Nathan's Occasional Blog

I’d like to live in Texas.

Autoblog —

Apparently a few speed limits around the U.S. have been quietly elevated in the past few months. In May the Governor of Indiana signed into a law a raise from 65 to 70 mph in areas with a population less than 50,000. At the end of June Texas declared that the maximum speed limit in that state would now be 80 mph. (Everything’s big in Texas.) Finally, earlier this month Iowa decided to raise the speed limit on its rural highways from 65 to 70 mph. The state embedded sensors in some of these highways and learned that drivers’ speeds were averaging 69.8 mph. Some Iowans may believe that by raising the speed limit to meet the velocity of speeders, the state is stepping out onto a slippery slope. We can dream, can’t we?

Read | © 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

This looks pretty sweet. Wish I’d known about this a couple years ago when we were finding fixtures for our new house. 🙂

Glowing temperature-sensitive sink-fixtures:

Cory Doctorow: These sink-fixtures from Germany’s Hansa have temperature-sensors that light up different LEDs to indicate the water temp, and replace the traditional tube-shaped spout with a trough that exposes the water as it courses out. Link (via Futurismic)

Heh … where’s the diving board?  Even better, note it’s still full of water.  How do you tackle this problem?  I mean the environmentalists would have a cow if you just knocked that down and let all the chlorine into the ocean.  Let’s raise a toast to whatever poor sap gets tasked with figuring this one out.

A swimming pool stands alone on the beach near Destin, Fla., Monday, July 11, 2005, after having been separated from the building complex by the effects of Hurricane Dennis passing through the area on Sunday. (AP Photo/Phil Coale) [link]

 

Now our government can’t even keep the identity of its spies a secret, because outting them is so much more fun in order to stab someone in the back for having an opinion contrarty to your own [thanks Mr. Rove].  But it seems the publishing industry knows how to get things done when it comes to preventing and containing leaks.

Blogging Baby —

One source said it was accidental, another didn’t mention how it happened – but either way, several copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince were sold at a bookstore in Canada last week. The Canadian distributor of the Potter franchise, Raincoast Books Ltd, brought a quick injunction against the lucky few who had purchased the book, barring them from releasing any plot details. The court granted their injunction, and ordered that the copies of the book be returned to Raincoast. As a bonus, the company promised to deliver a special J.K. Rowling-autographed nameplate to each of the leakees when the books go on sale for real July 16.

Read

Alciea was just changing Kaitlyn who gradually woke up from her afternoon nap with a lot of gas coming out her rear end. 🙂 Anyway, the new diaper was on and Alicea finished up getting our daughter dressed again … Kaitlyn seemed to quiet down and be okay with the world again.

Then it happened … le grande fart! It was so violent that Kaitlyn scared herself into a crying frenzy again!

And what was mommy and daddy’s reaction? To have a good hard laugh.

We’re evil. Simple as that.

I hate to sound cliche here, but DAMN … coincidence or is something more sinister going on here? My guess is the “company” they were drilling with is the London Underground.

London bombings coincide with security exercise:

Mark Frauenfelder: On July 7 BBC Radio five interviewed Peter Power, managing director of Visor Consultants, a “crisis management” consultant. Power, who used to work at Scotland Yard’s Anti Terrorist Branch told the BBC that Visor was running a security exercise at the same times and places that the bombings took place.

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don’t want to reveal their name but they’re listening and they’ll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they’d met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management

HDTV Happiness:

As I mentioned on my show the other night, our house is finally basking in the glow of HDTV! It’s truly an amazing experience, viewing high definition television within the comfort of your own home. Every single pixel is painted in happiness, dipped in the stream of media gold. My only issue now is: I don’t want to watch regular television. If it’s 4:3, it’s not for me. If it’s less than 1080i, then I’m not your guy. We’re now finding ourselves watching snoozer programming only because it looks astounding on the HD screen. How did I ever get along without HDTV? Only one who has walked the path of high definition could answer that question with conviction. The only frustrations I have are beyond everybody’s control!

Chris, it get’s “worse”. Next you’ll want to make sure your Media Center computer can talk to your computer in 16:9. Then your Xbox. Now when you rent DVD’s you’ll pay attention to the format and make sure you get the “wide screen” edition. Heck I just bought a new computer to use for our MCE system so I could use DVI straight from the computer to the TV (had been using Svideo, which will only do 4:3 at 1024×768).

