January 2005 Archives

We had a decent meal last night at Saint James Gate. We started out a pound of fresh mussels cooked in white wine, sambucca, tomatoes, basil, fennel and cream. Mmmm, yummy.

I decided on the Beef Tenderloin, yummy grilled tenderloin with a rosemary infused roast garlic wine sauce with some roasted potatoes, and fresh fried vegtables on the side. Damn, good stuff. Jenn decided on the Wild Mushroom Chicken Breast, a grilled and baked chicken breast with a sundried cranberry bread stuffing and a wild mushroom white wine sauce.

Desert rocked though, Jenn had a eggnog cheese cake, and I had this awesome triple layered moose, so rich and creamy. Damn, mix in a couple guinness and some coffee, and it was a wicked meal. I'd almost say it was up to Firlotte.com's standards

The bloodninja collection, old, but good. Sorta like cheese.

Wikipes is another application of wiki. Everybody go in, put in some of your favorite recipes, and cook dinner for your sweety. Thank me later.

The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions : Part 1 and Part 2.

Damn I love this site

The Buffyology database contains "every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database.

And yes Paul, I'm a nerd.

I wonder what brand of beer this guy used.

I'm so hire him to be a spokesman if I were a beer company exec.

I like the funky patterns formed in this figure from a sociology journal paper entitled "Chains of affection: The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks."

One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain.

On a side note, I also find it ironic that the man who did the study looks like a pedophile. But thats just my personal opinion.

I found this today, a little old, but still good.

A few weeks ago the USS San Francisco, struck an uncharted undersea mountain while traveling in the South Pacific at a depth of 500 feet. At the time, apparently, the sub was traveling at almost full speed. One sailor died in the accident, and 20 more were injured. The Navy has released some photos of the San Francisco, now that she's been hauled into drydock. Wow. (WashPost backgrounder on the accident, and the uncharted mountain. Nice lil' gif of the ship's logo)

404 Research Lab. I was inspired by this 404 and went searching for some more. Some of them are funny, some let you play games, some are just creepy.

A Londonder made a tsnuami-relief donation using lynx on a Solaris box. Nice normal day, right? Wrong. The site-operator decided that this "unusual" event in the system log indicated a hack-attempt, and the police broke down the donor's door and arrested him. From a mailing list:

For donating to a Tsunami appeal using Lynx on Solaris 10. BT [British Telecom] who run the donation management system misread an access log and saw hmm thats a non standard browser not identifying it's type and it's doing strange things. Trace that IP. Arrest that hacker.

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

Out on bail till next week and preparing to make a lot of very bad PR for BT and the Police....

So just goes to show if you use anything other than Firefox or IE and you rely on someone else to interogate access logs or IDS logs you too could be sitting in a paper suit in a cell :(

Just digging through my archives, and found this movie, hope ya enjoy.

For everything else there is mastercard (NSFW)

Oh how I love redneck ebonics. Merriam-Webster online now gives "nu-kyu-lar" as an alternative pronunication of "nuclear." While dictionaries have become more descriptive and less prescriptive over the years, shouldn't they at least list it as [idiotic variant]?

This year has been declared the World Year of Physics. Why 2005? To celebrate 100 years since Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the U.K. and Ireland it is being called Einstein Year, but there are many events planned around the globe.

stupid migranes, i hate scents

eXeem Lite , the spyware free version of eXeem! Violate eXeem's copyright for fun and profit.

Well, I found out this morning that I have red urine. But no worries kids, its thanks to eating a bottle of beats yesterday. Hah, glad I'm not a paranoid delusional freak, I'd be convinced that I was dying.. I'd so need a course on coping with discoloured urine to deal with that.

Rug hooking must be one of the simplest and cost-effective of crafts (basically, cut old clothes into strips, use burlap, insert hook, pull up loop of fabric), and so it.s all the more amazing that it can be used to achieve such cool, painterly and stunning results. If you click on just one link in this post, make it this one, made by a Japanese woman out of her grandmother.s old silk kimonos. I.ve selected just one excellent, comprehensive rug hooking web site, but there.s a lot of resources and information available on the web for this craft if you.re interested in it like The Jennifer is.

Disney is remaking Tron!

Disney has hired screenwriters Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal to fashion a remake of Tron, the 1982 film about a computer programmer who gets sucked into the parallel world of a computer program, Variety reported...

Sternthal told the trade paper that the new conceit is that the computer programmer gets trapped in a cyberworld, so that the film can utilize the Internet.

Curiously clever.

Maps Looking for Maps? Please click on the country of interest.

The "Guardian Angel" bag is embossed with the outline of a handgun, so it looks like you're packing heat. The same designed has made a laptop bag with the outlines of groceries embossed into the sides, disguising the computer within as foodstuffs. The bags are sold to women in Rotterdam to assuage fears of muggings.

Corsair has shipped a RAM stick with a mini-LED pixelboard built into it. It's intended to show the temperature of the RAM, but you can use Corsair's Memory Dashboard to program the memory to display your own personalized greeting (or obnoxious salute). Click here for an image

Type in a message, you can have three messages of up to 23 characters each, click a button, and your message gets sent to some spare bits on the memory. (Where exactly? According to Corsair "the default message is stored in a microcontroller on the DIMM; user programmable messages are stored on the hard drive and loaded in Startup.") And from then on, that message will scroll across the display like your very own tiny Times Square Zipper...except it won't be giving you the latest news headlines and sports scores.

