Pete and I are finishing up our Carabiner analysis for our Mechanical Engineering studies. Check out this sweet video showing loading.

Carabiner FEA Analysis from mikedidonato on Vimeo.

Good morning!

We’re back! This weekend (actually most of last week really) was pretty much non-stop work. Friday saw class, Saturday saw class, and Sunday saw 11 hours of work on an engineering project. So really, not all that super.

BUT, there were moments of joy nestled in between the mayhem. First, I had dinner with Schuyler and Darcy on Saturday night. We got a little dance dance revolution and guitar hero in before I headed out overwhelmed with exhaustion. Those people are so much fun.

Saturday’s class was rather exciting as well. The class I’m taking is ‘Management Failure Analysis’ We’ve been talking about big failures and what went wrong and how to fix them. This week we had Rear Admiral Thomas Atkin come in to talk to us about Katrina. Admiral Atkin was the Chief of Staff for the federal government’s response to Katrina. His commentary was great and, whew, what a cool guy. Tall, clean cut, and dressed in his coast guard uniform he walked into the classroom with an aura of authority. He was extremely well spoken and really knew what he was talking about. He discussed federal and state law during emergencies and some of the challenges that he and the others (federal, state, and political) faced as they tried to rescue the people of New Orleans. We discussed future disasters, the role of media, the organizational structure of emergency response, and some specifics to Louisiana.

It was totally awesome.

The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth is -89.4°C (-129°F), at Vostok on Antarctica on July 21, 1983.

Check out this fantastic guide to some beautiful and rare cloud formations.

I work at a small company, and we have a few standing arguments that will never be resolved and will likely continue forever. I’d like to know if this is normal.

Do any of you have something similar? Leave your stories in the comments.

I’ll share a few of our standing arguments:

• In a one-on-one fight to the death between a coworker of ours and a female cow who would win? (no tools, weapons, sticks, rocks may be used)
• What is a sport, what is a game. Is a given activity a sport or a game or a contest.
• Are fish closer to vegetables than animals? (food-wise, i.e. are the advanced enough to feel pain or is it morally equivalent to eating celery)
• The Monty Hall problem.

There are so many more, and none of them are more useful (or resolvable) than those.

Authored by Kurt

So now that its been a few months I think its safe to announce that my wife and I purchased our first home! I didn’t want to jinx it the first couple of months, but things seem to be moving right along.

We bought a 2 story Dutch Colonial in the lovely town of Randolph.

Our House

Feel free to send presents and or cards.

Hey everyone! Dwane and I are moving to Oregon in just a couple of weeks. Has anyone
a) made a cross country move before?
b) driven across the country?
c) driven across the country with a cat?
If so, do you have any tips? Right now we’re taking Luna on practice runs. She is an indoor cat and I just got her a collar and a harness, both of which she squirmed out of at first. Also, we are planning on using PODS to move - anyone have any experience with them?
This is my third move in a year and a half and Dwane’s third in two and a half years. You’d think we’d be pros at moving by now, but is still is such a drag to pack and clean everything!
Oh, another thing: anyone want a globe made of interesting stones?

EDIT: Wow, some fantastic advice already. Mike D readers are the best. I thought of a couple more questions:

- Does anyone keep an emergency kit in the car? Besides jumper cables, I mean. If you do, what’s in it?
- Packing extreme breakables (we’re talking champagne glasses, heirloom pieces, etc etc) - would it be wiser to take them in the car?

Where I work, every time I leave my building I’m harassed by people looking for money… today it was MassPIRG, Greenpeace, DARE, and the Obama campaign. Today the greenpeace girl tried to be clever:

Greenpeace Girl: “Hey! What’s your favorite animal?” (as she blocks my path)
Me: “Pork”
GG: (looks dazed)

The problem light broke.

Update: violently.

Mike D! Come here! I want you!

Art and Meat, together at last.

From Ted.

Tonight in Woods Hole, there was a Double Rainbow!

Ever wonder what Harry Potter Puppet Theater would be like?

Check it out here.

MikeDiDonato.com isn’t going to see much action this week, I’m sad to say that the problem light is still burning brightly. But what better time to recommend user registration! If you go to the register page you can register for the website. At this time I’m going to accept 5 new content contributors. That means that if you register you might have a chance to add content to the website on your own free will!! Wow! what a privilege!

This is how it works. You can register and the website will automatically put you in as a subscriber. 5 lucky subscribers will be promoted to contributor. As a contributor, you can log in any time you’d like and publish little anecdotes or stories of rock into the Quickthoughts. Some of the current contributors include:

JonAbad!
ShaunMcQuaid!
Ryan Schenk!
Alicia!
and Theresa!

Once you’re selected, I’ll tell you how to make those posts happen. So if you’re interested, click that link above and lets spread the awesome.

Kurt found this sweet link suggesting methods to make your own guitar picks.

Anyone have any good ideas as to what I could make a guitar pick out of?

Shaun L. found this totally sweet video.

Check it out.

A ball girl at a minor league baseball game makes an absurdly insane catch.

Video here.

UPDATE: Debunked by Ben. See the comments.

Movie Trailer.

I’m excited; the book was intense.

PhoneMyPhone.com is an awesome little application that can help you endlessly. You enter in your phone number and a time when you want a phone call. This little application will call you at that time.

Potential reasons you might want to use this application:

You’re about to go to a useless meeting.
You’ve lost your cell phone in your bedroom.
You want an excuse to leave, just in case the date goes poorly.
You want to bug the heck out of Sander.

Bravo PhoneMyPhone. Bravo.

A life sized dinosaur model for my garden.

From Sander.

If you enjoy baseball, you may enjoy this video of switch pitcher Pat Venditte and switch hitter Ralph Henriquez trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

Here at MikeDiDonato.com we give you only the most useful data.

Dinosaurs and their estimated weights.

Pterodactyl
18 kilograms (40 pounds)

Velociraptor
90 kilograms (200 pounds)

Stegosaurus
2,700 kilograms (6,000 pounds)

Iguanadon
4,500 kilograms (10,000 pounds)

Tyrannosaurus
6,300 kilgrams (14,000 pounds)

Triceratops
10,900 kilograms (24,000 pounds)

Brachiosaurus
29,000 kilograms (64,000 pounds)

Apatasaurus (brontosaurus)
30,000 kilograms (66,000 pounds)

Thesaurus
.9 kilograms (2 pounds)

Phoenix found ice!

A short while ago I posted a quickthought that described a fantastic little article about the hidden architectural secrets that an architect put into his client’s house. The article contained the following ceaser shift cipher:

FDYDQ,WKHDUFKHU’VFKLOG;FXULRXP,EULJKW–BRXUTXLFHJLOGSLYRWVDQGOHDSVOLNHDGDOFHU.
WKHNHBWRSUHVHUYLQJFXULRXPLWB’VOLJKWLVWRORYHWKHTXHVWLRQDVPZFKDVWKHDQVZHU

I promptly started writing an excel program to help me solve it. Jesse then stepped in to help out a bit with some macro work. the end result is decidedly awesome.

Click below to download the excel sheet:

caesarcodebreak.xls

Try it out! You’ll have to use Microsoft excel and you’ll have to enable macros. But the result is a pretty sweet little program. Note: There are two sheets. the first is for all generic codes, the second sheet is specifically for shifted codes.

Surprisingly, Shamus was working on a program to solve ciphers at the same time. He did his in Labview. Check out a screenshot here.

Codes are sweet.