So I’m trying to get a little bit of feedback on the blog. Been at it now for a couple weeks, and I’m enjoying it. But what I wanna hear from is you folks – could you take a minute to hit this survey? I’ll post the results when things are done:
Take the Planet Geek! readership survey…
Thanks!
It’s MISTER FUSION!
Remember that cool device on the back of the deLorean labelled “Mister Fusion” in Back to the Future? The concept that a fusion reactor producing virtually unlimited power could be brought down to the level of a coffeegrinder was whimsical, but gave that ‘gosh the future’s gonna be cool’ feel.
Well, we might be one step closer. Far from the Cold Fusion whoop-tee-do from the 80’s, these folks seem to actually be on to something.
As Reported in the Purdue News:
Evidence bubbles over to support tabletop nuclear fusion device
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive “tabletop” device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.
Whoah. 🙂
I found my pants!
Ha, suddenly thought you were reading Ben’s Livejournal, weren’t you? Neener!
For some reason my favorite pair of sweatpants has gone missing for the last month or so. Since I’m working from home a lot of the time now, the requirement for business dress is lowered a bunch. Nothing like dropping the morning commute from an hour and a half to 15 seconds!
Anyway, my sweatpants seem to have returned from some bizarre nether region, and I am happily re-comfied. (Actually, once my friend and I made up the theory that this is exactly what Saturns rings are made out of. When you lose something you just had, it’s actually warped out to Saturn for a little bit, then will zip back and appear under your chair or behind the door or something like that. This works for pencils, books, carkeys, and lost pants apparently).
Fun with virtual host aliases
With some help from the folks on the #apache channel on irc.freenode.net, I’ve set up a bunch of aliases for the blog. So you can now URL to the blog as ‘planetgeek.homeport.org’ or any other variations, such as ‘dbs’ ‘dave’ ‘geek’ ‘shayde’, etc, and they’ll all go to the same place.
The trick is to have multiple ServerAlias lines, or a single one with a bunch of names after seperated with spaces. That combined with a named wildcard entry for homeport.org, and voila!
Neat, huh?
Well, finally did it.
Today I gave my employers final notice that I’m leaving as of Wednesday of next week. That means the dreaded exit interview, and all that jazz.
They’re really in a hard place, and I wish my teammates well, but I have to get out of there. It’s doing me no good to hang on there, and I’ve already gone 5 weeks -past- when I said i was leaving, and even THAT date was 3 months notice. They’re still understaffed. *sigh*
Now all I need is customers.
Mmm. Biodiesel.
Hey, someone’s on the right track! Arora just pointed out this article about Harvard University installing a Biodiesel station in Cambridge. This is pretty cool, though it looks like it’s not a public station.
Why is this important to me? Well, I drive a VW Golf with a TDI (Turbo Diesel Injection) engine in it. It’s a wonderful car, and I get obscene miles on it (about 45mpg)… this is great for a car that has a heckuva lot of torque for only a 93hp engine.
New laptop recommendations?
So with the loss of my laptop I’d like to get a handle on the current state of affairs for laptops. Since ‘jboat‘ was my primary work platform I’d need to replace it with something that could cut the mustard.
Read on for specs. I’d love to hear recommendations, what do you think would fit the bill? Otherbloggers, feel free to trackback to this, I’d like to hear from other folks as well.
Sunday morning at the con
Bright. Glowing thing. In the sky. AIEEEE!
Not enough sleep, but moving along. There were actually people waiting to register when Ben and I got downstairs, though the sun was barely up. Boy, these people need to get lives! Owait…
More post-coffee.
Convention, day 2.
Holy shit there’s a lot of people here. Current reg counts are something like 950 registrations, about 780 attendees (which is about right 🙂 . The LAN room is stuffed, their setting up tables in the halls to take up the overflow.
Convention days 0-1
Hah! Victory over encroachment!
On the evenings when we have company over, Zach’s room becomes the guest room, which of course means Zach has to sleep somewhere else. That means either Cat’s bed or mine. Last night it was mine. One problem. Zach turns into Claude Van Damme in the middle of the night, and likes using my back for target practice.
But this time….
Pushing systems to the limit
There’s sort of a creed in the technoid world that folks have a tendency to just want faster and faster machinery, even when that is not really warranted. Many people spend zillions of dollars on machines that spend most of their time running screensavers or playing Solitaire.
I’m always keeping an eye on ‘am i just wanting new equipment just because it’s sexy? or do I really need it’? Well, I think I hit my limit on this laptop.
Continued feed fiddling
Thanks to more help from Jasra, we dug up a Moveable Type template and installed it into Planet Geek‘s configuration. I just updated to the new template after testing it out a little using Bloglines,and it appears to be presenting stuff correctly – there should be Comments links and the ‘Read more…” function should be working. I’ll throw a cut here to make sure.
Ubercon this weekend!
This weekend I’ll be doing registration services for Ubercon down in the Meadowlands in NJ. Ben Cordes will be my second for this stint. If you’re in the area, or want to get into some seriously groovy gaming, stop by! The last 2 events have been a blast, and judging by registration numbers, this event should be the best yet.
BTW, just to be clear… Ubercon is a customer of mine, I’ve been working with them from the beginning. They’re great people, and I’ve met some wonderful folks through their events.
Good therapy
Last night I really came down with just the blahs. About 4pm I hit the “I’m -really- beat” wall, after a pretty intense day of coding, and I just couldn’t get motivated to get going again.