In Time for Halloween: War of the Worlds

All my life I've heard about this 1938 Halloween broadcast (details at Wikipedia, if you don't know what I'm writing about), but had never actually heard it.  Sitting around this evening, it occurred to me that surely it was on the web somewhere.  And, no surprise, here it is at the Internet Archive.
One hour, 27 megabytes, it's worth the time.

Birthday Art

From the Darling Daughter:

Some more detail:

Thanks V.!

Upcoming: Halloween & Cemetery Tour

At the Cedar Rest Cemetery in downtown BSL.  Info here.
Note to self: event goes from sunset to 8.  Not "be there by 8."

And here we go: FTL Neutrino Mystery Solved

Probably.  The paper still needs some peer-review and general sniffing-around, but it seems about right.  The problem seems to have been timing differences between lab-on-the-ground and GPS-in-orbit reference frames.  Here's a synopsis.  The discrepancy and its correction agree to about 3%, plenty of accuracy to confirm that these neutrinos were in fact moving slower than light.

Last week, Jobs. Now Ritchie.

Dennis who?  Dennis Ritchie, who cooked up C and unix in his spare time, just so he could load a home-brew space travel program on a surplussed PDP-7, that's who.  Not as flashy as Jobs, but with a list of achievements even more crucial to today's computing infrastructure.

Obit here.

Wiki biography here.

Slashdot reactions here.

Yet another one who will be sadly missed.

Defies Description

The master of children's rhyme meets the master of horror:

The rest can be found here.

Hurricane Season Wrap-Up

Here's a nice picture:

And some humor from xkcd for the small handful of hurricane geeks out there.

MTBing in Africa: Yr doing it wrongs

Just watch.  Swallow first though.
Click Here

Oh, the places you'll go!

Tuxachanie Creek always looks good in October:

But then, back home after a long day in the woods is always good too:

Once again, American enterprise steps in and tackles a sticky problem.

It seems that a Nebraska hardware chain now has a complete Zombie problem solving section.  And just in time for Halloween too.  Doesn't matter if you're still alive or zombified, they've got solutions for both types of customers.

Here's an article from a local paper: Undead Enliven Hardware Sales.  Yeah, if I lived in the area, I'd probably shop there too.  Businesses with a sense of humor deserve all the support they can get.


ps: Come to think of it, I'm feeling more than a little zombified after today's mountain bike ride.

Another one bites the dust: Mr. Coffee Edition

After four years of intensive use, the household Mr. Coffee croaked.  Just leaked water everywhere, all over the counters and kitchen floor.  Would've been a morning discombobulation of some significance too, if it weren't for the backup Chemex unit.  Much cleaner, and slightly better tasting coffee, but it is a little more trouble, it's not a push-button-and-forget operation.  Think I'll run with that one for a while.


Or, as Will Smith put it in Men in Black II:
Old and busted:

The new hotness:

Rest assured, if something unfortunate happens to the Chemex, there is the camping gear stainless steel percolator waiting as a backup.  Backup, always have a backup.

As usual, XKCD nails it.

Eternal Flame

It's hard to think of anything to say.  I mean, think where we'd be without Jobs: boring beige boxes using a kludgy CLI or a stone-age GUI, clunky flip-phones, and strangely shaped MP3 players that could hold a couple dozen songs.  These were the states of several types of computing devices before Apple waded in, led by Jobs and his vision of insane greatness.  Without Jobs' vision, I expect all of these devices would have advanced, but would not have been particularly fun to use, i.e.: really fast boring beige boxes, cell phones with even more buttons!, and increasingly cryptic MP3 players that could hold hundreds of songs.  Yes, the man does deserve our gratitude, and a place in our memories.
ObLink to the original cartoon at XKCD here.

Hot off the... interwebz!

The October issue of the Fourth Ward Cleaver is up.  Go dig around, catch up on the neighborhood news.

next morning edit: Huh, omitted the link last night.  Must've been tired.

Kind of like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Only more so.

It's Kanaval in Hati.

Think I'll stay near home this year.

Cool Job #873

Rappelling team resumes check of Washington Monument

It doesn't matter what you do for a living, you've got to admit: rappelling down the Washington Monument – and doing it legally and getting paid to do it – is pretty darned cool.