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May 26 Facebook is not teh s uckHey All,
Been a long time, I finally stopped resisting the facebook assimiliation and joined up. It's pretty cool, somewhere in between a blog and an instant messaging program and twitter.
I've managed to reconnect with people from just about all eras of my life, and that alone is just awesome, but beyond that I'm able to get a picture of their day to day, which is something you don't get through IM nor Blog.
Of course, I continue to maintain my anonymity, I tried to type in the name "Online Lobster" but facebook wouldn't allow it (it knows it's not a real name) so I had to mangle the spelling to get it accepted: Onyline Lawbstre
Take THAT name probability detection algorithm!  February 12 Still got it!!It's nice to know people reading my profile find me so attractive they feel moved to send me private messages! :D
Even though the only image in my profile is that of a Lobster, and I list my career as "Tap dancing for nickels on the pier" apparently there are girls out there who are hot for me, which just warms my crustacean heart!
Here's a sincere love note I got from one such admirer, I can't wait to hit up her site and see her videos as she clearly shows genuine interest in crustaceans such as myself.
 Soulja GirlThis is apparently a really old video that has been making the rounds for almost a year, but I'm just learning about it... I found a version with deliberately crazy subtitles which actually make it funnier than what she's really saying. Enjoy!
February 05 Physics for fun (not profit)Long story short, a long time ago I went to #mensa (group of smart people) with an idea I had to harness heat energy through the use of a nickel titanium alloy with the peculiar property of returning to it's original shape when heat is applied. I suggested one could theoretically create a heat powered AC unit for example, and they laughed at me and spat out a number of equations that proved what I had in mind would never work.
Today, I ran across a youtube video showing a working version of the very concept I proposed:
So there you have it, society for brilliant people got it wrong. After seeing this today I once again considered the possibility of returning to school for a degree in physics, it simply doesn't make ANY financial sense though. Physics doesn't pay hardly anything at all. Besides, I do some pretty creative stuff at my current job, and plus I can spend my off hours thinking about physics problems and trying to figure these things out.
Today I spent a long time thinking about where the energy is coming from *exactly* in this nitinol motor, because either it's violating the first law of thermodynamics or the process of returning to its original shape is an endothermic one and this is a thermo-dynamic energy converter (which either way is incredibly awesome).
As I thought about whether it's simply storing kinetic energy and releasing it I came to realize the movement is coming from the atomic level, from the crystaline structure of the metal which it snaps back to past a certain heat threshold.
And son of a gun, I seem to have solved a mystery of physics called the Mpemba effect. I was trying to think of other examples where atomic or molecular action can result in kinetic energy, the first example that sprang to mind was freezing water. As the molecules of water slow down, their dipole nature causes them to assume a crystaline structure that is less dense than the liquid form. So when it freezes, ice expands, that expansion is capable of exerting force, and therefore doing work (ripping the metal of a pop can for example of you've ever forgotten one in the freezer you know what I mean).
So the thought occurs, this energy has to come from somewhere (again, our friend the first law of thermodynamics) perhaps freezing is actually an endothermic process itself. That would mean that the process of freezing actually absorbes heat energy and translates it into kinetic energy in the form of water molecules expanding into a less dense crystaline structure.
Then I remembered the Mpemba effect, an unexplained phenomenon where hot water freezes faster than cold water, and if freezing is indeed an endothermic process then hot water would have more heat energy readily available to fuel this process than cold water would. It seems like such a simple observation but that's two thermo-dynamic energy conversion methods thought up in one lifetime! :D I'm pretty excited about this and plan to talk to a few physicists about it.
Dare to dream! And don't let others discourage you!
February 04 Lies, LIES!!I saw an article recently that claimed businesses and gamers were "warming up to Vista" and the author goes on to state that this is evidenced by the Vista adoption rate approaching 10%. Excuse me? Single digit usage is warming up? Dang, they've set some pretty low standards.
In the meantime, yesterday after almost a month of not logging into WoW because I had to rebuild my gaming laptop that runs Vista due to increasingly frequent driver errors for the video card... I wasn't 30 seconds into the game when Vista completely locked up. On a fresh install!
The website for my laptop lists no new drivers for Vista. I went out and bought a bluetooth adapter for my laptop only to have the installation fail. I contacted the manufacturer and they said they have no plans to make a driver for Vista.
Wonderful.
So I'm left wondering, what color is the sky in that author's world? Is he a shill? Was he paid in some way by MS to write a favorable article on Vista?
