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Alabama faux-snow
As a followup to my snow photos from Champaign at Christmas, here’s a sample of a few photos documenting what it takes to shutdown much of Huntsville:
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Christmas snow in Illinois
Finally getting around to going through photos I’ve taken recently and uploaded a set I took of the snow while we were in Champaign for Christmas. Here’s a sample that I liked with Sarah chasing Rachel down the street with a snow shovel full of snow:
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eMusic makes me a sad panda
I’ve been a happy happy joy joy subscriber at eMusic since 2005. I wasn’t sure what I thought initially when Lee clued me into it (indie music being a new thing for me), but after that first month I was hooked. Took me a few months and then I bumped up to the annual subscription option. Until recently, my most recent subscription plan worked out to $16/month, which got me 90 tracks a month.
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Rackable acquires SGI?
Well this is certainly not something I expected. SGI is one of the few HPC vendors out there that I’m aware of who are still doing neat things with hardware. We’ve got some of their large SMP Itanium boxes on the floor where I work, and I think they’re pretty slick machines. Pricy, but slick. And so far their support is about the best I’ve dealt with. That’s not saying their perfect (try getting a CXFS guru on the phone when you need one without sitting on a major outage for several hours), but they generally seem better than most of the other HPC vendors I’ve worked with (IBM, Cray).
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The Woz takes job at Fusion-io
So this story has been all over the place (at least if you read computing/HPC news). Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and designer of the historically significant Apple I and Apple II, took a job as chief scientist at a startup I was already aware of, Fusion-io. They’ve been designing PCIe boards loaded with flash memory to deliver super high performance storage to servers and maybe high-end gamers. In theory it’s using similar technology to SSDs, but they’re able to achieve significantly higher bandwidth and IOPs than has been achieved in an SSD that is focused on stuffing flash into a conventional SATA hard drive form factor.
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Nashville Photos: Lane Motor Museum
A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months.
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Cat Diary, Day 38,974 - Now where did I leave my dignity?
My masters have hauled me down to this strange new land they keep referring to as The South. It seems like I’ve been hear for ages, which is apparently just long enough for them to inflict me with a bladder infection. I felt so uncomfortable I showed them who’s boss by peeing in things to anger them, and figured they’d break them any moment. Since they hadn’t made me better, I figured I had to be more blunt with these simpletons and started going to the litter box every fifteen minutes and I even stooped so low as to drag my ass on the carpet like a filthy dog.
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An Engineer's Guide to Cats
An Engineer’s Guide to Cats
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Research in Alabama - scorpions fight cancer at UAB
Medical researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered a new use for scorpion venom – cancer medication. Each year, some 9,000 Americans are diagnosed with malignant glioma, a form of brain cancer that kills about half its victims within a year of diagnosis. Glioma cells work a lot like cockroach muscle cells. And while that fact is pretty disgusting, it also got UAB researchers thinking about the giant Israeli scorpion, whose venom is harmless to humans but deadly to its cockroach prey.
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More photos from Savannah trip: Museum of Aviation
On the drive back from Savannah, Charles and I quickly stopped in to visit the Robins Air Force Base Museum of Aviation. Didn’t spend very long there, but it wasn’t too much out of the way for the drive back and had a chance to take a few pics. There were some more unusual planes there that I’d meant to go back and look up info on, but obviously hadn’t since I only just pulled the photos off my camera a few days ago with the rest of the photos from Savannah.
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