Lately I’ve been entertaining myself by building a rebreather loop controller using the Arduino micro controller. This little open source board is really nice to work with for a number of reasons. Unlike many of the alternatives which employ proprietary programming languages, the Arduino simply uses “C”. It also has an IDE that runs the [...]
OK, so I never actually believed that they were a mythical creature, but it took me so long to actually find one after moving to Santa Cruz that I had great fun telling those who didn’t know better that they were figment of the collective local imagination. Courtney, who had seen them before, always sighed, [...]
Ever since coming to work at UC Santa Cruz, I have been feeling pretty lucky to work in a well engineered and managed datacenter. So lucky, in fact, that I’ve been cultivating hatred towards me in my former coworkers by regaling them with stories about how wonderfully designed everything is here. The problem with thinking [...]
Well, after five years living in Vermont, and something like thirteen years living in New England, Courtney and I have gone and moved to Santa Cruz, CA. There are a lot of reasons for this; the very hard winters and extremely rainy summers in Vermont were starting to wear on us, but mostly we just [...]
Several weeks ago we started seeing some pretty scary errors showing up on the main system disk for our Blackboard server. We had an extra server hanging around, so we decided to move all the data off the failing disk and onto our spare server. The only question was how to make the new server [...]
All next week I’ll be taking a cave diving class on my CCR down in North Florida. Cave diving has been a dream of mine since reading an article about Sheck Exley’s exploration of the Nacimiento Mante cave system in Mexico. At a time in my life when I almost bought into the idea that [...]
George Hotz, along with a team of hackers have come up with a method to break the chains binding the iPhone to AT&T, allowing it to be used with any carrier. The complete method can be found here on George’s blog. It does take some soldering skills and a bit of familiarity with UNIX and [...]
Joybubbles, known by many as the grandfather of phone phreaking died suddenly of a heart attack on August 8, 2007. Born blind to the name Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. he was gifted with perfect pitch and could whistle a perfect 2600 Hertz, giving him the unique ability to place free long-distance calls simply by whistling [...]
In a truly astounding display of cowardice and pandering to conservative whining, the Brattleboro selectmen narrowly approved an “emergency ordinance” banning public nudity on city streets today. Vermont, and Brattleboro in particular have a long history of tolerating nudity in public. The state, along with many of its towns have absolutely no law requiring that [...]
I live in Vermont, so of course I was excited yesterday when I learned that Springfield Vermont had won the nation-wide contest to host the premiere of the Simpsons movie. A total of 13 Springfields from around the country entered the contest and made Simpsons-like movies to convince the judges that their respective Springfield would [...]
Alinghi came from behind for the second day in a row to beat Emirates Team New Zealand yesterday afternoon on the waters off Valencia. The Swiss Defender put in an impressive performance in difficult and unpredictable conditions, but they were rewarded with a 4 to 2 lead in the match, bringing them to within one [...]
Last July Jayna Hutchinson of Lebanon, N.H was arrested for making faces at a police dog following a heated debate with a Vermont police officer who refused to take down her report of being assaulted. Citing that she smelled of alcohol, Vermont State Police Sgt. Todd Protzman agitated Hutchinson when he told her that he [...]
Strom Thurmond conducted the longest filibuster in history when he talked to the US senate for 24 hours in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. All these years, Thurmond’s throne as nation’s biggest windbag has gone totally without challenge… Until now.
Jeffrey Long, a high school student from the Buffalo, NY area, decided that [...]
We missed it this year, but it looks like the 2007 Baltimore Kinetic Sculpture Race was great fun! On Saturday, May 5, Kinetic Sculpture enthusiasts gathered from far and wide on the shore of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in central Maryland to partake in an eight-hour race that covered 15 miles on pavement, mud, sand and [...]
Everyone really loves duct tape, but by when I realized that there is a national contest to decide which couple can make the best Senior prom dress and tux out of this magical adhesive, I quickly realized that some love it a great deal more than others!
This morning I heard a radio story about [...]
