Fast Fact #2
By admin | November 29, 2011
The Tsar Bomba was the largest single nuclear weapon ever built in terms of yield. Designed by the Soviets in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s, it had a theoretical maximum of 100 megatons of TNT. Such a detonation would have resulted in the equivalent of 25% of the nuclear fallout caused by all previous nuclear detonations combined, so the yield was cut almost in half to 56 megatons. Still, the mid-air detonation of the first (and only) test was so powerful, the resulting fireball was prevented from hitting the ground by its own shockwave hitting the ground first and bouncing back into the atmosphere.
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Fast fact
By admin | November 28, 2011
Bismuth, long thought to be the heaviest stable element on the periodic table, and the main ingredient in medicines such as Pepto Bismol and Kaopectate, as well as cosmetics, is actually radioactive. This was only discovered because detectors sensitive enough to detect the miniscule radiation emitted weren’t built until 2003, and was measured to be much lower than the background radiation that occurs naturally on Earth anyway. Its half-life was measured to be approximately one-billion times longer than the current age of the Universe, and by all accounts, bismuth is still considered to be one of the least toxic heavy elements in nature.
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I love it when a plan comes together
By admin | October 10, 2011
Since moving into my new apartment, I’ve been slowly but surely settling in. The only item of consequence I still have to do is to get the furniture out of my old apartment and get it all into here. I was supposed to do it this weekend, but the weather was being uncooperative on the only two days my friends were available to do it this weekend, and today being Colombus day and a day I have off from work, the weather decided to mock me by being nice most of the day.
However, one thing I’m extermely excited about is the fact I have AT&T U-Verse in my new apartment. It was a service I was supposed to get when I initially moved back to South Florida. The necessary wiring in the apartment I moved into a year ago was in such a bad state, however, that getting a good U-Verse signal was pretty much impossible. It was so bad, the tecnichian ventured a guess that a good portion of the wiring would have to be ripped out from the building as a whole in order for me to get U-Verse. That being said, though, I have to say, it was worth the wait.
In the week or so I’ve had U-Verse, I’ve been able to tweak it such that not only does it go through ethernet cabling instead of the coax cabling everyone knows and loves, I’ve even set it up to go through my 48-port switch.
It hasn’t been without its glitches though. One thing I discovered initially was that at some random time after I turned my computer on, my computer, and only my computer, suddenly lost its internet connection. My laptop, iPhone, and iPad were all just fine and could connect to the Internet without a problem, and all of my U-Verse boxes were working just fine. The funny thing was, there was no set time on when it would happen. I could happily be on my main character on WoW for hours, and there wouldn’t be an issue, then suddenly POOF, my connection was gone. I’d have to disable and re-enable both of my NIC’s to get the connection back, and even then, it would only be sometimes for a few minutes.
Today though, I finally figured it out. U-Verse is set up as a multicast service. In plain english, that means that once it gets to the box that your U-Verse set-top boxes are connected to, instead of just sending the signal to the set-top boxes, it sends the signal to EVERYTHING. In this case, since I had the boxes hooked into the switch, all 48 ports on the switch were getting the signal. My computer, when it was receiving that signal, was essentially going “Huh, what in the tarnation is this? I’m killing my connection. Screw this!” at random times.
So what I did to fix it was quite simple, really. The switch has two services that work perfectly together to handle sugh traffic. One is called VLAN. Basically, VLANs are a way to divvy up the individual ports on a switch with a large number of hookups, and make the network believe instead of one big switch, it’s really several smaller switches. I set it up such that all of my U-Verse set-top boxes were on a VLAN all their own, and my other stuff, like my computer, file server, printer, and gaming consoles, were all on a seperave VLAN. The other thing I did was enable IGMP Snooping. In a nutshell, it lets you manually set an individual ort or a whole VLAN to listen for a multicast signal. IGMP will then send the multicast only to those ports or VLANs that have it enabled, and not even bother to send it to the others. In my case, I only set it up for just the VLAN that the set-top boxes were on, and to ignore every other VLAN. Pretty nifty, huh?
It took about 45 seconds for everything to become aware of what happened, but once it did, everything started working like gravy again.
