The massive mechanisms and constructs that keep modern society functional occasionally amaze me. A good example is this story from the New York Times regarding the efforts being made to fix a water leak in one of their main supply tunnels.
A lot of folks these days have at least part of their home network on wireless ethernet, or WiFi. I have two wireless access points in my house, for example, and plan on adding a third. Wireless networking has security considerations: unless your WiFi network is encrypted, someone outside your home can use your bandwidth or, potentially worse, intercept your data. Wireless security was improved significantly a few years ago with the introduction of WPA (WiFi Protected Access) after the previous security method, WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) was “cracked”. Since then, wireless networking has been pretty much secure against any intrusion. Until now…
The global economy has collapsed, the stock market is decimated, we are all going to lose our jobs, and the sky is falling! Oddly, none of the recent economic turmoil has scared me. In fact, when stocks bottomed out (presumably) a couple of weeks ago, I started buying shares. I’m not Warren Buffett, but I now own a couple hundred shares of GM, and twenty-some shares each of Apple, Microsoft, and RIM.
Am I crazy? I’m hearing of people selling their houses and buying gold, stocking up on tinned goods and toilet paper, and most of all desperately trying to convert any equity investments they have into or some kind of guaranteed investment. There must be something wrong with me that I keep feeling this strange compulsion to go buy more stock…
My friend Chris and I have made going to airshows a tradition of sorts. Chris actually knows quite a lot about aircraft, whereas I am more of the “wow, that’s cool” mindset and only skim the surface regarding technical details. One thing I’ve found is that the airmen sent to these shows, presumably amongst the best in their respective forces, generally seem to be pretty nice people. At least on the surface I haven’t noted much of that “strutting arrogance” we expect to see pilots have based on movies and TV shows.
The deck construction is almost finished. Almost… a slippery word, that can often mean “never”. Since the last posting on this topic, here is what has been completed:
It looks pretty good, actually, and is “done enough” that the things remaining feel rather minor. The roof has turned out really nicely: Solariumsplus did the work, and I’m really pleased with what Pete, Curtis and Randy put together for us. Some pictures…
We just had another power outage exceeding an hour in duration here at our house. That makes about six this year here after perhaps one per year of that duration during the seven previous years. You could argue, I guess, that I live in a suburb, and so perhaps the occasional power outage is to be expected. However, at my workplace in the heart of the corporate district in Burnaby, with BCIT on one side of the road and Telus/IBM/etc on the other, there have been three multi-hour outages this year as well. I know it is an exaggeration bordering on the insensitive, but I’m beginning to feel like BC Hydro has degraded lower mainland British Columbia into a third world power district.
Mobile phones and “smart” phones have a ton of features: things like taking pictures, browsing the Internet, and playing games. Studies have shown, however, that only somewhere between 10 and 50% of the users of these feature rich devices know how to do more than make phone calls with them. Rich Miner of Google mentioned recently that the reason for this is mainly “bad UIs”. I think, however, that Rich is probably on the wrong track, at least for some users. Maybe even the majority of them.
I am continuously amazed by the human capacity for cruelty and stupidity. Here we have a man, a former professional baseball player and sometime-actor by the name of Joseph Petcka, who claims he brutalized and killed his (presumably ex) girlfriend’s cat because “he attacked me”.
My elbow, or more accurately the area just on the forearm outward side of the elbow, has been sore lately. If I pick something up it twinges, or if I hold the arm straight and make a fist it hurts.
It has been painful, but not debilitating- like a lot of things that happen with my joints since I turned thirty, I more or less just have been living with it. After some poking around on the internet, I found some references to tennis elbow and concluded that this was the most likely culprit. I decided to give it a couple of weeks and, if treating it like tennis elbow with cold packs and compression improved it, to assume I was on the right track.
Adam and Jamie of Mythbusters fame are cool guys. I enjoy their program and find it oddly educational, in a sort of geeky-destructive way. But I have to admit that the following video of a demonstration they did at an Nvidia graphics card conference really impressed the heck out of me. The first part of the video shows their interpretation of computer graphics using a single CPU, and the second part is their version of a massively parallel GPU rendering.