Older Items
From Fozzee.net
This page contains my REALLY old posts, from back before I went to the template-based postings for the RSS feed. Enjoy em.
New WRAPs at last
After PCEngines discontinued the WRAP series of low-power network appliances, there were rumors of an improved version in the works. A few months back, they announced the ALIX series, but it's been a while in the works. Anyhow, the replacement, called ALIX is now for sale. It comes in a few varieties, like the WRAP with 1 or 2 MiniPCI slots, 1 to 3 Ethernet ports, Optional VGA and USB, and up to 256mb of RAM. At first, I was worried that they were "ruining" the WRAP, adding all this junk, but, given that it's all optional, what they've really done is allowed the WRAP into a variety of other applications, including HTPCs.
News and Things
I've been crazy busy lately and haven't had any time to update, but happened to see something on CNN that made me wonder. That Iranian guy was at Columbia today. Apparently, he's in the country to speak at the UN or something. I'm a bit surprised that, given their track record, the CIA didn't arrange for something to happen to him. My favorite part was the way the university liaison totally berated him before he started speaking... Gotta love politicians.
Cruisin'
Hey, we made the newspaper. Becky was recently interviewed by a reporter from the Omaha World Herald who ran this story about our impending cruise. I'm not generally a huge fan of media, but this article is alright. My only nit-pick is that they didn't include the reason WHY we recommended using a travel agent: It has a few benefits during booking, but it really doesn't cost anything versus booking yourself. Check it out for yourself.
Business Books
For those of you who don't know me personally, I often like to spend time at the bookstore perusing all sorts of books, but mainly the technical, gaming and business varieties. On this particular occasion (yesterday), I found 2 books of interest:
- The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it)
, which proposes that extreme success and extreme failure often have the same causes, and that when you're not doing one of those, you're failing but just don't know it yet.
- The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
which proposes that 80% (or more) of everything you do is generally wasted, and that the trick to optimizing your life is to identify that 80% and make it go away. This book also has an interesting look at Remote/Virtual Personal Assistants.
Taken together, these books present an interesting philosophy: Make a bunch of less-important things in your life go away, but there's no real way to know which things will and won't be important in the long run. Additionally, if you're doing it right, people will say you're crazy at the outset, and either visionary or stupid, depending on how your guesses worked out.
The future is here...
This article, on a site called Pink Tentacle (For reasons unclear to me, at this time), showcases a system for projecting images in "real" 3D. The article indicates that it works by using lasers to create plasma balls in 3D space. Persistence of the balls (and presumably, human vision) allows it to "paint" like a traditional CRT display. I'm a bit put off that the guy in the photo is wearing safety glasses... Makes me think that I might not want a distraught princess projected on my coffee table with one of these things....
Catching the Predators Catching You!
This article touches a nerve of mine with regards to NBC's "To Catch a Predator" series. I've always wondered how this isn't entrapment, and what crime is actually being committed. If I go around telling people that I've "stolen" an free AOL CD from the bookstore (and actually believe it), did I commit a crime? How about if I plan to "steal" one? I'm not exactly a fan of pedophiles, but I don't understand (in most cases) where the actual crime is.
Electric Vehicles
So I've been thinking recently about Electric Vehicles recently and with next weekend totally free, I'm hoping to do some playing. I'd eventually love to build a full-blown electric car (as if the TDI isn't economical enough for me), but for now, I think I'm going to start by trying to build a scooter of some sort. I really wish I had one of those old "Kent" style kick-scooters (A Razor has tires that are too small, and is aluminum (not conducive to welding on)) to steal the steering out of. I suppose I could build the whole mess from the ground up, but it seems like a lot of work when my real interest is the electric power train. For full details, see Electric Vehicles.
Pie in... Pi
I'd always wondered where Area Code 314 was; Out bowling last night, our team-score was 314, and it made me wonder again. Anyhow, I come to find out that 314 is the area code for greater St. Louis. So, I searched for Pie Shops in St Louis and came up with Country Girl's Pie Shop at 3330 Union Blvd. Just a random bit of pi for you.
New Toys It's been a while, but life's been busy... Picked up that Canon S5 and the pictures are incredible. As soon as I've got something to show, I'll have it posted in the gallery. Maybe some night this week, we'll make it to the zoo... the 12x optical zoom will make for some good closeups.
Transformers
I stumbled upon this today in my inbox... Some Guys (who like to dress up as robots... or cars) have entirely too much time on their hands. While the costumes look quite a bit like cardboard boxes, you've got to admire the time and practice that went into this crap.
Also from the inbox, 10 bad habits of email. I know lots of people, both personally and professionally, who are often guilty of these things. Are you an Email Junkie?
Hacking MediaWiki
I just had a pretty nasty scare whilest making changes to some of our "friends" pages. It turns out that pages can be created with an ampersand(&) in their name, but those pages get weird when you go to view them later. I was able to manually access the database (tables wiki_pagelinks, wiki_page, and wiki_categorylinks) and rescue 3 pages in our Friends Section.
