Reminder: Samsung Recycling

 TV & Movies  No Responses »
Sep 302008
 

Samsung is starting a free recycling program for all of it’s products, well ahead of the curve of the laws under consideration to mandate this kind of behavior from equipment manufacturers.  More information on Samsung’s Recycling Direct program is available at their website tomorrow, including all of the locations where this free recycling will  be available.

As I have a nice 32″ 1080i monitor that I plan to replace with an a Samsung A750 very soon, this news couldn’t have come at a better time.  (Especially since it appears that my g/f does not want to replace her 20″ non-HDTV with my old TV.)

 Posted by John Williams at 7:00 am

Heroes Season 3 Review

 TV & Movies  No Responses »
Sep 302008
 

IO9 has a review of Heroes Season 3, and the fact that the premiere 2 hour episode lost 25% of it’s viewership to shows such as “dancing with the stars” and “csi: miami.”  The language of the review is pretty harshly against NBC, but they make a few good points.

Season 2 looked to be spectacular, if you take in to consideration the plans for the remaining 14 episodes of Season 2 which were abruptly aborted because of the writer’s strike.  That left Tim Kring and the rest of the producers/writers with wrapping up the season gracefully.

In the scheme of things, it might just have been better to have gone ahead with their original plans (spoiler, but not much of one since it’s a “what would have been” look at the original plot) to release the virus and have the remaining 14 episodes to deal with the world wide catastrophe.

Likewise I’m forced to agree with IO9 that the one-hour countdown was too much hype.  As interesting as some of the clips on the countdown were, I found the whole hour to  be very trying.  After an hour of watching the countdown, I was glad I have Tivo…  so that I could watch the real episode later.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:00 am

Garage door

 Personal  2 Responses »
Sep 292008
 

Property owner finally put in an automatic garage door (and motor, to replace the manual/tilt garage door that was on the property I’m renting).  The automatic garage door was in the rental lease, but it took too long to get put in.

 Posted by John Williams at 3:56 pm

Disney Archive: Dine Line

 Other  No Responses »
Sep 292008
 

714-781-3463

For Disney Dining Reservations, reservations only taken 60 days in advance.

 Posted by John Williams at 9:12 am

A toast to Stanislav Petrov

 Other  1 Response »
Sep 282008
 

Little did I know that Stanislav Petrov is a world hero, and little did I know how close we all came to global apocalypse on Sep 26, 1983.  That would have been just before my 10th birthday.  All told, I owe this man 25 drinks, plus several billion more for each man, woman and child saved.

In summary:  Stanislav Petrov intentionally mis-identified a early warning strike by the United States against Soviet Russia.  This early warning strike was identified as an inbound nuclear assault.  Post-event analysis discovered a critical defect in the Soviet’s early warning systems which were a great embarrassment to them at all levels.  In the Cold War era, had Stanislav reported a incoming nuclear strike, as his sensors told him that he should report, there’s a very good chance that you and I would not be alive right now to have this quaint interchange of ideas.

Thanks to Charlie Stross for posting this gem.

I plan to mark Sep 26 on my Calendar hence forth and offer a prayer and thanks to this man who should be remembered by everyone.

 Posted by John Williams at 11:05 pm

Hubble and the Universe

 Photography, Science  1 Response »
Sep 242008
 

Gizmodo reported that Hubble made it’s 100,000th orbit of our tiny little planet, 3rd rock from Sol, and took yet another fantastic photo.

The universe we live in is such a beautiful place.  But then, just about everything is beautiful from 1 million LY away. ;)

 Posted by John Williams at 7:00 am

Why I hate school

 Personal  No Responses »
Sep 232008
 

The Dean of Administration at Fresno City College once told me:

If the teacher has a book that says that War of 1812 happened in 1813, and they teach that in their class, and a test is given on the topic, any answer but 1813 will be wrong on that test.

As you can imagine, I lost all interest in pursuing an academic education after that conversation.

 Posted by John Williams at 10:48 am

“How” A Celestial Perspective Video

 Science  2 Responses »
Sep 232008
 


How – A perspective on the size of celestial bodies

Found this on MetaCafe, care of Digg. A pretty impressive perspective on the size of celestial bodies ranging from Pluto (the maybe-not-a-planet-planet) to VV Cephei, the largest known Star in our universe.

 Posted by John Williams at 7:00 am

[the other] Palin for President

 Humor  No Responses »
Sep 222008
 

Found by Charles Stross

 Posted by John Williams at 7:00 am

X11BARS v0.99.8 released

 Personal  No Responses »
Sep 212008
 

  ASPECT Script X11BARS (69.1 KiB, 375 hits)
You need to be a registered user to download this file.

Change log

0.99.8 : 2008-02-05

  • Added outNPA and outNXX procedures to remove NXX and NPA programming quickly (for when the script fubars during entry)
  • Added OUT config menu to main menu
  • Added global variables to contain start/end number for NPA, NXX and string information for AC1/AC2 for NPA/NXX.
  • Updated all comments

0.99.7 : 2008-02-05

  • Updated menus

0.99.6 : 2008-01-25

  • Added alternate RLI programming for Canadian & International NPAs
  • Changed display of “all npas” to “other npas” to allow programming of Canadian + US, but not other NPAs, or US+Other but not Canadian. Enabling US+Canadian+Other requires all 3 options enabled
  • Fixed bug where set pacing configuration also exited configuration menu
  • Added warning that Mirviss mode only uses a single RLI for all NPAs and does not support assigning different RLIs to NPAs based on location
  • Fixed bug in NPA entry caused by mspause being located after transmit command instead of before.
  • Modified all “waitfor” commands to include trailing spaces on prompt due to occasional sync issues resulting in entry errors.

You might ask why it took me so long to release 0.99.8, the answer.  I forgot I’d made changes.  Going through my projects to import them in to the BugTracker reminded me that I needed to make the new release available.

 Posted by John Williams at 6:13 pm
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