I guess I'm just angry that I have two machines that I can't install XP on and am getting nowhere with Vista. I wish there was a version of WoW that worked on Linux, in the meantime I'm just going to have to not play WoW, or swap some computers around and build an XP box to play it on.
I can't believe how dependant the world is on Microsoft products, given the huge vacuum created by Vista for a stable operating system, you'd think in our capitalist society someone would step in and offer a proper operating system. Anyone? Intel? IBM? Google?
Edit: In case it's not obvious from my increasing grumpiness, my shoulder pain is back with a vengence... ranting takes my mind off the pain a little :P January 30 Stem CellsI was just watching 11th Hour, it's a show about bleeding edge technology and an FBI task force set up to investigate its misuse.
I like the issues they deal with but I hate how they villify technology. Today's episode was a little better in that regard, they showed stem cells saving lives as the good application, and then they showed stem cells keeping people young as the bad application.
I disagree vehemently on this issue. There is nothing wrong about wanting to stay young forever. But in the show they mused about how terrible it would be to be forever young, how foolish these people who wish to live beyond their years were.
So I'm quite ambivalent about the show, it brings issues near and dear to my heart to public awareness, but villifies them. :P
I have to bite my tongue and keep reminding myself humans are still infants when it comes to understanding their potential. Many are still plagued by superstition, delusion and most are unable to think deeply about issues themselves so have to settle for parroting the opinions they've heard others express.
All the more reason to hate this show, it's giving people opinions that are not conducive to growth and progress. Fortunately there are those of us who don't take our cues from TV shows and will push forward with these technologies. Too bad we will have to push through all the less clever people holding opinions given them by the writers of this show.
So, here, for a short time, the secrets of the universe that you may or may not be aware of:
There is no god
There are no souls
There is no afterlife
There are no ghosts
The bible is a boring work of bad fiction
Jesus never even existed
There are no demons
There are no dragons
There are no vampires
There are no werewolves
The life we have is all the life we get, when we die we cease to exist, so extending that life indefinitely is a GOOD thing. Just because everyone who came before us died doesn't mean we have to do it too! What are we, lemmings? The guy ahead of you jumped off the cliff to his death so you have no choice in the matter and must follow him to your own death?
Snap out of it people, wake up.  January 29 That's entertainment!I was watching Fringe this week and it's kinda funny how they have actors and graphics guys who know nothing about computers putting together words and screens that look incredibly high tech.
In one particular scene some alleged tech guru is tracking a download from a certain IP address... they trace it to the following IP address:
456.262.736.462
Which of course resolves to a name and physical address, guess I missed the RFC for the DNS server extensions that allow you to pass invalid IP addresses and resolve them to physical locations.
Still, it's just a show, heck maybe it's an inside joke for us tech savvy people? January 28 hipic? This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless! To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture. Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime 6.5 or higher is required. MobloggingGreeting! So here I am trying to setup my moblog options so I can add blog entries from my phone... this is just a test... ---------- Sent from my Verizon Wireless mobile phone January 27 feeling BetterI saw my doc for a follow up appointment, and we're aggressively treating the medical issues I have. She seemed upbeat and optimistic and I felt good about the sense she gave me that she's got a good handle on the issues.
I'm going to back off on the immunosuppresants for a bit till I run the course of hardcore anti-biotics to make sure I don't get an infection after this surgery, and she's doubled my diabetes medication to reign in the blood sugar and improve my chances of healing. Also dropped the prednisone dosage since it can raise blood sugar as well.
This will afford me the best chance possible to fight off this infection and after two weeks of throwing everything we have at it we're going to go back to dialing down my immune system to keep my body from attacking itself.
I feel a lot more optimistic now, I was worried my health was crumbling out of control but this is just a minor setback in a course of treatment that was otherwise working. The only drawback to pulling back on the immunosuppresants is I'm going to be in a lot more pain for the next two weeks.
But the pain will pass... January 26 Lots of stuff...It's been a full day... any day that starts out by removing 2 feet of gauze from an open wound in your body can't be good. :P Though I'm not sure anything can happen the rest of the day to make it worse.
I stayed home today, still recovering from surgery I had on Friday, and I have to say... I HATE daytime TV. More specifically I hate the commercials you are subjected to during daytime TV. Mesothelioma, SSI lawyers, personal injury lawyers and products and programs aimed at the elderly and otherwise infirmed. I guess it's based on the notion that all the young able-bodied people are off working at those hours so if you're watching TV you're retired or disabled.
