How about something far more cheerful in my life these days - like Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I going to see the Dresden Dolls last night?
After arriving home from work yesterday afternoon I hurried into the bedroom to change into more suitable attire for attending a concert put on by what is best described as a punk cabaret duo, namely Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione. I traded my jeans for black linen trousers, black elastic braces, threw on an electric blue necktie, and pulled my Victorian-cut tailcoat from the closet. I traded the USB key on my watch fob for a …
Early this morning was my final trip to the dentist's office of 2007. I figured that, seeing as how I'm on the road so much I should get a checkup and cleaning before New Year's to make sure that there's nothing pressing in the immediate future.
I could stretch this entry out and make it look interesting or even entertaining, but frankly I'm not in the mood for such creative writing at the moment.
I'm looking at four crowns, one of them ASAP before the cavity bores completely under the bicuspid's filling. I'm probably looking at four more root canals …
Children of the 80's will no doubt remember the company Heathkit, which was famous for selling all sorts of kits for the hobbyist, most notably a personal robot called HERO-1. They're still not down and out after all these years - in fact, they're going to be selling another personal robot kit called HE-RObot which will be based on industry-standard Wintel hardware. An advance release of the specs shows that HE-RObot's processor cores will be Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs on a mini-ITX mainboard, 80GB hard drive, USB-based machine management system (whatever that is), CD-ROM drive, multiple infrared sensors, a webcam …
I'm writing this update from Lyssa's parents' house once again - the holiday is here once again (however you happen to celebrate it), and this year we've gone back to visit our families. We left around 1200 EST5EDT yesterday in an attempt to beat the traffic rush headed to points north, west, east, and everywhere but the southern half of the compass rose. Traffic, weather, and being worn out from staying up far too late the night before being what they are, we pulled in around 1730 EST5EDT, a respectable timetable for leaving at noon.
One Jack Colley of the state of Texas is starting up a program which will require criminal record checks of people attempting to evacuate in the event of a natural disaster; the idea is that they want to weed out convicted felons to ensure that they can't prey upon anyone else trying to get to safety. Everyone attempting to board the evacuation buses will be issued a wristband with information encoded on it that will be used to identify people getting onto and later off of the buses. The data would be transmitted to the University of Texas Space Research …
Fun Fever constructed a large Tesla coil (a multiple circuit resonant electrical transformer) and a metal framework that would shape the electrical discharges in a particular way, namely, a tree with a star on top. Quite a bit of experimentation was required to get the …
The BitTorrent tracker search engine Torrentspy, which has been coming under fire increasingly in the past few months has taken a shot broadside, leaving the future of the site uncertain. A federal judge in the state of California ruled that the admins of the site lied under oath and destroyed evidence demanded by the MPAA for their prosecution. It was asserted that the admins of the forum also run by the search engine edited posts to conceal the subject matter and set up hidden forums for the discussion of privacy once it became clear that they were under scrutiny. The …
I can't say that I'm wild about the circumstances behind this (in fact, it's taken two days to calm down sufficiently to write about it without ranting), but the ramifications of this ruling are far-reaching and not a bit relevant these days.
In 2006, a Canadian citizen named Sebastien Boucher crossed the border into the United States and was stopped. His laptop was searched by US Customs agents. Allegedly, thousands of images related to child pornography were found on the drive (in case you haven't heard, US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) reserves the right to examine and make disk …
Given what happened with the wedding of 'lex Pendragon and Marlise this past weekend with some of the attendees and celebrants having problems attending due to delayed airplane flights or layovers due to weather, I think it'd be a good idea to post something about camping out in airports: Why you might have to do, how to do it, and what to look for.
While there are some people who actually plan to camp out in airline terminals for various reasons, most people don't. Those of us that do are usually constrained by transportation to the airport to begin with …
For a couple of weeks now, people in major cities like New York City and Los Angeles have been experiencing something far more unusual: Voices in their heads that suddenly cause them to look up at billboards. It isn't auditory hallucinations causing this but snipers armed with tight-cone directional sonic projectors aiming recorded sounds at people on the street as part of an advertising campaign for a show on A&E called Paranormal State. The device in question is called Audio Spotlight from Holosonics and involves the use of carefully tuned ultrasonic speakers. The principle behind this is that ultrasound …