This guy, who calls himself "The Blindfolded Pianist," has gone through all of Super Mario Bros and figured out the sheet music for it.

CoasterSims.com. Just because nature is full of icy death outside doesn't mean you can't sit in your computer chair and scream like a damn fool on a roller coaster.

How much does Oprah make every second? Find out that and more at The Salary Clock! Enter a famous person's salary (or your own) and find out your real-time earnings.

Every day, we urinate nutrients that can fertilize plants that could be used for beautiful landscapes, food, fuel, and fiber. Instead, these nutrients are flushed away, either to be treated at high cost or discharged to waters where they overfertilize and choke off aquatic life.

Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants tells you how urine.which contains most of the nutrients in domestic wastewater and usually carries no disease risk.can be utilized as a resource.

I have no idea who this dude is, but some of us, like Paul, are born with karaoke skills, some of us are not.

NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently detected [reg required] the largest explosion ever detected in the universe: an eruption releasing the energy of hundreds of millions of gamma ray bursts. Just to put it in perspective, a single GRB releases enough radiation to wipe out just about everything human beings would require for survival in a 1000 light year radius. (The Milky Way spans ~100,000 light years, while the United Federation of Planets spans about 8,000). Arthur C. Clarke has gone so far as suggesting that GRBs might be one of the reasons for Extra-Terrestrial silence: Gamma Ray Bursts are so large and inescapable, a single one would wipe out even an enormous galactic empire. Makes killer asteroids seem downright quaint.

Scientific American: Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth. Four academic psychologists review the data in the latest Scientific American, and conclude: "Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, research shows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, groups that promote boosting self-esteem haven't shown much interest in this research. If you ask me, the whole 'self-improvement' thing went out with the mid-90's, I mean, who actually still goes to those courses? If you're more then 16 and "don't know who you are", trust me, you arent going to learn it from a bunch of psychobabble from some hippie teaching you to love yourself.

Atlas of Canada including environmental, social, and economic overlays. Similar resources for US and down under.

The before and after tsunami photos have been synced-up and they highlight even more (if that's possible) the power of the sea. She has geo-aligned the various before and after aerial and satellite photos and adjusted the scale to provide a very accurate then/now comparison.

Adventure - based on the classic text game of the same name - was the first game ever to contain an easter egg.

It seems laughably primitive these days, but when it first hit shelves, Adventure was a programming masterpiece. The text version of Adventure (by Willie Crowther and Don Woods) required hundreds of KB and a mainframe computer to operate, so much that Atari told Warren Robinett not to even bother with a 2600 version. He did anyway, and the results are near legendary. The 2600 version of Adventure went on to sell over a million copies at $25 a pop. For his effort Robinett recieved absolutely nothing beyond his $22,000/year salary.

Play the 2600 Adventure. (Flash) If you're one of those who requires some eye candy, why not download the Quake 3 Adventure Map, instead?

Finally got our pictures online of the kittens, check them out here. My favorites are these two of Luna and Artemis

The kittens are really sweet, but Luna has discovered that she can jump pretty high, just about to the same height as the birds cages.. so needless to say she got in trouble last night. She's funny though, after she gets in trouble, she hides for a few hours, then comes and sulks on your lap, she'll be like it for a few days, at home this morning she was curled up on my lap sleeping while I was typing. Normally she'd be chasing my fingers, or chasing the pointer on the screen, but she wanted to make it up to me, so she gave me cuddles/love.

The Most (and Least) Wanted Paintings. Design by committee: Artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid used a professional market research group to survey aesthetic preferences and art tastes in 14 countries. The results are the theoretically most desired paintings for each nation.

GlobalSecurity.org has the tsunami on satellite imagery and on FlickR.com people have started publishing photo's of missing persons (also with rss). Breathtaking....

The Great Eastern ran on CBC Radio from '94 until '99. Sublimely funny, the show lives on with complete episode archives, select clips and some detailed backstory. I haven't heard anything as well written in a long, long time. Subtle satire at its best.

North Korea Issues Wartime Guidelines SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea has ordered its citizens to be ready for a protracted war against the United States, issuing guidelines on evacuating to underground bunkers with weapons, food and portraits of leader Kim Jong Il.

Eye of the Tiger [yeah, I know, its stupid, but it was forced upon me, so enjoy]

Oh, and I can write your name in the snow, can you?

Most real geeks arent just interested in computers and such, we really like cool explosions and insanely cool home made tanks.

Generally it's adviseable to not try those things at home kinds, unless you're me :)

Reason's Hit and Run excerpts a hilarious New York Times interview with Jeanne L. Phillips, chair of the Presidential Inaugural Committee:

Q: I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

A: Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.

Q: As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?

A: I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now -- not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the -- well, it's called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.

Q: How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?

A: I'm not sure that they do benefit from them.

Q: Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?

A: Honoring service is what our theme is about.

O'Reilly Media has just published Home Hacking Projects for Geeks, featuring 13 fun home automation projects for your house. Very cool illustrations and good reading about the projects the authors came up with.

The thirteen projects in "Home Hacking Projects for Geeks" are divided into three categories: Home Automation, Home Entertainment Systems, and Security. The book includes projects such as:

-Remotely Monitor Your Pet
-Make Your House Talk
-Remotely Control Your Computer's MP3 player
-Create Time-Shifted FM Radio
-Watch Your House Across the Network
-Build a Home Security System

You may say its violent, its racial, and its evil, and you'd be right. But when it comes to protecting my home, nothing works like Grand Theft Auto. Read more about it here, and here.