The Boston Bomb Scare As Covered By YouTube
Shamelessly stolen from Colin's blog, I had to share with you a YouTube reaction to the recent "Bomb Scare" in Boston.
Shamelessly stolen from Colin's blog, I had to share with you a YouTube reaction to the recent "Bomb Scare" in Boston.
Courtesy of Melanie, I give you the many sounds of Gir.
I received this article from Colin who's since posted a rant about Big Pharma in his own blog (with which I totally agree).
Without going into a rant of my own, here's the gist:
It should be pointed out that there is something seriously wrong with a society that rewards behaviour contrary to the betterment of it's citizens, while simultaneously neglecting institutions designed to improve it's quality of life. Our universities should have all the funding they need and companies like Pfizer should be held accountable for their squandering of resources.
Robin will love this one...
I got this link the other day from one of the geek lists I'm on. The Post-Rapture Post is exactly what it looks like: a service that promises to deliver your mail to those left behind after the rapture:
Just write your letter and it will be hand-delivered immediately following the exodus of the pure from the Earth. But you must be thinking to yourself, "How can the letters be delivered after the Rapture?" The answer is simple. The creators of this site are Atheists. That's right, we don't believe in God. How else would we be able to deliver your correspondence after the Rapture?
Absolutely brilliant.
A bunch of folks over at Harvard are doing a neat little project linking the blogs of the world. If you're interested in learning more, hop over to The Blog Conversation Project.
In somewhat related news, I've been MIA for a few days due in part to a new add-on I'm coding for this site. It's a cool idea I've wanted to do for years now and now that I have the tools, I'm finally seeing it through. I'll tell all in a couple days.
Can't... look... away.... it hurts to watch....
Billy Idol has a MySpace page.... and it sucks, in a way that only Billy Idol can suck.
Somtimes, I think that web developers go out of their way to keep people from downloading the videos they stream from their sites. I have no idea why they do this since it only helps to lessen the load on their servers when people download and redistribute the video clips themselves, but they do it anyway.
Of course, this doesn't stop any reasonably talented geek with a Linux box. The following code will let you grab all of Rick Mercer's previous rants from this year (lets hear it for simple naming conventions!)
$ for d in nov.7 oct.31 oct.24 oct.17 oct.10 oct.03; do FILE="ricks_rant_$d.2006.wmv" mencoder -o "$FILE" \ -ovc lavc \ -oac lavc \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq=4:vbitrate=500:acodec=ac3:abitrate=128 \ mms://a1740.v146341.c14634.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1740/14634/1/origin.media.cbc.ca/cbc.ca/mercerreport/videos/$FILE done
I'll be putting this in my cron from now on:
00 22 * * 3 FILE=`date +ricks_rant_%b.%d.%Y.wmv | tr [A-Z] [a-z]`; mencoder -o /path/to/rantRepository/$FILE -ovc lavc -oac lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq=4:vbitrate=500:acodec=ac3:abitrate=128 mms://a1740.v146341.c14634.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1740/14634/1/origin.media.cbc.ca/cbc.ca/mercerreport/videos/$FILE
I <3 Linux
What do you eat when you're unemployed? How 'bout $3.25 gyros at Alexandros on the Danforth?
Pavel sent me this link and I had to share it. It's a flash app that lets you select any point on Earth, zoom in, pan left/right and pick a location to see pictures from that place. I checked out Vancouver and walked down memory lane.
Tyler Hamilton has a great story in the Star (yes, I'm aware that I'm a few days behind on this) covering the new partnership between an Irish wind energy company (Tapbury) and a Vancouver-based flow battery company (VRB) to produce a whole bunch of power together.
Wind power really has one big problem: it's intermittent. If the wind isn't blowing, we're not getting any juice. One solution is to build a wider infrastructure and shunt power between sources (the wind is always blowing somewhere) but a better solution really is to store the power at the source until it's needed. That's where flow batteries come in.
In this situation, you'd have enough wind to power more resources than you need, so on a windy day, you'd actually be accumulating power in these batteries. On days with no wind though, that excess power can be drained at the same rate at which it was produced, providing a clean, sustainable base load power.
This isn't just another demonstration or pilot project done on a small scale to showcase a technology's market potential. This is a commercial deal, representing one of the largest in terms of coupling an energy storage technology with a wind farm.
How large are we talking? VRB is supplying a storage system that will be able to supply 12 megawatt-hours of electricity, or 1.5 megawatts over eight hours. That's a big battery system — enough to power 300 to 400 homes during a typical workday.
Tyler Hamilton, The Toronto Star
The technology is really neat, and the implications far-reaching. It's just so nice to see a Canadian company reaching out to the world market like this.