Benoît Mandelbrot Has Passed Away
Honestly I don’t know much about Mandelbrot sets or Fractal geometry, but i do recognize that Mandelbrot was a genius. Enough so that he even has songs written about him (Mandelbrot Set).

Angry NES’s version of Cee Lo’s “F*ck You”

I like this song.

MySQL Fanboy’s GIS Articles
Not everyone is into GIS, but i think it could have some really neat applications in mobile development.

Raytheon XOS2 — Pretty cool
I think before long we’re going to have real life bipedal weapons platforms. Gundams and Evas and Dragonauts!

Perceived Wealth Distribution and Reality
I found this interesting. It seems that people think the income gap is a lot smaller than it actually is..

Americans don’t know much about religion
This i found amusing, mainly because I know so many people who think themselves quite religious, but then when you want to have actual discussion or debate about theological issues they can’t seem to defend their positions.

Arduino UNO FAQ on LadyAda.net
For those of you who use Arduinos and are interested in how the new UNO’s differ from the older series. Take a look here.

Things I’ve been collecting over the last week. Posts that I thought were pretty interesting — to me anyway.

Building the Wall
I remember going to the Vietnam Memorial while we lived in Maryland — about 15 years ago. I don’t think it really meant anything to me, I just thought it was cool to see so many names on a shiny black wall. I think if I were to go now it would mean a whole lot more — after having served in the military.

4chan takes on the MPAA
So after hiring a company to DDoS bittorrent trackers who wouldn’t comply with their requests to take down certain material, 4chan had planned to DDoS the hired company. Well it seems that someone beat them to the punch. So what do the hordes of Anon at do? Go after the MPAA itself! It only took 8 minutes for them to take the site down. It made me lul.

From single-core to quad-core in less than a year
Multi-core phones would be amazing! That, coupled with the concept phone by Mozilla (linked below), would probably be enough for most people — who just surf the web, check email, and play Farmville.

Nifty Artwork
I think the fact that I’ve been watching Mad Men like a.. well.. mad man lately attracted me to this page. I want a suit like Don Draper.

Obama talks about taxes and strengthening the economy
While i don’t agree with everything this administration is doing / has done, I do think that taxing people more evenly would make things simpler and help bridge gaps between social groups. I’d like to see a day when we all pay the same amount in taxes, instead of this confusing system of earned and unearned income, capital earnings, donations to charities, etc. How about we all just pay 15 or 20 percent of our income? I think that would make things much easier, not just in terms of administrating and collecting, but also planning for what you’ve got to pay. But of course, a simple idea like this would probably just get screwed up by the government. It’s sad we can’t trust them to do something simple.

Paul Lekakis – Boom Boom
I lol’d at this, thanks Katie.

Wind Power!
Let’s see who else will pony up the big bucks and commit to something of this size? Or would there be more protests that a wind farm 20 miles off shore would disrupt the scenery?

Old People know stuff, kinda
I watched this video of Walter Breuning talking about his life, and what advice he has for the current generation. You’ll have to watch what he says though, some things are exaggerated a little. It’s still really neat to hear first hand accounts of times so long ago from someone who actually lived them!

Community Wi-Fi?
While the speeds are slow compared to N, the range is so much better. I could see community Wi-Fi or Municipal WiFi using this technology.

Phone of the future!?
How great would it be if your phone became the end-all-be-all tool you’d use? Instead of having to have a laptop, a phone, a projector, a watch, and a list of other gadgets, you could have one piece of technology to take many of those items and consolidate them into one. The big thing that really appeals to me is being able to carry your information in “physical” form around with you, instead of having to rely on some sort of “cloud” storage. With newer phones now also being multi-core, a phone like the Seabird would have more than enough power to handle web browsing, email, watching online videos, along with most office type applications.

Full Moon Beer
This sounds interesting. Being a lover of beer, I would definitely try it at least once.

I love fall weather
I think it’s the colors and lower temperatures. I can’t wait to get a motorcycle (something like this or this) and be able to ride around in this weather.

oh.. and this:


and this:

Indestructible 3-ring Binder — this looks like something a post-apocalyptic bean counter would carry around with him.

