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Relaxing Weekend (Monday, September 13, 2004 - 12:32:05 PM)
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Carolaina and I went to see her Grandma up in Melbourne. I need to stop bringing my laptop with me when we go there--I end up missing out on a lot of relaxing opportunities because I end up playing games most of the time. It's traditional for us to walk from her Grammie's house and down the road and around the old cemetary. I ended up not doing that this time because I played Dungeon Siege too much while there.
A couple of hours after we got back on Sunday, I got a call from Anthony! He's an old friend of mine from high school that I haven't seen for at least 5 years or more. We reminisced about how much we both missed playing Dungeons & Dragons. This coming weekend, we'll be spending time together, getting caught up on our lives. I certainly hope that we can renew our friendship.
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More Cowboy Bebop! (Thursday, September 9, 2004 - 12:28:46 PM)
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Three weeks ago, I started scrimping and scraping and saving all the money I could to get the next Cowboy Bebop DVD I wanted. Session #2 finally arrived on Tuesday. Every time I see a new (to me) episode, I'm just blown away by the quality of this series. Episodes 6-10 are on this disc.
If you haven't heard of Sturgeon's Law, it says this: "Ninety percent of everything is crap." Unfortunately I've found out that anime, like everything else, is not immune to this law. Even Robotech: The Macross Saga, which I loved as a kid, is not that great while trying to watch it today.
But Cowboy Bebop, though, is AWESOME! I'd say it's in the top 1% of all anime. I'm now even wanting to get one of the soundtracks. I just can't get enough of the show and it's great music.
Eventually, I'd like to get a Japanese movie called "The Hidden Fortress". I've heard that Star Wars was based on the story in this movie. I wish I could find where I had read this online, I could have sworn it was something the great Roger Ebert written. Ah, found it. Amazon.com has something about it as well--read the reviews down the page.
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Alternative Power (Sunday, August 29, 2004 - 3:22:05 PM)
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Through a link on Slashdot, I came across a neat article about a Hamster-Powered Night Light. I checked out the rest of their site and found it extremely fascinating. These people live WAY up there in northern Colorado, about 15 miles from any power line. So they've had to become very creative in coming up with alternative power sources.
They use a combination of solar power, wind power and hydro power that all hooks up to and charges batteries. As a result, they've become extremely efficient in their power usage. I really like their ideas about using LEDs for house lighting.
This site has inspired us to try and reduce our power usage as much as possible. Our last electric bill was over $120. First thing I will try is to build a battery-powered LED lamp. I found a cheap source of LEDs online. As soon as Carolaina's monthly check comes in, I'll be ordering some. According to the LED page on OtherPower.com's site, I calculated that I can make a nice little lamp using 10 white LEDs powered by (4) 9vDC batteries. If this is successful, I'll be building more and replacing all the lamps in our house with them. If the lamps don't put out enough light, we can always replace our standard, inefficient incandescent bulbs with the better compact flourescent bulbs.
We will also unplug anything and everything while we're not using it. The TV, DVD & VCR are all especially bad at continuing to draw power even when they're turned "off". Then, our only power hogs will be the heating/air system, the washing machines (clothes and dishes) and the stove top & oven. At least with the heating/air system, we can turn down the temp and revel in this wonderfully cool summer.
Now if we can just find neat ways to reduce our water bill...
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Friday afternoon I read about the 10-year anniversary of POVRay on Slashdot. It got me interested in this program again, so I checked it out and found that the lastest version is only a 10 Mb download. On Saturday I downloaded it during lunch--it only took about 30 minutes on the dial-up connection. Despite the poor documentation's best efforts to thwart me, I've had some success. Take a look at this earth in space image I created. If you're interested, you can download the source code I created.
I got the idea for this image from the XPlanet desktop program. Here's a screenshot of my desktop (sans icons, the stars were lost in the resize) so you can compare the differences. I reduced the cloud map image down to 16 colors to make it easier to work with. Of course, XPlanet on my desktop has a newer cloud map than the one I used. If you want to re-create all this yourself, you can go to the XPlanet site and follow the links to get the earth and cloud images.
Doing this kind of thing "manually" in POVRay really makes me appreciate how XPlanet effortlessly does it for me. It's nice to know, though that I can more or less recreate the desktop image if XPlanet ever craps out on me.
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I am so sick of dial-up. But since we can't even afford to spit right now, it's what I'm stuck with. I'll spare you the vitriolic, frustrated rant.
Carolaina has been back to school since Monday. The teachers are required to be there this week, and they've certainly needed the preparation time. The kids start back this coming Monday.
When I got up this morning, I could have sworn it was Friday. Oh well.
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