2079?
You're an adult the moment you sit down and work out how many years you probably have left.
"You won't be young forever
there's only a fraction to the sum
you won't be young forever
nor will anyone."
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We've finally named our new hamster.
After much deliberation we've decided to name him Pigpen, after the Peanuts character. Pigpen seems to enjoy making quite a mess in his cage, from throwing everything that isn't nailed down around to kicking his food dish off of the top level of the cage. He also likes kicking bedding between the bars.
We're still trying to figure out how he produces more mass in poo than food eaten.
As if that weren't enough we've also caught him teaching himself to climb the bars of his cage and trying to headbutt the door open. It figures that we'd have a …Read more...
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Taking the bait: you're doing it wrong.
This is the bluegill that Bill accidentally gigged when reeling his line in last Saturday.
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Drowning worms, just like in the good old days.
When I was a kid my mom and I used to drive out to North Park Lake in western Pennsylvania and spent the evening (and sometimes most of Saturday) sitting on a bench on the shore with a tackle box, two fishing rods, and a couple of dozen nightcrawlers from the gas station at the bottom of the hill. We never caught anything really newsworthy - at most a handful of panfish and only once a pair of rainbow trout, but we had some great times out there. Sometimes a flock of ducks would go swimming in the lake and we'd …
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LARPers Gone Wild: Fallout 2 in Russia!
When I was younger and had more time on my hands I used to LARP a couple of times a month with House of the Unknown at CMU. We never really did anything terribly elaborate - I was one of the few who dressed up because my character was sufficiently different from me, but a lot of folks just wore whatever they happened to have handywhich suited. I also used to go to anime conventions and cosplay a bit, though I never really put the kind of effort into any of my costumes that most folks do. I certainly never did …
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Review: Transformers 2 - Revenge of the Fallen
On Friday night Lyssa and I rounded up the usual suspects, and after a brief dinner at the TGI Friday's in Tyson's Corner Mall we stormed the movie theatre to catch the 2200 showing of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
I feel that I should state this up front: if you're looking for a deep movie that'll feed your head, this isn't it. It's a two-and-a-half hour movie about giant robots beating the hell out of each other. If you loved the cartoon as a kid, you'll be in hog heaven watching this flick. Shia LaBeouf reprises his role …
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First solid-state quantum processor developed.
Quantum computing, thought by many to be the holy grail of information technology, is based upon one of the basic tenants of quantum mechanics: a particle, be it a photon, a hydrogen atom, or a molecule of water, exists in a multitude of states (location, spin, orientation, what have you) until you actually examine it, at which time the particle suddenly 'picks' a state and stays that way as long as you're watching. At least that's the most commonly quoted interpretation of the math. At Yale University a team of scientists has created the first purely electronic quantum processor and …
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Misadventures in microcontrollers.
I've spent my free time over the past couple of days hacking away on my current project-slash-obsession and thus I've been doing a lot of reading up on microcontrollers, or at least the basics of them. Knowing nothing about them as a technology or about sound synthesis for that matter, I find myself having to start from first principles, which are never as easy as they seem to grasp no matter how much experience you have under your belt. I'm trying to design a synthesizer coming at it as a code jockey as well as a musician (or one-time musician …
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Wow. My vacuum sucks.
That is all the lint that was clogging the motor. I field stripped the carpet sweeper this afternoon and pulled it all out. Now it'll actually pick stuff up from the carpet.
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What hath the fabulists wrought?
It’s long been said that science fiction predicts, or at least inspires some of the things which we take for granted every day. While the exact origins of the genre could be debated until the cows come home (and they most certainly are in some circles), it was some time during the 17th century c.e. during the Age of Reason in which people really began to write stories in which the advances of the time were their inspiration. Great voyages by sailing ship and fanciful aircraft were taken to regions of the globe which had only been seen …
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