Dave found an awesome site on tesla coils – Tesla_Downunder – the laser stuff on this sight is awesome as well

Man this is pissing me off. I would avoid Vista, even on OEM machines, until Apple and MSFT get this fixed.

I’m pissed off at Microsoft. They jammed all this new media playing goo into Vista, and have all this ambition around Zune, but they haven’t made sure that the most important, most used music playing experience works well with Vista. They let their ambition and ego get ahead of their customers.

I’m pissed off at Apple. Vista has been in beta for like forever, and Apple couldn’t figure out how to get iTunes upgraded in time for consumer release? Everyone was too freaking busy on the iphone or what? Again they let ego and ambition get in the way of supporting customers.

It is really bad. We are constantly rebooting our Vista machine with iTunes.

Jerks.

For homework in my class this term

* NSM Archive - Gallium Nitride (GaN) * Ditto for AlN, BN, and InN * Office of Naval Research pages on GaN, BN, AlN, InN

Kurt pointed this out to me – EFX-TEK :: Prop-2 Controller – new version, more outputs, BS2 syntax. Looking good.

relevant to the course I am taking right now –

Theory aims to describe fundamental properties of materials from PhysOrg.com
Gold is shiny, diamonds are transparent, and iron is magnetic. Why is that? The answer lies with a material ’s electronic structure, which determines its electrical, optical, and magnetic properties.

[…]

Plasma Light: Way Cool Tesla Device for a Lamp – these could be useful in a halloween mad scientist setup

Via Rahul at JB, All Things Distributed: On the Reliability of Hard Disks. Fascinating. A 6-10% failure rate for hard disks, wow. Another great argument for redudant storage.

Demystifying Display Connectors – some stuff in here I didn’t know about HDMI, DVI, UDI, Displayport, etc.

Milk Desk – i love well designed office furniture. I have a custom desk now that I am unhappy with because, despite massive passthrus, it just can’t handle the cabling and desk space demands of all the accesories needed. I am designing my own desk right now, some cool ideas in this one.

* Via Rahul Pathak, Boyd’s Law of Iteration: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration. Great pithy maxim. Doesn’t apply so well to heart surgery or parachuting, but really valuable for domains in which the cost of and individual failure is relatively low. * And Dave says “When you understand a market, opportunity is everywhere”. Again so true in so many domains – deep understanding yields insights.

* Need a new tiny PC for carrying around – OQO 2.0? One of the small Sonys? I don’t need a desktop replacement, just something small for classroom/cafe use. If it is big, I won’t carry it. * Need to set up an Amazon store. Maybe for Halloween. * Microsoft Robotics Software – interesting, tho it requires download of so much crap. * Mic zooming HD cameras. * The annoying need for notepad paste. I do this and it’s graphic friend “paintbrush paste” all the freaking time. * How to get slickrun to activate with Windows-R * Photostamps. Personalized stamps. Another good halloween or xmas idea * Aboutus. Intriguing.