Axodys

I haven’t done a whole lot with “blogshares”:http://blogshares.com since getting my “site registered”:http://www.blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Faxodys.com%2F&user=4624 and an initial foray into buying stocks for the first week or so, but I check in occasionally to see what’s going on and make the occasional trade. I was shocked to discover just minutes ago that my share price is approaching $20 now. That’s especially cool since I bought back 4K out of the original 5K possible as I earned money off of my original investments. I do wonder what kind of activity was involved in driving my stock price so high so fast though.

“Echo”:http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage is an initative to develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving and a publishing API that’s getting a ton of support from all the “relevant”:http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/RoadMap people. It’s going to be very interesting to see how rapidly this supplants RSS as the standard. I plan to support the format once it solidifies.

In case you didn’t notice from ranchero.com and elsewhere– “NetNewsWire 1.0.3″:http://ranchero.com/netnewswire was recently released. With the big new Combined View feature, the “25%-off sale”:https://order.kagi.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi?storeID=2DQ, and the knowledge of just how much time I spend in the Lite version I just couldn’t pass it up.

Incidentally this is my first post via NNW.

I finished “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”:http://www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/phoenix/ early this morning after two straight days of reading squeezed between basketball games (Saxon Shootout was this weekend). I really enjoyed reading the book and the fact that it was almost 900 pages long meant there was a lot of great meat to the story, but I don’t think it’s my favorite from the series. For some reason that I haven’t completely pinpointed yet “Prisoner of Azkaban”:http://www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/prisoner/index.htm had a lot more emotional resonance for me when I read it than the last two books in the series.

I don’t really want to get into specific spoilers about OOP at this point, but there were a couple things I really, really liked and want to mention. One of the strengths of the series has always been its memorable characters, but up to this point the character focus has largely been on Harry, Hermione, and Ron. I absolutely love the fact that both Neville and Ginny experienced significant (and in many ways surprising!) growth and development as characters over the course of the book. I also enjoyed the continuing plot thread involving Fred and George starting up their own magical joke and gag shop. While I found the ongoing development of Harry’s relationship with Cho Chang fairly poignant [SMALL NON-SPECIFIC SPECULATIVE SPOILER AHEAD] I liked the way things ended up with an entirely different seeker possibly being a better match for Harry down the road (at least as far as one of Harry’s two best friends is concerned)[/SMALL SPOILER]. It was also fun (and at times painful) to watch Ron start to come into his own with his various new roles in Gryffindor.

Despite all the good things about OOP there were definitely things that I didn’t like or just generally annoyed me, but I think I’ll save them for a later entry when I’ve had more time to reflect on the book. In the meantime if you’re a Harry Potter fan and haven’t gone out and picked up the latest addition to the storyline you’re seriously missing out.

Well, it took a while because Intelenet Wireless ran out of stock, but Mary and I received our brand new “Nokia 3650″:http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/3650 phones yesterday and they’re pretty sweet. They’re actually kind of smaller than I expected too which is sort of amusing considering I’ve read some complaints about that out there on the web. To me they seem perfectly proportioned.

I may have to pick up a D-Link bluetooth usb adaptor so that I can easily interface our computers with the phones. I think I’m also going to add the base t-zones capability to my phone at least, but I’m not looking to do a lot of file transfering at this point.

Getting back to my phone review I’m quite pleased with the sound quality and T-Mobile’s coverage in Spokane seems great so far. This morning I was able to call Mary in her classroom from my office here at work and there were no problems whatsoever. I was also able to call Mary from out at my mom’s house last night and she lives in a housing development several miles south of the city limits so that was pretty cool. It will be interesting to see how the coverage is up north where Mary’s parents live.

Here I am almost 30 years old and I’ve never had my own cell phone. Mary has had one through AT&T Wireless for around the last four years, but the coverage in town has always been somewhat spotty and I can rarely reach her where she works because the reception is so poor there. As a result we’ve been thinking about changing services/and or both getting new phones for quite a while now.

