Archive for January, 2005
Dig the Purple Pants, Bill
By now, most of you have probably seen the “Teen Beat” photos of a foxy 1980s Bill Gates. which, by the way, were not from Teen Beat 1983, but from a 1985 celebrity photoshoot. What you may not have seen is the subsequent hawt Bill on Bill action.
Just Fireworks. Don’t Panic.
Washington DC, please relax. No, those explosions were not bombs, but just a piece of that $40M going up in a blaze of pre-inaugural fireworks near the White House.
Finally, Snow!
Well, it’s about a month late, but DC is finally getting some snow: the forecast, originally estimating not more than an inch, now says an inch or two of fine, fresh powder before the day is done. Some photos taken during lunch break: More from DCist, CapitalWeather, and the DC LJ community. Photos taken with [...]
rel=”nofollow”
No sooner has weblog spam become a significant issue to me than Google steps in with rel=”nofollow”, a proposal to keep links from being abused by spammers. (Also see the news from Six Apart.) This has applications towards referrer spam as well; all it takes is a line or two of code in our referrer [...]
Referrer Spam Attack
Referrer Spam. For myself and for anyone curious about my inbound traffic, my installation of Refer is public, but hidden from search engines by a robots exclusion <meta>. That, as many of you webmasters may have found by now, does nothing to deter referrer spam. As of late, this site and many others have been [...]
Mac Goes Mini
Small, cheap, no display: Daring Fireball on last week’s new Mac hardware offerings. I’m quite impressed with the Mac Mini and iWork: both wonderfully affordable, finally giving the average PC user a cheap gateway into the Mac world. Judging by the buzz I’m hearing on various Internet communities, the Mac Mini is it — the [...]
Arroz Caldo Viscoso
With temperatures dropping below freezing outside, and a chance of snow tomorrow, this was a perfect night to cook up a pot of Manong Ken’s Arroz Caldo — only with one more tablespoon of patis, half the water replaced by organic low-sodium chicken broth, and a lot more ginger than the recipe called for, which [...]
Titan Panoramas and Sounds
ESA is finally putting out more Titan data: stitched descent panoramas and color photos, and sounds from the Huygens microphone. The people at Planetary.org people have more detailed Huygens sound data, with processed WAVs and sound spectograms. The sound files are historic; this is the first actual sound we’re getting from an alien atmosphere. Hissy.
Aristocratic Astronomy
ESA Spins Titan Landing Show Into Sludge. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one annoyed at how ESA is dragging its feet on revealing Huygens landing images to the public. When the Mars rovers landed, I was all over their raw image galleries, obsessively poring over every hazcam and navcam and pancam image [...]
First Titan Surface Photos
The photos are coming in from Huygens. These first two were taken during descent, from an altitude of about 16km. Isn’t the second one freaky? And here’s the first shot from the surface itself: Check out the Planetary Society’s Huygens Blog for scientific commentary on these images, and a story on Huygens’ first pictures from [...]