Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Time to blow out dust bunnies

The dial-up on the home computer has been acting up badly and considering the laptop has no problems connecting or staying connected, it probably means it's time for another computer cleaning. It's something I try to get to at least twice a year, although I probably should do it more often considering how much dust and fluff the carpets throw off. Realistically I usually only manage to get to it once a year or so.

I really need to put the computer in a more accessible spot so the routine cleaning is less of a pain in the a** to do.

A twist on the double-slit experiment

This is a sweet twist on the classic double-slit experiment. Instead of two physical slits that you shine light through, send a really short laser pulse through a gas and and let the electric field of the light pulse act the double slit.

Paulus and co-workers focused a train of pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser into a chamber containing a gas of argon atoms. The pulses were so short - just 5 femtoseconds - that each one contained just a few cycles of the electric field.

The team was able to control the output of the laser so that all the pulses were identical. The researchers could, for example, ensure that each pulse contained two maxima of the electric field (thatis, two peaks with large positive values) and one minimum (a peak with a large negative value). There was a small probability that an atom would be ionized by one or other of the maxima, which therefore played the role of the slits, with the resulting electron being accelerated towards a detector. If the atom was ionized by the minimum, the electron travelled in the opposite direction towards a second detector.

The team registered the arrival times of the electrons at both detectors and then plotted the number of electrons as a function of energy. The researchers observed interference fringes at the first detector because it was impossible to know if an electron counted by the detector was produced during the first or second maximum.

Clever, very clever indeed

Found at Slashdot.

How nerdy are you?

Found at Michael Flanakin's weblog

Will you be my neighblogger?

Here's a neat idea that goes along with GeoURL. Blog Map created by Chandu Thota.

You simply add GeoURL or GeoTags meta tags to your weblog index page. Then go to BlogMap and sumbit your weblog URL. Then you're rewarded with linkage that gives you a map of your blogging neighbours (or neighbloggers). Pretty nifty, I think.

I don't seem to have many neighbloggers yet.

Found via J Bentley

Hoo's Holy Commandments

The Great and Holy Hoo has passed onto Haysoos the 10 Hooligan Commandments! (edited for language to keep this blog rated G).

Read them, and spread them forth so that the Words of Hoo may reach everyone!

1. Thou shalt harm none, and do as thou will
2. Thou shalt initially honour every person met as though they deserve respect, until they prove otherwise
3. Thou shalt boink who thou pleases. If everyone is consenting, the more the merrier
4. Thou shalt not kill, club, poke, stab or otherwise f*** with people who aren't f***ing with you
5. Thou shalt intentionally accomplish nothing one day a week. You pick which one
6. Thou shalt be willing to learn. Ignorance can be cured, stupidity is forever
7. Thou shalt pet the puppies and the kitties
8. Thou shalt treat all water sources as if you had to drink it
9. Thou shalt not trust anyone who relies on votes for his or her job
10. Thou shalt not f*** with stuff that is not yours

Play boss in your own Cube Farm

These look like amusing toys to play with. The Cubes. Each set appears to come with a cube-headed office drone, parts for his cubicle and stickers to decorate said cube with. There's even an expansion set with cube-headed assistant drones.

Who needs a dollhouse. Build your own corporate cube farm! Ha!

telnet atm.somebank.com:80

Web enabled ATMs. Running Windows no less. Can't you just see the crackers rubbing their hands in glee over this? Plus an upgrade from DES to TripleDES! Woohoo!

Should be interesting to see how they work out and stand up to crackers.

Found at Slashdot.

Memorable Hooligan moment #359

Beer and Captain Crunch do not a tasty breakfast make. Even when you're hung over. Especially when you're hung over. But it's a combination you can only come up with when you're hung over.

Really, really hung over.

Meet Nala

This is Nala, the newest member of our family. We picked her up yesterday from the breeder, Fortune Labrador after a 10 week wait. She'll be 11 weeks on Monday. Isn't she just so cute looking? That's a Puppy Kong chew toy she's trying to figure out.

Her first night with us was a little bit stressful (as expected), but she's doing all right now. She's learning the lay of the kitchen, but still cries a bit when she's left alone. The hard part is trying to figure out the difference between the 'Give me attention' whine and the 'Gotta go to the bathroom' whine.

She hasn't quite figured out how to play when she's the leash, but we're working on that. She's young, so it doesn't take much to tire her out. A few short training sessions teaching her Sit and Down, and then a short trip outside for a bit of a walk pretty much does it for her at this point. So far she's a lot of fun to have around, except for the 2AM bathroom break. We're really looking forward to when she's a little bit older and we can teach her more interesting tricks.

