Posted in Fun Stuff

Had a pleasant morning at the Aquarium. Today was the first chance we had to go there in a while, so there were a few new exhibits to check out. Spent a nice relaxing hour and a half cruising around checking out the fish and animals. Much fun. I love going to the Aquarium just to hang out.

This is a lionfish that was hanging out in one of the tanks in the Unidentified Floating Objects display.

In other news, the 5 day track from the NHC shows Isabel turning more towards the North Carolina coast. Better for us if it stays on that track, but that means it's headed to where my wife's parents live. Still not good.

Hey physics profs and teachers. Want a neat microwave trick for your students to try out? Measure the speed of light using a microwave and chocolate. It's a simple experiment using a line of chocolate chips and a microwave. The principles are discussed in the article and according to the article, gets pretty close to the answer. And when you're finished with the experiment, you can eat it!

Fount at Slashdot.org

Some more time wasters for your internet pleasure

Yeti Sports - with 4 more Yeti/penguin games!
Prank calls using the soundboards at ebaumsworld.

Oh, I like this. Still planning on getting the binary clock from ThinkGeek one of these days, but a binary watch would be even geekier. I want one...

Found via peetm.

I have my little Christmas tree glowing happily away on my desk at work now. With just under 4 weeks to go till Christmas, I figure it's probably time to start getting into the spirit of the season. I'm thinking one of these might also look cute sitting next to my tree. I still think $12.99 is a little pricey though.

Just for kicks and giggles, I dug out my Sony video camera and used it to take some video of Roomba. It's one of those Sony cameras that does the 'Nightshot' thing letting you see in low-light conditions by illuminating the area with an IR emitting diode. It also lets you see the IR lights that Roomba and its various components use. The pictures are posted over in the gallery.

This is a picture of Roomba in infrared. You can clearly see the 4 floor-directed IR lights.

This is Roomba's base station. The IR signal it broadcasts out the top is what Roomba uses to find it's way home. It comes on automatically when Roomba is turned on or is removed from the base station.

This is the light pattern broadcast by Roomba's Virtual Wall. It's actually a circular beam. It just looks like that because I have it pointed obliquely at the wall. The VW has 3 range settings which simply controls the intensity of the IR beam that is broadcast.

I just thought it would be a fun geeky thing to do.

Sweet! Seems a movie based on Babylon 5 will start filming in April.

Can't wait to hear more about it.

Heads up from Slashdot

Heard one of the more amusing variants on 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' on the radio today that I've heard in a long time. It was a song called 'The Twelve Pains of Christmas' and I got a pretty good chuckle out of it. I particularly liked the guy trying to rig up the lights.

No, not the video game.

From SciFi Wire comes news that Disney is remaking TRON. Should be interesting to see what kind of story they come up with and the liberties the screenwriters take with the original TRON concept.

My sister sent me these. I have no idea if they're real questions (probably not) or something somebody made up (probably), but I thought they were pretty funny anyway.

Mike put me onto this amusing online comic, The Order of the Stick that I think is just a hoot. Anyone who's ever been into role playing games will find it funny. Anyone who's hasn't probably won't see the humour in it at all.

It's probably best to start at the beginning.

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!

Stair Dismount (Porrasturvat) was a cheesy fun little game I found a few years ago. The premise is simple. Select an impact point on the dummy's body, click at the desired impact power level and watch it fall down the stairs. See how much damage you can dish out to the dummy.

Another variant, Truck Dismount (Rekkaturvat) puts the dummy in a truck with positionable ramps and 6 different dummy locations. Some of the hits the dummy takes make me wince.

I'm not sure why I find it so amusing. Maybe it's a strange fascination to push stuff down stairs and watch it tumble. Maybe it's watching the dummy's head pop up when you hit it right, or the contortions it goes through as it falls. Could be the cheesy porn movie music, or the sound effects with each impact. Whatever it is, there's usually something that makes me chuckle.

Today's OoTS is a highly amusing variant of Abbott & Costello's Who's on First routine.