I took a break from daytime TV and put on Event Horizon on Blu Ray... this is a gorgeous movie, I love the cinematography and the look of the movie, but I cannot stand the strobing of horrific images that happens periodically. I understand it's a horror movie but the imagery is just too over the top disturbing and taints the feeling of the movie as a whole. It's like taking some beautiful IMAX film and strobing the most grotesque images imaginable at you at random intervals. :P This is when having a near photographic memory becomes a liability, at least till they invent brain bleach.
I would love for someone to come out with a sanitized version of Event Horizon with all the strobing gore removed. That I would buy, but this I will just rent... and cringe when those few images that make it to my eyes before I can shut them start strobing.
I also caught an interesting documentary on my TiVo about a UFO sighting in the UK. I had seen a documentary on this particular sighting before and was going to delete this documentary before watching it since it had been resolved to my satisfaction as nothing more than hysteria about lights in the sky causing some air force personel to confuse a light house light moving through the trees for a UFO.
Turns out there's a lot more to the story than the last documentary I saw mentioned. There were three nights of sightings with each night a higher ranking official from the base coming out to see for himself. There are not only the eyewitness accounts of the craft but plaster casts of the indentations left behind, notes taken by the AF lt-col who investigated and did an excellent job of recording his observations. Took pictures, kept an audio tape recorder as they searched for and FOUND the UFO, he kept notes on the size, dimensions of the craft, he walked up to it, put his hand on it, took notes of the temperature, texture, drew the markings he saw... there was a lot of really good information corroborated by everyone who was there.
The only evidence that did not survive were the photos which were returned from the base film processing lab as completely whited out. The photographer goes on to say he suspects the pictures were confiscated and replaced with overexposed film. It was definitely interesting, TiVo shows the date of the program as 2005 and its in HD recorded off The History Channel.
Previously I had seen a discovery channel documentary on this incident that led me to believe it was a closed case. Weird.
That kinda got me in the mind to look up UFO related stuff on youtube, it's been a long time since I looked into the subject and I figured there's prolly lots of new stuff about it these days. Here's a couple of impressive looking videos, the site's english translation is very poor so I can't make out if they're asserting these are real pics or not but they look rather impressive.
January 20 There is hope...Finally a change for the better, there is an optimism and joy in people that feels almost nostalgic as it has been so long since we've been given a glimmer of hope for our country. I half expected Bush to declare martial law and cancel the handover, it would fit right in with his actions as president. I remember once hearing that my generation was a naive one because we never experienced evil like the previous ones had. Well, I submit to you that 8 years under Bush and the voter fraud, torture, looting of the treasury, destruction of the middle class, globalization, controlled media, fraud, brazen illegal behavior, false flag operations, psy ops on our own citizens, warrantless wire taps... I think it's safe to say we've seen evil. Any ONE of those actions by Bush would be enough to impeach him and put him away for treason but he kept throwing one egregious violation of law after another at us keeping us so off balance and shocked that no one knew where to begin. Does he get away with it? Who knows... only time will tell. If my hunch is right, he will get away with it for reasons of national security. Lets fix our country and regain the respect abroad that we lost! January 18 Streaming MoviesI bought a TiVo HD series 3, it's pretty cool, it has most of the features my old replay TV had plus a few new ones which I REALLY like:
Now the things I DON'T like about it.
The good outweighs the bad, especially since there's no more ReplayTV. What would really be ideal is a DivX HD DVR... but no one makes that. If hat some startup capital I think I might take that market on, TiVo is the only game in town, I don't think they'd so brazenly throw ads at you if they had competition. Then again who knows how long broadcast television will last, it's so much easier to just get a netflix account and instantly stream movies and archived TV shows.
I'd like to point out that if these movies were encoded in DivX instead of MPEG2, Netflix could offer higher quality video at lower cost (for storage and bandwidth) and it seems they definitely need to hire some experts to handle their digital storage mechanisms because on a great number of movies the aspect ratio is incorrect and the audio can sometimes be messed up on their rips. (Asylum, for example, the audio echos throughout the movie)
One side effect of having so many movies available for instant viewing... my insomnia is much worse... I get engaged by a film and stay awake. As I sit here typing this on Sunday morning, I have yet to go to sleep. :P :P :P
BTW, Netflix is also available if you have an Xbox 360, but Microsoft requires you to pay for their Xbox live service before you can access your Netflix service. I don't play games often enough to make the Xbox Live service the least bit compelling. Way to chase me off my Xbox and onto my PC, PS3 and TiVo, Microsoft! With no killer apps, an increased fee for xbox live and reduced service, I have a tough time seeing my way to even considering signing up again.
