Here's what we've all been waiting for. Satellite pictures of the Guinness Brewery. I feel like a kid trying to get into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Or, more acurately like an irishman trying to get into the Guinness Brewery. They've seriously got 12 foot walls all the way around that place to keep the goodness in, and the drunkards out. And don't tell me to take the tour cause they've got a whole separate fake brewery that they try to pass off as a tour. Most expensive free pint ever.

Vertical panorama

This is a building in Vancouver. That place is nice. I can only imagine the bomb-digity Suite on the top floor. You can see part of the tree they have planted in the 'back yard'. Yeah, like a real tree.

Phone blues...

So I went and dealt with the boys at Verizon lastnight. If anyone wants to send them flowers, they're at Holy Cross Hospital on Forest Glen Rd. No, just kidding. Turns out that signing up for two more years:
1) Is cheaper than paying the month to month rate
2) Gets me more minutes per month
3) Gets me a new phone
4) Eliminates roaming and long distance charges
5) Gives me free night and weekends

Hmmm, why didn't I do this sooner? Oh and I took this picture lastnight with my new camera. I can just feel the meticulous documentation of stupid things coming.

P.S.
Call me if you want to be in my new phone, I didn't pay the $10 extortion to have my numbers transfered.

Oh man, me and Steve should get together some time and bash stupid people in the face. Granted he wrote this two years ago, but I think he'd probably feel the same way today. Last week i went grocery shopping and I actually almost tried to swipe my card for the woman in front of me when she broke out a checkbook to pay $8.39. How can you not atleast have a check card if you have a check book?

Strange meatness

Has anyone noticed how terribly similar Stouffer's "Meatloaf" is to its "Salisbury Steak"? I mean, come on; am I (a well informed and educated consumer) to believe that there is actually a separate facility or process for each of these concoctions? I think they should just come out and say "beef product with potato-like side" and "beef product with pasta-like side".

More map stuff

I know I said I'd stop talking about Google maps. But to be fair, this isn't Google maps. It uses Google Maps. Its called Google Earth, and its an application that uses Google's query service to request data about locations. I thought it had a distinct keyhole feel and I was right. It displays street, topology and land image data as available for each location. Major cities are being modeled for a building layer, and there are even options to display schools, hospitals or restaurants. The real kicker for me is that it saves all the data it receives, so if you look up the same area twice, it doesn't need to reload anything. Of course this might just interest me because its like they took my St Mary's project and added their street data and searching capability. I'll say it again, I like the boys at Google.

Update
Check out how ridiculously good the elevation data is of Mt Avachinsky, on the Kamchatkan peninsula. (basically the middle of nowhere)

"It's easier to make nerve gas than manufacture cola"

So i like open source stuff. It just makes the world a brighter place. Open office is nice; Paint.Net... money. There was open source beer on some blog last week. I hadn't really know that Opencola actually made open source cola till now. Makes sense when you think about it. OpenCola (There's a lot of text, but its funny.)

20 min summary

I just ran across the MAKE podcast on my iPod from May 10th about the DRM Broadcast flag. Cory Doctorow is well spoken and knowledgeable. Keep in mind that his summary is only up to mid-may and there are new developments in the fight. Nevertheless, it is an excellent overview of the history for anyone who isn't quite sure what the big deal is.

sbemail

Oh man, I'M wearing leather shoes with no socks today. It is pretty great.

Tires

On TotT:
Consumers generally won't buy a bicycle with completely smooth or treadless tires, even though the tread pattern serves no purpose and tires would be cheaper to make (and therefore buy) without it.

People think bicycle tires should have tread because car tires have tread. But car tires have tread for a reason. In wet conditions water has to be given a way to flow from under the tire's contact patch, so the rubber can remain in contact with pavement and prevent hydroplaning. A car tire is much larger than that of a bicycle tire, thought, and the water has much further to travel.

Physics dictates that the pressure forcing water from below the car's tire is equal to the pressure of inflation, typically 30-40 psi. With a bicycle road tire, however, inflation pressure is typically 80-120 psi. In other words, in comparison to car tires, bicycle tires have much smaller contact patches and much higher pressure -- the two physical parameters of concern in hydroplaning.

The speed required to hydroplane on a bicycle has been calculated in the region of 90-100 mph.

