Nathan's Occasional Blog

You know you want to look at Hot Library Smut.  Don’t deny it!

Pretty awesome pictures if you ask me.  Of course I’m biased with a librarian mom and an ex-librarian wife.  If you’re into more modern stuff I highly recommend the Seattle Public Library’s Central Library.

oooooh yeah!  🙂

It seems that our solar system only has 8 planets after all.  As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now there’s been quite a controversy over the last week or two as 2500 astronomers gather at a conference to debate what is, and isn’t, a planet.

Pluto didn’t make the cut and is now a “dwarf planet”.  Link to Wired News: Pluto Stripped of Planet Status

Pretty interesting stuff, but what I love is how the public has really shown interest in this.  I’m glad to see the mass media covering real scientific debate, taking time out of the busy schedule discussing what some murderer ate on his plane trip back to the US.

Science isn’t cut and dried, yes and no.  It’s a consensus of opinions of the scientific community.  If most people think the Earth is flat, it is until enough opinions change because of some new discovery.  I love that.  I think Einstein did too.

Anyway, this should make life easier for middle school students everywhere!  🙂

UPDATE: Scott Adams has a great analysis of this whole Pluto thing on his blog today.  It’s a must read!  (FYI – Scott is the creator of Dilbert)

“Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think Pluto should be the funniest planet – or even the funniest non-planet. That distinction belongs to another. Uranus, 8th celestial body from the sun, is part miracle of gravity and part bung hole. It has earned its status as the funny man of the cosmos.”

Alicea and I are watching MythBusters right now on the Discovery channel.  Live – so we don’t get to skip the commercials.  Good thing too, because we just witnessed the most amazing commercial.  We were so shocked we rewound the DVR and watched it again.

Evidently the CIA is looking for techno-geeks to help them with all things spy-like.  They’ve got a pretty cool animated commercial talking about bugs, with the “star” of the action being a flying little friend checking out all sorts of stuff.

Have we really come to that?  The CIA has to advertise on national TV?  WOW.

I disagree with Jeff, who writes on his blog today “then there’s nothing to get excited about.”  The new build of Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 IS a big deal, and Jeff – thanks for blogging about it!

Why do I disagree?  Because the lack of a full Windows search client (lacking the UI bits for searching outside of Outlook 2007) is the one and only reason I’m not running Office 2007 Beta on my laptop.  Now that this is released I can move forward with running the new stuff.  Hurray!

UPDATE: Mark Orchant agrees with me that this is a big step forward for Windows Desktop search.

Moreover, I just dove into the new UI and discovered that even though I have the PDF iFilter installed, those files were NOT being indexed.  There’s no way to tell that (or fix it) in version 2.6.

Now if I could just figure out why MS has broken out Outlook’s email indexing from indexing of the file system.  Bad decision.  I should be able to search for keywords across ALL of my content, as I can in WDS 2.6.  If you want an inline version for Outlook that’s okay – just limit its results to Outlook content.  But if I search from the full client I should be able to get hits on Outlook items.

Link to Jeff’s Connected Corner : Yawn… New Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 Released

Looks like most of Seattle has given up on even caring about the Mariners this year.  Personally, until the management starts making better staffing decisions (players and non-players) I don’t think I’ll tune back in.

Sure opening day next year may see the M’s in a tie for first place, and they may have a “decent” season, but they’re not going to be contenders. 

Now, he said, the team is losing with 22-year-olds, not 38-year-olds like last year.

Source: Even die-hard M’s fans have thrown in the towel

I’m killing a bit of time today and I stumbled across an old bookmark to Red vs Blue.  “The series chronicles the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon, in a parody of first-person shooter (FPS) games, military life, and science fiction films.” [from Wikipedia]

So I’ve been going through a couple episodes from season 4 and am about dying from laughter.  Alicea and I will have to watch some at home on our MCE box tonight (we went through the first season or two a year or two ago).

I’ll leave you with this great line from Episode 62…

My logical data analysis sector indicates that would be highly unlikely. And my bullshit meter agrees.

The management of the Seattle Mariners has just sealed the deal for me – I loathe the M’s.  They’ve gotten rid of most of their good players over the last few years and yesterday they dealt pitcher Jamie Moyer to the Phillies.

That leaves Ichiro as the only player I still care about, and it also makes me change my mind about Ichi’s future.  He needs to leave.  The M’s are obviously not interested in fielding a winning team, and Ichiro needs to go to a team that is.  He’s a great player and I want to see him win a World Series ring.

