Date taken: November 19th

This sign is posted in the parkade at the building I work in. It prohibits doing sick stunts on your motorbike while in the parking area.

That or it means “no ghost riding the whip on company property”.

Paul Neave has put together a very impressive flash app that lets you input coordinates and a time, and view the night sky as it would appear on a cloudless night. It helped me identify a few of the stars and constellations visible from my house. You might recognize the name Paul Neave as the guy who made the Flash Earth application, which is also very cool. I couldn’t find a lot of information on his website, but it looks like he used a star map/database from somewhere and wrote it into that awesome dome-y interface.

If you’re into computer science or information technology, you’ve no-doubt been unwittingly signed up as the tech support go-to guy for your entire family. In many cases, the same goes for your circle of friends and neighbours. Sometimes it’s an easy way to make quick money, but it can be a hassle. There are a few things you should bring with you to every housecall to make your job that much easier:

The first is a Knoppix live cd or equivalent, these come in handy for all sorts of tasks, especially when the machine is wrecked up really badly.

The second is a USB flash drive full of common utilities, the tech support equivalent of a cartoon doctor’s little bag with a red cross on it. Here’s a list of portable applications that could help you out in the field.

1. ClamWin portable – the portable Windows version of ClamAV. Scan your client’s PC and remember the number of infections you find, so you can tell your friends later.
2. Recuva – a utility for restoring things that were accidentally deleted. It’s safer to have it on your flash drive than to try to go to the website and try to download it onto your clients’ machine.
3. SIW – System Information for Windows. SIW lets you quickly get all of the information about a system that you could ever want. Especially useful for figuring out the specific devices in a system without opening the case up. Also be aware that it has some password- and key-recovery features, which you may want to be careful with.
4. Portable Firefox and 7Zip – Your client’s browser may be crippled and unusable, this is the most common problem I’m asked to help with. 7Zip doesn’t hurt to have, in case you need to get into archives that aren’t supported by the system.

If you come prepared, you’ll be done and out of your neighbour’s musky, cigarette smoke-filled house in no time.

The Conet Project is a collection of recorded “numbers station” transmissions. If you want to get freaked out, spend some time reading about these numbers stations, and listening to the Conet Project (which you can download for free at the above link, or from Archive.org.

The Numbers Stations Wikipedia article has a link to a cool story that involves the use of numbers stations, it’s a very interesting read: http://www.myspystory.com/intro.html

A 100m-deep hole opened up this morning in Guatemala and swallowed several houses. Let’s get a grenade in there!

Read the related Somethingawful thread here, where I think they made the same joke as me.

An website called blog.thebudgetgraph.com made waves on Digg last week, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. It discusses the US Government’s $145 billion dollar budget for their war in Iraq, and things the money could be better spent on.

Data: From a Bread for the World study done in 2000. Or we can just give every tax payer their thousand dollars back. Unfortunately we don’t have time to entertain such flights of fancy like ending hunger or free health insurance. Don’t you know there is a war on?!

Be sure to check out the very cool Zoomify poster, too.