My sister has just started blogging. It’s called The Blog of Heart Physiology.
She opens with the catchy question
“Have you ever found yourself lying awake 3 am in the morning wondering why the aorta doesn’t collapse during systole due to the Bernoulli effect? Or why we see ST segment depressions during exercise stress testing? And why in the name of heaven only in the lateral leads?” …
We’re probably more alike than I’d feel comfortable admitting… :)
A motorbike driver is “speeding along” on the congested freeways in Tokyo.
I discovered a little gem the other day, a program called Q10. It is a wonderful little word processor, designed for writing and nothing else; it completely blacks out your entire screen and presents you with nothing but… writing. It even has little typewriter sounds to make it feel like you’re… writing.
It inspires me to create something. But what? Endless possibilities lie in front of me, a million ideas fluttering in the wind, ready to be grabbed and put into a literary masterpiece.
Unfortunately, problems loom ahead. The words do fine on their own, but the ideas that come to me seem to be rather a tangled mess of intertwining jumble. Take this example, the first two paragraphs of my first literary masterpiece: :)
The rain splashed down onto the platform from a dark and brooding sky. It was the kind of rain that falls with the intention of once and for all proving to people rushing to get home from a full day in the office, that the day can, in fact, get worse; and what funnier way of doing so than by soaking them completely wet while waiting for a train? The rain splashed loudly and happily onto the poor, hurrying persons being unfortunate enough, on this rainy Wednesday in November, to take the 6:05pm from Cheltenham Station; a train that was about 30 minutes late.
The reason that the 6:05pm was about 30 minutes late had, unfortunately, nothing to do with British Rail. It was largely because of a heated argument in passenger car number four, between a Mr. Nixby and a very unfortunate professor of high-energy particle physics.
I can’t wait to read the rest. The question is… where do you go from here? :)
A colleague sent me an attachment today, a MindManager map file. MindManager is a tool that has become popular recently; it’s a program that allows you to build mindmaps. A lot of people here like it. I’m not intending to plug the program here, I use Notepad to make my mindmaps and it works well for me.
Of course, to view the actual MindManager map files, you need a viewer. So I went to their site and downloaded the free viewer, which turned out to be a whopping 76 megabytes of download. It included a full professional installation, that reverted back to a free viewer when the trial period expired. Good marketing, supposedly, but that was not what I was looking for.
And it integrates with the entire Office suite, install dictionaries and so on; unless you manually deactivate all those features – although I was unable to deactivate the installation of the German spell check library for some reason.
This is, I’m noticing, a trend.
More and more, I’m leaning towards Portable Applications. Portable applications are programs you can install onto a USB stick, that require no further installation or setup in terms of registry settings, COM registration or anything. It’s just a simple, portable program: Plug it into a computer, start it, and you’re on.
My favorite application in this category is Miranda IM. A complete Instant Messaging client that supports ICQ, MSN, IRC, Jabber, and several other protocols. No advertising, no graphics-heavy application that takes over your system. Just a clean, small program that does what it’s supposed to do.
Truly, small is beautiful.
Probably one of the more romantic ways to propose. At least if you like cats.
Check out the thread on Stuff On My Cat when Jeff proposed to Heather… through a cat. The posting generated an unbelievable amount of comments, with people staying glued to their screens all day to see if Heather said yes or not.
She said yes. And the congratulations poured in from the U.S., England, Denmark, China….
I have to suggest a website to you, Dear Reader.
The past days I’ve bought a few musical pieces from eClassical.com, a wonderful website that has mp3 recordings, without DRM or any other digital rights scheme, for very good prices. It’s super-easy: click on what you want to buy, enter your credit card number, and you get a download link back in the mail where you can download the files.
The selection is great. Alfvén, Haydn, Prokofiev, Telemann, Stenhammar, Mahler, Fauré, Orff, Pärt… Or try Beethoven’s nine symphonies (all of them) for $7.99…
My new favorite composer is Camille Saint-Saëns. His 3rd symphony (“Organ”) is highly recommended.
I took a few pictures from my new home town Skärhamn. Have a look at them here.
Orbiter is a really cool space simulator. It’s written by Martin Schweiger as a freeware project and is probably one of the most realistic (and beautiful!) space simulators out there. It features very physically realistic models, which means you probably need to learn orbital mechanics before you can put anything in orbit.
But the thing I like the most is all the stuff that goes into the DeltaGlider III, the main spaceship used in the simulation. The first thing I did was to try to take off as a normal plane, and within twenty seconds I had master alarms going off, warning lights and beeping sounds all over the cockpit. In a futile attempt to figure out what was wrong (the landing gear broke due to high speed), I inadvertently shut down the main bus generators and suddenly I sat in a dark cockpit, slowly descending towards earth with broken landing gear, and absolutely zero power. For a few seconds, I frantically tried to press random “APU start” and “emergency power” buttons, but before long I plunged into the ground like a JAS 39 with faulty software.
The picture on the right is the fuel and engine control block. It controls the regulation of fuel to main, rcs and hover engines, as well as crossfeeding, refilling and fuel dump systems. As you can clearly see, the system is hooked up to a space station (dock), from which we are refilling the main fuel tank.
And there’s systems for the high-gain antenna, power supply, autopilot, landing gears, airlock and docking, passenger status, main-engine gimbals, life-support and the on-board computer, the flight controller.
In short, a dream come true. :)
On the topic of what 2007 is going to look like, the Minneapolis Star Tribune had an article about what might possibly happen, and what is actually likely to happen. And on the topic of health, it was said, which I thought was very true and rather amusing…:
You’ll probably hear that some common food has an unexpected health-boosting property. (Eggs prevent glaucoma! Onions promote healthy scalps, but only in suppository form!) You’ll read that cappuccino froth has been found to make lab rats actually explode with tumors, but this study will be countermanded by another one that says cell-phone radiation deactivates the froth peril, and in the end you will still hit the drive-through because there’s nothing in the fridge but French’s mustard from 1999, and everyone has to die of something.
(StarTribune, James Lileks: “A white-bread year ahead”)