Of course I also had to get a component video switcher becuase my TV only has 2 component inputs and 1 DVI. Currently our HD cable box goes to the TV in DVI and our DVD and Xbox use component. Now the PC will use DVI and the cable box, DVD and Xbox with use component. I just need to figure out what I want to “share” the switch box. I know it’ll be the Xbox, but I’m not sure what else.

What I can’t wait for is the Longhorn evolution of Windows. From what I’ve heard there will be no more Media Center edition … all that stuff will be a part of the Home feature set. [I’ve also heard the Tablet PC edition bits will be part of the Pro feature set, though none of this is set in stone]. Anyway due in 2006 will be HDTV support from the Media Center platform as well as support for Cable Cards, which are PC-card sized decoder cards already found in many of today’s plasma and LCD screens.

What will those new features mean? It’ll mean NO MORE CABLE BOX! Once all those technologies come together all you’ll be able to just rent a decoder card from your cable comany, plug that into your MCE box, and have full access to their eitire range of channels (at least those you subscribe to) directly in your MCE. The MCE computer becomes the HD tuner (no more IR blasting to control other devices), and the HD PVR, and the HD DVD player, and the CD player, and the WMA/MP3 player, and the digital video and picture viewer, and the … well, whatever you want it to be!

I just bought a Shuttle XPC G5 computer to put in our home media center. It’s got an Intel 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 540 processor, 1GB of 400 MHz DDR RAM, and a 200GB internal SATA hard drive on it. The case has 1 PCI-Express slot in it (the model I bought comes with an nVidia GeForce 6600 256MB card, and 1 PCI slot (which comes populated with an ATI tuner card). Should ROCK now, and it’s ready for Longhorn. Can’t wait until it arrives!

Does anybody else out there have a MCE computer in their home theater configuration? What do you think of it? What do you wish it had that it lacks, or did better?

A woman walks in with a large black duffel bag and shuts the door. “This is my graduate student Janice Breen,” Komisaruk says. Breen opens the bag, unpacks a few electromechanical components, and begins to assemble them using a screwdriver.

“So what do you call this?” I ask. The device looks like a tampon attached to a hefty electric toothbrush, which is in turn wired to a box with a glowing red digital readout.

“It’s the, um, contraption,” Breen answers distractedly, hunting for an outlet.

…I stare at the instrument in my hands.

“Basically,” Komisaruk concludes, “it’s a dildo.” [continues]

If I didn’t tell you this was an excerpt from Wired, I’d bet you’d go around thinking this was some SciFi porn story or something.  Nope, this is even better – it’s the real world!  Wired: The Coming Boom  [nice title!]

Normally my definition of cheap broadband is “borrowing” a WiFi connection off of someone who has no clue how to set up a wireless network, but this will substitute in a pinch.  Plus it’s got a killer range – 22km!  Low power eh … wonder if you could get this down to a laptop or PDA platform (or does it need a stationary antenna)?  Any way, pretty sweet.

My favorite DSL company Speakeasy is running a WiMAX trial in downtown Seattle that looks cool, but the coverage area is pretty small even though they’re using the Space Needle as a tower.

xMax: Cheap wireless broadband?:

A company called xGTM Technology has developed a new low frequency wireless networking protocol called xMax that can cover a wider area than either WiMax or Flash-OFDM (they claim a maximum range of 22km) and has a signal that’s better at penetrating buildings. The best part is that it doesn’t need a dedicated swath of spectrum to work, xMax transmits at powers that are low enough not to interfere with other signals, which means it can use radio channels that are already being used for other purposes. The first xMax wireless network is being built out in Miami and Fort Lauderdale right now, and they claim that one base station can deliver wireless broadband to up to a thousand users across a 40 square mile area.

I don’t think this is what they mean by a geologic timescale.

This combination photo shows two photographs taken less than one minute apart of the Australian tourist attraction known as the Twelve Apostles, about 220 kilometres (135 miles) south west of Melbourne, before and after one of the pillars collapsed on July 3, 2005. Part of the Twelve Apostles, one of Australia’s most famous landmarks, has been reduced to a pile of rubble after one of the ruggedly beautiful rock stacks collapsed in front of stunned onlookers. Picture taken on July 3, 2005.
Yahoo! News Photo