Himeji, Japan

This is Himeji Castle in Japan. It stands beautifully atop a hill in the flatlands. There is level upon level inside, filled with racks of weapons and resting places for henchmen. As you ascend you feel an appreciation for what it may have been like to wait in apprehension for assailants. It also got me thinking of the nature of castles. About the concept of walls and gates. Security in general. The walls are the strong points and gates the weak. Even though the gates were heavily fortified, they were breakable and the castle could be viewed in the various sections between gates as they progressed in a spiral up the hill and to the top of the castle. A castle is in fact a means of delaying attack for as long as possible.

Update
Oh yeah, this is the castle where they shot the ninja training scene in "You Only Live Twice"

Insane boat thing

Has anyone seen this? I don't know if I'll buy one, but that guy is gonna make a lot of money.

Incongruity abounds

What??? This is like Amnesty International buying and raffling off a prison camp. I'll admit that the scale might not be the same, but its an endorsement nonetheless. A buncha Canadians raised money for an Eco-Center by having an H2 raffle. Benefactors could sleep easy knowing they're driving us all to hell at no more than 10 mpg.

Update
Yes, I'm well aware that the Carrera GT gets 10 mpg in the city. But its so pretty. I guess its just a little more incongruity for you to choke down today.

Fun Fact: Gas mileage figures are not posted on Hummer window stickers because the car weighs so much it is exempt from mileage-reporting requirements.

Zero to 60 in 4.4s

Pardon me while I wipe the drool off myself.
Thanks. This is one of 48 club edition 911 Carreras that Porsche is releasing in honor of the Porsche Club of America. So quick, I need to get into this club and scrape together 99,911 dollars.

This is exactly what the internet was created for.

Food tragedies in history: BMD

I have a feeling that Snapple is going to take it on the chin for quite a while as a result of their sicle-snafu . But hey, at least no one died. Beware the molasses.

Uh, you listen to what?

The Sneeze has a post asking what your most played song is in iTunes. I was curious, so I checked it out. It turned out to be White Houses by Vanessa Carlton. Highly embarrassing. But wait. The play count is 16,794,634. I find this HIGHLY unlikely since the next song has only been played 32 times. Its almost as if Steve had access to my ipod over the weekend and is playing an elaborate joke on me.

Update
Also note that you can listen to a 224 second song 385 times a day. And then to get to 16,794,634 times you'd need 43,622 days, or 119 years. I think.

32 inches of manliness

So I kinda want to buy this TV. Although I just can't quite seem to justify spending 1200 on a TV when I've already got two. But if I can get five people to give me a hundred each, I could justify spending 700 dollars on one. I'll let you come over and watch it any time you want. Really.

Decision time

Great, here's a review on the Nokia 8801 that I was bitching about last week. The Nokia Execs must be Placebo addicts. Anyway, the review wasn't glowing, since they compared it to the Razor which is already pretty established as the bomb digity. So now we have to be very careful. The battery life, memory space, and pricetag are all sub-par. Nokia needs to improve on the phone, and they'll want to release another model. We need to convey this to them as consumers. Some people need to buy the phone though so the line isn't just dropped. Regardless, it comes down to I'm not spending that much for a phone now anyway. Anyone have an audiovox 8910?

Auckland

In Aukland, New Zealand they have something called the Sky Tower. Its like the space needle, but in New Zealand. You can go up and get a nice view of the city. But they also drop people from it. There are cables of course, otherwise it'd be a big mess. But the really funny part is that they dangle you out there and you look kinda like this just waiting for them to pull the switch. I didn't really feel the need to participate, the clear floors made me feel uneasy enough.

Oh, look its the eye of... Run away!

Yowza, this is kinda freaky. Which of these do you think is from the night sky and which from a fantasy movie?

Screw the taser... R2D2 gets pimped

So this article came up a while ago but I wasn't really motivated to post it till now. Maybe it was the thought of strapping gattling guns onto baby Aibos, or maybe I've finally succumed to the coolness of this device. Basically it solves the problem of mobile mortar attacks by monitoring the sky and shooting down incoming projectiles with a hail of exploding bullets. It also computes the origin from the trajectory and sends return fire or UAVs to check it out. All well and good until our UberAibo overlords figure out we're expendable.

Please madame, keep your tails together.

HAHA, this is great. Ever wonder where in the world corporate logos came from? Well, Starbucks' little green seal is a heady homage to the lonely seaman's life.

