brainwagon

Well, Scrappy did end up spending the night at the vets. They decided to anesthetize him, install a drain and then make him suffer the indignity of wearing a lampshade on his head for the next three days. On Monday, I’ll have to take him back to have the drain removed, and then in a […]

Well, it’s been about 11 months since our adopted cat Scrappy last got in a fight but he’s back at the vet’s today. He apparently got into another one, and instead of turning his back and getting bit on the rump, he got bit on the face and that seems to have turned into an […]

According to my UPS tracking code, my Sipura SPA-3000 should be awaiting me when I arrive home today, and in a timely fashion, I found this link for setting one up to do free/cheap VOIP: GRYNX » VoIP for free with the Sipura I’ll post a complete review of the device itself after I’ve tinkered […]

Fifteen years ago today was my official hire date at Pixar Animation Studios. Because nobody works for a company for fifteen years anymore, I thought it would be nice to commemorate the occasion by asking some of the people that I have enjoyed working with over the years out to lunch at Hahn’s Hibachi, a […]

According to Phil Plait, James Randi ended up in the hospital for a heart problem that required bypass surgery.     Randi is probably best known for his ruthless skepticism of all sorts of paranormal skullduggery, most famously his attacks on spoon bending Israeli Uri Geller.  In 1973 he worked with the Tonight Show to change the […]

A while ago, I wrote about how you could unlock a PAP2 and use it on Free World Dialup as a simple, cheap VOIP adapter.  Unfortunately, while playing around with Asterisk this morning, my adapter reset itself, promptly redownloaded some new firmware, and now is back to being locked with Vonage, this time, without the […]

Seattle: 3 Pittsburgh: 7 Carmen’s got 0-0 and 6-7 in her football pool, and narrowly missed hitting either at the end of the first and second quarters. I’m betting Seattle will come back in the second half. Oh, and the Stones for the halftime show? Could there possibly be a more tired idea for the […]

No mysterious saucers are visible on the ground, but at least it isn’t still just a blur on the ground. read more | digg story

Boing Boing presented a link to this: HOWTO cook an egg with two mobile phones The only problem?  It doesn’t work.  It can’t work.   Dan and his readers figured it out relatively simply: if you take the battery’s capacity, express that in calories, and then take the mass of the egg and figure out […]

It seems that a collection of public relations officers appointed by the Bush administration are giving NASA a black eye by trying to “recast” (if one is charitable) or “rewrite” (if one is accurate) the scientific research that the technical staff at NASA produce.  In particular, Bush appointee George Deutsch pressured NASA scientist Dr. James […]

Yep, it’s another release of WordPress, mostly fixing some open bugs/problems from the 2.0 release.  I’ll be upgrading to this in the next couple of days, so expect a minor amount of downtime in the next day or two. WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.1 Release [tags]Wordpress,Blogging[/tags]

What can I say?  Life sucks today, but there isn’t a day so bleak that isn’t improved by a massive plate of brownies.  Over at Cooking for Engineers, those kitchen elves whipped up a batch of “John’s Favorite Brownies”, made with none other than  the excellent Scharffen Berger chocolate.  Yum-mee. Cooking For Engineers – Recipe […]

What’s wrong with Microsoft’s DRM strategy: “We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle.” Really, why […]

I just finished listening to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code and I can’t help but shake my head and wonder: Why the hell is this book so damned popular? Dan Brown is a dreadful writer.   Not just mediocre.  But bad.  Really bad.   I mean really, let’s open with an evil albino?  Why not […]

I saw some of these little cars while in Paris, and of course wondered what they would be like in collisions. Check out the video of a little Smart Car mashing into a barrier at 70mph. Smart – Google Video [tags]Google Video,Smart Car,Collision[/tags]