Production Management is done. It was the class that has been giving me the most stress this semester that’s for sure. The prof. put our website online and it’s live at http://www.lethbridgehouse.net. Some of the navigation is tricky at best and downright confusing at other times as well some works are better than others, nonetheless here it is in all its craptacular glory. For my part, I helped make the 3D driving game.
Long Distance Plans Suck
I just got my phone bill and despite my efforts to reduce the amount of long distance I’ve been using I realized why the bill has been so high lately. On September 4th somebody, either myself or someone pretending to be me, signed up for a $23.95 long distance plan from Telus. The reason I am so angry about this is that I use the Yak Alternative Long distance service, that is I dial 1015945 before all of my calls so that I only get charged $.05 a minute no matter when I call or where ever I call in North America. Since I was paying for a Telus plan anyway it would have been cheaper had I not used the Yak thing at all! That’s eight months of careless bill paying and I imagine about eight months worth of wasted $23.95’s. I’m 99.999% sure I wasn’t the guy that signed up for that plan. Needless to say I’m pretty pissed off. I wonder if Telus recorded that conversation because I would like to have the voice of that person identified, then brutally punished to the fullest extent of the law. I hope it wasn’t me.
Go Leafs Go – Raise That Interest
I have a fixed mortgage so it doesn’t affect me personally but apparently every time the Toronto Maple Leafs do well, the interest rate in Canada goes up.
Again via Plastic QL:
A BMO economist has found some uncanny correlation between the success of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Bank of Canada interest rate policy.
Vanilla Ice Finds His Audience
Via Plastic Quicklink:
Does anyone see anything strange about the first stop on Vanilla Ice’s new massive five city tour? Those of you unfamiliar with the proud history of Gallaudet University can click on their web page.
Vandal Captured
Have you ever been splashed by a car while riding your bike or walking out in rainy weather? I hope you didn’t do what this guy did, slashing some 2000 tires and doing £250,000 as pay-back. He’ll be cooling his heels in jail for the next 16 months.
Recorder Stephen Lennard said: “In December last year, motivated by frustration and anger at what you considered to be the inconsiderate manner of motorists as experienced by you as a cyclist and a pedestrian, you embarked on your astonishing and extraordinary campaign.
“The scale of the damage and the financial consequences of it are breathtaking.”
To Blog or Not to Blog?
The New York Times writes about the dangers of careless blogging. Maybe that’s why lately I’ve been refraining from writing too much about my everyday life. Then again maybe I just don’t get out much and therefore don’t have much to write about – no I like that first reason better.
Mental Chinook 3D Driving Game
It’s finally done. Mental Chinook is 3D driving game made in Macromedia Director for my production management class.
Unfortunately, it looks like the actual game file is lost. I thought I had a backup somewhere but I can’t find it.
Keith Hollihan’s "Reality’s Apprentice"
“Reality TV may seem a world away from real life, but what happens when Donald Trump’s The Apprentice moves in upstairs? Worse, what happens when it seems to be a sham? Keith Hollihan reports with a fascinating account of his life’s surreal intrusions.”
I have only watched one or two episodes of The Apprentice, but as luck would have it I did catch the episode in which the participants had to renovate and rent an apartment in 48 hours. It never occurred to me what the people living below that apartment thought. The people living below were Keith Hollihan, his wife and two children.
“They didn’t care that we couldn’t sleep. This was the Iraqi invasion of reality TV shoots, and we were embedded — whether we liked it or not.”
Keith puts the reality in reality television. If you like the show then you’ll love the article.
Windows has Security Flaws
You may have noticed your Windows operating system telling you it has updates today. This Techweb Article summarizes the revisions.
Microsoft took it on the security chin Tuesday as it released April’s round of security vulnerabilities. The total number of vulnerabilities in the four security bulletins tallied an astounding 20 separate flaws in Windows and Outlook Express.
“This is simply an unprecedented number of vulnerabilities,” said Vincent Gullotto, the vice president of Network Associates’ AVERT research team.
April’s mega collection includes 20 new vulnerabilities, 8 of which are rated as “Critical,” the most dire assessment in the Redmond, Wash.-based developer’s four-level ranking system. Sixteen of the 20 vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely, the most dangerous type of bug because hackers can conduct an attack over the Internet.
I’m in the process of updating right now.
Apparently so is everyone else.
Spacecraft to measure Earth’s drag on space-time
As readers of my blog know, lately I’ve been reading Stephen Hawkings’ book, The Universe in a Nutshell. That’s why I was particularly interested in this NASA project which although it has had funding since 1964 is soon to lift-off.
Awaiting the right conditions and containing the world’s most accurate gyroscopes, Gravity Probe B is set to test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The experiment aims to measure a weaker and even stranger effect called “frame dragging”, a warping of space-time by the gravity and angular momentum of a spinning body.
In principle, it is possible to measure [frame dragging] by monitoring the spin axis of a gyroscope orbiting the Earth. The axis should change its orientation relative to that of a distant star.
Once we can measure the effect in the Solar System, says Kip Thorne, a gravitational physicist at the California Institute of Technology, “we can definitely understand how the same phenomena are working in the distant Universe and around black holes,” which cause much stronger warping.
I can’t say for sure what exactly this project will do for the average Joe, but here is an impressive list of previous NASA spinoff technologies.