Category: Uncategorized

As I was thinking about old photos, I thought I’d do a quick Google Image search to see what turns up.  This struck my fancy.

For years I’ve thought about scanning all of my photos from yesteryear.  Although I have a nice scanner, it’s not designed for photos and, in general, photos tend to be a bit grainy and sometimes off in color– especially if you’re like me and always printed them at Walmart back in the day.  Apparently negatives can be scanned much more effectively: not only are they higher-resolution, but the colors are more “true”.

After some thought and online research, I decided to hand over my entire collection of negatives to ScanCafe.  They have generally positive reviews, are recommended in several discussions about photo scanning, and have reasonable prices.  I spent the entire afternoon today organizing the negatives we’ve had stored in a fireproof box for over a decade.  They’re all in little sandwich bags, carefully labeled and ready to ship to ScanCafe.  On Monday I’ll drop off the box at UPS and wait 6-8 weeks for the scans to come back on DVD.  I had originally thought I had maybe a thousand photos.  I was wrong.  The final tally: almost 1,100 negatives… with roughly 4 photos per negative strip, that comes to well over four thousand photos.  Wow.

I admit it’s a little scary sending all of these precious memories out the door, but I feel like in the end it’ll be worth it.  Moreover, once I have the scans in hand, it’s going to be fun to go through them with the kids… and also email them to friends and family for a good laugh.

I saw an article called “Songs in Code” which uses programming languages to describe famous songs. It’s like the Song Chart Meme on Flickr about a year ago, but much much geekier.

A few that I identified:

Awesome.

So tomorrow the smart guys over at CERN are going to fire up the Large Hadron Collider, which is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. There are some really cool experiments they can run with the kind of beam energy it produces, but there’s a huge hubbub right now because tomorrow morning (September 10) they’re going to “turn it on”. And some people think it’s going to create a black hole that will destroy the planet.

Of course, these are people who not only don’t know the facts, but aren’t terribly well-versed in science. The facts include such tidbits as:

• The LHC has already been “turned on” and in fact has been undergoing testing for a few months now.
• Tomorrow’s run will be at around 7% of its full operational level.
• The Tevatron at Fermilab has been running at energies far higher than that for years, with no observed planet-destroying black hole activity.

And the science:

• Even if a black hole was produced (an occurrence whose likelihood makes the lottery look like a good bet) it would be so small it would almost instantly evaporate in a burst of Hawking radiation.
• Even if it didn’t evaporate– which would require Stephen Hawking, the smartest man alive, to be wrong– it would be so miniscule that its event horizon wouldn’t be more than an atom’s width.
• And with an event horizon like that, it most certainly wouldn’t be able to destroy the planet.

But hey, sensationalism is much more fun, so there are people making death threats against the scientists, and of course a flurry of lawsuits intended to shut down the whole experiment. It’s laughable, really, but I suppose it underscores the fact that in general people are pretty ignorant of science. Or at least high-energy particle physics.

Had I been planning ahead, I would’ve arranged an End of the World party last weekend or something. That would’ve been fun.

In the meantime, someone thoughtfully created a web site that will tell us the current status of the LHC’s planet-busting mission. It’s hosted at www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com and currently says



So if the earth is indeed destroyed, remember to check the web site to confirm it.

So last night I was driving down I-25 and there was an amazing sunset over the mountains. Gorgeous.

Since I have this spiffy new e-mail capability, I thought how cool it would be to send a quick message from my cell phone to my blog. So I flipped open the phone and started texting.

It took me about three miles to get that in, because of course I’m flying down the road at 80mph and have to keep at least half an eye on my driving. Then I had to enter the e-mail address for the message, and wow is it tricky to do that when you don’t know how to create an at-sign on a teensy phone keypad.

In the end I decided that mentioning the beautiful sunset could probably wait until a time when I wasn’t careening along at 80mph.

Another year, another Memorial Day 10-kilometer run. I did the Bolder Boulder yesterday, an annual tradition, and despite the cold wind and threatening rain I managed to finish and meet my goal. I always intend to run in under an hour, and this time the official time clock said

00:57:01

Sweet. Just under the wire, proving that although I’m getting older I’m not yet old. Considering I didn’t train at all (except for the occasional pickup game of ultimate) I think that’s not too shabby…

Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian candidate for president, was responding to questions and said this beautiful quote:

A long time ago, I was talking with my friend Jason Peters about building a web application that would allow you to keep a journal. When you think about it, a journal is a pretty simple thing. It’s a bunch of text, and maybe a few pictures or mementos pasted in here and there. How hard can it be to build a web site that saves a bunch of text?

I thought about the idea but never really did anything with it. It became– like so many other things– a da Vinci project for me.

Well, today was a slow day (which is often a good thing) and I decided to actually sit down and make this thing happen. After a couple hours of programming work, I’ve built the framework for my online journal. Oh, sure, it doesn’t do much except save text now, but it’ll grow. All my da Vinci projects end up growing over time. Soon I’ll have pictures, and cross-referencing, and blah blah blah.

But for now, I can finally sit down and start keeping a journal. We’ll see where it goes from here.