Check out the other pictures in her own album

She's a couch potato! She's a tornado!

It's been a couple of days now, and I think Nala seems to be settling in. She's definitely got personality. One minute she's a couch potato sprawled out on the kitchen floor taking up as much space as she possibly can, the next minute she's tearing through the living room chasing a ball and almost colliding with the walls in the process. And just as suddenly she stops dead and stares at what's going happening on the TV. She heads off to the corner and sulks if we punish her, but happily comes when we offer a treat.

She likes the short little walks outside we take her for. She'll carry her end of the leash in her mouth while she's walking. We probably need to stop that and replace it with a bone or something for her to carry around instead of the leash.

Radio show bloopers

Heard on a local morning radio show during a discussion about smoke-free amusement parks.

Host 1: I drive by Westvaco every day and that chokes me up more than anything else!
Host 2: Aren't they one of our sponsors?
Host 1: Oh, crap.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Appraiser gets to go do his thing on Friday. One last conversation with the insurance guy to get things finished with that and it looks like we'll be able to close by the end of the month! Woo hoo!

Women should be on this list

My wife will probably smack me for the title of this post :)

This New Scientist article about the 13 things that do not make sense is an interesting read, and presents some of the more perplexing problems that still defy explanation. There are some pretty interesting ones in the list.

Found at Slashdot.

Passing of a medical physics pioneer

From the MedPhys mailing list comes sad news of John Cameron's passing on March 16. He was a well respected elder of the medical physics community as a researcher and educator. I only had the opportunity to meet him once and although I was a bit star-struck (like someone meeting one of their idols) he was very pleasant to talk to.

There are a lot of people who will miss him and his contributions.

Stay-at-home-dad week

This week I get to be a stay-at-home dad for Nala. Need to work on some training and education for her. She can be very stubborn when she doesn't want to do something. When we go outside for walks, as long as she's within sight of the apartment, all she wants to do is run back inside. Take her out of sight, and home is completely forgotten and she goes about doing her doggy things. She likes to smell everything, and for some strange reason she always wants to crunch on rocks (which we take out of her mouth as soon as she tries to grab one). Maybe they look like food or something to her. She isn't quite at the stage where she can hold something in her mouth while walking, so we can't keep her mouth busy with something else to keep her from picking up rocks to munch on.

She's fun to watch running around chasing a ball at the tennis court, although she has all the attention span of a gnat (as my wife says), so you constantly have to grab it and bounce it around for her to chase after. Otherwise she pounces at it, chews it a bit and moves on to something she thinks is more interesting, like leaves to munch on.

Getting to the final stretch

It's down to the final stretch. All the major work is done on the house, and we went through the house with our realtor for the walkthrough today. Neither of us was terribly impressed with the painting that was done. The colours came out nice enough, but there are a lot of little touch up things that need to be done. Far more than what I would have expected. If the painters were all finished, then they were very sloppy on finishing the details.

Hopefully fixing all the things on our list won't take too long, and we'll be able to finally close on this this house and move in by mid-April.

Sleepy dog

This is the position we usually find Nala in most often. Crashed on the kitchen floor, partly on her back and partly on her side. Growing dogs need their sleep I guess. She's 3 months old now, and in the 2 weeks since we've had her she's already put on 5 pounds and is up to 25 pounds now. She's going to have to start learning how to walk down the stairs on her own before she starts getting too big to carry.

6 years already!

10 years ago, if someone had told me I'd be doing what I'm doing whre I am, I'd have thought they were crazy. Me, leave Canada? Work in the US? Never! Not a chance!

But here I am, 6 years after moving down south and almost 9 years since leaving home (almost 4200 km/2600 miles away as the Mapquest crow flies), and I'm still here. 6 years ago yesterday, we packed up our meager little apartment in Detroit and flew out to New York. Bought a car from a friend of my brother-in-law and drove down to Charleston SC. And here I've been, ever since.

6 years...whodathunkit.

Achoo!! Achoo!!

So Nala's been with us almost 3 weeks now. We got her just as pollen season was heating up. With the weather warming up, now everything is getting into full bloom and there's the usual light green dust covering everything. Even the dog comes back home with a light dusting of green after going out for a walk.

This year the wife is being hit with allergies harder than ever. Sniffling, sneezing her head off and the Alavert/Claritin isn't helping much this time. Time for a trip to the doctor for something a little stronger.

So, is it the seasonal pollen allergies, or is it the dog? Or maybe both?