house update

we had the inspections (pest and structural) yesterday. everything came back pretty good except the structural guy found a missing support under the floor. someone removed it when the ductwork was installed. I'm not too concerned about it, the only snag is if this would effect teh appraised value and not allow them to do their 100% financing then were screwed. I was going to crawl under there and fix it myself last night, but I was too tired. the buyer seems to be a pretty handy guy so he may just prefer the cash (500 to go towards improvements) and I'm happy writing the check and being done with it. I'd give him 5 crisp 100's if it meant closing the deal without a hitch. Jen is siding on lets just wait and see but i'm pretty anxious to get this done. turns out they own an aluminum trailer in the north poorer) section of town, and have it payed off at 70k or something. we learned this through our realtor when she overheard them talking during the inspections. the house would be a major upgrade for them. We wern't present for the structural. and got home at the end of the pest. the pest inspector was interested in the rental, so we gave him the address and hope to hear back from his t his afternoon if he's
interested, so that was a lucky coincidence.

free books

it seems print.google.com was indexing books, but as of recently has stopped scanning in at attempt to address copyright info.

that won't stop me from reading ben raines in the ashes series. see for yourself here.

dragon illusion

the Dragon optical illusion is some kind of paper thing that looks odd. see how to build it here and let me know how it works!

waterproof paper

I love these kinds of accidents. you know, the kind where you spill some crap on your paper and discover you just made water proof paper that you can still write on. sounds like the teflon story.

Desk warez

People come by my desk and love to play with miscellaneous things that I have sitting out, so far all I have is a hacky sack I got for my birthday, a couple of broken units that we build here (those are not the favorite) and a pet wooden snake I picked up while I was on company business.

I usually keep the snake hidden as it seriuosly offends my boss, but its lots of fun to 'leave out' and see what happens.

what ideas do you guys have for cool things to have on the desk for people to play with when they come to talk to me?

guess-the-google

thanks to kunae gives us guess the google picture game that pops up 20 images from a google images search and you have to guess the search word. I suck at it. the only one I got right was because the search word was part of one of the imiages, kitsch

back window

out the back window, click for 800x600

Genuine Advantage

linked from geek.com article about getting around MS's genuine advantage scheme.

Vista

the next version of windows will be called VISTA, not the code name longhorn. I like the code names so much better than what they actually choose. Vista?!! yeah.. thats a garmin GPS. names been taken, pick a new one.

RTV

I was asked the other day by one of my employees:

"Boss man, what does RTV stand for?"

now to give it a little context, the RTV is a chemical that turns rubbery. we use it for sealing things. hmm.. sounds easy enough right? after a few minutes I did learn what really stood for here. I was a little disapointed I wasn't able to pull that one out of my butt on the fly. maybe next time.

DHT

ever wonder what a Distributed Hash Table is? well after snooping around Azureus, I wondered what pesky abreviation was. you can read up on it here

pinky!

probably my only readers of this blog already know about this, but I'll do a quick write up for the rest of you.

you see, when my wife and I went on a cruise this summer with my brother and his wife we had a most wonderful time. someone coined the term 'pinky' after this late teenage girl that just got married and was traveling among the 1500 passengers on the ship. one night she was part of a game show that we attended and every time she answered she had this kind of high pitched yelp. pinky pretty much summs it up and will forever describe my stereo-type view of late teen girls.

Pinky. I laugh every time I think about it.

blackjack computer

hidden way down in an article about building the first blackjack computer

No, we kept it a secret. We wouldn’t have been countenanced well by the church. There are a lot of hard-liners that only see black and white, even though the Bible doesn’t actually condemn gambling. There is a thought somehow that gambling is evil. There was deceit involved there, and that really bothered my wife in particular. It has always been an issue. I personally haven’t had much wrestle with it because I came to realize that man is basically evil, and except for the grace of Jesus Christ we haven’t got a chance. We’re doomed. Whether the sin is one thing or another, it is still a sin. Gambling per se isn’t a sin. The love of money is a sin. It’s like trying to rate sin. Can you put one sin over another? Jesus made it clear that when the Pharisees talked about having sex with a woman out of wedlock, the fact that you had lust condemned you equally. To gossip about someone, or to lie to someone, these are all human failings we have. Gambling is just another in a long list of things that are ripe for abuse. To get more to the question, Ken’s lifestyle-that is the real world. As Christians we are to be out in the world, and be witness to the world. For some, we will be the only bible they ever read. It was an opportunity to witness to Ken, and we had some very good conversations about faith and such subjects.

Spam Filter Chess

thanks to slashdot.org for the link to can a spam filter play chess is an indepth paper on unix scripts to setup, 'train' and play a spam filter. it is VERY educational in both scripting and the concepts of learning through probabilities. a must read for the intellectual or bored gourd.

Dshield

Dshield.org seems to be the internet storm watch center. I Like it!

$99 linux

This is an embedded device, 90mhz, keyboard, display, and 802.11b for $99 that runs linux. if its not to hard to mod this would be a GREAT embedded box. I wonder how hard the GPIO is to expand?
hack info here
more hack info
add mmc?
a little first hand experience
mainboard scan

for me, an idea to expand the GPIO with i2c here

NE64

I'm back to playing with the NE64 chip. I've got someone that can really benefit from a simple program on it so I'm off to use it! finally! heres a note for me on uBug12 and miniide review

NE64 on freescale
intro to microcontrollers
bcd to 7-segment display
asmide
GNU for HC12
HC12 guides
hc12web
miniide and ubug12 example

XR honda

for me, a link to xr650r.us as they seem to link to even the manual!

home price inflation

I was taking a look at the stock LEN, one of the symbol Lennar Homes trades with, you know.. the guys that are building our new home? anyway, check out the max history yahoo finance publishes, and it got me to wondering if home prices have tracked the value of this stock? probably not but its fun to look at and think that if I were right I'm selling at a high and buying a high so its kind of a draw.

corporate words

here is a list of words that some have submitted as 'weasel words' I've made it a little way down the list and my favorite so far is ThoughtShower

Thoughtshower: 'Brainstorming is itself bad enough (and was apparently banned by the BBC because it was deemed offensive to those suffering from epilepsy), but 'Thoughtshower' is abominable. This site also explains a variant of brainstorming, in 'blamestorming' (where colleagues publicly denounce one another).