Don’t want to shed out 500 bucks for MS Project? Try Gantt Project. — something an old coworker and i were talking about brought me across this. He was saying that often times he was working from home after work to get things done. Besides adding extra stress to your life, after you’re off shift, you shouldn’t have to put in extra hours (especially if you’re not being paid for them). Being able to give management a project plan, detailing what tasks need to be done, how long they’ll take, and when the estimated completion date is, should allow him to have more time at home NOT being a slave to the man

About time the US started really upgrading it’s network infrastructure. — I was astounded when i read the number ’1Gbps’! That’s how fast my local network at home is. I could only imagine having that kind of speed for the internet! Not only would that let me do more things with my server(s), but download speeds and gaming would be so faaaaaaaaaast!

Pandas love to party! — it’s true. they love teh cakes. but they don’t quite move-it-move-it

I love this house! — I love it when people incorporate their environment into their home-building.

The database nerd in me likes reading about stuff like this — I always find it amazing when you can aggregate and search data efficiently. Especially when you’re talking about the amount and size that Google has to deal with.

This is old, but I still find it funny — I think it’s a combination of people not knowing how to use computers, and then believing everything they read on the internets.

New MC Frontalot.

Last but not least, Happy Birthday to my dad! If you’re friends with him on Facebook, go wish him a happy B-Day

Last week I got an email from iPay Technologies. They wanted to do a phone screening for their interviewing process. I accepted. I had my phone screening on Thursday, and Friday morning there was another email in my inbox stating they wanted to call me in for an interview. Zach went through the same thing. And now we both have interviews with them. Good thing they have two job positions open , maybe we’ll be the ones filling them. The only thing i’m concerned about right now is the compensation. They never said how much or what range the pay would be. I’m hoping they’re not going to try to hire me for what I’m being paid now.

Depending on how the interview goes, I may or may not be giving my boss a two weeks notice here in the future.

In other news, my dad got his M1 Garand. It’s beautiful! I could only imagine lugging that thing around through a combat environment though. It’s quite heavy. Hopefully soon we’ll be able to go shoot it! I kinda want one now. ^_^

Over the weekend I played lots of Left 4 Dead 2. I’ve finished all the campaigns on normal, and am now working on some of the achievements. The game really takes the feeling you get from when you first played Left 4 Dead and refines it. The chills, the excitement, the freak outs. They’re all there! There were a few times where I actually yelled/screamed like a little girl! The new zombies really do add a whole new dynamic to the game, by not letting you take advantage of the tricks that you could in L4D. The new melee weapons are also awesome, there’s nothing like beating a zombie over the head with a guitar or frying pan. And Realism mode.. oh so awesome.

I also finished reading Helix by Eric Brown. It was a good read. It really sucked me in, which is probably why i finished it in two days (or so). The characters were really believable, and the environments were well detailed. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s into science fiction and likes a story about a mission gone bad, crash landing on a strange alien structure filled with thousands of different alien races.

Work has been pretty stressful these last few weeks. Not so much the workload, more so the constant inability to achieve consistency.  I like being able to have my boss give me a task to complete, which i then complete and return the results. What i don’t like  is being told to do something, spend a week or so on this task, just to have it thrown away because certain people don’t like the results (not because they are wrong, but because they didn’t show the high numbers they were unrealistically expecting).  So basically i’ve been throwing my work down the drain no matter what i do.

whatever though. I’ll just do what they tell me to, collect my paycheck, and not take any initiative on anything since it never pays off anyway.

Last week i was pretty sick, I guess I’d caught the flu sometime the week before and it then went active the night after Halloween, I guess the constant temperature change from going in and out of bars was enough to lower my immune system so it was susceptible to attack. I spent the next week in bed pretty much. Sunday through Tuesday were pretty much a blur of half-consciousness, headache, and sleep. I stayed home on wednesday too just to make sure i didn’t get sick again. Thursday i went to work and wished i’d stayed home. And then there was the weekend again. I took it easy this weekend and stayed home. Friday and Saturday were just filled with chilling on the couch and watching TV shows and Anime. I ended up reading an entire book this weekend too. The Age of Ra by James Lovegrove wasn’t too bad. If you’re into that kind of story. It was a little hard to wrap my head around a world where the ancient Egyptian gods were real and the whole world was ruled by them. Other than that though it was a good read and worth the 7 dollars or whatever i spent on it.

On sunday i went to the range with my dad to shoot stuff down range. It was lots of fun, even though i’m still not a fan of his rifle Kicks like a mule! Instead of going to Knob Creek like usual we went on Post and used French Range. It was a lot nicer than where we’d shot before and fewer rednecks too!  We also shot my dad’s new ERMA, i think it’s a KGP-69. It needs some cleaning, and probably some parts replaced, but it was neat to shoot something different.

So far this is my favorite song.

Ghost Town