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So, I found story today about teleportation.. seems like at the quantum level, scientists have been able to teleport things around. Pretty frikkin’ awesome. I sent it to Marcy, who then brought up time travel… which then made me think of this movie about the tenth dimension that mcc showed me like a few years ago..

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Man.. this video is awesome… it makes my brain hurt a lil’ bit, but it’s super cool to think about this stuff… Yay geeky stuff.

Ok, this is a fitting close to this post.. a geeky joke, courtesy of our favorite punster, Audris:

2 atoms are rushing down the street and they crash into each other
atom 1 goes Are you alright?!
atom 2 goes, yeah, but i think i dropped an electron
atom 1 goes For realz???
and atom 2 goes yeah, i’m POSITIVE!

Sweet. Tonight was the lunar eclipse. So frikkin’ cool. It was a little foggy, and it took me a little while to figure out how to really take pics of the moon properly… But, about 5 minutes before it hit total, the entire sky cleared up.. and I was able to get a few decent shots of the moon as it got eclipsed by the earth.. I started out with a large aperture, but then figured out that it was a lot better at f/8.0, and a pretty fast shutter, like around 1/30..

I put together a little montage of my best shots, but it’s not at good as this one.. But, for my first lunar eclipse shoot, I think it’s pretty decent…

All the pics are here.

Ok, I guess I should get to sleep now.

For the past few weeks, my computer had been acting more and more sluggish with each day… and I couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. I mean, yes, I usually have a ton of windows open, but I kind of need to with the amount of multi-tasking that I do…

I figured that the digital detritus was just building up from over two years of use and my laptop was just in need of a wipe and rebuild.. But, I don’t really have time to do that (nor do we have an IS dept to handle that kind of task)..

So, last night, after a night of sitting around, I awoke to find my laptop in a frozen catatonic state. Ugh. I did a hard reboot, and was horrified to find that it wouldn’t even start up anymore. I turned it off, booted into the IBM restore function, looked around a bit, and then restarted again, and then thankfully it started up again. But, sensing that whatever caused my laptop to zombie was still lurking around, I did a little digging around. My hard disk sure was frag’d crazy, but come on, that couldn’t be the cause of the problems…

I found that whenever I started up Firefox, it used like 208mb of memory… even with just one window open. Hmm.. that’s not quite right. Talking to Mike, his FF only uses like 80mb even when he has like 8 tabs open, so something is definitely not right.. Some googling came up with some fixes that just seemed too drastic to be the right fix, so I dug around my settings for a bit.. And then I found the culprit…

I had set the “Remember visited pages” setting to 999 days. Hmmmm.. could that be it? I mean.. Firefox couldn’t possibly be storing 999 days of my browsing history in memory, could it? Sure, I’ll give it a try… I remember that I changed that cuz it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I set it to 30 days.. and.. VOILA!! Memory usage is now down to 50mb.. Woooohoooo…

Seriously, that setting should come with some sort of warning or something… Anyway, hopefully this post will serve as a warning to others so that I’m not the only one that is shooting myself in the foot.

This should teach me a lesson not to be such a packrat… Speaking of which, I really need to clean out my closet.

This is rad. And by “rad” I mean omg what a super nerd I am.

The Konami Code works on Digg.

And by “works” I don’t mean it gives you 20 lives, but it expands all of the comments, which isn’t the cool thing — but the fact that it doesn’t anything at all is really rad.

Hmmm.. I wonder if the Konami Code works on like ATMs, now that would be super duper rad, for reals.

Woohoo!! I’m now the #6 dennis on google. Is it really, really nerdy to be excited about this?

Don’t answer that.

Woohoo. Tales from my nerdy past. This is my 1993 appearance on the local quiz show, Academic Challenge. I tried to upload this to YouTube, but they have a 10 minute limit, and the other day I decided to try google video, and it worked there..

I remember our strategy for the “Hodgepodge” category was to always pick “Math” because our rationale was that no matter what, we would be able to figure out the answer. But, honestly, that was actually the most stressful cuz I don’t really like math that much, and I’m a little too impatient to sit there and calculate things out… I’m much more of a “don’t think about it too much” trivia answerer..

Anyway… good stuff. Wow. the 90s.. Yay.

Ok.. so I’ve been saying for years now to invest in corn futures.. My reasoning was that as global consumption of beef increases, global consumption of corn will increase (since cows eat a lot of corn) — so, corn prices will continue to rise.

So, we just hit a 10-year high for corn prices. And, I think it’ll continue to rise, because of the beef thing, and now — ethanol is taking off, so that’ll exert even more pressure on corn prices..

Damn, if only I had followed my own advice and actually put my money where my mouth is.

The future isn’t plastics, my boy, it’s in CORN.

Ali and I headed down to the Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight yesterday — along with 1,000 other pillow-wielding people.. It was pretty fun, kind of silly, and very, very feathery. On the Muni ride over, I looked around, and like half of the people heading down to the Embarcadero were holding pillows. C’mon people, you’re supposed to at least try and hide it a little, no? I got there a few minutes before 6, and people were milling about.. At 6pm precisely, the entire plaza erupted into a huge pillow fight, and after about 5 minutes of pillow pummeling, feathers started flying. Feathers were everywhere, it was insane.

So, anyway… my PR folks must be working overtime, cuz I’m in the news again. And, they say that I’m “incredibly attractive.” Well, they said that everyone that went was “incredibly attractive,” but I’ll take it anyway.

Psst. This Wednesday, Justin Hermann Plaza, 6pm.

Pillow Fight.

Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day. Extra points for anyone dressed up as Cupid.