Category: Miscellaneous

Wishing you all the best! I hope you have a Merry Christmas—or whatever holiday you celebrate in your part of the world.

Here is a photo of the “not-so-white” Christmas that we’re having in Southern Alberta.

There are about a dozen people in the world who have done it—cloud surfing on a wave of air which forms around a cloud called the morning glory.

“The cloud is in the shape of an enormous tube and rolls in at first light over the coast of Queensland. It offers what some call the most exciting gliding experience in the world.”

Cloud Surfing.

I know a least a couple of movie addicts that will just love the Double Feature Finder. It’s a service that allows you to find movies in your area that start back-to-back. It appears to only work with American Zip codes, but if your in the states and love movies… enjoy!

I’m off to Medicine Hat for the next week enjoying time with my family over the Christmas holidays. Please feel free to share what you’re doing to celebrate the holidays in the comments. You don’t even need a Blogger account!

Some of you may have noticed some weirdness with the blog today. I’m switching from Blogger to WordPress and I couldn’t be happier! Hopefully it won’t take too long to import everything and to get all the bugs worked out.

It’s been so dark out lately that I was just wondering when the first day of winter is. Well it turns out its today; also the shortest day of the year. The days just get better from here.

“The winter of 2005/2006 will start on the 21st of December, 2005, at 1:35 PM EST (18:35 GMT). It will end (and spring start) on the 20th of March, 2006, at 1:26 PM EST (18:26 GMT).”

I came across a very interesting site that goes into detail on how to program your computer to play Tetris. I’m always interested in artificial intelligence related matters so I found this particularly interesting:

“This article […] describes how to use a USB ‘web camera’, a personal computer,a relay board, and custom software, to form a system that is capable of playing the video game Tetris running on a separate personal computer. The novelty of this system is how closely it imitates a human player; the camera essentially looks at the game display, and the relay board essentially presses keys on a keyboard.” (emphasis mine)

He’s even got a 2.3mb video showing the computer playing Tetris.

Zeit·geist:
n.
The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation.

The 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist.

Check out a BBC commercial for digital television that has generated 1,300 complaints. Some even described it as “horrific” and “disturbingly psychotic”. Personally I thought it was pretty cool looking.