Random Fact of the Day

The five-trillionth digit of pi is 2.

Great Rube Goldberg Machine

At roughly 3 minutes 20 seconds long, this is a great machine to watch. The band literally spent months setting up and testing the machine in order to get it to run in time with the music. They did set the machine up so that they could do a cut in the camera shot if necessary to splice two takes together, but it wasn't necessary.


Here's the YouTube link, and yes, they even have 1080P available. I found this video originally linked from the Death Pill blog.

Renewed Commitment to Updates!

Starting this week I will be having content posted here regularly. What does regularly mean? In this case it means a minimum of one new posting per week, most likely on a Monday, although not always the case. There is actually content in the queue so I am working with a cushion to ensure that I can make this renewed commitment to regular posting.

You may also have noticed that the tbq.net site does not exist at the moment and actually has not for a few months. So for the time being the URL is forwarding to this page, so for that reason there will also be [more] TBQ related content posted here, so stay tuned.

Weird Suggestion

So I finally get around to getting a Blogger account setup and start building a profile. It seems that I had a partial profile built already, it shows that I'm already following a blog. It may be a suggestion by Blogger, based on the keyword contents of the Ethereal Madness blog over the last few years. This blog is for Vote Earth, which is the official blog of Earth Hour, arranged by World Wildlife Fund. Neither I, nor any other members of this blog, support WWF or any other similar "green" organization that seeks to destroy our standard of living to carry out their political agenda. I guess that's about it for my post.

Weird Ads

I open a new browser, which takes me to this page, as it is my homepage. I have this as my homepage for a few reasons. Primarily, if I see the same update over and over again I might be inspired to write something new. Second, I see if anyone posted a new comment since I don’t regularly check the email where the notifications are sent. And I sometimes just like to see what sort of ads Google decides to put on the page. Tonight’s surprise came when I see that there are 4 separate ads, but only one of them was in English, and the other three Hebrew.

I’m not 100% certain, but I’m pretty sure that of the very small percentage of people who this blog would appeal to, and the other small percentage of people who actually take time to look here from time to time, pretty much all of them are comfortable with the English language. I don’t recall anything that I’ve posted that would appeal particularly to the people who understand Hebrew, but not English.

I guess I could take the time to browse through translated, local newspapers from around the world and write random entries about them. I’m sure I could come up with a semi-informed opinion about the inner workings of Taipei’s city council, or what the latest Parisian, mafia member uses as fashion accessories to compliment their various firearms.

That all seems like a lot of work though, and I neglect things like this enough as it is. I did get a check in the mail this afternoon for $100.57 from Google as payment for my Adsense impressions. That alone might be enough to inspire me to write more and try to attract readers. We’ll have to see.

Windows 7

So it’s just my luck that the week I get my computer completely functional, I get the opportunity to buy a copy of Windows 7 for $30. This was a student rate that only requires you to have a .edu email address to register through Microsoft’s “Ultimate Steal” program.

Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have been. I hope that it lives up to its hype. But either way, I would like to have an OS that will allow me to fully utilize more than 3.25GB of RAM and DirectX 10/11.

The copy I have is only an upgrade license rather than the full license, however, as long as you have a legit copy of Windows XP or Vista it should work without issue. I just reformatted my hard drive to have a clean instillation of Windows 7, and I will know later today if it actually works or if I’ll have to reinstall Windows XP so that I can install 7 on top of it.

It's that time again...

...for a new computer! My desktop has been causing me grief for a while now and I finally decided that enough is enough and that I was going to build a new computer. The final key that helped me decided that now was the time was a donation from Aaron of the wreckage of his last computer. After playing with it for a while I realized that the CPU was good, as well as the RAM. The motherboard is dead, as well as the 400GB hard drive that I tried using. I few days of research led me to the DFI Blood Iron P45 T2RS motherboard, actually I liked the X48 better as it had full speed Crossfire and Firewire, but the extra $75 wasn't worth it to me.

My computer was almost top of the line when I built it in 2005, which makes it a dinosaur in computer years. Four video cards, a burnt out motherboard, and three CPUs later, I've finally decided that its days as my primary machine are over. I'm currently in the process of taking the hard drive and copying it onto a virtual computer, so that I can use that particular setup whenever I need something off of it, rather than just keeping the machine around anymore; it's time for it to go to that great recycling center in China.

So the new computer is clock-for-clock 63% faster than my Athlon 64 4000+ that I've been using for the last 2 years. It is also a quad core Q6600, which means that it can multitask much better than a single core, which is great if anyone has ever seen the 75 processes that I'm usually running. Throw in 4 gigs of DDR2-1066 RAM that I cannibalized from my server, my Radeon 4850 that I'm recycling from the desktop, my Audigy X-Fi Platinum sound card also from the desktop, my Thermalright Ultra-120 extreme cooler, and a random hard drive and I'm good to go. I'm still waiting for the proper mounting bracket to arrive so I can attach the cooler to the new motherboard, and then I'll be good to go, Yes I am recycling my Quantum case, I like it too much to let 30KG of steel elegance just go to waste. I might replace some of the fans with colored, glowing ones, but I haven't got that far yet.