Very funny stuff.

Scott Adams has a blog, and hosted on TypePad no less.

Should make for some entertaining reading.

Well, I'm certainly not going to get rich blogging. Good thing I never planned to.

Found at Walk This Way

Just in time for the Christmas shopping season: The Ultimate Star Trek Collection. Even though it hasn't been released yet, there are already 7 reviews of it at Amazon, most of them complaining about how it can't be the Ultimate collection because the animated series isn't included.

At Amazon's discounted price $2500, it's a little bit of a spendy gift for someone, but definitely something I wouldn't mind having in my collection. 212 DVDs all in one collection...I'll need to get a comfy chair for this one.

Yesterday was an uncharacteristically busy day, but a fun day.

The past week was pretty busy, and Nala was cooped up inside for most of the week, so yesterday we spent most of the morning out at the dog park letting her run around and play with some of her dog park buddies. Then it was off to a local vineyard (Irvin House Vineyard) with some friends for their 'Blessing of the Vines' event. It was the first time out to a vineyard for most of us, so it was a pretty good time. We rolled up just in time to see the priest's blessing, so we unfolded the lawn chairs, grabbed some BBQ and some popcorn, and sat down under some shady oak trees to watch. There was some reasonably decent music to listen to, and afterwards we strolled through the vineyard and looked at the muscadine vines. There were even a few grapes left too, but they were still ripening or on the way to becoming raisins. Our friends hadn't encountered muscadines before though, so the wife educated them a bit and showed them the innards and described how to eat muscadines. Admission to the event came with a glass of wine, so we sampled a few of them. I think our group found them passable, but not terribly impressive. Perhaps this vintage wasn't one of their best. The wife and I tried their Mullet Hall Red and the Magnolia (one of their white wines). I'm not really a big fan of red wines, but the Mullet Hall Red was enjoyable, light and not to tannin-y like most other reds. The Magnolia was supposed to be their sweeter white wine, but wasn't nearly as sweet as some other muscadine wines I've had (although those were almost too sweet for my liking). I think I'd have to try a few more varieties and vintages to see if I really like the Irvin House wines.

After we got home, one of the wife's friends stopped by to hang out and help finish off some of the extra food left over from Friday's post-exam party. Then it was off to the John Legend concert at The Plex. It was a pretty good sized crown at the event, and we even ran into a few people that we knew there. It was a pretty decent concert overall, although the John Legend part of it didn't actually start until around 10, and went for about an hour and a half. Most all the people there seemed to be pretty into the concert though, including the opening acts.

First concert I've ever been to where I was patted down and frisked. Just the guys too, not the women. "Welcome to our world", the wife says.

The wife would probably kill me if I took the day off and did nothing but sit my plump butt in front of the TV all day, but I'm seriously considering doing that Jan 6 for SciFi's Firefly marathon and SciFi Friday. Starts at 8 AM, all 12 episodes and then into the second half of the season for Stargate: SG1, Stargate: Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica.

That's 15 hours of some of the best TV on the air now (the wife would have other things to say about that). Mmmm, I'm getting all wobbly just thinking about it.

Anybody want to join me for this SciFi orgy?

Wife and I went out on a rare date night last night. Started with dinner at Atlanta Bread Company where we enjoyed their soup loaves, because they're just so yummy. I love their loaf of chili. Then a quick trip to the bookstore to kill a bit of time, where we picked up a copy of Marley & Me, a book about a lab retriever and his family that we'd heard a lot of people talking about. And to finish off the night, we went to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Growing up I read the series countless times, so I was looking forward to seeing how the movie version would be. I was quite impressed with the screen adaptation. I thought the movie followed the book pretty accurately (as accurately as it could in 2 hours anyway) without feeling too rushed. The acting was well done, and the actors cast in the rols of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy did a good job of capturing the spirit of the characters from the book. Definitely a movie I'll plan on adding to my collection.

A nice quiet night with some tasty food and a good movie. Can't ask for much more than that.