Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
My wife is a student member of the American Chemical Society. The other day, we received one of their goodies catalogs, and one of the things they have are some cool element pins.
While looking at the pins, I realized that I can spell my name in elements! How cool is that! Ok, most of you probably think it’s pretty dweeby. But I thought it was cool.
So next time you see me you can call me EuropiumGermaniumNeon.
Couldn’t do my last name though. Oh well.
Shopping around for a new PDA for my wife to replace the Visor Edge she stepped on. So the past week or so we’ve made visits and repeat visits to BestBuy and Circuit City. The local BestBuy has pretty much emptied their selection of PDAs, and only carrry a couple of models now, neither of which I would have recommended to my wife. So scratch them. The local Circuit City has a slightly better selection. And they all work too, not the cheesy dummy display models.
She wants:
First I recommended the Tungsten C. Fortunately Circuit City happened to have one on display. She didn’t like it much. Wasn’t too fond of the keyboard.
My next recommendation was the Sony TH55. She likes the style, but the stuff on the screen is too small for her.
The Sony TJ37 was my next recommendation. At first she didn’t like it too much, but after a second visit to Circuit City, she says it’s starting to grow on her.
PalmOne has just released the Zire 72, which I was telling her about also. Showed her the specs, and we checked out the Zire71 at Circuit City yesterday. She thought it was cute, and put it on her list of possibilites. It doesn’t have WiFi though. But that might not be a terribly big deal though.
There are a couple of reviews on the new Zire 72 and TJ37 so I’ll have to show them to her and see what she thinks. Personally I’m leaning more toward the Zire72 since it’s got the better camera and processor, even though it lacks WiFi. It does have BT though, so maybe my T3 will finally have something to talk to.
GBD, golden brown and delicious. A term used in culinary circles to describe what fried or roasted foods should look like. But after this weekend it also describes me as well, although I’m not sure anybody but my wife would say I’m delicious (and even that I’m not too sure about). But definitely golden brown. At least my face anyway, and maybe my arms a little bit. The rest of me however, remains pasty white. I’ll spare you the graphic details
The stable my wife rides at had a horse event going on this weekend. Lots of people, lots of horses and several events going on. Most of the competitors were at the beginner and novice level, but it was a lot of fun to watch. I brought along my camera and took a bunch of pictures all over the place, so I spent a good deal of time in the sun getting tanned and a little bit burnt. My wife spent a lot of time out in the sun getting very tanned as the dressage scribe.
A fun, but very tiring day.
I’ve decided what I want to do when I grow up.
I want to be one of those senior citizens that goes touring about the country in a big tour bus full of other senior citizens, and then descends on an unsuspecting restaurant in the middle of the dinner rush.
Then I will take my camera and take pictures of the horrified expression on the faces of the people manning the front desk as the tour bus disgorges dozens of invading seniors. I’ll take these pictures and assemble them in an online photo gallery to share with other senior groups. They could even send in their submissions and I could post a “Best Horrified Expression” of the month or something fun like that. And then I’ll select one for Best Expression of the Year. Maybe even award a prize for it.
Yesterday this very thing happened as I was pulling up to California Dreaming around 6ish. I don’t know if there was any picture taking though. Not only was there the invading horde of seniors, there were also very formally dressed up teens on prom dates spilling out of assorted limousines. I suppose should have known better than to go there during the dinner rush, but my wife and her friends wanted to go there. Naturally we ended up going elsewhere.
Wow, talk about bandwidth. 6.25 Gb/s (gigabits/second) over a 11 000 km link.
10 minutes to transfer almost 500 GB of data. Talk about some serious bandwidth. Details are here
From Physics News Update
A LAND SPEED RECORD FOR DATA FLOW, 6.25 gigabits per second (average rate) moving over an 11,000-km course, has been set a consortium of scientists form the CERN lab in Geneva and Caltech in Pasadena.
This new result was announced at the Spring 2004 Internet2 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia (http://lsr.internet2.edu). The World Wide Web got its start at CERN, where particle physicists had to find ways of sending huge loads of data to collaborators. CERN will again need huge flow rates, perhaps at the 10-gigabit-per-second level, when they begin physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now under construction.
(http://ultralight.caltech.edu/lsr/)