Geoff and his girl Anne invited Kelly and I to go to the Louisville Science Center on Saturday. Geoff captured lots of photos. We also saw Space Station, the first-ever IMAX film shot in space! It was awesome to say the least. Then we grabbed a bite to eat at Saffron’s a tasty Mediterranean restaurant on Main Street. Thanks Geoff! Thanks Anne!

GAIM is an Instant Messaging client which can use AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and many other protocols. Originally, it was solely for Linux, but last year they put out a Windows port, and just now they have finally release version 1.0 for both platforms. It’s been a long, long time coming, and I’ve been using it on both platforms for a long, long time so it is great to see the project reach this milestone. I suggest highly that if you are using AOL’s client, you dump it immediately and go and download a copy right now!

Update: This is from an email I sent to the developers to congratulate them, and Sean Egan replied:

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:38:59 -0400, Ben Wilson wrote:

Thought I’d drop a line and congratulate you on Gaim v1.0. Being a developer, I know that version numbers don’t really mean that much technologically, but they are a huge psychological barrier. I’m sure it’s a big relief.

Actually, you’re wrong. 1.0.0 is entirely insignificant. The only reason for it is that we decided to change to a major-minor-micro versioning scheme, and 1.0.0 was the most logical place to start.


-s.

So, nevermind! Actually, not really. I’m giving Gaim their props anyway.

Further update from Rob Flynn, maintainer of GAIM:

Thanks :) It’s always good to hear these kinds of things. :)

Further further update:

(13:41:10) HunterDixon: ooh, just installed gaim
(13:41:11) HunterDixon: i like
(13:41:30) HunterDixon: oh wow, tabs
(14:00:08) HunterDixon logged out.

C’moooooon. You know you remember The Wizard. 1986? Dwarf? Toymaker? The CIA? Yeah, I thought you did! Good to know I’m not the only one. That show was pretty awesome. Little dude toymaker gets called up by the government each episode to craft some sort of robot dog or RC helicopter or rocket-powered pogo stick. When I was 8 years old, that was my five-year plan right there, save for the dwarfism. David Rappaport, who played title role passed away in 1990, but luckily some good sport in Norway has maintained a site about just him. You can check out his The Wizard pages, too. Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy this little trip back to 1986 when men were men, and the Cardinals won the NCAA championships.

update: apparently this Rappaport chap was involved with the founding of “Frestonia“, and independent state in the heart of London in the late 70′s.

Normally, I don’t post stuff about my model sailplane hobby, but I thought that this neat idea was worth it. One of the ingenius guys at the Charles River RC club had the neat idea to fix a GPS to his plane and then take the information it gave him and plot it in 3-D space. The result was this image. He then later mixed that in with some satellite photography and came up with this image. Pretty neat! You’ll be able to read about it next month in an article he is preparing here next month.

update: for those interested, the original thread I found this on is here on LiftZone‘s forums: Show Me Your Launches!

Today is the 35th anniversary of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing. In honor, I suggest you check out this kick-ass full-screen Quicktime panorama of the moon and the Apollo landing craft.

There are still some conspiracy folks questioning “Was it faked?” but there are heaps of evidence that say “it was it real!” I think I’d have to side with the “NOT FAKED” camp on this one. Mostly because the science is there, and maybe just a bit because Buzz Aldrin throws a mean left-hook.

NASA has a nice gallery of Apollo 11 photos, and you should check them out. After that, why don’t you take a look to the heavens this evening (link to Louisville-specific data at Heavens-Above.com), and wonder what it must have been like to be there on the moon.

Charlie, Geoff and I did a little geocaching today at lunch with much better results than yesterday.

We hit 3 for 3 today. First up was Turn Where ? Was: Sams Club — the first in a Louisville-themed collection of caches where you are guided by the age-old method of “Do you remember where (some long-gone landmark USED to be) was?”. For example, the old White Castle on Bardstown Road, Shillito’s, The Sams Club… etc. The second was Camo 826 in the heart of the industrial park. The last was Charley the Cat, next to J-Town’s Little League park, Skyview. Down by the train track where the cache was, I think we may have interrupted a pair of locals in some sort of naughty business as when we approached they high-tailed it out of there blanket in hand. Charlie took some very nice photos indeed, and you can check them out in my geocaching gallery

Charlie and I hit some geocaches today during our lunch break! Turns out there are quite a few within walking distance from our workplace, and two of them were right across the street on Papa John’s beautiful coroporate campus. We didn’t find the first (titled “Better Pizza 2”), but we did find the second (titled “Papa’s Paradise”). A nice little jaunt on a not-so-hot day.

