Rat thoughts

A recent Wii Everybody Votes Channel poll asked whether people eat bananas by peeling them a little at a time, or all at once.

Me:  Who peels a banana all at once?  If you do that, it loses its structural integrity!
My SO:  That was the geekiest thing I've ever heard.

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Lt. Gary Stu, since he always ends up saving the day.   ;-)

I saw this just now:  Back to the Future license plate replica: OUTATIME.   I think I'd rather have one that said RYLOS.

My roommate found this device in his basement.  It was apparently something a former roommate had built.  He doesn't know what it does.  When I flip the switch, the green LED comes on, but turning the dials don't seem to do anything in particular, at least that I can see.




One of the IC's is labeled MC14013BCP, which Google says is a "Dual D-Type Flip-Flop". Another is labeled LM324N, "Quad Operational Amplifier". The third is a 7555CN, a "CMOS Timer, Gen-Purpose".

Anyone know what this thing does?  I have enough skill in electronics to know what the parts are, but not enough to figure out what they do together.

In the latest episode of CSI, the killer reveals the location of one of his victims as the corner of Boulder Highway and Hasbrook.  I can't find a Hasbrook on the map, but Boulder Highway runs from Las Vegas to Boulder City, Nevada.  They show a train passing over the bridge where the body is hidden, and it is clearly a Metrolink train.

Metrolink only runs in Southern California.  The closest any Metrolink train gets to Nevada is San Bernardino, about 185 miles away!

Ooops!

If I had to guess, I'd say that scene was shot on the Antelope Valley Line, somewhere in Soledad Canyon around Agua Dolce Canyon. 

And if I'm not mistaken, the engine is an EMD F59PH; the number appears to be 861.  This particular engine was involved in an accident in 2000, a tractor-trailer got stuck on the tracks and was struck by the train.  The truck's load crushed the cab and injured the engineer.  She was still able to radio the next train which stopped just 60 feet from the wreck.

5 weeks ago I ordered a Dell Mini 9 netbook.  It's a tiny little laptop, only 9 inches wide.  It uses an Intel Atom processor, has no optical drive and uses a Solid State Drive (SSD) instead of a regular hard drive, so it has no moving parts.  It's available with Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux; I ordered the latter.

It finally arrived today, and it's really sweet.  It's soooo small.  The MacBook Air has nothing on this thing.  You can set two of them on top of a standard laptop.  It's totally silent; there's no CPU fan, no power supply fan and no hard drive.  The keys are smaller than usual and are a bit tricky to type on, and the small touchpad will take some getting used to, but otherwise, it's a really neat device.  The screen is small but very clear.

I ordered a 16 GB SSD with mine, but the schmucks at Dell only partitioned 3.5 Gigs worth.  They left the remainer totally unpartitioned and unusable.  I fired up GParted to see if there was anything I could do, but it wouldn't let me unmount the system drive while Ubuntu was running.

The system came with an Ubuntu DVD, but it doesn't have a DVD drive, and I didn't order an external drive, so I couldn't use the bootable Ubuntu DVD to repartition the drive.

The MacGyver moment:  I dug up an 8 year old 6x CD-RW drive with a missing faceplate, hooked it up to a spare power supply for juice, and then used an IDE to USB adaptor I had lying around to connect it to the Dell.  That wouldn't let me boot to the DVD, but fortunately I had a previous version of Ubuntu on CD-ROM so I booted to it, then used GParted to resize the partition.  I shut down, unhooked the frankenCD, and restarted the Dell.

Bingo!  I now have the full 16 Gigs of space available, minus Dell's utility partition, of course.

I didn't realize I had that many geeks reading my LJ.  :)

The icon is the Curwen Hand Signs for the 5 note theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  It is used by Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut) to illustrate the 5 notes and to greet the alien near the end of the film.

The 5 notes are:

ray - me - doh - doh (lower octive) - soh

Several years ago, Microsoft was sued in California and settled.  As part of that settlement, anyone who'd bought a copy of DOS, Windows or Office (or bought a computer with this software) in California between 1995 and 2001 could file to receive part of the settlement.  I had a ton of Microsoft software, so I was expecting a pretty big refund.

After many years, I finally got a voucher for $240.  The only hitch is that I have to buy software or computer equipment (monitor, keyboard, printer, scanner, mouse or a complete pre-fab computer) to cash in the voucher.  I don't need any software, I don't need a printer or scanner, I build my own computers, and I certainly don't need $240 worth of keyboards and/or mice.  But I did have an old 17" monitor, and LCD's have come WAY down in price, so I figured that would be the way to go.

I did some shopping around and found that Sam's Club has a 22" widescreen ViewSonic VG2230wm for $299, a pretty good deal in its own right.  With tax and after the voucher it came to a mere $80!

I wanted to use the new monitor along with my old 17" in a dual-display setup, but my antique Matrox G400 (real men use graphics cards without fans!) couldn't handle two monitors with different resolutions.  Fortunately, my SO gave me his ATI X1600, so I was able to get the two hooked up.  And the old monitor looked SOOOO horrible next to the new one.   So small and so dim.  I was immediately tempted to go buy another 22" monitor.

So today I did.

Oh...  My...  God...

This setup is soooooo freaking amazing.  44 inches of monitor!  3360x1050 of desktop.  It takes up almost my entire desk!  I have a half dozen windows open, all at the same time with nothing covered up.

This is just...   wow.

And I now have a video card that can support modern games.  Too bad I'm still running Windows 2000.