you may know this movie from the scene where the man in the moon gets a giant rocket in his eye. i hadn't seen the whole thing until today, and it's interesting to see what society and movies were like in 1902. it's also the world's first science fiction movie. this version has a french guy explaining what's going on, i say just hit mute and listen to it the way it was back in the day. well, minus the fill-in improvised organ music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0BmQaIIR4

costco kills their impossibly generous return policy on electronics.
http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9691796-1.html?tag=head

crash an entire airplane's in flight entertainment system:
http://blogs.csoonline.com/node/151

so i came in to work this morning to find out that a major department was offline. a contractor had come in to do some electrical work, fried the firewall, and now no one could get any work done. more importantly, they couldn't surf the web to pass the time. i tried booting off a cd and rescuing the hard drive on site, but no luck. i pulled the drive and put it in the forensic system at my desk. the system wouldn't boot with the drive installed, even if it was the secondary. i put it in an external usb drive case, booted the system, plugged in the drive, and was able to see the partition table. i couldn't mount the partitions or fsck them so i did a bit-for-bit copy of the drive with ddrescue. dd worked too with the conv=noerrors,sync options. then i opened the image in a forensic tool normally used for investigating compromised systems (autopsy and sleuthkit) and was able to see the data. to copy out the files rather than just look at their contents i had to check the partition table for the number of the first sector on the partition i wanted, use dd to seek to that offset, and copy out the partition i wanted from the image of the entire drive. THEEEEN i mounted the partition image with the loopback filesystem, copied the files to a usb drive, put the files on the new firewall, reconfigured the firewall for the new NICs, carried it over to the site, racked it, tested it, and cracked open a beer. yeah baby, nerd high-five!

the funniest thing i've seen in a long time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N4C0DLAF64&eurl=

as a kid whenever the temperature was near freezing always tried to make snow with our garden hose. now i can finally achieve my dreams of snowmen, sledding, and 15 pound snowcones.
http://www.uncrate.com/men/gear/misc-gadgets/sg5led-snowmaker-009509.php

i just found out that if you look at my pictures one by one and just keep clicking the little "next" arrow (instead of going through the photo album pages), none of the picture descriptions i so painstakingly entered show up. so if you're wondering what some of the pictures are, try going through the album pages to see the descriptions.

my pictures from la paz are ready. there are a few hundred so you'll be free of boredom at work for quite a while. don't forget to leave your usual sassy comments.
http://media.bryanzimmer.net/pics/main.php?g2_itemId=6995

i'm doing a little early spring cleaning, let me know if you're interested in anything:
http://www.bryanzimmer.net/4sale/

i had one of those technology-related "damn, that's cool" moments today, which are unfortunately rare for me as i've become fairly jaded in my old age. i went to the atm today and saw several big signs saying "no more envelopes", "deposit cash and checks without envelopes", and "hey moron, put down the envelope." myself being wary of new unproven technology (oh the irony), i picked up a stick and carefully prodded the beast. images of the obelisk from "2001 a space odyssey" flashed through my monkey brain. i entered my card and pin as usual, pulled out my check, and read the instructions. "place check or cash in slot". wait, what about entering how much money the check was worth, and writing my account number on the back? surely this magical box of lights, sound, and money had not gained the ability to read during its quest for world domination. i did as ordered. my hard-earned schillings were whisked away into the inter-nets, and the proper amount appeared on the screen a few thousand milliseconds later. a receipt with a picture of the check was stuffed into my greasy meat-hooks, and i backed away slowly. silent awe friends, silent awe. not because of the wonders of optical character recognition (a technology so old we used it in stickball back on the farm), but because of the simplicity and seamless amalgamation of several whiz-bang technologies into something that makes everyone's lives easier. similar to the toilet paper holder in the bathroom that automatically drops down another roll when the first one is empty. it's a great time to be alive.