I wonder what the world would be like if Microsoft adopted a Google-like "Don't be evil" policy. :D December 15 Let there be light!!December 09 Apply directly to your zombies!I was looking for something on the net and came across this ridiculous image. And it's not a joke, this wasn't pulled off The Onion, it's a real advertisement for a real product, I cut off its name so it can die in obscurity like it damn well should.
This is the worst hack photochop I've ever seen in my life... how someone approved this and then went on to pay money to have it displayed is beyond me. It is so cartoonishly bad it makes advertising parodies I've seen look like brilliant marketing campaigns.
 So try it today, turn your night of the living dead zombies into Marilyn Monroe lookalikes!
November 26 Mom, it IS Two Pack Shaker... I just asked him!This is one of the funnier prank calls I've come across, I grew up on this music so I recognize all the artists and lyrics he's doing... the thought occurs that no one in my immediate circle of friends would know these names though... so I can't really share this with anyone I know and expect them to understand it. Still it's funny to me and here it is.
Basically this guy calls up a thai restaurant, ostensibly placing an order but actually rattling off the names of famous rap artists... check it out... ten points for every artist you recognize, 100 points for identifying the source of this entry's title.
November 06 Can't Stop BarackSo Tuesday has come and gone, and of course, I voted, took a snapshot of my voting sheet as proof... I insisted on a paper ballot although they did have one electronic voting machine available. It was hardly in use as opposed to the 10 cubbyholes for paper ballots that all had a line for them. And while I was there, the people in line in front of me also insisted on a paper ballot, looks like the word is out, everyone knows to avoid the electronic voting machines whenever possible, they seem to always cound the vote for republicans, odd little bug, I'd say. :P I think the only people using them were republicans since the machines were gonna vote their way anyways. What an impressive victory for democrats, we won it all, the house, the senate and the presidency. All the republicans are whining now, online the ones I've talked to are blaming Obama for their diminishing stock portafolios... ummm, sorry to be the ray of reality but this downturn in the stockmarket started before the election even, you're just now getting around to finding a scapegoat? Oh well, they've had their head stuck in the sand for the last 8 years, cheering on their leader as he tore apart the country... guess they have to misdirect the anger on to someone and now they finally have a release valve. barack October 26 I'm so cooooooooooooooooold!!! So I like fresh cold air to breathe while being warm and toasty under the covers... that's just my preference... but lately it's just been so cold, I'd forgotten just how cold it can get here in Seattle.
I am TEMPTED to turn on the heat, which says a lot because heat is my enemy. I'm currently at 60 degrees, not cold enough to put on a blanket yet.
Good thing I'm single otherwise I'd have to put up with complaints like this:
October 04 Liquid Diamonds DeconstructionMusic is an incredibly complex thing... it starts as a subconscious appreciation of the mathematical relationships between different tones, their durations and patterns therein, add to that the same type of appreciation for the rhythmic variations of the iambic pentameter in the words of the song and then layer on top of that the message of the lyrics and you could have yourself a heaping helping of uber complexity.
As I was filling up my new 16gig iPod Nano with all the music I've collected over the years I ran across one of my favorite songs which has a deep, personal meaning to me, and though I've never put much thought into the lyrics, I've long had a deep respect for what I think the artist is attempting to represent with the emotion she sings the song with and the way the song is composed.
When I was a child one of the strongest memories was that of going to Disneyland, my family would go early and we'd stay late as it was not something we got to do very often. In Disneyland there's a big clock by the It's a small world ride. You can hear the tick-tock of the clock when the park is quiet which is only in the morning when few people are there and again at night when most people are gone.
This is how the song Liquid Diamonds begins and ends... with bare clocklike percussion that starts in and stays steady from beginning to end with the rest of the music coming in, climbing to a crescendo of complexity and emotion. So full of passion and yearning...
Then the song fades out but the percussion lingers.
I sort of think on this song as a metaphor for life... the clock is ticking before we get here, it ticks as we come to know our universe and ourselves to the extent that we manage, it ticks through our attempts to find and define ourselves... through all our passions and obsessions the clock keeps ticking. As we age and accept our own mortality and yearn for more life the clock is still ticking, oblivious to our existential angst.
And finally as the curtain closes on our lives the clock continues to tick, in our absence.
Kinda neat! :D
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