Say hello to Copper!

I adopted him last weekend from a friend of mine, and he’s the most wonderful dog ever. We know he’s part beagle, but we’re not sure what else he is… but he’s adapting quickly to life at Fort Awesome. He knows well enough now that when I open the gate to his fence that it’s time to go inside, and he definitely knows that when I walk in with his blue food bowls that it’s chow time.

I had more to type here… but for now it escapes me because Copper is trying to lick my face.

Links for 4/13/07 [my NetNewsWire tabs]

• Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Web Worker Emergency Survival Kit «
• Daring Fireball: Some Facts About AAC
• Daring Fireball: Bottleneck
• The Macalope » Blog Archive » Don’t hate the phone
• Digg - Firefox Inside Firefox
• Digg - LBJ Ordered Assassination of JFK Says Hunt On Deathbed
• Digg - 2 New Get a Mac Ads: “Flashback” and “Computer Cart”
• Digg - John Edwards: “We Need Net Neutrality”
• Digg - Vista Makes Backups You Can’t Restore From
• Digg - This is Why You Shouldn’t Clean Your HDTV with Windex

As I type this, it is snowing outside. Don’t believe it could snow in Abilene in April? Check it out.

Some of you know that I read a lot of online news - most of it being technology-related - but news nonetheless. I’ve been testing an early version of NetNewsWire 3 (a popular news reader for Mac users) for the last couple weeks, and I think I’ve found my favorite new feature. As I read news, I can open the actual site for the story in a tab of the application, and one of the new features of NNW is the ability to send those tabs to del.icio.us or to a weblog as list of stories with the links… what this will allow me to do is share some of the news I read with you, and do it very easily. So… here they are.

Links for 4/7/07 [my NetNewsWire tabs]

• How To: Using your Mac as a NAT router - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
• Digg - Racial slur on sofa label stuns family
• Digg - Apple’s new Mac Pro uses exclusive quad core 3 ghz Xeon
• Digg - George Lucas Says First ‘Indy 4’ Trailer Coming This Thanksgiving
• Morpho Towers: ferrofluid sculptures that groove to the music - Engadget
• iPod Slows Enemy Bullet, Saves Life - Gizmodo
• 8-Bit Tie Not a Joke Any More - Gizmodo
• Asus C90 Will Be First User Upgradeable Lappie - Gizmodo
• Two Grandpas Building a Flying Car in their Garage - Gizmodo
• Lightsaber Umbrella Uses the Force to Stop the Rain - Gizmodo

Friday night I went to see 300 (IMDB). I’ll sum it up for you like this: holy crap. I honestly didn’t expect it to be that good, but I think it was the most badass movie I’ve ever seen. It made me want to grab my spear and shield and go run around the countryside killing Persians. Not that I have a spear or shield, or that we have country side or even Persians around here for that matter, but… wow.

Saturday, I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything I thought it could be.

I’m home for the break… if you want to do something, call me or message me on Facebook.

Well, I am officially living at the Fort now… and it’s Awesome. Took most all day Saturday to move in, and I’m not quite done, but it’s livable for the time being.

[begin rant] I’ve got a new idea for car horns. Maybe it’s not new, but since I thought of it last night and I’d never heard of it before, I’m counting it as a new idea - pressure sensitive car horns. With pressure sensitive car horns, you’d be able to decide just how loud the horn should be for a given situation. Sometimes, you just want to honk to let someone know they have right-of-way and should get out of the way, and in those cases, you don’t need the horn to be so loud and rude. However, when someone just about clips your front bumper merging into your lane on the highway and cutting you off for no reason other than their apparent idiocy, it’d be nice if you could, by the loudness of your horn, let them know that such a move was indicative of the actions of a complete idiot, not just a partial idiot. [end rant]

I start a new job tomorrow with University Communications, working on the HSU website. From what I can tell, my job will be to push updates to the website - something that makes me happy because I have long felt that the HSU website isn’t updated quickly enough when it needs to be (case in point: the bad weather days we had recently… yes, they posted that school was cancelled, but by the time it got on there it was almost too late to be of any use). Not that the team behind the website isn’t top-notch from what I can tell so far, but maybe I can bring some speed to the need-to-know updates.

Ok, check this out:

Most computers these days have hard drives measured in gigabytes, the largest of which is currently 750 gigabytes. Common sizes are 60, 80, 120… more than likely your computer has a hard drive somewhere in that ballpark.

ILM (International Light & Magic), the special effects department of LucasArts produces cinematic effects for tons of films. Those source files for those effects generally pretty large, so ILM has a great need for having a large amount of hard drive storage on hand. The chart above (courtesy of CNet.com) shows “Available vs. Used High Performance Production Storage”; the blue shaded area shows the used portion of the available (the red shaded area). I had to resize the picture to fit it here, but you can see just at the right edge of the chart a jump in the available storage, topping out at… just under 135 terabytes. For the uninitiated, 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes, or 1,048,576 megabytes. This means that ILM has 138,240 gigabytes, or 141,557,760 megabytes of storage.

Lets say you have an 80 gigabyte hard drive in your computer… that means ILM has 1,728 times the capacity of your computer.

If you’ve got a 30 gigabyte iPod, ILM has 4,608 times the storage of your iPod.

Based on Apple’s estimate that a 30 gigabyte iPod will hold 7,500 songs, that means that ILM could store 34,560,000 songs. Also based on Apple’s estimate of 4 minutes per song, those 34.5 million songs would total up to (take your pick of the following):

• 138,240,000 minutes
• 2,304,000 hours
• 96,000 days
• 3,154 months
• 262.84 years

I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of storage in my book.