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RIP Steve
By admin | October 6, 2011
As many people are undoubtedly aware unless they’ve been living under a rock, a titan of the IT world, Steve Jobs, passed away yesterday at the age of 56. He was a genius in so many ways, it’s hard to comprehend how one person could get so many things right when it came to what people want in all things gadgets. He assumed people weren’t complete idiots when it came to computers, and the best PC the most incredibly talented geek on the block could get from Apple was the same as what someone could get who was only aware of Apple for the previous 5 minutes. He was also spot on with things like the iPod, iPhone, and iMac. He also made things so intuitive with is Macintosh operating systems, pretty much all that was required to run one day-to-day was basic common sense.
To commemorate his passing, here’s a video, perhaps the most shown video on the news channels when the announcement of his passing came across the airwaves. This is the commencement speech he gave to Stanford in 2005, discussing his own mortality, innovation, being true to yourself, and not letting anyone else dictate how someone should live their lives. Enjoy:
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Two in two days? Say it isn’t so!
By admin | June 26, 2011
I just spent the last hour going throgh some of my old posts on this site, and I have to say, I really posted quite a lot more than I do now. In fact, when I was on a little site called LiveJournal (some of you from around 2000 on may recall the site), I posted quite a bit on there as well, before deciding to move on to a site of my own. That being said, I really think I should try to revive the site, since I do pay for it, after all. Granted, I pay for it all in one shot, once a year, but still, it’d be nice to get what I pay for.
Speaking of getting what I pay for, one thing I’m glad I got earlier this year was a Disney Annual Pass. I bought it in February, and it allows me to go to any of the parks in Disney World any time I damn well please. It has some nice perks that go with it. For starters, parking is free, so I save $14 a shot right there, and the vast majority of the restaurants give me a 10% discount, with some giving a 15% and even a 20% discount for one or two. Oh yeah, and with the pass, I get special discounts on the Disney hotels, some of them up to 40% off, which rocks. And the best part? I get all this for a grand total of $400, spread out over 12 months. I just had to pay for the price of a single-day ticket as a down payment, and the rest was spread out over 12 months, which came out to just over $26 a month.
So I did the math the other day, and with the number of times I’ve been to the parks already, the Annual Pass has already paid for itself 3 times over just based on the cost of single-day tickets and parking alone. And there are absolutely no blackout dates whatsoever, so when I get the extra 3-day weekend here & there, I can go spend some quality time @ Disney. And the cool part is, I also found a website, in the form of Hotels.com, which has tons of good deals on hotels. And the website has a deal where for every 10 nights I book through them, I get 1 night free, which is a weighted average of the amount I spent and the nights I spent at a particular hotel. I already have a free night at any hotel up to $61.
And speaking of financial matters, one thing I’m very proud of myself for finishing involves a debt I’ve been carrying since college. I made a couple of financial boo-boos in college, and they’ve been costing me ever since, but not any more. 10 days ago was the last payment I had to make for a debt that’s been costing me over $450 a month for the last 5 years. I up until 5 years ago, I was just paying the absolute minimum, and getting nowhere fast with it, so I decided to bite the bullet and begin paying $450 every month to pay it down faster. It was tough adjusting to that for the first few months, but I stuck to it, and as of 10 days ago, I no longer have to pay it. I even made sure the account got closed, so I would be officially done with it. I’m glad too because it’s eaten up a significant chunk of my paychecks every month, and was the single largest payment I’ve had to make every month after rent. So now, my biggest debt is my car loan, which is just a hair over $300 a month. I have a little over a year left on that loan, and that’s just with the minimum payments. I’ll begin throwing some extra money that way in a few months, since I’d like to get a few things and begin saving up a bit since I’d like to more to a more spacious apartment, and one where the parking situation isn’t such a damn hassle sometimes.
One of the things I really do need to get is a power supply for my computer. A little over a month ago, it died rather spectacularly on me, so I’ve been leaning pretty heavily on my laptop ever since. I’m glad it’s as powerful as it is, since I would’ve definitely been suffering from World of Warcraft withdrawal if I hadn’t had it. Instead of going to Best Buy, I have to special order one because the rig I built for myself requires a high-watt PS, and the only place to really find these are online, and they cost a pretty penny. Luckily, a couple of the sites I visit regularly both have power supplies that fit exactly what I need, so I’ll probably end up getting one in about two weeks or so.
And on that note, I think I’ll sign off for now. Peace skittles & beer!
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