Baby robots

Again, AI roxors. And Machine Learning is even better. Apparently Sony has a robot nursery in France where they're stripping out little dog's electric noodles and putting in curiosity schemes. The video is fairly amusing; for those of you who don't appreciate a good neural network prepare to get your anthropomorphism on. Also: how you I get my hands on one of them 'bleak black' evil Aibos?

Broadcast flag THIS [gestures toward crotch]

Good job everyone. Its good to see that some of the American public can be motivated. All you have to do is threaten our TV and we're like mother eagles defending our young.
from boingboing
"Within the space of a few hours, the committee was Slashdotted, BoingBoinged and Instalanched.

By 6 p.m. on Tuesday, the 27 members of the Senate Appropriations Committee received more than 11,000 emails and faxes. That's nearly 500 faxes an hour. Dianne Feinstein alone received more than 2,600 messages in her inbox. Kay Hutchison, the senior senator for Texas, received 1,441 letters."

That's actually fairly impressive. And if you don't know what a "broadcast flag" is you're a bad person. Go apologize to your TV.

More like freeuse though.

I admit my name isn't as catchy but this is a kinda neat idea. Its like yard sales except more organized and (hopefully) less annoying. Find the freecycle group near you (there's actually quite a few in MD) and you could be involved in an open exchange of goods instead of constantly throwing away and buying new.

A great day for one man makes another man's head explode in rage.

Makes perfect sense when you think about it. I mean, its the old "trash is treasure" quip; except completely different. Its more like the old "My wife sold my Lotus on ebay for half a quid cause I cheated on her" quip. Yeah, its the first time I've heard that one too.

This is what girls are doing when they take forever in the bathroom.

Please please PLEASE stop being BITCHES!!!

That's what I want to walk into a Verison Wireless and scream everytime I think about getting a new phone. Ok, fine, its time to be a big man and admit that you jumped on the wrong bandwagon (its going on right now with HDDVD and Blueray) -- CDMA sucks. Bite the bullet and go buy a GSM system so that you can provide your constituents with the badass electronics they want. And all you "I'm already on GSM" bitches? What the hell are you guys doing? Get on your horse and go to Europe or Japan or Korea; go anywhere but the wartorn precision bombed markets of Iraq and bring back the phones you find laying around. Right now I'm looking at a grand to import the phone and hoping to find a GSM carrier that can run it. Can anyone even find out how much wireless service costs without signing the 2-year-we-get-your-first-child-and-right-testicle-contract?

Update
Sorry, that all came out of trying to see when the N90 will be onsale at Ritz and for how much. Neither of which have I accomplished.

Lets leave the thinking to cardboard cutouts

Ok, no one's buying Snapple, what do we do?
Start selling Snapple Popsicles!
Brilliant! How will we advertise it?
Break the world record for the largest popsicle!
Brilliant! Where and when should we do this?
New York City in the summer heat!
Brilliant!

What could go wrong? Besides the normal kiwi-strawberry popsicle flood, of course.

Cooking with Soapstone

We've come a long way since cookware like this. Apparently there are still advantages to using stone though. MetaEfficient seems to have a few interesting listings like that, some different ones anyway from the usual suspects. I'm not gonna get one, but that's only because I don't have a gas stove. I can still daydream.

Does UPS ship stuff this big?

Either way this is wonderful. I wish more people would create huge objects of interest and put them in the middle of nowhere.

Smoking Manners

Wow, Wowee-wow-wow. Those Japanese have a way with words. I always thought Hiku just produced odd results, but maybe its just the way things work over there. That's just assuming that these are real.

I promise I'll stop talking about google maps.

Google maps has added satellite imagery of non-North America. Can anyone find these islands? They're on the western coast of Australia somewhere between Brisbane and Cains (yeah, i know its big) and I think they look like Kangaroos.

I watched some of this lastnight. Makes me want to buy more movies, which is always trouble. Casablanca showed up like six times while I was watching, but there was only one line from all 20 Bond films. Who am I kidding, Bond was lucky to get one slid in there.

Night photography

This picture is from the luau I went to. It was pretty touristy, but the stage performance was impressive. This is a picture of a few people (I'm not sure who) who went off to talk in the dark. Its a 4-5 second exposure, with the light source coming from a dim street light off to the left. You can see a ghost that walked in front of me in the left center foreground. My absolute favorite thing about this picture is the girl on the far right. She fell down in the water sometime during the course of the shot. Check out what else you can see after adding a little fill light.

Thbpt.

