From Austin to Adelaide
8915 Miles!Seattle
weeks-3-9days0-4hours-2-2minutes-5-5seconds-2-1December 2024 S M T W T F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Categories
Friends of Picayune
Meta
Category Archives: Science & Technology
RIP: Lou Ottens
Music fans throughout the decades have this man to thank for developing two major formats. His first was the cassette. Before them, tape was a reel-to-reel setup. Great quality for production and editing. Crappy for the average user: the machine … Continue reading
Octavia Butler gets some overdue love!
Although it will require the International Astronomical Union to make it official, the brilliant people at NASA have named/dedicated Perseverance‘s landing site to Sci-Fi author Octavia Butler. It’s a shame she didn’t live to receive this, she passed away in 2006. … Continue reading
Texas gubmint decides to murder the poor for Kapitalism
The animation from The Simpsons is a pretty accurate representation of how fucking dumb and willfully ignorant the Texas government, namely the executive branch, is. It’s also spot-on impression of this douchenozzle we have named Sid Miller, he’s the Agricultural Commissioner. … Continue reading
Posted in Austintatious, Biology, Ecology, Science & Technology
Tagged Current Events, Politics
Leave a comment
An iMac on Mars!
Not exactly. The recent probe Perseverance utilizes what was state-0f-the-art in the first iMac in 1998, the G3 processor with its blazing speed of 233 MHz (most processors are in the single-digit GHz range or at least a thousand times faster). No … Continue reading
An old piece of propaganda from the Seventies
The recent winter storm brought this to the forefront again as a friend asked why I was giving the temperature in Metric, then backpedalled on how he was joking. Another friend reminisced with me about the big push to learn … Continue reading
Fry’s bites the dust
“Well, that was sudden but sounds like them,” was my immediate reaction because customer service, product knowledge and basic human interactions were alien concepts to the Austin location. Ergo, them being open one day and then shut down nationwide seemed … Continue reading
Snow-ma-geddon 2021!
Power was restored at my house today, hence no post for yesterday! Lucky you while unlucky for Jennifer, her apartment remains offline and everything there is electric. Hard to believe 20 years ago, I wasn’t too thrilled about natural gas … Continue reading
1996: Copernicium is “discovered”
The short version to this story is that 25 years ago, Scientists in Germany created the 112th element and named it after the Polish Astronomer Copernicus (the Latin version of his name). They did this by “combining” Zinc-70 with Lead-208 … Continue reading
GM to go all electric by 2035
To all the MAGAts, haw haw! All that screaming, bullying and so on from your Orange Foolius to lower mileage standards have failed. For a corporation the size of General Motors to finally announce this means they have planned this … Continue reading
2001: On The Media begins
This weekend, the one podcast I have religiously listen to since…I can’t remember. Let’s just say when iTunes (now divided into Music and Podcasts) first added the ability to subscribe to podcasts. Checking the Internet, iTunes 4.9 which was about … Continue reading
Posted in Diversions, News, Science & Technology
Tagged Anniversary, Aughts, Communication, Podcast, Politics, Teens (21st Century)
Leave a comment
e-mail Etiquette is lacking with Generation Z?
A rather interesting opinion piece about how Gen Z does/doesn’t know how to write an e-mail, especially to their university instructors. Having been and continuing to be an avid user of this medium, I saw some of the writer’s point … Continue reading
A belated farewell to (Adobe) Flash
This browser plug-in to make animation and simple games work kept the Internet from being 99% dominated by porno; today it’s probably in the 80% department. I honestly don’t know what the real numbers are but I do consider 99% … Continue reading
My first attempt at digitizing vinyl worked out
I think Jennifer’s main gift went over well. It’s too soon to tell but I’m confident the middle present (in cost) was a success: Blue October’s latest release on two green vinyl disks. Why green not blue? No clue. As … Continue reading
RIP Chuck Yeager
We all learned about him from the movie The Right Stuff in the early Eighties, the first known man to break the sound barrier. It is a shame he didn’t get to be astronaut because he didn’t have a college degree. Chuck … Continue reading
Possible ray of hope, if it’s true. Dec. 2020 edition
Jennifer alerted me to this article last night when we were talking. Oddly it wasn’t in the regular news feeds I follow but the Austin American-Statesman is about a C+ on the reliability scale in my experience. The local excuse for … Continue reading