Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk to read or plugging my laptop in and reading wasn’t appealing. In fact, I almost bought the Barnes and Noble Nook to read Cory’s book, but I’m convinced there’s a pricedrop coming given the Kindle’s recent price drop. Finally, I took at trip Let me just say that I recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of science fiction. I will now get into my thoughts about the book - there will be SPOILERS!

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Love the folksy Trail Name”] [/caption]

I’m not traditionally a nature-as-scenery photographer.  I prefer animals and humans.  But on a recent hike through a trail in Papatsco State Park, I took my camera along and captured some of the lightly forested trail.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“People love to mess up trees just to leave their mark”] [/caption]

Last year was Dina’s graduation Tiki Party.  This year it was Daniel’s turn.  We arrived the night before (no hospital visits this time) and so we had plenty of time to help cook and set up.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Dina’s interpretation of how the party would go”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3532” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Starcraft - Nothing Special, right?”] [/caption]

Starcraft 2 recently came out so, naturally, I just installed Starcraft for the first time.  A few years ago, I decided to atone for that summer my brothers and I had played Warcraft III from an illicit copy by buying the Warcraft III Batlle Chest.  It was a pretty awesome deal - for $20 I got the main game, the expansion, and strategy guides for both games.  The following year I bought the equivalent bundle for Starcraft.  I would have played it about six months ago when Dina’s boyfriend, a Starcraft (and Blizzard, in general) fan was over the house.  But, a bug in Windows XP kept the game from installing.  When I tried it again this weekend, it worked.

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I haven’t done one of these since last October.  At lot of the same photos are there, but there are a few less panda shots.  A few of the photos have switched spots with each other. And there’s the relatively new photo of Dina and Brian. Interestingly (no pun intended), my most viewed photo is not in the top 20 most interesting. (So people on flickr like uninteresting shots?)

Last time I mentioned my Franka Solida III, I had just had my first roll in my Yashica developed. I mentioned being a bit worried about the fact that I couldn’t tell what was in focus by looking through the viewfinder. Turns out that my fear was founded as I originally thought the units on the lens were ft when they were in fact meters. The results show:

We all know that technology continues to get cheaper and cheaper every year.  But this was brought into sharp relief yesterday when I looked up the invoice for Dave’s computer to see what components it contained.  I built Dave’s computer in 2006.  It was a graduation present from my parents and meant to be Dave’s computer in college.  At the time he was really big into WoW and other video games and he had a crappy old HP computer.  The total price of the computer was $2421.92.  It included a 500 GB Seagate drive (I was really into Seagate then) for $280!  Nowadays you can get a 500 GB drive for around $50.  The DVD burner didn’t fall as dramatically in price.  The one I bought him was $36 and you can get a pretty decent one now around $20.  I’m not going to focus on the motherboard price because those tend to actually stay constant for a standard entry board; around $100.  The next expensive item was the graphics card.  It was a PCI Express x16, 512 MB Radeon card and it cost $600.  Nowadays you can get the same thing for less than $50.  The RAM was 4 GB for $439!  I just bought that much RAM for $90.  Finally, the Pentium IV 3.8 GHz processor for $621.  Newegg no longer carries P4s.  Last time I shopped for one, about two years ago, it was $50.  (The keyboard and mouse were gaming-specific so they sold for a premium, and Windows XP was $89)

Found online here.  Mostly involves my 365 project.  But the first photo is from a BBQ with a bunch of our friends.  That was an exciting day in both good and bad ways.

I never really knew much about how CPUs worked until I took a class in CPU design at Cornell.  Until that point I never knew about registers and cache and pipelines.  Ever since then I’ve been growing in my understanding of how the CPU works and how all the parts fit together.  This culminated in me building five or six computers for myself and relatives.  In that past few years, these computers have been dual or quad core computers.  I’ve been using a dual core computer for my Linux computer for around a year now but I didn’t really think about it too much until this weekend.  I was working on a new strip for my webcomic, " I’m Not Mad"  (which I do with Nothing to the Table’s Daniel).  A particular panel was taking forever to render, so I opened up the system monitor to take a look.  The image was split into a bunch of squares and each square was given to a CPU core to work on.  And, for basically the entire render time, both CPUs were maxed out as I expected.  When it only had one square to do, one of the CPUs dropped to idle because there wasn’t anything for it to do.  Nothing out of the ordinary there.  But then I noticed this crazy pattern: