A Three Hour Tour

Why?

Hello again… I’m back!

Miss me while I was gone?  No?  You didn’t even know this was here… how rude!

All kidding aside, as you can see I have revamped my website layout, making it hopefully look nicer, be more functional, and ideally just… work better.  Whether or not I attract an audience remains to be seen, but I hope that at least one or two people find me and comment.  Getting a legitimate comment out of the thousands of spam comments I have received since creating this blog would seriously make my day.

Please be sure and check out my Jeopardy program that I have put many hours into writing.  Leave a note if you like it or find it useful!  It’s nice to finally have something I can ‘release’, per se.  I find it amusing too that my programming knowledge was to some extent based on creating a Wheel of Fortune game, and one of the first pieces of software I release is… based off its sister show Jeopardy.

What will I write about?  Programming could be one thing.  But there are already so many good programming blogs, what can be gained from another one?  Perhaps nothing.  Perhaps a different perspective.  Perhaps it will prove useful to some Google searcher who happens to stumble across it and it explains something they were searching for.

But unless you share the interest of programming, talking about remote code injection, thunking, DNS, port I/O, etc. is bound to be dull and uninteresting.  Raymond Chen already wrote an 11+part series on scroll bars.  Yes, those little things that tell you how far down the page you are.  But he can get away with that because, well, he’s Raymond Chen.  I can’t.

On one hand I could get quick publicity by making a political rant.  I’m sure if posted to the right places I would have a comment thread about as civil as a Thursday-night frat party. but with an even lower collective IQ.

For now though I’m EOW.  Going to take a code seven and work on a photo gallery.

Isn’t it odd how our brains notice things? For example, I seem to have a habit of looking at the clock at exactly 11:34, which when turned upside-down spells out “hell”. Now do I really have that habit, or do I just happen to notice those times because 11:34 has a (somewhat immature and meaningless) significance?

Recently the MacBook Air computer has caused some issues on airport security: http://www.michaelnygard.com/blog/2008/03/steve_jobs_made_me_miss_my_fli.html

To make a long story short, some ppor traveller missed his flight because the TSA didn’t know that the MacBook Air was a real laptop.

Recently the TSA gave their explanation for the whole issue in a blog post: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/03/apple-macbook-airs-are-cleared-for.html

Basically what happened was that this traveller was simply trying to bring his laptop through security. Quite simple… not a problem. Certainly not intended as an attempt to bring down a plane.

To the TSA agent, however, this was a unknown traveller bringing some odd-looking electronic device through a checkpoint. And if it’s your job to make sure that no dangerous devices make it on the airplane, you sure aren’t going to let an odd-looking device through without further investigation.

Unfortunately for our poor traveller, being pulled aside for a secondary screening, and missing his flight, sure seems like overkill for what was an innocent piece of luggage. But the TSA agent didn’t know that, and if the “device” did end up causing a tragedy, even if he wouldn’t be legally responsible, he’d certainly feel terrible.

So next time you fly, and get hassled by the TSA, remember that they are just trying to keep people safe. And keeping people safe requires that if there’s even a shadow of a doubt that something might be dangerous, it must be treated as a real danger.

Something to think about next time you go to an airport.

So I migrated servers a long time ago, and never completed moving the database that runs this blog. So for a long time, this has not been functioning. For a looooooong time. Well hopefully I’ll have some time to actually post to this now.

Anyone ever wondered what the spring constant of a slinky is? Me neither. But evidently it is 0.9267 N/m in the case of an original metal one.

Thus one of today’s most pressing physics questions has been answered. Now to work on the other: calculating the moment of inertia of a penguin.

So I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do here, but I wanted to put this on my new website… which if you have tried to see the thing is very much under development.  Any title suggestions?

So for now this is it; sometime when I have more time I’ll get around to making this better.