A Few Links

Heather and I just wrapped up a HUGE weekend, and I can’t wait to post about it, but I just don’t have the time / energy right now!

Teaser: we drove over 1000 miles

In the mean time, add one of these to my Christmas list: Quadrotor UAV

Also I wanted to share a cool little application I found out about as of late, called Launchy

It pops up a launcher when I press “ALT + Space” that I can start typing the name of the application I want into and then within a few letters I generally have the program I want right there ready to go. It is so much faster than picking through three or four levels of a cascade menu in Windows!

For example, I wanted the calculator,

Using the mouse it is:

Take right hand off keyboard, find mouse, click: Start->All Programs->Accessories->Calculator

Using Launchy:

Press “ALT + Space”, type “cal” hit enter

As far as I know it works fine in Vista and Win7, but I am still living in the XP era here… I guess I could load it on Heather’s laptop… maybe I will update this later.

Stay tuned, hopefully I will have the real weekend post up shortly 🙂

-Jordan

Things From The Internet

I had a sort of backlog of links I had been meaning to post…

First off, a clever add for a mini-van I don’t know if it will sell a lot of Sinnas, but I thought it was pretty slick.

The second link is actually a collection of links, all galleries from the volcano. I am just amazed at the pictures people were able to get. Just looking at the pictures is enough to be somewhat terifying, never mind the havoc that it caused for most of Europe.

In no particular order:

Enjoy!

-Jordan

Quick Link, For A Long Read

I really hope to get something more substantial posted later this weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to post something I read.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

A few notes:

  1. It’s rather depressing, I hope he is wrong about some of this
  2. It’s really long, I read it in bites over the course of a day
  3. As I reflected on it, I have a huge amount of respect for someone putting that together. There is a lot of research there, plus interviews.

As a side note, if you use Firefox (and you should, although I haven’t even managed to sell Heather on that yet) Delicious has a plug-in you really need to be using. Being able to bookmark anything you think you may want to look at later is wonderful, and you just attach meta-tags so finding links is typically easy.

-Jordan

Think About Warmer Places…

Actually, it hasn’t been as cold the past few days, and I have actually seen a little sunlight!!

The past two days have been mostly cloud free, and I am starting to hope spring will someday come.

This post isn’t actually to complain about the weather, it was to share this awesome video:

Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog

A little background, if you aren’t familiar with the term, check out the wikipedia article on the Sun dog phenomenon.

You have no idea how much child-like wonder that video evoked in me. I really want to watch a launch someday. I hear it’s kind of hard to catch a NASA launch because of the frequent weather delays. Right now the prospect of hanging out in Florida waiting to see if the rocket goes up today doesn’t sound so bad though 🙂

Another random thing that would be really fun, although perhaps only for me… is this place: Titan Missile Museum

It isn’t really close to anything though. I lost the link to it, but I found that place from a quick article with a bunch of pictures from somebody else going through it. Looked pretty interesting.

-Jordan

Coffee!

Heather and I are just winding down our first weekend in Des Moines for 2010.

One of the great things I got for Christmas was a coffee maker! Somehow A year ago this time, I didn’t really drink coffee. This meant that we didn’t put a coffee maker on our registry or buy it when we were equipping our new household. I don’t really know how I made the transition, but at this point it seems like I have always liked coffee. This has been a slight problem on weekends, because I really missed having it to start my day off with. Needless to say, I was excited to get the chance to try out making a pot of my own this weekend.

Heather always makes fun of my taking pictures for the blog, and just now I realize I didn’t get a picture of that momentous occasion. I guess you will have to use your imagination.

Anyway, the coffee was great, and I think adds a lot to a relaxing Saturday morning.

I did however find that I may be making it all wrong

I just don’t see it being worth all the work those guys go to for a *small* cup of coffee.

-Jordan

Podcast Recap

I have been thinking about the podcasts I listen too quite a bit as of late.

I managed to find a few I really enjoyed over the past few months. During the Atlantic drive, “a few” just wasn’t enough.  I branched out, listening to others that weren’t really what I was looking for, but at least they filled the time.

As of right now, I have about a 30 min each way drive. That creates an interesting problem, in that I now have more podcasts minutes in a week coming in than I can keep up with if I only listen while I drive. I have thought about doing podcasts while in the gym, but I haven’t made that leap.

The podcasts I want to listen to:

Security Now. An information security / internet privacy focused show. The two guys doing this both know a lot about the subject and manage to explain things really well. I like this podcast a lot, although Heather says it makes me annoyingly paranoid (I frequently admonish her to never ever use public wi-fi). I feel like I have to keep listening to this, as I have learned so much already.

The Instance. A World of Warcraft show. I am not really an active WoW player these days, but I like the chance to keep up with game news… keeps me somewhat up to date when talking to people who are playing more frequently. That fact alone would not even begin to keep me subscribed though, this show has some really good production quality. Unlike a lot of podcasts, the host actually owns a radio-grade mic, and knows how to post-edit. Add in a sense of humor and you have a pretty solid podcast.

Extra Life Radio. Done by the same main host from The Instance, it’s a group of guys who get together and talk about sci-fi, video games, and movies. A fun listen, but I think this may get cut.

Gamers With Jobs. I was really taken with the concept of GWJ, guys who still like video games, but are married with jobs so they don’t have the unlimited time some people seem to have for games. As it turns out, they have a lot more game time than I have. They are also active and former journalists in the game industry. This means they know a ton of people actually making games, and as much as it frustrates me to hear them talking about loving every minute of a game I know I don’t have time to touch, I am so captivated by them getting into the nuts and bolts of game design with the actual game designers as guests I can’t stop listening.

Gun Dudes. A few guys talking about guns. I started on this podcast expecting a more informative show. Really, it’s just 3-5 guys (depending on the week) shooting the breeze… more or less on the topic of guns. I find it pretty entertaining. I think it might have something to do with my envy over their ability to drive 10 minutes and be out in the desert and able to shoot. I guess that’s and advantage of living in rural Utah.

To sum all that up…

Other than Security Now, I didn’t really manage to find podcast that really taught me much, I was hoping to use my drive in a beneficial way, but it turns out it’s a lot easier to just find a way to stay entertained as you slog out the drive. I tried out a few other podcasts, but nothing I am even going to bother to mention here.

And… that whole thing is probably the last thing you wanted to read about, but not much else is going on 🙂

-Jordan

Fuel Numbers

This is semi-random, but given the amount of driving I am expecting to do now, fuel economy is fairly interesting to me.

It has been somewhat interesting to me from back last year when gas was so high. I have been keeping a spreadsheet with every tank of gas I put into my Escape, and the miles driven. Not too long ago I found a website that makes keeping track of that kind of thing a lot easier.

Fuelly

I had big plans to ether go back and re-enter an entire years worth of spreadsheet data into Fuelly, or to at least work up some summary numbers to post here. That may still happen, but in the mean time, my profile on Fuelly is publicly viewable, so check out what I have so far!

Jordan’s Escape on Fuelly

-Jordan

Yet Another Video Link

I feel bad posing another random video, but there hasn’t been much going on as of late.

anyway, the video: Crazy things done on a bike.

Also,  I have been thinking of cataloging books here, it might be interesting to look back on. so I will give it a shot here I guess:

Finished this month:  “Dauntless” (the lost fleet, book 1) and “Zoe’s Tail

Started: “Atlas Shrugged

I am strongly tempted to try and post mini reviews of each finished book, but I think I will skip that for now. I should say that I rather liked Dauntless, and am really looking forward to working my way through the rest of the books in the story sometime soon.

-Jordan