I have been meaning to mention this site for a few days now.
The site universcale has a flash application that allows you to graphically compare item sizes. At the high end it explains the concept of light years and then using a standard sliding scale the user can go all the way down to a femtometer (which is the scale below picometer and is one quadrillionth of a meter).
As you progress though each scale, images are shown to give you something to compare against. The application also gives you some nuggets of information like: When comparing the same if a nanometer to everyday life, it says that if the Earth was one meter in diameter, a nanometer would be the width of a one yen coin or a little over 3/4 inch.
Even if you have just a passing interest in sizes, this site is a must see. Please go check it out. I'll bet you will be amazed.
Oh, and one more thing. It has a 'new age' soundtrack playing in the background. Luckily you can turn it off...
I just received an Email from Movable Type touting their new Setup Wizard. I have been meaning to upgrade my blog to the most recent version, but tracking down all of the settings and remembering how I configured and transferred the information to the server was more than I could do without dedicating a significant block of time to the process. Also I wanted to back up the entries before the upgrade so that I could restore if the upgrade went south.
Hopefully, you will see a new face on this blog, and I will have some better control over trackback spam in the next couple of days!
We picked up Guitar Hero II for the XBox 360 today and I have been learning how to play the game. This game is an absolute blast! While I do not claim to be musically talented AT ALL, I do love the music and at times get completely wrapped up in the process of playing the guitar. Believe it or not, the best part is when I miss a note. I genuinely feel like I let the audience down.
This is a must have game...Highly recommended.
Mark Cuban made some great points in his post yesterday. His statement: "I cant remember the last time I bought a CD Player of any kind, nor can i think of a reason why I would." made me think. I buy a lot of gear, gadgets, etc. but I too can not remember the last time I bought a CD player. In fact, I had to go out to the family room to see if I even had a CD player connected to the main entertainment system.
Surprisingly, I do. A Denon DCM-340 six disk changer. I'll bet it has been years since that thing has been turned on. I then started thinking back to the last time I played CDs. I remember recently, converting my CD collection from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis but I only used the CDs as source material and did not listen to them. I have purchased both SACD and DVD-Audio disks but they play on the Pioneer Elite DVD player. Maybe those count? Both cars have CD players but I just plug the iPod into them.
Ah hah! On RV trips, my wife and I listen to audio books on the CD player in the truck! I suppose I could download the books from Audible but I can not stand their subscription model.
Still, if CD players went away I would not miss them a bit.
I decided to stop writing blog entries after 90 days of, more or less, daily activity. I was noticing a trend that I wanted to change but thought that a 30 vacation would help as well.
The main trend that I had noticed was that the entries were starting to be done before going to bed and they were done quickly so that I could go to sleep. I was not preparing the entries and at times I was not even sure what I was going to write about when I started. I felt that I was short changing the experience.
During the 30 day reprieve I noticed a few things. First, I felt like I should be writing to the blog. What I mean is, that events would occur and I would think, I should put that in the blog or maybe that would make a good topic for a blog entry.
Second, I found myself wanting to refer back to a blog entry for some specifics on what I was doing and realized that there were no entries to look at. Third, I have found that doing daily blog entries keeps me more organized than when I don't write to the blog.
So what does this all mean?
I am going to start writing to the blog on a daily basis again. I am going to refrain from writing the blog entry at night before going to bed and I plan on writing smaller more frequent entries as well.
I also hope to improve my writing skills and decrease the time it takes to go from idea to finished product. I will do another evaluation in 90 days.