The Life and Times of Adam Hinds

There are four engineers traveling in a car. One is a mechanical engineer, one a chemical engineer, one an electrical engineer and the other one an engineer from Microsoft.

The car breaks down.

“Sounds to me as if the pistons have seized. We’ll have to strip down the engine before we can get the car working again,” says the mechanical engineer.

“Well,” says the chemical engineer, “it sounded to me as if the fuel might be contaminated. I think we should clear out the fuel system.”

“I thought it might be a grounding problem,” says the electrical engineer, “or maybe a faulty plug lead.”

They all turn to the Microsoft engineer who has said nothing and say. They ask him, “What do you think?”

“Well, I think we should close all the windows, get out, get back in, and open the windows again.”

My friends, wife, and I recorded this video in Nashville, Tennessee on July 4th, 2008. Happy birthday, America! I had originally recorded the fireworks show in it’s entirety to post, but my wife (whom shall remain nameless) recorded over it.

PS: This video does contain language that may be offensive to anyone with hearing capabilities. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Yesterday the wife and I were out shopping at the local mall when we went into the pet store and saw this adorable dog. We couldn’t resist. Say hello to Willie #2, or just Willie for short. Yes, we will be bringing him along to our trip to Tennessee.

As part of my attempt to be personally fully prepared for a sixth month deployment to “da gulf”, I went out last night and (finally) picked up a iPod speaker set. After much debating with myself between several models and testing each one extensively using my iPod and playing several different styles of music on each player to see how it would sound, I decided on this Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere speaker set. I had been intending on picking one up for about a year now, I just hadn’t really needed it. Now that I have it, I don’t know how my iPod lived without it. It even came with adapters for different iPod sizes, a remote control, and a sweet case so it doesn’t get hurt in my backpack on the plane. Good stuff.

Most companies would be happy with having the most user friendly, fastest, and overall BEST operating system in the world, but then again Apple isn’t most companies. I found this article today on MacRumors.com. Mac keeps putting Windows to shame. Good.

Apple has posted pages for Mac OS X Snow Leopard for both server and client and describe a bit of what users can expect from the next OS X release. Apple promises that Snow Leopard “dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.” Some early screenshots from the Developer seed of Snow Leopard do indeed show significantly smaller application file sizes over current Leopard installations. Other features listed on Apple’s site were largely touched on in the press release.

The New York Times, however, reveals that Snow Leopard’s big focus is taking advantage of the recent trend towards multi-core and parallel computer processes. Steve Jobs provided some information on Apple’s direction:

“We’ve added over a thousand features to Mac OS X in the last five years,” he said Monday in an interview after his presentation. “We’re going to hit the pause button on new features.”
….
“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things,” he said. “I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.”
According to Jobs, Apple has made a parallel-programming breakthrough. Specifically, Apple claims their new “Grand Central” technology is “way beyond what Nvidia or anyone else has.” There had been talk from Nvidia’s CEO that Apple may adopt their CUDA technology, but it appears that Apple’s implementation may be more advanced. CUDA allows programmers to offload processing to the computer’s graphics processors, which can be very powerful.

Apple’s focus on parallel computing comes at a natural time with Intel upcoming plans for Nehalem processors which will scale up to 8-core processors. Apple has announced that Snow Leopard will be delivered in “about a year”.

Source: MacRumors.com

Another website I found a long time ago. Figured I’d give it another shot at life. This is for all the Mac users out there.

www.marbleofdoom.com

My friend Donny found this. All I can says is … why?

http://zenwerx.com/pi.php

or you can see π in picture form…

http://zenwerx.com/pi/pipic.php

I had some issues today with my blog as I attempted to update to the newest version of Wordpress. I followed the instructions exactly and it ended up destroying everything. When I went to recover, it failed. So now I am left to start over … again. This is beginning to become a pain in the ass. But now I have started over … again … and am on the most current version. Hopefully I won’t have any more issues from here on out. Freakin’ Wordpress.

Well we just got our new dining room table, which was the last piece of furniture we were waiting on before making another walk through for fam and friends. So here it is.

We are planning on painting all of the walls and of course we have to get window dressing for most of the windows. We need to get more paintings/photos for the naked walls. I’m not sure what else we’re going to do. But for now this is what it looks like. We’re happy with it so far. Enjoy. Click here to see the album in full view without the slide show deal.

This is what happens when you leave your Windows PC’s on all night long. Click the link below.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~jvdkuyp/flash/see.htm