The house in St. Paul that I grew up in, and that my parents still live in, was built in 1923. Using ancestry.com, my dad dug up the census entry that shows the people living in that house (and some of the nearby houses on our street) as of April 5, 1930.
Apparently a Czechoslovakian immigrant named Phillip Hadd and his wife, Mary, lived there with their three daughters. It is likely that these were the original occupants of the house. It looks like the neighborhood was a real melting pot of recent immigrant families. In the ten houses listed on that page of the census, the listed locations for parents birthplace include Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Germany, Bohemia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Austria, as well as six US states.
I can't think of a single family in the neighborhood when I was living there (mid 1980's - 1994) that I considered to be new to the country.
This shirt was an instant buy for me, of course. How many of the robots can you name (naming the movie/show/game they come from is sufficient)? I got 23. (thx lukas)
My April is shaping up to be another fun-filled travel fiesta. I'll be in beautiful Ottawa, Canada, from the 7th to the 10th, talking to the fine folks at Chipworks. Then, from the 15th to the 25th, I'll be back in Kazakhstan doing... what we do... there. The wacky part about this particular trip to Kazakhstan is the 10 hour layover in Amsterdam. I fly in at 8:30 in the morning, and my flight leaves around dinnertime. I hear its a good airport, though; let's hope they have good wireless. Sadly, I'll be trapped in the international departure area because my country clearance cable doesn't allow me to visit Holland—I can't leave the airport and visit the Van Gogh Museum. :(
Everyone break out your March/April issue of Sport Rocketry magazine, which you obviously subscribe to... Now turn to page 15. There's me. :)
The page is a collection of silly rocketry pictures. For those of you who aren't into rocketry, this rocket is made of an old spent engine casing, but looks like I just glued a nosecone and fins to a big engine—something that is expressly forbidden in the safety code. It's a little rocketry joke.
I actually stole the idea from Robert DeHate; unfortunately that didn't get conveyed in the article. I hope he doesn't have a conniption... Honestly, Robert, on my old rocketry website I even called the rocket a DeHate G80.
Since I've been at LANL, it seems like the media has a fascination with every single thing that goes wrong here. While there have certainly been some big problems here, the response has been disproportionate to the severity of the actual events. What is really frustrating is that things at least as bad have been occurring at other DOE facilities, including other weapons labs, during this entire time and they go largely unrecognized by both the Congress and the media. So... let's see...
After years of bad press, I feel like the general public believes that LANL scientists couldn't keep a secret or keep track of a hard drive if their life depended on it. Looking at DOE facility security incident statistics for recent years, it appears that LANL falls about in the middle of incident frequency.
I'd like to see a single standard implemented here. If this sort of thing is a matter of national importance, then someone needs to crack the freakin' whip on some of these other clowns. If it's not, then stop telling the world that LANL employees are a bunch of undisciplined cowboys.
If you're reading this, then you are looking at mouser.org on its new home and may proceed to use the site as you are accustomed to. Edits to the genealogy pages, gallery comments, etc., are no longer in danger of being lost into the aether.
If my sysadmin is to be believed, mouser.org will be transferred to a new server sometime this week. This may result in the unanticipated borkination of certain dynamic features of this website. Anyone making changes to the genealogy pages, photo gallery, or any long-forgotten database-driven portion of this site might want to consider taking a break until I say the move has been completed—or at least back up your work.
I have fond memories of hanging out in the MIT Leg Lab before they closed it down the year before I left Cambridge. Some of my rockets are made from carbon fiber tube stock they threw out. They made really awesome robots that could walk, hop, and correct for unexpected disturbances. Apparently, since the closure of the Leg Lab, a spinoff called Boston Dynamics has emerged and is still pushing the limits of robotic equilibrium management and locomotion. My old friend Lukas crawled out from under the rubble of Atlanta to send me this awesome video of one of their products, a quadruped called "Big Dog" that is shown here traversing uneven slopes, ice, snow banks, piles of bricks, and occasionally being kicked in the side. The control problem here is so amazingly difficult that, even though this sometimes looks like a newly-born horse, its performance is just incredible.
Why is it that auto makers seem to oscillate in their apparent regard for alternative fuel vehicles? More importantly, when they are giving lip service to such an important issue, why is that they always run towards hydrogen fuel as The Future™?
"So if we put aside the spectacularly improbable prospect of fueling our planet with extraterrestrial hydrogen imports, the only way to get free hydrogen on Earth is to make it. The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one."
Hydrogen fuel for automobiles fails on so many levels it is comical that people even entertain the idea. Please do the world a favor and read Zubin's article, linked above. The more we educate the general populace about the basic science and economics behind issues like this, the sooner we can work towards actually improving out situation rather than just pipe dreaming with buzzwords.
Hey wouldn't it be great if we could power our cars with ice cream? And the only exhaust would be fluffy kittens! Yay!
A new computer has found its way into my home. I want to say that there were reasons other than playing Warcraft that caused this to happen... but that's basically it. Playing Warcraft on my work laptop was wrong for a number of reasons. Among them were:
1) It has a 12" screen w/ 1024x760 maximum resolution
2) It has passive cooling, aka Leg Heat Sink Technology™
3) It has no hardware graphics acceleration
4) It's lab property and I probably shouldn't be playing games on it.
Note that a side effect of #3 is that games like Warcraft cause the processor to go to 100% for the duration of play. This, combined with #2 and the fact that one (read: I) could (read: do) play Warcraft for countless hours in one sitting, leads to severe burns on the thighs. Insulating my thighs with something like a lapdesk or, heaven forbid, a table, leads to the laptop overheating and resetting within an hour. The only solution was to play on the kitchen counter, which is made of granite and turns out to be a pretty good heat sink. However, the counter height ruled out any comfortable seating meaning I had to play while sitting on a stool. Not good.
Anyway I picked up one of Dell's cheapest offerings, beefed up the RAM, graphics card, and monitor and now I have a desktop in my home again for the first time in about 4 years.
Since Warcraft was one of the drivers for the purchase of this computer, getting something that would work well with Ventrillo was also a concern. I already own a Bluetooth headset that I use with my PS3, so I got an optional package on the dell that bundles a Bluetooth receiver in the box and throws in a BT keyboard and mouse.
Unfortunately this machine was only offered with Vista and, as far as I can tell, Vista can't handle Bluetooth for shit. I can get audio to come out of one model BT headset, but not another. I can use the mic on the headset, but not if the headphones are enabled. If I have audio streaming to the headset, then the mouse doesn't work.
All I want is for the Ventrillo voice audio to come out of the headphones and the regular sound to come out of the speakers, and for the mic to work (in concert with the mouse and keyboard). Is that so hard? I thought Bluetooth was a more mature technology than this; it certainly seems to work sans problems with my PS3. Is it Vista's fault, then? Because this implementation is worthless. I'm going to call Dell tonight and see if there is some magic bullet that I can't figure out.
