Out of The PIT

I found Foot 2012 on FAILBlog.

I heard about this Census web application by OpenFile from Metro Morning .

I found an interesting dance video on FAILBlog.

HKL, Laz and I got together this afternoon for a LAN run of Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator . The demo only allows for up to three people to play together, so it was a good number to start with. The full version actually allows up to six per bridge, with what seems to be eight possible bridges for team vs team play and/or cooperative missions. We enjoyed the demo scenario, so there may be more LANs in the future.. MJNL and I went to Zen Japanese Restaurant for dinner. GY had recommended the place a while back and we have been meaning to try it out for quite some time. We were not disappointed: The fish was fresh and very tasty. I did not order anything exotic but went for one of their sushi plates, so I recognized all of the fish. (Although I still don't remember which fish they came from - I just remember that I have had it before.) After dinner, the two of us headed up to the David Dunlop Observatory for one of their observing nights. We had been meaning to check out

I found a Clover Mite skittering around my desktop yesterday and today. I spent a moment looking up what the heck it was first before coming across the line in the wiki: "You are able to contain them for a little while if you draw a pen or sharpie circle around them." Wha..? So I tried it out. You know what? It does work! I even took a video of it.

I got this blast from the past from AI .

It seems as if there is an easy way to import/export blogs from Blogger/Blogspot. I just need to maintain some sort of backup schedule, import our wedding blog (somehow) and then complete the Hawaii blog. Now that Dragon Age: Origins is done, I think I can concentrate on getting all the stuff onto the site. I am currently culling the images so that there are only a few each day, although most of the space will be taken up by the (rather large) videos..

Since I am here, I should mention that I had not told anyone about this new blog. Partially because I was not actually thinking of continuing a blog after the server died and I lost my domain name. I think I did write up about it on The PIT, which is slightly ironic since it was not viewable by anyone at that time - or after for that fact. Maybe I will post some old entries - but more likely I won't. Who knows what secrets will be let out if I accidentally let those comments run amok.. (Besides, some of that HTML I used may not conform well with this new format.) We will see how long this guy stays under the radar. Oh, and I hope there is a way to archive these entries - it would be a shame if I could not save any of this..

Whoops. I guess I have to get accustomed to these WYSIWYG interfaces. I am so used to typing my blog entries in pure HTML that all the comments I normally added  - weren't. The < and > signs are automatically converted to &lt; and &gt;, which is great for people used to it, but I was so scarred by Microsoft FrontPage 2000 that I never wanted to use one again. (Did you see the type of HTML it produced? Garbage!) In any case, I must remind myself not to put in comments through the WYSIWYG editor.. <!-- Remember!!!! -->

RL asked me to bring out an extra stick for a friend he was bringing to hockey. Apparently it was a girl, so I figured that I would give the shorter stick I was using (which I got from WK who liked playing with short sticks) and use my longer backup stick. I got to the rink and was ready to hand the stick over when she stood up. After looking up for a moment, I handed over my backup stick and said "I think you should use this stick.". This afternoon I swapped out my winter tires for my summer ones. I think this is the last season for these tires, they are getting close to the wear bars.

I had been meaning to bike to and around Centre Island for a number of years now, and finally was able to organize something. I figured that if I just throw the invite out there and go, things will turn out all right. Seems like it actually did. We had ten people (plus two kids) show up! That was quite a number, considering that not everybody had a bike. I would have liked to have biked down to Centre Island, but MJNL would have none of that. It was hard enough to convince her to take the subway downtown (as opposed to driving). However, we did get to land on Centre Island, have brunch, pick up a rental bike for HKL and PL, bike to Billy Bishop Airport, drop the bikes off, played four rounds of disc golf, have a little snack at The Rectory Cafe, and then head back to town from Ward Island. Then we had dinner at Salad King before going home. I would have liked to explore Ward Island a bit more (and play more disc golf) but time was getting tight and everyone was getting tired. Next

After a few years, I finally got around to registering our bikes in the Toronto Police Service Bicycle Database . Of course, if you make a mistake, or move, or need to make any changes there does not seem to be a way to modify the data, or even look it up. At least our bikes are not actually worth much anyway..

If we consider one DNA base pair as a unit of data, and since there are four types of DNA molecules, then each unit of data can have four possible combinations - the equivalent of two bits of digital data. There are approximately 6.4 billion base pairs in the the DNA of a human cell, so the equivalent of 12.8 billion bits or about 1.6 billion bytes of of digital data. The digital equivalent of one person's DNA should fit on three 650 MB CDs. Note that if you are only considering the haploid human genome , then we would only consider half of the total, or 800 million bytes of digital data. Assuming that there is about seven billion people on the planet, it would take 5.6 quintillion bytes of data to hold every person's genome on digital form. That's 5.6 million TB drives. Assuming Moore's law applies to hard drives (doubling of hard drive space every two years), and that hard drive sizes were 4 TB in 2011, and also assuming that the human population will grow a

I got this link from MIBAgentQ. I do not want to see the Phantom Menace anyway, and this is another reason why not to! http://gizmodo.com/5894682/ this-video-on-how-awful-the- light-saber-battles-in-the- phantom-menace-are-will-ruin- star-wars-for-you