One of my personalities sent me a link over lunch. I've hated McDonald's for quite a while now, hell I can't even remember the last one I've been in, however I've only hated them because I decided to. There's really not much more to it than that. But now maybe I'll have some actual backing in my platform, since i now have McShit to refrence.

Satellite fields

So I was looking up fields we play on for wafc and I noticed that you can actually see the four fields we use at Anacostia. How long till we can see live broadcasts of the game by using google maps?
Anacostia Airport Elipse Polo

Largest crater or something

So while in Honalulu I went up Diamond Head Crater. It's pretty interesting because you drive and park inside the crater and then start hiking up the inside. The trail was concrete and had an ass-load of steps. Part way through there is a tunnel that is pitch black and you just hold a railing and hope you make it through. Once through you continue up an installation that is obviously WWII era. It gives you a nice "medal of honor" feeling, except for the fear of death. Anyway the top offers spectacular views and observation bunkers like pictured above. Wiakiki beach is clearly visible, but that's a story for another day.

No paradox

So these crackheads have a little too much time on their hands. They're trying to show that existing quantum theory dictates that time travelers physically can't alter the past. Basically, they liked "12 Monkeys" better than "Back to the Future". Makes you kinda wonder why there wasn't better turnout at the convention.

Update
Incidentally, you can dress up like Jeffrey Goines, go out to a bar and a movie and no one will say a thing.

Coupla pictures from Fort Abercrombie in Kodiak, Alaska. The fort wasn't too impressive, but the view was nice.

Perhaps a good idea?

So I get a monthly reminder from Capital One that my credit card statement is ready. This month however I was puzzled to read: "Log in to see your Capital One StatementGirl on Swing."
WHAT?
Is Capital One providing 'statement girls' to entice users to use the website? What does 'on swing' mean? It took me a few miuntes of asking these questions before I clicked the 'show external pictures' button in Thunderbird. When I did it became clear that the picture was of a girl on a swing, and indeed there was no such thing as a StatementGirl. I am a little disappointed.

Russia part 3

Ok, so the top of Mt Avochinsky was high. Which mean the air was thin. Which meant that we were all gasping from our exertion. However, you might notice there are a lot of clouds constantly surrounding the top of the volcano. Those are sulfur vents. Anyway, after we got up there Alexandre told us not to "breathe too deeply". He then proceeded to break up chunks of rock for us with his HUGE hammer that he carried up there. I had nice visions of me passing out from sulfur inhalation and rolling down the cone to my death. I didn't let something silly like that stop me though. They explained that the cap was made of different rock since it was the cooled lava that fell down into the volcano to act as a plug to keep the magma in. Sweet. It was kinda like climbing around on big pieces of steel wool that would bloody you up good if you weren't careful. Our way back down was a lot easier and more fun. At one point the told us to zip up our jackets and hurl ourselves down the snow covered hill, so we could slide down and the sherpa guy would catch us before we slid off the cliff. That was fun. We got back to camp and were pretty much spent. An 11 hour hike will do that to you. All in all it was an outstanding trip and I cannot stress enough that it would never have happened in the US. Not without waivers and training and all types of safety procedures. Good times.

Sophomoric receipts

Money. Ever sign a credit card receipt with something other than your signature? Well, my signature is basically a J and a 2, so I sympathize with this guy. He's been trying desperately to get someone to check the signature on the back of his card. You can read the whole story, or just the apex.

Stanley takes a Roadtrip

So this may only be hizot as shizit if you're an AI fan, but VW and Stanford have got a Touareg to complete a test course in Wolfsburg. Its pretty much a production model with a butt-load of sensors and computers that they're building to enter the (now 2 mil) DARPA Grand Challenge. Also note he's a diesel which can only add to the hottness. Watch out johnny5, Stanley is coming to take your woman.

Update
Check out one of the competitors that failed last year because it couldn't get past a tumble weed. So when I build mine it'll be able to inflate and throw beach balls out the back.

Ninja shirt folding

This video on howtofoldashirt.net is great. I'm going to start thinking about doing this to all the shirts I fold. Mmmmm, that's good. Oh, once you brain wraps itself around the wonderfullness, check out the Starwars parody there too.
Update
No, Seriously WATCH IT.

Sorry I forgot to conclude the Russia story like I promised. Tomorrow, I know you're on needles and pins, but tomorrow.

Matrix pong

Those asians, they love the ping pong. Oh, and this is so awesome.