The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

A special event for the 600th anniversary of the Astronomical Clock’s in Prague.

60 minutes news story about the Bloom Box:

He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There’s no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.

Dictionary definition of combustion:

combustion, burning (a process in which a substance reacts with oxygen to give heat and light)

Clearly, what’s going on in the Bloom Box, in which fuel and oxygen react to produce energy, is TOTALLY different from combustion, which is where fuel and oxygen react to produce energy.  Completely different. Not even remotely similar. Nope, no combustion going on here.  And that’s not even getting into the later part of the article where they mention that the Bloom boxes could also run on solar power.  How would that even work?  I mean, I guess you could use them to prop up solar panels…  A giant cardboard box would work just as well, though, so that’s not much of a selling point.

I was watching the Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi channel today. One episode took place in the far distant future – the year 2000.  This is now the show’s 50th anniversary. I don’t think they’d have imagined that people would still be watching their show this far down the line. I mean, if they had, they’d have picked a year further in the future… Yet here we are in the year 2008… Um, 2009, and its still shown regularly. I think its impossible to predict what things we do matter and which will be forgotten.

Happy new year!

Something I simply don’t understand is how and why so many bad Christmas movies get made.  I’m not talking about movies that just aren’t that good, or have some issues, or maybe could have been pretty good in script form but then fell down in execution.  I mean absolute crap.  Crap they couldn’t have spent more than a single day writing, and barely any more time filming.

Tonight I watched a truly wretched bit of drek named Christmas in Wonderland.  This was, apparently, in theaters just last Christmas (for such a short time I didn’t even notice it, apparently…) and is already reduced to being a time filler on ABC Family’s “10,000 really crappy Christmas movies marathon.”

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I’m really not doing a very good job of keeping up on posting here.  It something I think about quite a bit – minor stuff mostly. Oh, that was kind of interesting, I should post something about it.  Only its been so long since I’ve posted something, I feel like posting a minor update is kind of stupid, and that I should work up something big to kick things off again.  Which I don’t.  And the longer its been since the last post, the bigger the thing I feel like I should post should be, which winds up meaning that I never post.

While pondering this problem, I realized that the only way to get around it was to simply post.  From now on, I plan to post every single day.  Of course, then I realized that New Year’s is coming up, and this would make a really good New Year’s resolution.  Then I realized that I was just trying to put off delaying updating some more.  So I modified my New Year’s resolution to be, “I hereby resolve to post every single day, starting three weeks ago as of New Years Day.”

Of course, three weeks ago was in fact on Tuesday, and its now Thursday night, which means I’ve broken my New Year’s resolution three weeks before I make it, which is kind of a new record for me.

Jeff Freeman, also known as Dundee, one of the founders of World of Dreams, died the other day, apparently of suicide. I haven’t spoken to him in years – shortly after the end of WoD was the last time – but he was a great guy.  I learned a lot from him.  The world is definitely a poorer place without him.

My dad’s hearing has been deteriorating for a while now, to the point where we’ve now been using closed captioning on the TV.  I have to say, I’m rather amazed at how badly closed captioning sucks.  So often its just awful.

I was watching a Bruce Willis movie the other day that kept transcribing completely unimportant things the background characters were saying.  You’d have the main characters having an important conversation that was made completely impossible to follow because they’d stick in sentence fragments from the background.  Stuff that’s completely inaudible and has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

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My fancy new Bluetooth keyboard. I got it today. I actually got it free, through Microsoft Live Search Club.  It wasn’t the keyboard they originally had up as a redemption item – it was an older model, I believe, but that went out of stock.  I originally ordered it back in January, and contacted them earlier this month after the 12 week waiting period had passed.  Today I got this in the mail.

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Just updated the server to the new WordPress 2.5.  This is mostly a test post to make sure things are working right.  I really need to post more often, though 

As long as I’m posting, though, I’ll mention that imported my older articles, and they can now be found in the archive.