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I can’t wait for this game. Online play, Sonic, and now a stage builder? Awesome. February can’t come soon enough.

I’m in the mall for lunch and I stopped into the new Apple store to check out the iPod Touch. That’s right I’m posting from one! Now if only I had some extra cash…

Amber and I are watching Modern Marvels on the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan. (The C is silent - Mack-in-aw.) Stuff like this amazes me - the sheer size and amount of materials required for a project this big are hard to comprehend. To help combat the crazy winds the bridge can be subjected to, the center two lanes are actually metal grates. It can flex as much as 35 feet to the left or right and 10 feet up and down. It’s something like 150 feet from the road surface to the water below. My mom had trouble driving up and down Pike’s Peak and over Skyline Drive in Colorado. There’s no way she could make it over this bridge on her own when you can see right through it.

I never thought this day would come. I’m going to buy a Mac. Not just any old Mac, but an iMac. The same Mac I made fun of for looking like a giant deformed Jolly Rancher when it was introduced back when I was in high school. Only now it looks like this…

…and it comes with a very sexy 24″ screen.

I blame my iPod. Thank God for Epic’s computer loan program.

Well. I’ve been neglecting my site. So much in fact that I didn’t realize it went down a while back. I don’t think it took me too long to realize it, but once I did it took a few weeks to get it working again. To make a long story short - under my current hosting if there’s a problem with my account, there’s only one person who can get it fixed. If that person isn’t available, I’m just out of luck.

Anyway, I recently registered a few new domains (I’m not abandoning this one quite yet) and I’m gearing up to switch hosts to something more reliable and more in my control. I probably don’t have many readers at this point, anyway, but some other changes are coming. I’m working on a new layout and adding some content to make this a *little* more than a blog. The site may be down again for a bit while I get things changed over.

Digg.com unveiled their latest version including expanded topics and some new customizations. If you’ve never been to Digg, you should go check it out. I’m interested to see if the new topics acheive the same general quality as the Tech news has for the past year. I’m also excited because they’ve added the ability to deselect topics from your homepage view, which means I don’t have to see anymore stories about the latest Linux distro or tech deals that I can’t afford. You’ll have to register to gain access to all the new categories (until the list the Beta status in the coming weeks), but you can’t really take advantage of Digg without registering anyway. Don’t forget to add me as a friend.

I don’t get it. Spammers hit this blog with spam every single day. Almost all of it comes in the form of trackbacks for things like brand name drugs, sex sites, and random names of famous people. When this first started happening, I didn’t know how to handle it. Every little thing made it onto the site, and with the default WordPress install I couldn’t figure out anyway to hold it so that the three of you who actually visit this site wouldn’t be able to see it all.

In the last 24 hours alone, there were 606 spam trackbacks. That’s definitely the highest number I’ve noticed so far. Thanks to the Spam Karma 2 plugin, not a single one of them made it onto a viewable page of this site. And that’s why I don’t see the point in sending me this crap. Why bother spamming a site that gets zero traffic and zero spam views? Maybe they just enjoy wasting my time. Well, guess what? It takes me about 30 seconds to delete all that spam, and if I wait long enough, Spam Karma will do it for me. So they aren’t even wasting my time. So what’s the point?

Edit: I should point out that the default WordPress install does include the plugin Askimet for combatting spam, it’s just not turned on by default.

It’s now 01:02:03 04/05/06 - and because of the wonder that is WordPress future posting, I don’t actually have to be awake to share this momentous second with you.

Man, I want one. I don’t even know when they’re being released in the US or how I will manage to trade my old one in. Rest assured, I’ll figure something out.

On a totally unrelated note, someone plans to make Family Guy video games. Can I please be Stewie on a quest for world domination? Level 3 can be the death of Lois.

Edit: Here’s a video comparison as well as some close-up pics. That thing looks sweet.

I first saw this question posed in the Math discussion folder at work (back before the Classifieds where restricted). Then today a story from The Straight Dope (original here) showed up on Digg where there was a pretty spirited discussion about it. Simply put:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (think of some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the wheel’s speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

The answer seems obvious: the conveyor will keep the plane stationary, no air will move past the wings, thus no lift will be generated, and the plane will stay on the ground. The plane can’t just jump into the air. It sounds simple enough, and this was my take on it for the first few minutes I pondered the question. But the first assumption this argument is based on is wrong. All I needed was for some to frame the situation a certain way and I saw my mistake. The plane will not stand still relative to the ground.

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