JL421 Badonkadonk

We've all had those days, dreary, overcast with the high likelihood of drizzle. What you really need to banish the blues of the grey is a JL421 badonkadonk ($19,999 MSRP) available from Amazon.com. Load up four of your closest pals, paintball guns and tube socks for all, and hit the playa in armored comfort. Clocking in at a swift (if not bumpy) 40mph, the 'donk' ensures that your and your chums can enter the fray, account well of yourself and still make it home in time for tea and crumpets with nary a stain on your "Live free or die" tie-dye t-shirts. Order now to avoid disappointment.

Iggy and the rider

Finally a concert rider that makes sense and has a sense of humor. And from no other that Iggy and the Stooges. Thought the Fark Miss GA thread was funny? This is as good. Skip through the backline requirements if you like (and if you don't know much about musical instruments and PA systems it won't make much sense. But funny, whoo!) to the dressing room requirements. I especially like the request for a Bob Hope impersonator. And the BMW. Do take the time to read what the road manager thinks about stage lighting and lighting designers. And Broccoli.

Flight Patterns

Here are a set of wonderful visualizations of air traffic as seen by the FAA. This short video time reduces air traffic to virtual con-trails. It's amazing to see a new day announced via the light of the dawn of the volume of air traffic, east to west.

Swamp Donkey?

Yes this is cruel, but good grief, what were the organizers of the Miss Georgia pageant thinking when they posted this bevy of, ahem, beauties? I thank the readers and posters at Fark for providing the only reasonable response possible. I nearly barfed up a lung laughing at the Fark thread. Thanks John!

A short story

"This story concerns the publisher of a stock newsletter who sends out 64,000 letters extolling his state-of-the-art database, his inside contacts, and his sophisticated econometric models. In 32,000 of these letters he predicts a rise in some stock index for the following week, say, and in 32,000 of them he predicts a decline. Whatever happens, he sends a follow-up letter but only to those 32,000 to whom he's made a correct "prediction." To 16,000 of them he predicts a rise for the next week, and to 16,000 a decline. Again, whatever happens, he will have sent 2 consecutive correct predictions to 16,000 people. Iterating this procedure of focusing exclusively on the winnowed list of people who have received only correct predictions, he can create the illusion in them that he knows what he's talking about. After all, the 1,000 or so remaining people who have received 6 straight correct predictions (by coincidence) have a good reason to cough up the $1,000 the newsletter publisher requests: They want to continue to receive these "oracular" pronouncements."

Steampunk Laptop

A most wonderful working Steampunk laptop (additional pictures). How I would love one of these. I do have a number of Corona portable typewriters from the early 20th century that could be pressed into such service. However I'm afraid I don't have the time nor the patience to build one. Default: Curta.

Slingzilla!

The newly deployed 1.84Tb server I've built over the past few weeks has been augmented by:

• •Tivo Series 2 running the Galleon open source app (adds many media-server capabilities to the default Tivo app)
• Slingbox Av. Used to route Server and Tivo contents to wherever I want said contents. Even streaming over a reasonably poorly performing wireless network the audio and video resolution from the Slingbox is amazing. The fact that I can now access all my music, videos and images stored on the server from wherever I can get internet access is most pleasing.

Baby's for Sale on Amazon - 16% off!

I see that Amazon.co.jp has a special offer on babies this week. 16% off - no limit on the number you purchase. And they come in such cute containers. Shop early. Shop often.

Speaking of Laser ...er....Rayguns.....

From the site "Rayguns":

FMOM Industries - Wave Disrupter Gun

Are you genetically pre-disposed to not wanting to blow your face to bits? Then, by crikey, this may not be the device for you - Try a kite!

But, if you're a man, then send large money orders forthwith and procure yourself FMOM's latest and greatest. Built from the exacting plans of the famed Dr. Grordbort, and reinforced with purest Tremontium, this little tiger will turn your foes to a slurry!

Why, just in time for Christmas! Super molecular-disrupting fun for the little one's. Methinks I will take two of these and a nickle-finished Neurodistruptor with extra powerpack and sights.

CakeQuest

Evan's 12th Birthday party is today. No suprise that he's selected LaserQuest for the event (again....). After the major effort last year creating the "LaserQuest Maze Cake" - something a little less ambitious was deemed appropriate for this year. Hence, the LaserGun Cake. Trust me, it looks better in real life. Much more like a gun than a hideous pile of brown frosting...

