Steven S. Holland

My friend Bill Whirity (see link to his website on the side) is making a movie (look for his other movie Broke on netflix!) called The MisInvetntions of Milo Weatherby.  From what I have seen of it, it will be awesome.  It is about these two kids and their, well, misinventions with science. They just finished shooting it, so no idea when it will be out.  Here is a great video from it:

http://billwhirity.com/milo/videos/microwave_implosion.mov

UPDATE:

http://www.billwhirity.com/milo/index.html

Has a trailer and information about the movie.  I have seen it, and it is excellent!

Images of the earth and moon from 31 million miles away.

“A NASA spacecraft designed to look for comets turned its cameras homeward, capturing a unique view of the moonEarth as seen from 31 million miles away. The spacecraft, Deep Impact, took shots at 15-minute intervals, which were combined to make the sequence shown below. passing in front of the

The latest images show the moon and Earth in greater detail than previous ones taken by orbiting spacecraft, showing oceans and continents on our planet and craters on the moon. By studying how Earth looks from so far away, the scientists hope to sharpen their search for alien worlds that may share similar characteristics”

Sox won 5-4 tonight over the Rockies.  Good rally in the 7th won the game for them.

I always like this view from the ramps at New Comiskey (Us Cellular Field):

Let’s say you have three light switches, one of which controls a single  light bulb hanging in the middle of a room.  The light switches are outside of the room, and with the door shut there is no way to see that the light is on — no light under the door, through a keyhole, nothing.

How can you tell which switch controls the light bulb if you can only enter the room once?

EDIT:

Solution: You turn on the first switch for a long time, say 10 minutes, then turn the switch off and turn on the second switch and immediately enter the room.

1.) if the light is on, the second switch is connected to the light.

2.) if the light is off, but the bulb is hot, it is the first switch.

3.) if the light is off, but the bulb is cold, the third switch is connected to the light.

This is just really cool. It’s a water balloon colliding with a guy’s head in slow motion (1000FPS = 1000 frames per second). Played back at 30FPS (normal video) that is a slowdown rate of 3% of normal speed.

I am always fascinated by things like this in slow motion. There was a great Dave Chapelle skit where he talked about how anything in slow motion is instantly much cooler/funnier. It’s true. Movies always exploit this effect.

Take anything, the simplest thing, and slow it down like this, and it becomes this amazing, beautiful sequence. I still remember being in grammar school and watching this video where they slow down a bunch of normal, everyday actions — and one, of course, was a simple drop of water incident on standing water. The coolest thing ever. That image sticks with me to this day.

So I have been using the Ubuntu linux distribution on my work desktop for a few weeks now, and have acclimated pretty well. There are still some things that I need from Windows here and there, and I was looking for ways to run a virtual version of windows inside my Ubuntu OS. After asking around to a few people who are way more knowledgable in Linux (Aaron, and Justin, mainly) I was looking into VMware. VMware costs money, though, and so I decided I would give VirtualBox a shot, since it is free (it’s also open source), and from what I have read online it’s a good alternative to VMware. Instead of potentially killing my Ubuntu installation at work (which has required an awful lot of tweaking and extra libraries for the code I am running), I gave it a test run on my laptop, starting with the inverse problem of running a virtual machine of Ubuntu OS inside WinXP.

I must say that it was extremely easy, and fast to install the virtual box. I ran into a few issues with the screen resolution inside the virtual box, but that was fixed by installing some extra files that virtualbox default loads onto the desktop of the ubuntu installation. So far I have not noticed a lag in opperation (I alloted 256MB of memory to the virtual machine, and gave the system an 8GB partition of the hard drive), and it solved one of my huge complaints about Ubuntu a year ago, last spring, when I had installed it and played with it — the network settings for the wireless card are by default accesible to the Ubuntu virtual machine, so I should be able to connect readily to different wireless networks without so much hassle with the wireless networking settings (which, unless I missed something, only allowed one network setting to be stored at a time). So far I am liking it a lot. Now the real test will be on Monday when I attempt to install WinXP on top of Ubuntu…

Turns out that Creative was sued for basing the listed size of its hard drives in base 10 instead of base 2, leading to lower actual capacity than the drive’s advertised size. Link!

I have been getting a lot of comments and trackbacks that are spam, so I reluctantly are changing it so that i have to approve all first comments for them to appear.  After that, if you have had a comment approved, you should be able to post as normal.

I passed my oral thesis defense today, so I currently have a masters!

In celebration, watch this:

Today! 10AM. I have put a lot of work over the past few months into putting together my thesis, and I am hoping that will pay off.

I found this xkcd comic strangely appropriate — hopefully I am not subconsciously doing something like this during my presentation:

I guess there aren’t imaginary antennas…