Category: Geeking Out

I wish I went on quicker. That is–I wish a human head, or my head at all event, could take in a great deal more & a great deal more rapidly than is the case;–and if I had made up my own head, I would have portioned its wishes & ambition a little more to…

We had a contest in our Information Services Division (ISD) of the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center (ARSC) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) last year to design a new logo. Here was my submission, which came in second place: ISD Logo Last week, exactly one year later, we’ve got t-shirts for the division.…

In honor of the recently established Hip Hop Chess Federation, which combines the mental discipline of chess with the physical discipline of the martial arts and the intellectual strength of Hip Hop music (I’m not up on the new stuff, but am a longtime Public Enemy fan), I thought I’d post some inspirations for the…

My father teaches phlebotomy at ODU, but is a total wuss when it comes to donating blood. He used to fall back on the excuse that his type I diabetes excluded him from donation, but had to find another excuse when that prohibition was lifted. I’ve been prohibited from donating blood for a year every…

Here’s a really neat way to visualize our world in Real Time. twittervision takes the text-messages posted on twitter, and shows them on a google map as they are being posted. Watching this application with the “3D View” turned on, I was able to watch Californians planning their night as I was turning in to…

Microsoft has come up with a novel solution to the issue of security in Windows Vista. The basic principle is don’t let the user do anything. You see, if users are prevented from any productivity whatsoever, they can’t screw things up right? Take for instance User Account Control. This is a new “feature” (note the…

Recently I needed a way to quickly sort a large dataset on the fly, but the classic bubblesort algorithm was too innefficient. Luckily, a quick google search revealed a Quick Sort v2 Algorithm by Anthony Baratta, who took and modified the Quick Sort Algorithm from 4 Guys from Rolla, who adapted it from an algorithm…

I remember making my first international phone call when I was in Junior high school. At that time, while my parents were away at work, my Commodore 128 computer was busy on their phone with its 1200 Baud modem, hacking calling card numbers in a process computer geeks refered to as “Phreaking.” After several weeks…

“Some kids get their ears pierced… others it’s a unique haircut… Charles likes people to see his brain.” – Supervillain Brain Child’s Mother, from The Tick Cartoon My friend Carolyn and her husband Clint made this really cool animated video from her CT Scan, which I highly recommend. A few months back, I had a…