Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

More Amazon goodies

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I’m about to be heading to bed, but I spent a little time tonight playing around with Amazon‘s recommendation features. As you bounce through Amazon you can tell them what you own and assign ratings to items, which they then use to create recommendation pages. So far, it’s actually be fairly impressive — the more I put in, the more accurate they get. At the moment, off the top of my head, I’d say that for every 5 items they recommend, I’m likely to already own 3 of them (at least with music — the ratio for DVDs and books is somewhat less). Quite interesting.

I’ve also created an Amazon wishlist so that should anyone ever feel like spending money on me, they’ll have some suggestions. Woohoo!

New element discovered

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The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by investigators at a major U.S. research university. The element, tentatively named administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have one neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons, which gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.

Since it has no electrons, administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with.

According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.

Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately three years, at which time it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganization.

Research at other laboratories indicates that administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, and universities. It can usually be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.

Scientists point out that administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.

(Source unknown)

Check out my (messy) apartment!

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This is too cool! I was playing around at work with printing out some of the panoramic shots I’d clumsily put together using Photoshop, and one of the guys I work with pointed me to a really cool little PC program called Panorama Factory. After taking a series of shots, you feed them into the program, and it does all the work of warping and assembling the pictures into a finished panorama!

The coolest thing about this program, though, is that if you have a full 360-degree set of shots, it can create a Quicktime VR movie file! QtVR files allow you to click and drag around a photograph as if you were standing at the point where the photo was taken — they can be pretty cool to play with. So, on that note, check the rest of this post for a QtVR file I just made of my apartment! It’s a little messy, but that’s about the norm — it’s not too bad, or I wouldn’t put this up! You will, of course, need QuickTime installed on your system to view the file. You’ll also want to give it a moment to load if you’re on a dial-up modem, it’s a 1.1Mb file, so won’t be super-quick.

I’m alive!

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I do exist! Really, I do…

I’ve just been more or less ignoring things here for a little while. No real reason — it’s just that there hasn’t been a whole lot going on. I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with music and hanging out in the chatrooms, which — unfortunately — means some of my other pet projects have been getting short shrift. This should be changing, though….

Political compass

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Here’s an interesting online test — a Political Compass that adds a vertical Authoritarian/Libertarian line to the traditional horizontal Left/Right line and uses a series of questions to map out your political position. I ended up with a score of -6.12/-5.90, which puts me in the same rough area as Ghandi, from the looks of it. Here’s the analysis, though they recommend that you take the test before reading it.

(via Rebecca Blood)

I’m back! Really! I’m here!

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I got back in Monday night, I’ve just been too caught up in either resting or getting life as usual going again down here to have tossed anything up on the page for the past couple days.

I’ll get a more detailed post up soon — in the meantime, I’ve uploaded some pictures of the trip: James and Stacy’s wedding, the post-wedding relaxation, the Pride parade, and having fun at The Last Frontier with some of my friends from the Alaska chatroom in Yahoo! Chat the pictures that used to be on my .mac server have since come down.

Enjoy!

Off to Anchorage

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Well, Laura’s here, and we’ll be heading off to take me to the airport in the near future here. Then it’s off to Anchorage, to visit friends and see James and Stacy get married — woohoo!

If I manage to get any further posts up over the weekend, they’ll be from way up north somewhere….

Getting ready for Anchorage

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Well, I’ve got one more day of work ahead of me, then I’ll be heading back up to Anchorage for the weekend — woohoo! I currently have no clue quite how the weekend is going to work out…it’s definitely going to be interesting to see what happens. I know I’ve got the wedding on Saturday, but aside from that, things are pretty hazy. Guess I’ll just have to play it by ear and see how it all works out.

Last friday Chad, Rick and I went out to Polly Esther’s Culture Club, a 70’s/80’s-focused dance club down by the Space Needle to celebrate my 1 year anniversary. Neither Rick or I had been there before, so we figured it would be worth checking out. End result — fun place, and good music, but too expensive to become a regular habit ($10.00 cover!?). Made for an entertaining night, though, and will be worth stopping by from time to time.

The past couple days I got to spend some time when I was off work with Prairie, who I’d met through Yahoo! Chat some months ago. She goes to school out in Ellensburg, and as she had some free time between the end of college and her boyfriend returning to town, she came out to visit and see Seattle. Made for a fun few days, babbling about everything from Alaska to musicals to various books, and she let me borrow her copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the book that the movie Apocalypse Now was based on) to read — I’ll dive into that once I’m done with Gödel, Escher, Bach.

All in all, it’s been a good week so far. Tomorrow night Laura’s going to be coming out, we’re planning on hitting the Down Under to see a DJ she knows, then she’ll crash here so that she can give me a ride to the airport Friday morning. From there, it’s off to Anchorage — and on that note, it’s time for me to start packing!