X Prize Almost Won

SpaceShipOne just completed it's first of two required trips to win the Ansari X Prize Challenge. Basically it's $10mil to the first company to take 3 civilians into space and do it again with the same vehicle in 2 weeks. Contact Sir Branson for a ride. For more hit the ars.

May the schwartz be with you

A Spaceballs sequel... C'mon Mel, don't tease me - I'm fragile when it comes to sci-fi movie rumors that are too good to be true. (i.e. James Cameron directing Alien 5).

What the Bubble Got Right

Great essay by Paul Graham The author flows through a lot of topics, bubbles past, khakis, nerds, stock options, productivity... while keeping it short enough for a quick read.

Boeing Jet Converted Into Limo

From Gizmodo:

A Mexican limo company has converted a Boeing 727 airliner into an 18-meter, 50-person limousine powered by a 6-cylinder turbocharged diesel engine. They've thrown out the cramped quarters to include a bar, a dancefloor, a lounge, and even a "romantic space" in the back (romance is near the engines, it seems). For just $1,500, the coverted 737 can be yours for about 3 hours.

Just watching my new Star Wars DVDs

I'm taking a break from 24 season 2 to watch the new Star Wars DVDs. They look and sound amazing. I also like the subtle improvements to the improvements made a few years ago. So far I have to say well done and highly recommended to any Star Wars fans. And "Empire" is still the best of all the Star Wars movies.

Green Day: Burn our CDs

So Green Day is selling CD-Rs (blank CDs) with the artwork printed on it so you can download and burn their music onto them. Very cool.

Google local is here

Google local (find nearby stores & stuff) is now in Canada. I like it, especially the map.

That song from the Cold Shots ad and my search for audio software

You may have seen a television ad for Molson Cold Shots (beer) where two guys are talking by a fridge at a house part. You know, the "she's got hungry eyes" one. Well in the longer version of the ad the background music is great. Currently the Molson Cold Shots website plays it. My Internet searches revealed it's an unreleased mix by Montreal rapper "B-U The Knowledgist". Some people said it could be downloaded in MP3 format from the site. Well I couldn't find it and attempts to register failed. So finally I decided to just record it off the site and encode it to an MP3. Well the audio recorder with Windows can't do more than 1 minute at once. I tried various shareware programs. One was limited to 3 minutes for the free version, another to a low quality, frustration mounting... Then I find the open source (really free) application Audacity and it's awesome. Well it did make me download a separate MP3 encoder, but once I did and pointed the software to it, I was riding the gravy train to an audio feast. Delicious. So blah blah blah give me the MP3 already you say? Here it is. I'll leave it up here until someone asks me to remove it or the downloads use up too much bandwidth. I think it should be cool to post it here since it's available for free off of the Molson site. Enjoy :)

1954: What a home computer will look like in 2004

From manalang.com:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in year 2004

It's a fake picture (see source pictures here and here), but still funny.

Spread Firefox

I've posted here twice before about how the Firefox web browser is a better choice than Internet Explorer and how popular this idea has become. Today I discovered the "Spread Firefox!" campaign. This website has lots of information on why Firefox is good, how the worldwide adoption is going, and articles to help people switch and convince others to do the same. Unfortunately the spread site seems to be slow today, probably too much traffic. Well, at least the main Firefox site is always fast.

Build your own Ferrari

From an Acura: Lots of pictures

The trilogy soon

I hope my previous post about the upcoming original Star Wars trilogy wasn't too negative. Minor quibbles aside, I am looking forward to watching a digitally re-mastered Empire Strikes Back. Here's an article about the cleanup the original film has to go through for movies of this age.

My honeymoon pictures

I put up a little honeymoon website. Sorry for putting up honeymoon pictures before the wedding pictures, but the wedding photos aren't all ready yet.

A model airplane with real jet engines

Wow, great model It even crashes realistically. Check out the movie. Seriously though, it's a shame to lose all that hard work. There's a jet powered Concorde model too.

Mozilla browser use continues to rise

I use Mozilla FireFox as my web browser Web browser use share September 2004

Source	Internet Explorer	Mozilla/Netscape
W3Schools	74.8%	19.0%
OneStat.com	94.9%	3.0%
WebReference.com	65.1%	13.0%
Browser News (avg.)	81.0%	10.5%

Plastic magnets

I was talking with my engineering student brother about materials (metals mostly, but we dig polymers and composites too) and the topic of non-metal magnets came up. Anyway, this link is for him.