Happy Birthday Buddy.

At this point, I pledge to you internets, that I will teach my children to completely own unit conversions. Not metric to english junk, I’m talking unit analysis to bring your inch^3/second into Tons/Hr.

I think it is the single most important skill for engineers. I think it even beats out basic differentiation by 5×10^-14 Parsecs.

fun fact: what is a parsec? it stands for parallax of one second of an arc. Parallax is the act of seeing something in two different spots because you’re moving: perspective shift. So if you’re driving in your car, and you took two rapid photographs of a tree… once you’d downloaded your photographs you’d see that the tree was in two different spots. Parallax is an astronomical method of using this basic theory to try and figure out how far away we are from celestial objects. So, we could look at some distant star from Earth now… and then again in 6 months. Since the Earth has moved around the sun we can figure out how far away that object is - presuming we know how far we’ve gone and where the relative change in position is of the star. The actual parallax is half of the distance that the star has appeared to move.

So that explains the first half. The “one second of one arc” (or arcsecond) is just 1/60th of an arc minute. An arcminute is 1/60th of a degree. There are 360 degrees in a circle. That means that one arcsecond is 1/1,296,000 of a circle. So, a parsec is the distance that a star would be away from the earth for its parallax to equal 1/1,296,000 of a circle.

This comes out to be about 3.26 light years. Neat eh?

I don’t go to shows.

I’m going to this show.

Gogol Bordello.

Sunday August 3rd. Toad’s Place New Haven.

Who’s in?

Riding it out to 27, where perhaps things will rise new.

A method for keeping those loose cords at bay.

The Wall Cleat.

UPDATE:

That whole website is rife with beautiful design. Check out these as well:

Thermal lamp.
Baseboard Picket Fence

Sunday night I had a dream. My sister T and I were headed over to the post office to drop some letters off for my mom. She was driving our family’s van. We chatted about nothing special as we made our way to our destination. It was about 8:45am.

As we pulled up we saw a huge crowd gathered in front of the door. It turns out they didn’t open until nine.

“oh man! this is going to take forever,” tree noted.
“why don’t you jump out and get in line,” I offered “I’ll park the van.”

Theresa hopped out of the drivers seat. I took the car and did a three point turn. Then I went turned left into the parking lot. Despite the large amount of people in front of the post office, the parking lot only had a few cars.

As I pulled into a spot I felt the car thump heavily. I used the auto-mirror on the passenger side to let me see if I’d hit anything.

I had run over and killed a toddler.

!!!!

I woke up totally horrified wondering why on Earth casual dreams seem to get overly horrific without any warning. Despite waking up, I still felt like I was on Cape Cod. I pulled the warm blankets up over my shoulder and started drifting back to sleep… when I heard a sound from downstairs. “who would be downstairs at this hour?” I pondered.

And just like that, I realized I wasn’t on vacation in Cape Cod. No. I was at home. And it was Monday morning. And in 45 minutes, I’d have to get up and go to work.

What a lousy way to start a week.

A colleague of mine here at work passed away over the weekend. He was one of my company’s close vendors. He would regularly come to our place to help out with designs or efforts. His company is integral to the way we do business.

It’s an odd feeling when someone who you’d only met with a few times, but knew well enough to wave as they passed in the hallway, passes away. It feels empty, but not debilitating.

I suppose that’s often the mark of death - a feeling of emptiness. Let’s not stress on his not being here anymore, let’s celebrate the fact that he was with us for 50 or so years and made a impact even on those who he’d only worked with briefly.

Here’s to you Ed.

After reading the fun Schenk interview, I thought it might be fun to interview our MikeDiDonato.com readers so that we can improve the community here. We’ll all learn a bit more about each other. I asked Kurt if he’d be willing to be the first subject. So here we go!

MD.com: Kurt! Thanks for your willingness to be our first interview victim here at MikeDiDonato.com. Tell us a bit about yourself and your family?

Kurt: How bout we switch this around and start with my family. They may be the coolest people on the face of the planet. Starting with my wife Shauna, who has put up with me for going on decade now, I think she can be classified as Insane in 37 states for dealing with me.
My Parents, Mom and Dad, once drove up to Worcester from Rochester, NY to come to a Halloween party we were throwing in April without telling me. So you might say thats where I get my “unique” personality. My brother, Andy, and my sister, Katie, are only lightly less cool than I am just because I’ve been around longer. My whole family is pretty important to me, it really took alot to move out to Boston away from all of them, but with the invention of the Internet (Thanks Al!) and the Telephone the hundreds of miles seems alot shorter.

Now as for that little bit about myself. I’m a biologist by schooling and a Nerd by choice. I like the planet earth and while I may not be a hippy, i try to do my part to keep this place clean. I’m currently a lab rat, pouring over tubes of science and microscopes of data. Tons of little bugs live and die under my tyrannical thumb. In my off time I enjoy reading, books, magazines, rule books to games, and whichever catalog is sitting in my “office”. I’ve dabbled a bit in pretty much every facet of nerdom that there is (MMORPG, Table Top wargaming, Miniature painting, P&P D&D, CCG, Boardgames, etc etc.) and I must say anime is the wierdest.
Some people might call me extroverted and sometimes they are right. IT takes a little while for me to warm up to new people, but once the gates are open they can’t be closed.

oh yeah I like Mayonnaise.

MD.com: What was the last book you read?

KO: Well I’m currently reading A Storm of Swords, but prior to that I read A Clash of Kings. Both by George R.R. Martin they are part of an ongoing saga that he is writing. If you like intrigue, Kinghts, or a Medieval themed story with a dash of magic being thrown in, this series of books is for you.

