Thursday, December 20, 2012

RIP My Red Toyota Tacoma Truck

I loved that truck.  Saved me many times in snow and from deer.  It took the force of a full size pickup in a rear collision and bent the frame last Thursday.  It saved me but it was announced to be totaled today.  Good bye young friend.

(Note this is not my actual truck but close to it.)

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Hackers Dump Data On 53 Universities


"Hackers published online Monday thousands of personal records from 53 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Zurich and other universities around the world.
The group of hackers, calling themselves Team GhostShell, claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter and published some 36,000 e-mail addresses and thousands of names, usernames, passwords, addresses and phone numbers of students, faculty and staff..."

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Kung Fu Panda 2 Opening Weekend Part 1

The kids performed in a demo this weekend for the Kung Fu Panda 2 opening weekend at a local mall.  I had to break up the vid into 2 becasue of the You Tube leangth limit of 15 minutes.  The second part has the kids and I will post that when it is done rendering.

Or check it out at the link: http://youtu.be/Ennz5oaVCSw

Friday, May 13, 2011

Everyone was Kung Fu Fighting

In January 2011 the Jing Ying Institute of Kung Fu & Tai Chi in Arnold Maryland did a demonstration at the National Aquarium in Baltimore for the Asian Pacific cultural festival.  The below video is a small piece of that demo.  The camera and sound men who keep getting in the way are filming for the show “D.C. Cupcakes”, but less than 3 seconds of any of the demo made it on the TV show.

Now that I have finished this semester and have some time I will try to catch-up on the videos I have to render.

How to Build a Schizophrenic Computer

From article:

"Schizophrenia is one of the most infamous and mysterious mental disorders. Attempting to get to the root of the problem, scientists recently came up with an extraordinary solution: They built a schizophrenic computer. In a study published in the online version of Biological Psychiatry in March, researchers altered an artificial neural network capable of learning language and stories, to the point where it started "acting" schizophrenic.

People who suffer from schizophrenia often have difficulty thinking logically or discerning what is real or not real in their lives. "It is characterized by delusions or disassociation of language, often with hallucinations of spoken speech," says psychiatrist Ralph Hoffmann of Yale University, coauthor of the study along with computer scientist Risto Miikkulainen of the University of Texas, Austin. Because of that language disassociation, struggling to recount stories correctly is one of the early signs of schizophrenia. So to gain new insight into how schizophrenia might affect the human brain, Hoffmann and Miikkulainen tried to give a storytelling computer system the same problem."

Read more: DISCERN Artificial Neural Network - How to Build a Schizophrenic Computer - Popular Mechanics

Friday, March 4, 2011

Writer Cutting Out Traditional Publishers With Amazon Kindle

From the Article:
"Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling "indie" writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn't have a publishing deal, Novelr says.



And she shouldn't. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales -- and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it's usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.



The comparison isn't entirely fair, because Hocking sells her books for $3, and some $.99. But that's the point: by lowering the prices, she can make more on volume, especially impulse buys. Meanwhile e-books cost nothing to print, you don't have to worry about print volumes, shelf space, inventory, etc. And did we mention the writer keeps 70%?"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/amanda-hocking-2011-2#ixzz1Ff3qQpI9

I love it when people use technology for to their benefit.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Anonymous vs. HBGary

Anonymous is "The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code....But did he?"

Read the article below for more info.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars

Sunday, July 18, 2010

They Grow Up So Quick!

This year we decided to take down the old wooden swing set and replace it with some garden beds. Lemony found information about square foot gardening, and we (mostly our youngest, zilla, and myself) recycled all the old swing set lumber into garden beds. All this worked out well and now we are harvesting the fruits and vegetables of our labor.

Of course if you have an garden you will have bugs. Lemony found a very large caterpillar eating the tops of the carrots one day. After much debate if we should squish him or not (I thought it was probably just going to eat everything and turn into a tree-destroying moth), our daughter fairyberry came to the rescue with her butterfly book. We think it is an Eastern Black Swallow Tail, and with a little research, found that it was the second easiest caterpillar to raise in captivity. So he was named, housed and fed all the carrot tops and parsley he could eat.
Below is a closeup of the caterpillar, a little blurry through the glass. He was green with black strips and yellow dots.


So we fed the bug and waited. A few days latter it attached to a stick we had placed in the bowl and hung like a J. The next morning the brown, woody looking chrysalis had formed. A little over a week latter my wife came home to find this in the bowl.

Lemony took this picture and released the butterfly in the yard. He flew away over the neighbors house. I have to admit, I am happy no one listened to me and we did not squish the caterpillar.
Update from Lemony: Turns out that Heimlich is a girl.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Friday, May 21, 2010

Happy 30th PAC MAN!

Google is celebrated Pac Mans birthday with a working javascript of the google logo.

Thats just cool.

Monday, May 17, 2010