updated link - w. England 14-SEPT-12)

So not going riding

So not going riding
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

No way would i go out riding tonight. It is absolutely pouring down rain!

Jeremy Clarkson on Motorcycles (British)

Jeremy Clarkson Vespa GTV Navy 125 review | Driving - Times Online: "What I’m trying to say here is that, yes, bikes and cars are both forms of transport, but they have nothing in common. Imagining that you can ride a bike because you can drive a car is like imagining you can swallow-dive off a 90ft cliff because you can play table tennis"

Alec and Cubscouts selling popcorn

Alec and Cubscouts selling popcorn
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

IRS Withholding Calculator

IRS Withholding Calculator: "The purpose of this application is to help employees to ensure that they do not have too much or too little income tax withheld from their pay. It is not a replacement for Form W-4, but most people will find it more accurate and easier to use than the worksheets that accompany Form W-4. You may use the results of this program to help you complete a new Form W-4, which you will submit to your employer."

Nathan - may be handy with your new job!

Random Cat drinking

Random Cat drinking
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

Random Cat will only drink out of the faucet. He's too good for the fancy Drinkwell cat fountain!

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.: "The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.
Try it, you’ll like it. It's free."

Airave and bandwidth

I've just gotten a Sprint Airave -- a box that acts as a micro cell tower and sends the voice signal across the Internet to the public telephone network -- and I thought I'd see how it works when you are limited in bandwidth.

So, I'm downloading a whole stack of files, using over 600kb/sec of bandwidth (the cable modem only handles about 680kb/sec) and got on a conference call.  

Everything seems to be working fine!  Fancy...

Motorola S9 audioblog

WxExW Auto Audio Blog #20

Set up the Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headset on the Instinct - here is the first test!

Gabcast! WxExW Auto Audio Blog #20

Oh no another comfy cat

Oh no another comfy cat
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

BywayBoogie banquet

BywayBoogie banquet
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

Great food after a great day of riding around Paris, AR. Thanks to the Grapevine Restaurant.

Study: Sprint ranks worst in pay-for-performance - Kansas City Business Journal:

Study: Sprint ranks worst in pay-for-performance - Kansas City Business Journal::

"A Glass Lewis & Co. report, released Oct. 3, said the Overland Park-based wireless carrier (NYSE: S) paid its top five executives almost $74 million in 2007, when the company’s stock dropped about 30 percent and it reported a $29 billion loss."

What I like about this is the employees participate in the same bonus scheme - last bonus period we got a nice surprise!  :-)  Too bad the merry-go-round will stop in a couple years.  Then I'll have to get a real job.  

I should re up my American Concrete Institute certification . . .

Audioblog: Instinct, Moto Bluetooth test

Just playing with the Instinct again, paired it up with the old Motorola H500 Bluetooth headset. Functional, somewhat muted. I get a pair of S9 headphones later this week or next week - see if they are any better!

Click to listen . . .
Gabcast! WxExW Auto Audio Blog #19

Cooking

Here I was feeling pretty good about getting a homecooked meal for Alec tonight - nothing fancy, just a basic omlette, toast, orange wedges, etc. Then I talked to Nathan. And he's fixing home made macaroni and cheese. With home made croutons. From his own made from scratch home-made bread. (using his home-brew yeast cultures I have to assume!)

Sigh.

And he's a single dad with a harder full-time job than I have!

I think I'll order pizza.

Alec selling popcorn

Alec selling popcorn
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour

Pork Salad - or a good hard shaft?

From the Jamie Dupree show on wsbradio.com: "Subparagraph (A) shall not apply to any shaft consisting of all natural wood with no laminations or artificial means of enhancing the spine of such shaft,"

I'm not sure if they're legislating how to F*** us or just making pork salad, but that is from page 300 and 301, Section 503 of the senate approved version of the Wall Street bailout bill.

Fancy.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): "Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers."

Apple App Store customer reviews now require purchase

Macworld | iPhone Central | App Store customer reviews now require purchase:

"That’s kind of a no-brainer, when you think about it: if you’re going to review an application, it only makes sense that you’ve used it, right? Hopefully, this will do something to prevent the onslaught of bad reviews based only on an application’s description."

On a site I run for work, we encounter the same problem - people providing bad reviews, bad information and inflammatory comments on devices and services they don't have - and have no intention of purchasing. This is an interesting technical solution - and fairly easy for Apple to adopt, since their review platform is tied directly to their backend purchasing systems.

Our systems are unfortunately not so well interconnected - we have no way to identify users who actually have the device, so we rely on good old fashion manual reviewing of content submissions. Some sludge still leaks through, but it's as good as we've got for now.

TexSTOC Ride Report

TexSTOC was my first event I've been to since I wadded up my ST1100 in May of this year. Rode down on Saturday on my new-to-me Ducati ST2 (hey, it's still an ST!) - it took a while to get psyched up to go ride, but I did it. Intellectually, I was ready to ride, but my body still remembered the last time I was riding it rather hurt. Lots of autonomic responses trying to make me stay home. (translation: I was skeered)

Turned out to be a fine ride down, great people too. Met up with a good chunk of the KC crew that I'd seen occasionally at Culvers or for BBQ over the past couple of years, plus a new member, Maureen, from Lees Summit. Spent an hour or more talking with Mike and Allison from Louisiana about their BMW club, pets, kids, lowering bikes, their Cajun ride to eat and rock in November and more.

Saw George Catt across the room at dinner but never caught up with him - guess he was across the street atCampSTOC Hi, George!

I won the door prize (set of screwdrivers) for the most unreliable bike there -- thanks, Keith!

Going home was even better than coming down. Rode from Eureka Springs up to Eagle Rock, then cut across MO Hwy F through Roaring River state park. (that'd be a great location for a camping evnet!) 'F' took me to 112, south to Seligman, then North on 37 to Washburn, and 90 across to Southwest City. Awesome route! From there, down through NE Oklahoma and up US69. Passed through Pitcher, OK, a sad rural wasteland. They've had a double dose of hell - first the tailings from lead and zinc mining have toxified the entire area - no plant growth, serious heavy metal poisoning in the animals and human stock left there - and were hit by supercell tornadoes on 11-May of 2008 killing six. No one has bothered to rebuild - just left the ruined buildings and found somewhere else to live. It gave me remembered shivers looking at themoto photos from the Chernobyl area


However, I did manage to hit lots of twisties on the ride home, and got my rhythm back. The new Avon on the back of the Duc only has about a quarter-inch chicken strip left on it. That Ducati sure handles sweet and really has a great growl coming out of the corners. I wasn't sure if I'd be willing to push it any after wadding a bike, but I was hitting the corners harder and faster than I ever had on the ST1100.

• View More Photos from the event at will.mylanders.com

Morning in Eureka Springs

Morning in Eureka Springs
Originally uploaded by kcsporttour