I am filling up my second harddrive fairly quickly and I am needing/wanting a new one. Right now it looks like the best option would be an external harddrive and I have looked into this one. The colors are not necessarily appealing but there are not too many other options available. Maxtor has some external harddrives that are pretty well priced but they have features I really don’t want (like one-touch backup).

My other want/need is a laptop. Next year I will have a lot of time spent on campus, idle time on campus. I think of a lot of little things when I am sitting around and it would be nice to keep track of them when I am not at home. I don’t need a desktop replacement machine, just something light and portable to allow me to get things done when I am away from my desk. I have been looking at these two. The only problem is that you cannot order them directly through ASUS, which I don’t like. I do not want to order them through some third party vendor…

Last night it got pretty nasty here. There were a few tornado sightings just north of here and but nothing substantial, just lots of rain and wind (100mph sustained winds). Then I wake up this morning to more of the same but on top of it the smell of feed lots. If you have never smelled a feed lot, don’t worry, you are not missing anything!

The storms last night did a lot of damage to the surrounding crops but we needed the rain (we haven’t had rain in a few months).

I am still trying to come up with new ideas for the look of this site because everything I think of is either too complex or dumb. Maybe one day I will finally get an update completed, maybe.

America’s Army 2.1 was released late yesterday and was made official this morning. I had a chance to try it out briefly last night and noticed a few striking things.

• Stryker vehicles. They have put the Stryker vehicle in the game with the .50-caliber automatic rifle on top. The entry of the vehicle into the game adds a whole method of playing.
• Karma Physics. The new feature that the developers of the game are calling “Karma Physics” basically effects the way players’ bodies react to injury. Shoot someone at the top of the stairs, he’ll roll down them. The velocity and the size of the shell also effect reaction.
• New firing rates and muzzle velocities. Playing last night the first thing I noticed was the change in firing rates on guns like the M4 and the AK47. The guns now fire faster as the trigger is held (as they would in real life). They also fire a lot harder (the bullets travel faster).

These were some of the more prominent features that I noticed although I did not have the time to spend doing a complete investigation.

So if you want a free game that has great gameplay and awesome features, America’s Army is the way to go.

Well, I needed a break from the project I was working on last week and I got it today. Work has begun on a new project that is basically a simple system for adding rates to a bank’s infastructure. Nothing too involved, just some queries that get current rates and output them.

This project should go fairly quickly but it gives me a chance to get away from the older project that I was working on that was just getting monotonous.

I spent most of the day flipping channels catching parts of the Indianapolis 500. Personally, I am not a huge car racing fan but I watch the Indy 500 because of the tradition in it and usually some very cool things occur during it. Today was a little disappointing though; The race was delayed because of rain, then they dried the track and there were 4-5 wrecks right in a row, including one that occurred on pit row. Then the rains came back and the race was shortened to 180 laps (instead of the normal 200).

Since most of the race was under yellow it was pretty boring, but they had a little memory lane segment where they showed some famous moments from the 500’s past.

In other news, it looks like Sony has come out with a Powerbook killer. Who knows how well it will do, but I am looking forward to their 1.7 lb ultra-portable notebook. If I get I a laptop I definitely want something that I can take pretty much anywhere. It does not have to be a desktop replacement, just something that allows me to get my work done on the go.

Yesterday the dedication of the national World War II Memorial took place and I watched all of it (yes, all 2.5 hrs). There were some very good things said and Bob Dole commented on a very sad fact; One in every four WWII veterans has since passed away. What makes it worse is the fact that the school children of today see the war as ancient and the people who fought in it too old…

This memorial took 60 yrs. to get up. 60!! The Vietnam vet memorial was up in 10 yrs. but 60?! And people are openly criticizing the memorial, which, to me is just flat out wrong. Criticize on your own time but let the veterans remember and get closure, don’t stand around talking about how you would have changed the look of the place because it isn’t necessary.

I was watching a special yesterday on Flight 191 which crashed 23 yrs. ago. The special was based around the horrible maintenance that American Airlines devoted to their DC-10 fleet. Their poor habits in maintaining their aircraft killed 270 people and basically put McDonnell-Douglas out of business (they were bought out by Boeing).

The whole cause of the crash centered around a pylon that held the engine to the wing of the aircraft. When the pylon snapped (due to poor maintenance) it severed the main hydrualics line that supplied hydraulic fluid to the wing. This caused the wing to dip and the plane to stall, the plane rolled over and nosed into the ground.

After the accident McDonnell-Douglas released a statement that they had never anticipated a complete loss of hydraulics in one wing because the chances of something like that happening were slim. Well, they weren’t slim enough.

I think any idustry where there could be a mess up can relate to this crash. The remote possibility of something going wrong should cause some alarm and a jump to fix it. Had American Airlines stepped up to the plate and taken better care of its fleet this probably would not have been an issue. If the engineers at McDonnell-Douglas would have taken the time to produce more possibilities for errors, then this may not have been an issue. But, some of the problem layed in the way the FAA put out its plane requirements. There was no “stick-shaker” on the copilots side of the aircraft. The “stick-shaker” warns of a stall and had this been installed, the copilot (who was flying the plane due to power loss on the pilot side) would have known they were going into a stall and tried to save the aircraft.

Little things make all the difference.

Dunstan Orchard went through the code he uses to produce the layout that he uses. It is a fairly interesting way of taking content in plain HTML form from a database and making it into a good looking site.

His code has given me some ideas for a project that we are about to start here at work. I think that I can implement his idea into the project to make for cleaner output and easier manipulation, we’ll see how that goes though.

I must also say that Dunstan’s method of displaying the header is quite interesting. He has ninety versions of the header illustration, ninety!!

I just read an interesting article on the future of hospital technology and if we will ever get to the point where the paper use is done away with. The author of the article came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to completely get rid of paper in hospitals because of the need of so many people to have certain information. An example is that you cannot give every nurse a handheld computer because the costs would just sky rocket.

There is a company in Austin that is focusing on developing technology just for medical use. They specialize in software and hardware that enables doctors to move from patient to patient with all of the patient’s info stored at a central database accessible through Bluetooth or some other wireless technology with a handheld device. Their products still somewhat hinge on paper though as all of the non-doctor staff uses paper to checkin on patients and perform routine visits.

It will be very interesting to see where medical computer use goes from here.

Well, a friend is going home for a week or so and asked me to watch her parakeet. Of course, I said yes. It’s not hard to keep up with it, just have to give it some food and water. I have been trying to teach it to whistle different songs but I don’t know how well that’s going. At night the bird is fairly quiet and in the morning it’s the same but when I come home from work the thing goes nuts and can’t stop whistlin’ and singing up a storm!

I am working on an archive system for posts that I make here, it’s going pretty well. I am basically making the archives dynamic (using mod_rewrite to make them look like directories). I thought about going the static way but I really do not want to get into the whole re-building/Movable Type ordeal. So, the archives should be up by the end of the week, hopefully with a database restructure, depending on how in depth I feel like getting.