Archive for category: General

Bee Picture

May 27, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

The cool thing about digital cameras is that you can just keep snapping pictures until you get one that you like. Check out the following that I snapped with my little point-n-shoot Panasonic: Not bad for a hand held exposure of a silly insect that just refuses to be photographed. [tags]Photography,Macro Photography[/tags]

Movie Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

May 27, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

To open our Memorial Day weekend, I decided to join some of the Pixar Morlocks and go see the opening of X-Men: The Last Stand, the third in the lucrative X-Men feature franchise. I’d enjoyed the first two installments, so was looking forward to this with some anticipation. Caveat: My geekiness does not actually extend […]

Scrappy does some light reading…

May 26, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Just a picture I snapped this morning of my cat as he was reading. As soon as I got the camera out though, he flopped over and pretended he was napping. Silly cat. Addendum: I now have given up all hope of actually rising to the blog A-list. I mean really, blogging about your pets… […]

Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…

May 26, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Last night, the A’s managed to lead the Rangers 7-0 going into the bottom of the sixth inning, and still managed to collapse sufficiently to register their sixth straight loss. Heavy sigh. I wonder what the chances are? This is the third largest collapse of the A’s in franchise history. I could run my analysis […]

Hacking the Hummer DTV Game

May 25, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

I found this rather nifty website detailing how you can hack a Hummer DTV Game that you can buy from Radio Shack for $18.00. Why would you want to do this? Because it contains an improved version of the Commodore 64 that Jeri Ellsworth originally created for the C64 DTV, a wackly little joystick that […]

Be a hoopy frood! Celebrate Towel Day!

May 24, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Carry a towel tomorrow.

Liam’s Pictures from Old Books

May 24, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Wow! An incredible website of pictures scanned from old books, nearly all of which are in the public domain. There are nice pictures of ruined castles, architecture, all sorts of cool stuff, available in multiple resolutions. Very, very cool. [tags]Public Domain Art,Clip Art,Old Books[/tags]

Baseball Trivia: Baseball Leap Year Babies!

May 24, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Don’t ask how this subject came up, it won’t make any sense, but somebody asked me how many major leaguers were born on Feb 29, the extra day added in leap years. I had a database of such things loaded, so here they are: Dickey Pearce 1836 Ed Appleton 1892 Roy Parker 1896 Ralph Miller […]

Finished Me and My Katamari!

May 24, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

I really enjoyed the Katamari Damacy game for the PS2, so when I heard that there was a Katamari game for the PSP, I knew that I had to have it. I’ve been playing Me and My Katamari for a couple of weeks, and just yesterday managed to complete the King of the Cosmos level […]

Video-game from 1952 – OXO, a tic-tac-toe

May 23, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

From Boing Boing, a link to edsac.net, a site dedicated to the first stored-program computer to operate a regular computing service. It was constructed in 1949 at Cambridge University. Apparently, in 1952 someone by the name of A. Douglas wrote a version of Tic-Tac-Toe for it (I didn’t see the code anywhere, but I’m in […]

Happy Birthday Sir Arthur!

May 22, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

If you have a peek at the Google Search page, you’ll see that it features a Sherlock Holmes motif. That’s because May 22nd is the birthday of the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As I’ve mentioned before, you can download excellent human-read versions of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from Project Gutenberg, […]

Bay to Breakers!

May 21, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Well, it’s 6:39AM, and I’m just about ready to head off to the Bay To Breakers, a 12K race (which I will be walking the entire way, thank you) from the San Francisco bayside to the ocean beach near Golden Gate Park. I’ll have pictures with the new camera and hopefully a GPS track illustrating […]

San Francisco Arts on Fire

May 19, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Last night, Carmen and I trudged off to see the San Franscisco Arts on Fire show at Candlestick Park. All sorts of artists which use flame were on hand: tumblers, sculptors, musicians, and just plain crazy people. They even had a finale which featured a mini Burning Man. It plays through the weekend, drop in […]

Why YouTube is winning out over Google Video

May 17, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

Recently Google Video decided to allow uploads directly from the web browser, and promised that they would expedite the approval of video (it took several days last time), but it still is slower and less convenient than YouTube. I uploaded the video below to each, and within minutes, it was available on youtube, but it’s […]

STANFORD Magazine features Donald Knuth

May 17, 2006 | General | By: Mark VandeWettering

STANFORD Magazine has a nice article about mathematician/computer scientist Donald Knuth, worth reading (as is virtually everything Knuth himself has written). [tags]Donald Knuth[/tags]