Damocles Still Hanging Around

Spent the weekend on the construction of a new server. Objective was to build a system with large RAID 1 space for archiving, that would also double as a fast render engine for Truespace. System was speced out to inlcude:

• Thermaktake Tsunami VA3000BWA
• ASUS A8N5X w/ nForce4 Mobo
• AMD Athlon 64 processor 3200
• Thermaltake CL-P0200 Silent 939 K8 CPU Cooler
  
• Radion X1600 Pr PCIe 512M Graphics Card
• Corsair XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
  
• SilverStone Strider ST60F 600watt PSU w/ modular cables
  
• Seagate ST3200822A-RK 200 GB ATA Internal Hard Drive (IDE Master)
  
• 2 x Seagate 500 GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATA Internal Hard Drive (500Gb Raid 1)
  
• Pioneer DVD R/W (Reclaimed from another system)

The 200Gb IDE drive is the boot drive. The two 500Gb Barracuda's are built into a single RAID 1 array. I went overkill on the Strider PSU. 600w is way more than I need right now. I do, however, expect to add two more 500Gb SATA drives to take total capacity to 1Tb RAID 1. I will also take the PATA drive space up to 500Gb. The lights on the the Corsair RAM are cool + I really like the ASUS mobo - it's temperature monitoring and fan management is nifty. Oh yeah - I also went overboard on the CPU cooler -- it's just that there is no way I can trust the crap cooler that AMD ships with the processor + I plan to do a little overclocking....

Oh the name of the new system is Damocles - hence the title of this post. Move along now.

29 October 2006 Update: Added 2 x 320Gb SATA drives last week. Configured as RAID 1. System is now 720Gb RAID 1 (give or take a Gb). Total disk space in the cabinet is 1.84Tb. And to think, the first PC I had with a hard disk was an IBM PC XT with a whopping 10Mb drive.

Must be seen to be believed....

An aircraft carrier made out of Lego to minifig scale i.e. rather big.
File under the categories of (1) Wow! and (2) Too much time on one's hands.

Lovelab Farewell

Found in the Seattle Stranger newspaper and online:

Laugh? I nearly bought a round!

From the pages of Amazon.com, this review:

Twenty-Nine! TWENTY-NINE!!!!!, June 11, 2006
A Kid's Review
I told my mother, Mrs. Fran Stalinofskavichdavitovichsky, to go to the store and get me 30 Tagger Micro Darts for my Nerf the Smurf Rocket Launcher. She came home, and I opened the bag, and it only had 29! It was supposed to come with 30! Upon seeing this my mother tried to flee for cover, but I easily caught up with her fat pig legs. I bit her! Bit her deep!

(and yes - the url does reference Obidos - which be gone...., don't worry - redirects save all)

Gin and Vimto

There are some things that pair well: fish n' chips, assault n' battery, stuff like that. But Gin and Vimto fills me me with such wonderus dread that I have to try it. One of my cousins (who will not be identified to protect the guilty....) IM'd me about this amazing concoction. Couple of problems prevent me from trying it: (1) you can't buy Vimto in Seattle and (2) you can't buy Vimto in Seattle. Now, that's strictly only one problem, but it's such a massive one I thought I'd mention it twice.

Mom, Dad - next trip to the US, please bring a large bottle of Vimto (and Iron Bru while you're at it). And a stomach pump. Thanks.

FON up and Running

Router configuration was completed last night. I now have a "Bill" access point serving those around the junction of 4th Ave and University in downtown Seattle. Buy me a beer and I'll give you free access.

Toonfest 2006 Update

News from Disney's Toonfest 2006 held this past Saturday August 26:

• Support for Safari and Firefox browsers is underway ("the new guy from Pixar wants us to support his browser...."). The Disney management team confirmed that other browsers apart from IE will be supported. Work is actively underway;
• Confirmation of "gardening" as the new, large upcoming addition to Toontown. Plant Jellybeans to grow flowers, pick them and sell them in the market. Plant gags to grow gag trees (with a whole range of bigger and better gags). Trees and plants need watering (at the time of the demo the watering can animation was not complete)
• Wedding Cake gag - attacks *all* cogs you are fighting at the same time.
• Daisy Duck will be coming back to Toontown (after all, the Garden is named after her. Goofy was just looking after it while she was away).
• Disney ToonTown runs on "about 40" servers in Seattle. Linux is the OS of choice (couple of distro's)
• Cog HQ is under construction. No details from the Disney team regarding release date.
• Disney is lookig into how to allow users with single accounts to play multiple toons at the same time (their stated largest fear was "additional characters being sold")
• Trolly games in development
• Account packages that will combine accounts for Toontown and the upcoming "Pirates of the Caribbean" online game.
• ToonTown pins were given out at Toonfest: Three Cogs and five characters (the blue monkey being my favorite). I've asked Evan to scan them for me + will post a picture. (Some are already for sale by others at ebay)
• If you collected six out of seven stickers around the evnet you received a set of magnets with each of the ToonTown land names + a special "ToonFest" magnet. I've seen two sets of these for sale on ebay.

"Snacks on a Plane"

My new concept for airports: "Snacks on a Plane", serving tasty morsels to to famished passenger.
Movie tie-in possibilities are almost endless.

Linksys WRT54G Upgrade to DD-WRT

Spent this afternoon upgrading my Linksys WRG54G to DD-WRT in order to run a FON access point. Since I had the V6 version I had to jump through a few additional hoops, removing vxworks and installing a micro Linux binary on the router. Very useful pages at bitsum. I plan to complete the FON installation and configuration next weekend. Will update then.

So Sue Me......

Expand the image below to see an e-mail message that was sent to a web site admin. This really happened!