MD.com: What first attracted you to the fantasy sci-fi sort of genres?

KO: Well, in ninth grade we needed to read a book over the summer before classes started to write about when we started up, and I was looking over all the books and they all sounded so boring. The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks stood out as sounding exciting, so I got that. I had never read anything so large before, I think the largest book I read was maybe 200 pages up to that point, but this was 700+. I moved on to the rest of his books and just never stopped.

MD.com: how’d you meet Shauna?

KO: We met at Work. We both had the same workstudy job in the Bio Prep lab. So we knew eachother about a year before we eventually started dating. She wouldn’t let me copy her Chemistry lab and i was upset about that, so I would continually threaten to put her in the autoclave. Not very nice, but apparently it worked. So guys…if you like a lady threaten to cook her at 121 degrees celsius at 4 atmospheres of pressure. It Works!

MD.com: If you were a superhero, what would you want your superpower to be?

KO: Flight. Most definately. Most people may not know this but I’m not a good flier. Some people may call it Terrified. If I had the power to fly myself I think that would help me overcome one of my few fears.

MD.com: Scared of Flight? Interesting. When was the last time you were on a plane?

KO: Last March when we flew back from a Cruise we went on with Friends.

MD.com: What are your biggest goals and aspirations?

KO: Thats such a tough question. Like for right now? For the next five years? Ten years? Lifetime? I mean there are things I’d like to do like see the Grand Canyon, visit all 50 States, stuff like that. But nothing really earth shattering. I find it difficult to try and quantify your life in a set of goals, because so many things could happen when you least expect them that it makes your goals impossible to achieve. I just try to keep my wife and myself happy, in that order, and everything else seems to have a way of working itself out.

MD.com: How soon can we expect to see Kurt Jr. and Shauna Jr. running around the new house?

KO: You try this every time we have a conversation and I tell you the same thing every time.

MD.com: ASAP?

KO: No.

MD.com: ha ha. Lets end with this one: What’s your favorite MikeDiDonato.com post?

KO: Well I have a ton, so how bout I give you my top 3.

3. This would have to be When you shaved your head. That was really brave of you.
http://www.mikedidonato.com/2006/04/01/a-life-changing-experience/

2. Skylines. I really liked the Skyline challenge and was saddened when they fell by the
wayside.

1. Wish Corruption. I thought that was a ton of fun!

MD.com: Thanks for being the first interview Kurt! Rock on!

If you don’t mind being wigged out by some alarmingly scary art photography based on childhood fears, then check out this link.

Because it’s AMAZING.

Miracle Fruit alters taste of Sour Foods.

Dear Friends with Allergies,

In all the years before Connecticut, I only had a vague idea of what this whole ‘allergy’ thing was all about. Slightly stuffy nose? yeah. Occasional sneezes? sure.

I had no idea.

First the eyes. For those of you in industry, it can be as bad as welders flash. Unbearably dry itching death. Like someone cleaned your contact lenses with a fine sand before you had a chance to use them. Who knew pollen could be so irritating? not this guy. that is certain.

The description ‘runny nose’ doesn’t do this ailment justice. When the armies of pollen come out to fight you can’t use tissues fast enough to stop the floodwaters.

The Sneezes are persistent. Not constant for me, but still notably annoying.

Ears. I don’t think this is common: I get a perpetual sound of wind in my right ear. It’s very subtle… unless I’m trying to sleep. Then there’s a freight train on my pillow.

Hopefully this rain will crush the allergen front and soon we’ll be living in healthy allergy free bliss once again.

Yours,
Mike D.

1. Birds.
Last night around 11pm the birds were going crazy.
What?!
Go to bed birds. Go to bed.

2. Coffee.
If someone could make a french vanilla coffee that tasted the way it smelled?
Instant millionaire.

3. Advertising.
This weekend some advertising will likely appear on MikeDiDonato.com.
It will be subtle and textual. It will help pay for the operation costs without sacrificing awesomeness.

4. Spring Cleaning.
It’s that time of the year. Hopefully by Sunday night the House of Rock will reach new levels of clean comfort.

This isn’t looking good.

The problem with regularly doing fun things like rock climbing or Kung Fu is that they tend to become the norm. They don’t lose their fun factor, but they do lose some novelty. Granted both climbing and Kung Fu are continuously changing and re-challenge… but the basics are the same.

I think the intention of Fun Club should be to introduce novel fun to the group.

The Box’s story with Video.

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Comments are off. E-mail me with the answer if you figure it out.
MikeDiDonato AT gmail D0T com

Ryan Schenk: Mike D, I just played the funniest joke!
Mike D: Do share.
Ryan: There is a command on the mac called “say.” If you type in the command followed by a sentence, the computer will actually say the sentence in a computer voice.
Mike D: Okay.
Ryan: It’s especially funny if you log into another user’s mac remotely with SSH, because then the audio will play over THEIR speakers
Mike D: ha ha
Ryan: example

say “Hey Neil, you sure know how to push my buttons, if you know what I’m sayin’”
(neil is my boss)

Excellent Job Ryan Schenk. Excellent Job.

Say it!

RING RING RING

Mike D: Hello this is Mike D.
President of my company: Hi Mike.
Mike D: Hi, what can I do for you?
President of my company: I’m frightened that you got a B in your ethics class
Mike D: ha ha ha
President of my company: what happened?
Mike D: I was horribly bored with the subject matter and stopped putting effort into the class.
President of my company: Ha!

From Adam.

Amazing Analog Text Clock Concept

Boy, it bugs me when people say “height” as “heigth“

Does anyone like either:

1. Evil Olive
2. Clockwork.