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GW likes to take a couple people with him whenever he travels…

…as he should be doing. He’s the PRESIDENT for crying out loud. And some people say this is excessive.

(click for larger version)

This amazing image shows a couple of planes on their descent onto a pair of parallel runways. The smaller plane is in the foreground; the larger plane in the background. This creates an optical illusion that makes it seems like the planes are merely a few feet from each other, when in reality they are a few hundred feet from each other.
http://www.noahwass.com/two_airplane_optical_illusion.aspx

via: http://www.noahwass.com/two_airplane_optical_illusion.aspx

I don’t usually use Windows, but at school last Friday this thing popped up when I logged in. I took a quick screen shot and saved it to my flash drive. LOL. Nobody else around me got it, so I guess I have to explain this.

OpenOffice.org is a gnu (open-source) alternative to Microsoft Office. It was developed specifically to be free, and always will be. It runs on the Java platform, so obviously Sun (the company that develops Java) has decided to use it as promotional material. Just goes to show you how notoriously annoying Java can be. Its not that JRE (Java Runtime Enviroment) is bad, but I hate that every time it updates itself it installs a new version on a different place in my system without uninstalling the old one. You can even see this in action in the screenshot: there are two icons for 2 different running versions of JRE.

Two funny sites about cats:

KittenWar.com -
You see 2 pictures of different cats, then you click on the one you like better. Simple and gets boring fast, but worth a laugh to see the funny-looking kittens.





ICANHASCHEEZBURGER.com -
teh funstest. The best of lolzcats.com organized neatly in a easy to navigate blog. lolcatz make the funniest single-picture comics but its impossible to navigate their site. icanhascheeseburger is much better.

I left for about a week to the Jersey shore. It was pretty fun, but I have over 24 bug bites (I can’t exactly see my own back, but it itches like crazy so I’m sure there are a few more). So now that I’m back I can finally write about the new iMacs.

I was wrong- we were all wrong to a certain extent. Almost all predictions revolved around brushed aluminum, but each in a different way. I, and many others, wanted the “chin” at the bottom to disappear. That big gap below the screen, where the Apple logo is. I also thought Apple would round the top and bottom edges so the iMac would look exactly like their cinema displays. But, I was wrong.

Although the iMac still has its huge chin, it actually looks good. The “aluminum and glass” design works well. Apple has really done a great job refining their product line. I think everything Apple will make in the future would be simple, bold, clean, and professional. As Jobs mentioned in the keynote, he wants Apple products to have a sense of exclusivity and elegance while still being affordable.

Whoever is directing this, please, stop for a moment and think. Just think about it. Is the world really ready to end? Please, just stop. Do not make this movie. Please.

About noon yesterday (I left the night before) I got back from my short trip to Chicago, Illinois. I took a lot of photos, so check out the album at Pakman20.com/photos. I think from this trip I’ve learned 3 main things:

1. Ohio has very clean restrooms in their new, big, shiny, standardized rest stops.
2. Although the Sears Tower is higher than the John Hancock Building, the Hancock has a much better tour in their observatory and is presented much better. It’s cleaner, newer, has more information, and is designed well.
3. Straws can be made out of paper and still be durable.
   When I visited Shedd’s Aquarium in Chicago I noticed that is was very energy efficient/environmentally friendly. There were almost as many recycling bins as garbage cans, the back of every map and brochure had “please recycle” written all over it, even the bathrooms had replaced the expensive, tree killing paper towels with high efficiency blow dryers- each equipped with an LCD display that cycled through advertisements and reminders to recycle. But by far the coolest things were the straws at the restaurant and food court. Like the cardboard tube at the center of a roll of paper towels or wrapping paper, they were made not of plastic but recycled cardboard spiraled into a tube. Of course they looked and sounded cool, but I thought they might be a little weak in actual use. To my surprise, they were just as strong as plastic even after sitting in a glass of Coke for a little over a half hour, a feat that would rot any ordinary roll or paper into a deliciously feeble pulp. A cardboard straw is just as good as any plastic straw, except better for the environment. The wrappers identified them as “earth friendly straws” from aardvarkstraws.com. Now if only I could get these at my local Shop Rite…

Tremulous is not only unquestionably the best free game I’ve ever played, but right up there on my list with other games that I’ve payed for. It’s a great fps (first person shooter) with a little bit of rts (real time strategy) thrown in. You choose your side: humans or aliens (I’m always a human) and play away online. Even compared to non-free games, it looks great. Not top-of-the-line, but still great.

If you play as a human, you start out with only a rifle. You have to hunt down the aliens, and each time you kill one you get “credits”. You can use these credits to buy new armor, weapons, etc. Each time you die, you loose everything except your credits. But that’s not all. There’s also a lot of strategy involved. The humans have to protect their reactor, the main core of their base. The reactor provides power for other structures, such as respawn points (telenodes), medistations (heals you), armories, and turrets. If the aliens destroy your reactor of all of your telenodes, you loose.

The aliens, meanwhile, have to protect their “overminds”, the alien equivalent of a reactor, eggs (like telenodes), and so on. Aliens don’t have credits, though. Each time they get a kill they can evolve one step higher. The more they evolve, the bigger, stronger, and faster they get.

Tremulous is awesome. Even if it doesn’t sound like fun to you, trust me, try it. It’s free, so what do you have to loose? The music in that promo video is kinda weird, though.

Official Site: Tremulous.net
Windows and Linux versions: http://tremulous.net/files/ (get the ’stand alone’ version, at the top of the list)
Mac Version: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/action_adventure/tremulous.html (universal binary)

Here’s an awesome picture I found on Digg.com. From http://bestpicever.com/pic-132-Tornado-rainbow. I love how the raindrops are distorted, even though that’s only because of the camera.

And here’s a couple more cool pictures of tornadoes. If you click on either you can see a bigger version. And the rest of this site (BestPicEver.com) has some other pretty nice photos, including non-weather-related ones. I like the butterfly with transparent wings, the tip of the iceberg, the chair with balloons, and especially the water droplet. Unfortunately, though, the pages on that site take quite a long time to load.

Tim Knowles of timknowles.co.uk put a camera in a box and mailed it to himself, setting the hidden device to take a picture every 10 seconds. He recorded a total of 6994 images and says he put them into a slideshow, but I can’t find it. I could only find this small image of highlights: (click link to see image) Continue reading »