Three Things I Learned Today

This was inspired by Arya’s training to be an assassin in A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m tempted to publish it online somewhere, but that also seems kind of vain. Does anyone really care what I learned today? I guess I'll find out if anyone comments.

July 15 2011

• Alan Verasko now claims he is working for his father and was underpaid for his work on the crawlspace.
• [jobnumber];l[linenumber] displays a page at a time when viewing Tandem spooler output.
• http://wallbase.cc/start/ is a great place to look for interesting digital images.

July 16 2011

• Inverted round maile becomes much more stable when you trap rings in it every so often.
• Nurse Naniko is really only worth watching for the fan service scenes.
• In the Philipines, a fat gecko might fetch over $1000 for use in folk medicine.

July 17 2011

• Michael Pollan has a variety of tomato named after him.
• The “side” of my crawlspace facing the back yard is pretty flimsy.
• Zooey Deschanel sings in the new Winnie the Pooh movie.

July 18 2011

• British PM wants to convene a special sitting of Parliament on Wed July 20 to issue a statement about the phone hacking scandal.
• Clarks are having their last swim meet of the summer tonight.
• Apparently it’s not only annoying that my gutters didn’t get put back up, it’s against the law.

July 19 2011

• Cornell physicists have demonstrated a temporal cloak, which can hide short duration events from the rest of the universe. (Short is currently 110 nano seconds.)
• Somewhere between 2 and 15% of women have an extra type of cone in their eyes for detecting colors.
• The band Vampire Weekend was sued over their use of the photo on the album Contra.

July 20 2011

• Google can detect one particular type of malware that intercepts google results and warn infected users.
• Borders liquidating all stores. :-(
• The Latin word for meat really means the meat of mammals and birds, which is why Catholics can eat fish on Friday. (Along with amphibians, reptiles, and insects.)

July 21 2011

• Lytro is making a camera that captures enough spatial information to refocus the image at different points after the shot is taken.
• Rhubarb is very sour, kind of like a sweet tart without the sweet. (Unless you dip it in sugar first.)
• There is still extensive road construction on 71N in Northern KY.

July 22 2011

• Oracle and Google are in court over use of Java in Android phones.
• There was a terror attack in Norway
• The left hand keyboard part of Break on Through is the rhythm and the right hand part tracks the lyrics.

July 23 2011

• Celuose Gum is another term for wood pulp in a food label.
• You can get a pretty good photo of a helicoptor at 300mm zoom.
• Amy Winehouse was found dead today in London.

July 24 2011

• Parent’s AC went out.
• Getting off at exit 191 is a good way to get to Dan’s house in the event of bad traffic on 71/75 S.
• Tilted Kilt’s Boddington’s is now functional.

July 25 2011

• Parent’s replaced their AC with Bryant. (Same company that tried to sell the Fritsches on new units when they didn’t need them.)
• I’ll be shooting pool with Stephen, Bobby, and Katy on Sundays at Bank Shot.
• WASPI is an open source security project.

July 26 2011

• It was a neighbor who complained about the weeds in my yard.
• Drilling into masonry by eye to try to match previous holes is a bad idea.
• The plastic things for attaching downspouts to the house must come in at least 2 different sizes. (Maybe I should have stuck to aluminium bands, but the one on the left front of the house worked so well.)

July 27

• Courtny Farms discontinuing A la carte program (too error prone and time consuming)
• Gallup poll shows congressional approval rating lowest ever recorded.
• Running a gcc compiler on AIX might be a short term solution, but is hardly ideal since the default AIX make command doesn’t understand gcc make files.