After hearing a lot of good things about the “Nokia 3650″:http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/3650 out there in weblog nation (integrated camera, bluetooth, pda capabilities) I was pretty sure that was the way I wanted to go, but unfortunately Amazon only seems to have single user deals. I kept poking around the web though and today discovered that “intelenetwireless.com”:http://intelenetwireless.com has an offer for two Nokia 3650s for a combine $160 after rebate if you sign up for a year’s worth of the “T-Mobile Family Time”:http://www.t-mobile.com/plans/family/default.asp?blnOverride=False&nav=hme plan. Yep, that looks about perfect. Time to order.

“ZMatrix”:http://zmatrix.sourceforge.net/index.html

bq. ZMatrix is an animated desktop background which displays streaming characters in a style similar to what was used in the movie ‘The Matrix’.

Looks like it’s a Windows only product, but pretty nifty if you’re looking to jazz up your desktop.

I had to put in my contacts for the first time in months today. Of the course the ones I initially put in were pretty crusty with age and lack of regular maintenance so I ended up digging around and finding my supply of pristine unused ones. I have different prescriptions for each of eyes so naturally the two boxes of fresh contacts were in two entirely different locations. Luckily I still had a pretty good idea of where those locations were.

So why did I have to wear my contacts today? The right side of my glasses came unscrewed and the lense fell out. I tried fixing it myself after digging around in my bag and finally finding my collection of very small screwdrivers, but didn’t have much luck. I then compounded the problem by losing the pesky screw on our bathroom floor.

So in the interest of time I went with my contacts and it looks like I’ll be going that route for the next couple days until I can swing by my eye doctor and get the frames repaired. It’s a good thing I played in “Hoopfest”:http://hoopfest.org last June and picked up these contacts as part of my preparations, it made today’s problem much more managable.

“Documents Detail Shuttle What-ifs”:http://www.msnbc.com/news/921637.asp?cp1=1

bq. An in-depth NASA study concludes that while the crew of the Columbia might have been able to be saved had the true state of the shuttle been known in time, the shuttle itself was doomed.

Here’s a quote from the article I found especially disappointing:

bq. The inspection spacewalk itself would have been almost trivial, the NASA team discovered, requiring neither a risky free-flight by an untethered astronaut nor complicated lash-up ladders. The two trained spacewalkers aboard Columbia, Mike Anderson and David Brown, would have been able to do it with their hands.

And speaking of risky space walks, why hasn’t NASA developed any kind of remote controlled camera/mini robot system that astronauts could deploy to inspect the shuttle once they reach orbit? It wouldn’t have to be big, just a video camera (MiniDV size or less), control and transmission circuitry, a small gas tank, and some thrusters to direct where it goes. You could even attach a long light-weight cable to it and just reel it in (carefully) when you’re done. Is there any reason that this couldn’t be developed with cheap, off the shelf technology?

*Update:* Looks like NASA tested something called the “AERcam”:http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/assembly/sprint/ on STS 87 back in 1997.

bq. The AERCam Sprint free-flyer is a 14-inch diameter, 35-pound sphere that contains two television cameras, an avionics system and 12 small nitrogen gas-powered thrusters. The sphere, which looks like an oversized soccer ball, was released by Mission Specialist Winston Scott during the STS-87 spacewalk and flew freely in the forward cargo bay for about 30 minutes. The free-flyer was remotely controlled by Pilot Steve Lindsey from the Shuttle’s aft flight deck using a hand controller, two laptop computers and a window-mounted antenna.

That’s actually a bit bigger than I was thinking of, but obviously it was just a prototype. In light of the fragile tiles the round shape and padding is a logical improvement on what I was thinking of.

And here’s the official NASA AERCam site: “aercam.nasa.gov”:http://aercam.nasa.gov. It looks like they’re also working on a much more practically sized “Mini-AERCam”:http://aercam.nasa.gov/Mini-AERCam_extended.htm

bq. The nanosatellite-class spherical Mini AERCam free flyer is 7.5 inches in diameter and weighs approximately 10 pounds, yet it incorporates significant additional capabilities compared to the 35 pound, 14 inch AERCam Sprint free flyer that flew as a remotely piloted Shuttle flight experiment in 1997.

That sounds pretty promising. Now can we please make these little guys standard equipment on all future shuttle and space station missions?

“Reclaim The Public Domain”:http://www.petitiononline.com/eldred/petition.html

I see they’re almost up to 4000 signatures. This is wild.