Sunday, January 16, 2005

Feel the Noize -- 9:55 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

For Christmas I bought myself a series of DVD guitar instructional videos so I can finally learn to play decently. The series has been available forever; a friend of mine used it when we were in college. For those of you keeping score at home, it's called Metal Method. I got the complete basic course and the Stevie Ray Vaughn style DVD. The first lick on the SRV disc is the opening to "Scuttle Buttin'" from his album Couldn't Stand the Weather. I can play it at about half speed pretty cleanly. I can actually play it better than Stevie can, on account of him being dead and all.

My oldest son has expressed an interest in playing guitar. He's taking piano right now to get the basic music concepts down. I'll let him use my old guitar to see if he'll stick with it or not. I'll use the DVDs to teach him.

Bleh -- 8:15 pm CST, Update by The Master

Well, step 1 of the massive system swap is done. I've got my new AMD A64-3500+ up and running, and Half-Life 2 is easily 4 times faster than before. This is an awesome upgrade, considering load times were at about 1-2 minutes for a full level change, and between 30 seconds and a minute for save points. Yuck.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

How a Huygens Disaster Was Averted -- 1:42 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

We are all enjoying the sights and sounds of Titan sent to Earth by Cassini from the Huygens lander. What few realize is how close we came to getting nothing but garbage from it. The Italian company that made the radio link between the two crafts failed to take Doppler shift into account. To make matters worse, the timing information was in firmware, not software, so it couldn't be fixed en route. The whole flight had to be altered so that Doppler shift could be avoided. If it weren't for the persistence of one scientist, we would be bemoaning a very expensive failure today. Thanks Slashdot.

Past Two Days' News

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