Geocaching is a pseudo-sport where people hide little treasures called “caches”, record their longitude and latitude with the help of GPS receiver, and then using the Geocaching website, they list their new cache for all to see. Prospective geocachers go to the site, search for local caches, get the longitude and latitude and then commence to searching. Some caches are tiny film canisters (like the ones we found today) some are coffee cans, some are for swapping old ties. Write your name in the log and move on!

Dear readers, I have changes up the styles a little bit. The new “default” theme is what used to be the “blue” theme. And the old “default” is now the “simple” theme.

What? You didn’t even know you could change the theme for the site? Why sure you can, doodarino! Look for the THEME dropdown list and choose one. Dependent on the theme you have chosen, this should be on the left or the bottom of the page.

Just a quick link — here is a decent article on Louisville Mojo, a great local web site that has grown quite a bit in the last year or so. Turns out, I have two (tenuous) connections to it. One is Michael Briedenbach, with whom I worked at Corvus, and the second is Chuck Burke, the founder and el presidente of Louisville Mojo and also had a hand in Dance of Shiva, a wildly popular BBS here in Louisville in the early 90′s where I was a member. They had newsgroups there! It was all very exciting. BBS’ing was very much a “community” sort of thing, and it’s taken a while for the Internet to finally find it’s foothold in the culture to support communities. That’s all really, just thought I’d remember them good old days.

I’ve always had a thing for strange things — ghosts and UFO’s and all sorts of odd things. Early memories of Halley’s Comet and space shuttles and stuff soon gave way to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, V, and the paperback cover of Whitley Strieber‘s Communion
that used to freak me out. Recently, it’s been more “realistic” interests such as cryptography, ciphers, The DaVinci Code or The Rule of Four. All of this stuff has always just been there — like some subcurrent.

Recently, Charlie at work piqued my interests in such things again, as he is also an observer of these mysterious, wonderful and fun conspiratorial ramblings and skeptical science. It would seem that all of our conversations, whether they involve Neal Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon, or perhaps the Masons (which bring into light Alan Moore‘s From Hell and Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven), or perhaps the edges of science itself in the form of Nikola Tesla, are connected in one manner or another with some facet of our lives in very odd and conspiratorial subcurrenty sort of ways. Jack White, of The White Stripes (a favoured band of us both) has a bit of a thing for Nikola Tesla and his brand of high-voltage fruitcake science. We both in one manner or another have family or friend connections to the Masons or the Ordo Templi Orientis — both of which are real, actual, secretive organizations filled with tantalizing mythology and years of history. I could go on and on – and if I was a conspiratorial theorist worth my salt, I certainly would! But, alas, I am not — I’m just making a point that this stuff is terribly interesting.

So, just recently, on This American Life specifically Episode 265 titled “Fake Science”, they did a piece on Art Bell, the proprietor and host of Coast to Coast AM. I played a bit of it for Charlie and my surrounding office-mates (specifically the part where a man claiming to be “the Anti-Christ” calls into Art), and this morning, Charlie introduces me to Mel’s Hole. Mel is a man who discovered a hole in Ellensburg, Washington that he claims is at least 80,000 feet deep and might be a portal to another dimension. I cannot and will not attempt to explain further here, but suffice it to say you can listen to the saga by checking out the Mel’s Hole Audio site which has a number of Art Bell broadcasts with our man Mel Waters.

Art Bell and Mel’s Hole is just terribly entertaining to me, and I don’t claim to believe much of any of it. But, some unexplained mysteries of this world, some odd correlations or connections are just too interesting not to explore! I love it, and I can’t get enough of it. I’d suggest if you’ve got a little time, just poke around, you’ll find something.