Best Street Performer

This was taken in Victoria, BC. He was actually pretty good too.

Mt Rainier Pic

Taken last August on our trek to Mt. Rainier.

Bug-eyed Butterfly

Here's a butterfly from the Butterfly House at the Pacific Science Center.

Week in Review

Wow, the week is over. Once again, it went by too fast. What have I done in the last 7 days? Lets see…

I saw Glenn Beck with Bonnie, Tasha, and Brenda last Saturday. It was fun seeing all of the people there, and slightly disappointing that there weren’t more protesters outside. We almost didn’t get in since they ran out of tickets before we got to the window to buy them. After waiting around, and after many people had left, someone came out and told them to take our money and let us in. So we did get in after all. I also bought a Gadsden flag while standing in line for tickets. Thanks Bonnie for taking us.

Sunday was Amy and Shaun’s wedding. That was fun. The band really could have used more practice and the reception was really long. The food was good, the speeches were entertaining, and the slideshow was fun to watch as well.

Didn’t do much during the rest of the week except look for a real job, earn a few bucks, and run errands for grandparents. I really should have spent more time watching TV, reading, and relaxing but there isn’t enough time in the week for that.

Space Needle

Taken this summer when we all went down to the Science Center.

McDonald's Sandwiches

McDonald’s, my favorite source of fast-food based breakfasts, currently has their Sausage McMuffin on sale for $1. This would be very good for me, except for one problem, I really enjoy the Sausage McMuffin with Egg sandwich much more than its eggless cousin. The Sausage McMuffin with Egg sandwich is still priced at $2.49 (or $2.59 at some locations around here), that’s $1.49 simply for an egg fried into the shape of a patty. That’s roughly half the price of a dozen free-range, organic, large, AA grade eggs from Amazon Fresh.

Being my usual, frugal self I asked how much it cost for the egg patty by itself. Those are 65¢. So I ordered a few of the $1 Sausage McMuffins and an equal number of egg patties. I saved 84¢, plus tax, per sandwich just by adding the egg myself.

McDonald’s would be making 84¢ additional profit by paying an employee to put that egg on my sandwich. Assuming a very slow employee takes 15 seconds to get an egg from the warming box and place it on a sandwich, and that employee has no other job requirements during the breakfast rush, that egg placer would be generating $201.60 in value per hour, minus the cost of the eggs and the local minimum wage as their pay.

Me, with experience working in very high-volume, fast-food production could probably do that egg placement in 3-4 seconds, generating 4-5x the value per hour. If they were to offer me $100 per hour I could probably bring myself to inserting myself in the machine known as the McDonald’s kitchen. Sadly, I do not believe there are any fast-food restaurants in this area that receive the volume of business required to keep me completely busy during the breakfast hours.

This is not an endorsement of McDonald’s as either a healthy meal option, nor as a good value for your money. Their breakfast food merely tastes good to me, and therefore I am writing about my experience.

The Fair

Yesterday was time for the annual trek to the Puyallup Fair. We got in using our free student tickets, as usual; despite the fact that these tickets are for ages 6-18. As soon as we were inside the fair we were approached by someone offering a free vacation plus giftcards to places I like to go, for simply sitting through a 90 minute time-share presentation. So a few minutes ago we were thought to be under 18, and now we're assumed to be over 21? Good times. Anyway, I don't make enough money to qualify for the presentation, since they only want to make the offer to someone who can potentially afford a timeshare. Oh well, it was still an interesting experience. Time to go do something productive.

Classic Train

Taken last summer on our trek around Mt Rainier.

Eagle

Eagle at Point Defiance Zoo.

Hot Air Balloon

I'm going to post something at least once every other day, it may only be a random picture I've taken, but it will be something. Stay tuned.

9-9-9

Today is 09-09-09. If you would have seen the clock this morning at 09:09:09, there would have been a lot of 9's. Carry on.

Happy Countdown Day!

Today is countdown day in most of the world (except the US). This is because the date is 09/08/07. If the time on the blogspot server is correct, this is being posted at 09/08/07 06:05 04.321s AM
09 - Year
08 - Month
07 - Day
06 - Hour
05 - Minute
04.321 - Second

Hooray for Dumb Surveys!

Doing one of the countless surveys I regularly receive I noticed that the survey program was much more dumb than usual. The first set of questions asked me which fast food restaurants I had visited in the last 4 weeks and how many times I frequented said restaurants. I filled in that I had gone to both Taco Bell and Arby’s once in the past month. Then the survey goes on to ask which of the McDonald’s coffees I had ordered in the last month. There wasn’t an option to say that since I don’t drink coffee I probably wasn’t going to be ordering coffee.

Since I had just told the program that McDonald’s wasn’t one of the two fast food places I’d visited in the previous 4 week, the program should realize that I’m probably not going to be ordering something from a place I haven’t been. Some better programming on their part will allow them to save substantial time in collecting and processing survey data, and save the time of those taking these surveys.