Happy Birthday HAL!
// January 12th, 2010 // No Comments » // Music, Random Stuff
To celebrate HAL 9000′s birthday, I present free for download, a track I produced a couple of year ago.
Enjoy!
Archive for Random Stuff
Interview: HamBrief.TV #47
// September 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Amateur Radio, Development, Random Stuff, Skywarn
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Chris Matthieu, N7ICE, for HamBrief #47. We talk about my involvement with Wayne County’s Skywarn program, emergency communications, and other assorted rag chewing.
Thank again to Chris for the opportunity to talk about one of my hobbies!
You can find more information at:
Reflections of a Previously Ignorant Student
// September 25th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Amateur Radio, Random Stuff
Yesterday I started a 14-week class to upgrade my ham ticket to Extra Class. I’m fairly anxious to learn all the fun stuff and even have the chance to help my dad! He too is taking the class and while I’m at least 20 years everyone’s junior, I feel like I’m back in high school again.
We’re at what used to be an old Jr. High School, which is now an adult education and autistic center. Each room is stocked with the old desks of my elementary school (which is actually just across the football field and the street) and even came with the old classroomy smell of chalk and books.
It’s funny how when I reflect about the time great time I had in school, I repeatedly think of how nowadays I’m so damn interested in the things I cared nothing for (other than getting a passing grade). It’s a good thing I feel like I jipped myself out of only a few years of learning and not half my life. Perhaps it’s time to really think about night class. I’ve tried the online learning, but for someone who sits in front of a computer for countless hours at a day, a plastic chair and a desk/table might not be such a bad change.
But what? Philosophy? (Solar/Astro/Theoretical)-Physics? Business? Archeology? Electrical Engineering? So many choices. It’s like I’m a kid again, but this time with a hunger for knowledge. These days I lean towards Philosophy if I was to go for purely selfish reasons, but I know Business is probably the way to go.
With life hopefully slowing with what seems like the days of autumn, I’ll bring a focus back into learning and education. With any luck and lots of hope, my son will appreciate what I had such high disregard for growing up.
RedZ: Revolution or more Z’s?
// July 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Random Stuff
“Introducing Patent Pending Search 2.0″ by RedZ Revolution Search
They seek to provide results by website snapshots to speed up your access to accurate results. Do they find it or put me to sleep?
“…most people do not have the time to patience to read through page after page of text based listings.”
That’s why the real goal should be giving us the most relevant results first. While I see that the company is trying to move the decision making more towards the human mind, you can not get around the fact that human thinking is linear.
“The Web sites are the results instead of plain ordinary text, allowing you to sift through massive data quickly.”
A computer is able to produce and cycle imagery faster that our mind can comprehend, at least that’s the common understanding. It’s therefore our own mind creates a bottleneck in the flow of information and decision making, not the method of display in my opinion.
It seems from information provided on their site, that RedZ is focused on presenting the data in a visual way, rather than a textual format. So what’s new? Seems like a gimmick and even potential advertisers on the WebHostingTalk forum are not buying it either.
Several site statistic sources are putting their daily visitors in the tens of thousands, so you’d have to rely on their network to provide good numbers for your money. They also don’t charge of pay-per-click so as to avoid the chance of fraud, another key component of their pitch.
I’m not impressed with what they are looking to provide, especially when there is already quite a bit of thought about how a website’s design affects the human mind and decision making. I don’t want that to have an effect on mine, and I like my results to be normalized; it’s one less thing to worry about.
For me, RedZzzz…
How I got here:
I was brought to them by a tweet by @suedecrush.
Brilliant!
// February 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Random Stuff, Storm Chasing, Weather
Storm chasing in 3D! Why not have two cams right next to each other and have the video interlaced so that you can use 3D or polarized glasses to watch storm chasing! Talk about getting immersed!
Building ImageMagick on OSX
// February 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Random Stuff
I had some trouble getting everything working in OSX so after some digging I found this PDF.
http://imagemagick.sourceforge.net/docs/GuideToBuildingIMForMacOSX.pdf
Rather than use the method specifically explained in the doc, I used /usr/local as my prefix and then built as normal.
New Server, New Blog
// February 1st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Random Stuff
So I finally migrated the domain over to A2 Hosting servers. I also figured I’d clean the slate and start anew!
