I want one. Check out the demos to see how it works.
TactaPad
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Diamonds
I’ve gotta say this is one of the coolest things I’ve read about in a long time. A company in Boston has come up with a way to make diamonds from scratch, and I’m not talking about diamond dust. Real diamonds. Potentially big ones. This has some pretty incredible possibilities.
Almost There
I am one test score away from being fully certified in my applications at Epic. I’ve only been there for four months now. The thing is, I’m not sure I passed the last test.
Once I got out of constant classes, I started getting assigned small scale development and a few projects all of which have kept me pretty busy. I don’t think I’m really supposed to be spending time at work studying anymore so I really didn’t review much before the test. Let’s hope that wasn’t a mistake.
Something strange happened today. One of my latest projects is to retrofit an older version of the software with some changes made by some official body regarding codes that go out on claims. Basically I look at another guy’s work and copy it over to an older version. Anyway, I start adding these codes and a good chunk of them dealt with abortions. Some of them were not that surprising like “abortion due to rape” or “abortion due to imminent danger to the mother,” but the last one was “elective abortion” and that just made me stop and think. I realize that abortions in healthcare are a fact of life, but it was still a little strange to be confronted with it like that.
The weather is finally acting like it’s supposed to, at least that’s what I hear. The A/C will probably be off for the rest of the year, and the bedroom will be nice and cool for sleeping. I’m looking forward to it, but first I catch up on some tech news.
Currently Watching: Angels vs. Yankees
Smart
Here’s another guy asking, “Is Nintendo smarter than we think?”
Retro Phone Handset
This is too good not to share.
Firefox is #1 Best Product of 2005
Duh.
Art Imitating Life
If you’ve ever heard of the game World of Warcraft, you know that it is an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). It’s one of those games that can consume your life if you’re not careful, which is just one excellent reason I’ve avoided it (others would be the cost, and limited free time now that I work 40+ hours per week).
Recently something pretty cool happened in the world of the game. Blizzard, the game maker, introduced a new area with a new boss. When players got there, a spell called Corrupted Blood was cast upon them. Here’s where things get interesting: when players returned to towns in the game, they brought the disease back with them. The result was a virtual plague that quickly spread throughout the game. It was strong enough to kill low level characters and must have been a serious pain even to those at higher levels.
The fact that the whole thing was never supposed to happen doesn’t really matter. The plague spread in a very “natural” way, imitating a real life scenario. I’d say that’s both really cool and pretty scary at the same time.
Sound Without Speakers
Sound drivers about half the size of a coffee cup attach to solid surfaces, turning the entire surface or object into a large speaker. Imagine sitting in your living room, being truly engulfed by surround sound emanating directly from your walls!
Changes
So apparently I decided to start posting again. Who would have thought. The thing is, now I’m itching to change things up (in more ways than one). The site needs a new layout and a major overhaul in general and possibly a change in hosting. There’s files all over the place on the server, a lot of which aren’t mine and I don’t care about. Jimmy left long ago, and now Dylan has got his own website he’s been working on as well. So now it’s just me. I don’t even know if I want to keep this domain name, but until I come up with something better I’m hanging around here.
The first thing I decided to do was to switch back to Blogger for comments. I dropped Haloscan for several reasons. One, it was Dylan’s account so it doesn’t seem right to keep using it now. Two, I realized a few months ago that Haloscan doesn’t actually keep all of your old comments (at least not when you have a free account). It’s limited by either number of comments or a given amount of time, I’m not sure which. Three, Blogger has made a lot of improvements to the way they handle comments and I like it much better than I did when they first introduced the feature. So yeah, some comments have disappeared, but I can’t imagine there was anything that interesting there anyway.
I’m probably going to stick with Blogger for now, just because it makes things so easy, but I’m considering something else down the line. I’d really like to build my own system, but I doubt I could ever make something as effective as WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad.
One thing I know will change is the layout. We took the easy way out before and used a slightly modified, pre-existing Blogger template, but this time I think I’ll go for my own design. Stay tuned to see how that goes.
Currently Playing: Trapt – Stand Up
Family Guy Gets More Episodes
Family Guy silently gets a new 22-episode order, all but finalizing a fifth season. After sitting through class all afternoon, this just made my day!