Friggin’ Mariners.  A fitting end for them this year is to never win again.  They’re well on the way to that.  They’ve lost 11 straight now and the next six are hosting the Yankees and Red Sox.

I’m watching the Dodgers and Giants on InHD right now.  The Giants are getting shelled – it’s 5-0 with no outs in the top of the 2nd.

It’s so bad that Greg Maddox, a (hall of fame) pitcher, led off the second with a ground rule double.  The guy behind him then laid down a sacrifice bunt.  Which the pitcher fielded, thought of going to third (didn’t) and threw way wide of first.  The or second baseman got the ball from the wall half way down the line and threw to third.  The third baseman missed the ball.  The pitcher eventually got the ball off the wall on the third base line … and threw late to the plate.  Sacrifice bunt turns into a home run.

I’m astonished.  No wonder the only teams the Mariners can beat this year are in the NL.

Heh – Giants pitcher just got yanked.  Box score for B Hennessey tonight.  1+ innings pitched (no outs in 2nd before pulled).  7 runs (3 earned).  1 walk. 1 strike out.

And the carnage continues.  7 hits for the Dodgers so far in the 2nd with no outs.  This is going to be a LONG night for SF.

I’m sitting here watching the third round of the PGA Championship on CBS in high definition (HD).  First off, it’s about time CBS put their HD programming feed for golf in widescreen format (they usually show golf in 4:3 even on the HD channel).

Another thing of note is that when I turned on the TV (after Kaitlyn went down for a nap) there was one of Microsoft’s “PeopleReady” adds on TV.  This is the first TV ad I’ve seen in HD that’s actually using widescreen.  Most of the ads on HD broadcast TV (CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, ESPN, etc.) are still in 4:3 format, leaving big black borders on the left/right of the screen.  OR the ad will be widescreen, but widescreen in a 4:3 format so they’ve added a black border on the top and bottom to go with the crappy borders on the sides.

WHY WHY WHY do advertisers think that’s a good idea?  You’re shrinking your products on the screen and wasting 15-20% of the screen real estate you’ve already paid for!

As I write this I just saw a Sprint ad that was full screen 16:9 widescreen too – good job Sprint!

Of course you have to be wary when you ask for.  One of the easiest way to fast forward through a recorded HDTV program’s ads is to watch the borders to see when the ads are over.  🙂

Most accidents reported in the media involving motorcycles make it sound like the motorcycle driver was at fault … at least in the headline.  It’s quite concerning to see them take the same tack with the accident the other evening on Hwy 18 where a 17 year old girl was going 100 mph on the wrong side of the highway at 2a.  She was killed when her vehicle slammed into a big rig.

I feel sorry for her and her family.  Another account I read indicated she had taken off after an argument with her parents.

But the headline in the PI says “17-year-old dies after her car is hit by semitrailer”.  Really?  Because in my mind when you’re roughly doubling the speed limit in the middle of the night and end up running into another vehicle that pretty much seems like you hit them.

So why did the PI write the headline as such?  Same reason we see “sensational” news on TV … ratings.  Everyone’s scared of these huge trucks on the road so let’s play on that fear.  “Look – a trucker killed a 17 year old girl” the PI seems to say.

A 17-year-old Spanaway teen died early Friday after a semitrailer hit her car, which was westbound in an eastbound lane on state Route 18, authorities said.
Source: 17-year-old dies after her car is hit by semitrailer

Screw that PI.  The statistics show that truckers are actually the safest drivers on the roads … long-haul truckers even more so.  It’s the folks who go out partying, or want to show off to their friends how fast/cool they can drive, or gab on cell phones while driving down the road who are dangers to society.

Seattle PI RSS feeds: UNSUBSCRIBED.  Hopefully the Seattle Times is better.

By the way, if I see another idiot driving 50 mph in a 60 mph zone while holding a cell phone to their head and driving a $70k vehicle I’m going to …. I don’t know – I’ll think of something.  You can spend $1000/month on a car and insurance but you can’t scrape together $15 for the hands free earbud for your phone?  Hell, most phones ship with the earbud.  GEESH!

UPDATE: I just browsed through the rest of my unread RSS items from the PI and found the same story with the headline “Teen killed after driving wrong way on state Route 18“.  This story was posted just after noon yesterday, with the article that pissed me off published at 10:30p last night.  I wonder which headline made it in the paper?