My Hot Rods
Mood:  chatty
Topic: technology
My neighbor here at home has been working on his hot rod. He imported the chassis from Europe and bought the motor and tires here in the States. After a few weeks, he's nearly done and has agreed to allow me to photograph it this weekenend. I can tell he's near completion as he's recently been revving up the engine.

Computers are my hot rods. Just as my neighbor could have bought the same car with the engine already in it, but didn't so that he could have the joy of installing it himself, so do I enjoy customizing my computer. I love anything involving customization from adding new physical components to installing new operating systems and configuring them. Another of my personal favorites is configuring the desktops, the digital equivalent of a car's custom paint job. I think that's why I love Fedora Linux so much - every 6 or so months they release a new version for me to install and explore and tinker. Additionally, KDE (one of the desktops for Linux) has nearly limitless opportunities for customization.

When I go to Best Buy with my fiancee I usually urge her to buy the latest $99 Dual Layer DVD burner, not so much because I want to burn dual layer discs or because I want her to be able to burn her own DVDs, but because I want to install it. Any component she buys even for her own computer brings me happiness to install.

For the past year and a half I have been counting down the days to graduation, not only because I will start my life and get married, but because I will have enough money to start working on computers from scratch. I've already found some sites for purchasing some really cool looking cases and can't wait to build my ultimate machines. My goal is to build the ultimate Windows and Linux machines. The Winbox will nearly solely exist for the purpose of allowing me to run Adobe Photoshop without the slightest slowdown. The Linux machine is intended to have two purposes - become my all-purpose machine as I've decided to fully support the open source movement as much as I can and to give me a way to benchmark if Linux is truly that much faster than Windows. My recent tests seem to indicate that it should be a much cleaner and faster run, but I've been running Linux on POS computers designed for Windows 98. I yearn to run it on a modern computer to be able to truly experience the features and not have ridiculous wait times for some of the programs. It'll be quite some months away, but I'll have pictures posted when I begin working on my rods. In the meanwhile, I'll post a picture of my neighbor's hot rod, if it's ok with him.

When Electrical Engineers Think too much....
Mood:  chatty
Topic: technology
During today's morning meditation I had a sudden epiphany. If nerve impulses travel through the body electrically, we have the equivalent of current passing through our bodies. If current is moving, we must posses our own magnetic fields. Then I wondered if this magnetic field might interfere with our portable electronics such as mp3 players and cellular phones. But then I came to a realization that made me gasp. Our body's magnetic field must be very trivial, so it may be our electronic devices which are interfering with us.

As you know if you've taken an Electromagnetic Physics courses in high school or college, when current moves through a wire it sets up an magnetic field concentric to the wire. So if this dot . were a wire going through your computer screen, the magnetic field would be going either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the dot. But another important way of looking at it would be if you had a circular magnetic field and put it by the dot, it would induce a current. The relationship goes both ways, you see. Therefore, the magnetic field coming off of the wire of a device could potentially affect the one in your body.

Am I saying we should stop using electronic devices? The answer must be obvious to you, because I wouldn't be typing this on a computer if I believed that were true. However, I think it is a topic worth studying as we have more and more devices on our person and surrounding us everywhere. When does this become too much? After all, I remember the demo in class where the frog was levitated with a few T's of magnetic field. This is because the magnetic fields were interacting with those within the frog. Now, most of us are nowhere near that much magnetic field ever, but I merely mentioned it as an extreme example of what we could be up against as we have more gadgets on our person.

Digital Life
Mood:  chatty
Topic: technology
I'm back because my fiancee has returned to NYC and I hope to be able to write daily for the next 15 days until I return to captivity.

Today I was reheating some food for lunch. I took it out of the fridge, covered it up, and put it into the microwave for one minute and forty-five seconds. I busied myself during this time by grabbing my utensils and the juice I'd be drinking. I even put dressing on my salad. My food still wasn't ready; it had nearly thirty or forty seconds left. "What's taking so long?", I thought and then amused myself with Homer's complaint to Marge, "isn't there something faster than a microwave?"

It wasn't the first time I'd gone through this sequence of events, but for the first time I realized what had happened to me. The digital world had changed my concept of time. Technology has come to represent to me an ever speeding up of important tasks. When we first got the internet, if I wanted to watch a movie trailer I had to wait nearly 20 minutes. They were nothing more than a novelty because it took so long. Then it shrank down to 10 minutes. Now, I can usually have a trailer downloaded in a couple of minutes on a good day.

The same phenomenon happened with web pages. I remember when an image filled page took a minute or two to fully load. Now it's just a few seconds until the page loads.

But all of this has ended up having a negative effect on me. Things that take a long time are horribly annoying. I used to be able to tolerate the time it took to fill a floppy disk. Now putting so much as a 300k file onto a floppy fills me with dread. My USB 2.0 jumpdrive is much smaller and much faster.

Even burning a CD, which took fifteen minutes on my original hardware and now takes 3 is so drearily long. I want it to go fastter dang it!

So, the microwave, which once amazed me with the speed with which it heated up food, now annoys me with how long it takes. The heating of food, unlike the rest of technology has not sped up. It's not because it's necessarily impossible, but because people don't care how fast the microwave is the same way they care about how fast their computer is.

I fear for my children's attention spans. I think it is definitely possible that some of recent increase in ADD diagnosis may be self-made.

Memory Works in Strange Ways
Mood:  chatty
Now Playing: "Happy New Year B" - Rent Soundtrack
Topic: technology
Today Rich and I were talking about the Xbox because I'm going to a Microsoft job interview this Friday. Since I'm not a CS major it's probably the only thing that I'd be qualified to do as an electrical engineering major. So Rich mentioned that the codename for the next Xbox is the "Ybox".
This jogged my mind to when I was working on my dad's computer.

Devoted readers will remember that I was trying to get some Adware and Spyware off his computer that had installed itself when I visited some website. Well, techies will know that Windows 95 was codenamed "Chicago". (Sidenote: I forget what the next windows is, but it's going to actually be an overhaul unlike ME or XP and is codenamed Dolphin or something like that) Well, this particular Adware made use of DLLs (dynamicly linked library) which are files that allow programs to be upgraded without having to redo all of the code. At least that's the simple explanation. Anyway!

So while I was looking through the DLLs of Internet Explorer I found references to "Chicago" in the code. Apparently when they changed the name to Win95 they didn't want to change the references in the code; because it probably would have been a nightmare. It was quite strange to see this "ancient", in PC time scales, reference on my dad's computer which was running Windows 2000.

Well, that probably got about half of you excited and the other half probably have no clue what I was talking about. Actually, if you're in the first group you probably know so much more about it than I do that you're probably either correcting me in your head or thinking about how you discovered this many years or months ago. hehe....if you're a new reader...I'm usually more balanced in my posts...so...um...sorry about that...