On Cameras and Cruises
With Becky planning our trip to Greece, I've started thinking about the technical aspects thereof. Our (potential) ship has an Internet cafe, so uploading pictures shouldn't be an issue. Taking pictures, on the other hand, might be. She's got her "7.2MP" Sony that takes pretty decent pictures, and I've still got my venerable Canon S230 (3MP) that has been through dang near everything. I've seen the pictures in all the tour books, and am really anxious to take some great pictures on our trip.
For years, I've talked about upgrading my digital camera, but the S230 is just the right size to toss in a pocket, and I'm concerned something bigger, while it will take a TON better pictures, wont get used much because it's a pain to take. Spending a small fortune on a trip is a powerful motivator to spend a slightly lesser sum on a new camera. Currently, I think that the Canon PowerShot S5 IS
The Coolest Calculator you'll see today
Jason sends me a link to a 6-bit video of a binary adding machine. While not that impressive in principal, this one is made entirely of wood and is therefore totally mechanical. Have a look!
Gallery Revamp (Updated)
UPDATE: Over 700 pictures have been imported (including what, imho, are the decent ones) so I've unplugged the old gallery, and changed over the link. Enjoy!
Having put off the inevitable for some time, I've been working on revamping the photo gallery by importing 7 years worth of content into PHP Gallery2. Some pics wont be getting imported for personal reasons or quality reasons. Where available, I'll be copying the titles (I wrote a neat Perl Script to do the dumping and file renaming from the database), but I have yet to figure out how to import all of your comments.
Wiii! (and other gaming things)
We got Mario Party 8 on release day (May 29th) last week, and have played it quite a bit. Also, I got my first look at Lord of the Rings Online today; It looks pretty sweet, but I'm just not sure that I have the time to get into another MMO right now. I will say that from the screenshots I've seen, the graphics are just stunning; It'd be almost worth the $50 to wander around Middle Earth for a bit.
MIG Welder Update
After a tremendously long delay, I've finally made some headway on my MIG Welder Repair project. See it's page for full details.
Tatermitts?!
So I was watching TV tonight and caught a commercial for "Tater Mitts"... Basically, they're ScotchBrite pads built into a pair of rubber kitchen gloves. What a pointless idea.
Arrr, Pirates
Just got back from the 8:00 sneak-preview of Pirates 3. It was pretty sweet, including some old guy (presumably a theater employee) assortedly berating the audience before the movie started. More to come.
So the movie was definitely better than the previous 2 installments, and the graphics were fantastic. I'll also say that there were some pretty decent plot twists, enough so that you didn't expect the ending, which I might add was fairly open-ended. I'm assuming they wanted to leave their options open for the Pirates MMORPG. I'm not really sure about that game yet; As much as a Pirate fan as I am, I'm not sure if the game will be too kid-oriented, having an E+10 rating....
BioDiesel
I had to put fuel in the Jetta tonight, and wanted to try B2... I ended up at Sapp Brothers down on south 144th. Anyhow, the site I saw the other day (which I can't find now, of course) indicated that they had both B2 and B20... When I got there, I found out that they only had B20... Suffice to say, I got my biodiesel... No harm, yet... It smells a bit different... sweeter maybe.
Anyhow, Biodiesel.org has a correct listing for Sapp Bros, but it seems incomplete, as I think they're missing some mid-town stations... I'll try to get a listing here sooner than later.
28 Weeks
Last Friday, we went and saw 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to 28 Days Later. Even Becky, who usually isnt a huge fan of Zombie movies enjoyed it.
Saturday, we headed downtown to tour a bunch of Condos that we could never afford, before going to Ryan & Sommer's wedding reception north of town. Unfortunately, even though my camera was in the car the whole time, no pictures from either. (Speaking of car, check out the Jetta TDI page.)
Kansas City
See the scoop on our latest trip to KC on the Travel page and photos in Gallery 87.
Zoo Pictures
Went to the zoo today to enjoy the weather and hopefully take some decent pictures (I recently got the photo-bug reading about a flash diffuser setup over at Steampunk Workshop.) Think I'm going to have to try that, as soon as I figure out how to run a remote off my Canon Elph S230.
New Pictures
About a week late, pictures are available in the Gallery from last weekend's camping trip with Jeff & Marie. They'd been saying all weekend that it was going to rain, but thankfully for us, it only rained during breakfast. We stopped at Hyvee on the way home for their breakfast buffet, so no harm done.
Daylight "Savings" Time
Slashdot is running a story on how the 3 week DST shift really didnt help anything, from an energy consumption standpoint. I suppose that means that it was a total waste of resources, because presumably some extra energy was spent making all those changes. Go figure.
New Pictures
After Entirely too long, new pictures are available in the Gallery from our recent GeoCaching outing with Jeff & Marie. Enjoy.
Going Live
As soon as Dan gets me a logo, we'll be fully live... For now, I'm just going to turn this on, and hope no one cares that I've still got a ton of broken links. Becky will eventually be generating some content About Us, and we'll be off and running.
The New Look of Fusselman.org and Fozzee.net
As promised, the new things are here. I was seriously sick of dealing with the old site; It made it difficult to update, and I spent more time keeping the site up than I did actually putting up content. More to come!
