This has been in the works for a while but it’s been made official by Sean Kennedy and Cimmerian of Rantmedia: the first Rantmeets, monthly gatherings of fans of Rant Radio, their original media projects, and the antics of Sean and Cim will begin in September, the first being held around the world this upcoming Friday, 4 September 2009. Every month thereafter Rantmeets will be held on the first Friday of every month.
The first Rantmeet in northern Virginia will be held at Stacy’s Coffee Parlor in Falls Church at 1800 EST5EDT (6:00pm). I don’t have …
I realize that some of these stories are kind of old, but in my defense I work a lot.
Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science announced earlier this month that they had grown a replacement tooth for an adult lab mouse. While this doesn’t sound like much given that rodent teeth grow continually through the creature’s life, they accomplished this task by engineering mouse cells to grow teeth and transplanting them into the socket of an extracted tooth. The tooth grown was fully functional, and seemed to have all of the nerve connections, structural integrity, and usability …
Rapid prototyping and fabrication are one of those technologies that you don’t appreciate (or even know are in use) until you walk into someplace like the Boston Fab Lab at MIT and run into them face-first. Things we buy in the store just sort of pop into being without the consumer knowing anything about how they were made, be it by injecting liquid plastic into a mold or using a robot to mill a block of metal into an intricate shape. Anyway, a student named Mark used a ShopBotCNC machine (the best way to describe one is a …
Lyssa and I got up early (which is to say, we slept in for a change) last Tuesday to get our stuff packed and leave for our first vacation in a couple of years. Jason met us at our apartment and helped us load everything into the back of his SUV (we packed kind of heavy for a change, though most of it consisted of books that we were hoping to catch up on). After a quick lunch at our local deli and a sidetrip to pick up some essentials (like shampoo and asthma medication) we then hit the highway …
Lyssa and I packed up our stuff and set out around 1100 EST5EDT on Saturday morning in the general direction of Rockville to Laurelinde’s place, where we picked up Cate and Tori (after a cup of coffee, of course, following a rather rude surprise early that day) for an afternoon in Maryland. We set off toward College Park for lunch at Plato’s Diner because it happened to be within spitting distance of our eventual destination. Tori was turning sixteen and as her gift we’d all chipped in to get her ears re-pierced at Curious Tattoo on the …
I took Pigpen out to run around the apartment in his ball a couple of days ago and used the opportunity to refill the water and food in his cage. After I put him back he promptly returned to his daily life of climbing around the cage and taunting gravity by climbing around on the roof of his cage. As you would expect would happen, from time to time he’d lose his grip and fall to the bottom of the cage (or maybe one of the mesh floorwooks that added a little more terrain to the interior). At some …
Disclaimer: I got three hours of sleep last night because my sleep schedule is screwed. This post will probably not make a whole lot of sense.
Lyssa and I organized craft night at our place on Friday evening and put the word out for folks to come over and work on stuff. There isn’t much else that you can say about that, really – I’ve been experimenting with Arch Linux on my netbook to get a sense for whether or not it will work for my purposes. I would eventually like to use my EeePC as a wearable computer …
When I discovered that Spyglass Pictures was bringing G.I. Joe to the big screen a while ago I was nonplussed until I discovered that Christopher Eccleston, who happens to be one of my favorite actors, was playing the arms dealer Destro, or James McCullen the fourteenth, head of MARS.
Chris, Chris, Chris.. what were you thinking?
I want to like this movie, I really do. It’s just that there are so many things about it that piss me off in one way or another. When I go to see a science fiction movie, I implicitly agree to suspend …
Only on the DC beltway can you be doing 70 in a 55 zone and have a little old blue-haired grandmother in a Thunderbird behind you hammering on her horn and pitching a conniption fit because you’re not going fast enough for her. The moment traffic opens up, that grandmother will stand on the gas pedal and burn past you like you were standing still, flagging you off as she did so. If you’re very fortunate she’ll hurl her $8us vaguely-coffee-flavored mixed beverage from Starbucks out of the driver’s side window at your windscreen in an …
Every morning I pop open Google News in one of my browser tabs and mainline the top 100 stories to get a sense for what’s happening in the world and what general sort of day I’m in for. Last week the Associated Press announced that it would be modifying the content it makes available on the Net in such a way that they can (hypothetically) control how it can be read, where it can be read, and who can read it. They say they want to be able to monitor how the content they make available to everyone …
