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Another One in the Can

Dragon*Con 2005 is now done, and we all escaped amazingly unscathed. The ‘con went incredibly well overall. I spent another 5 days honing my RegencyFu™. I’ll probably write more later, but right now I’ll just say this: I had some really awesome people helping me in the room this year, and it continues to amaze me that they seem perfectly willing to for me to do nothing much more than just let them know what needs to be done next. These last 2 or 3 ‘cons, I’ve always considered myself just as much a technical grunt as room runner, but it’s finally beginning to sink in that I’m probably most valuable concentrating on coordinating the room. If I continue to collect such talented help, I may be able to do just that.

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Another Meme

Shamelessly stolen from Joyce

Directions: Type “(your name) is” , (with the quotes) into a Google search, cut-and-paste the first 10 responses that work. Just pull the answers right out of the excerpt google shows you, don’t click the link and search around. The only rule is that each one has to start with “(your name) is”.

Jeff is so wrong about this that I find myself shaking my head on this one.
Jeff is down! (I cheated on this one and had to look. It involves baby oil wrestling.)
Jeff is in a serious relationship with his boss Julia
Jeff is late, and interupts the class.
Jeff is also largely responsible for Newsgator Media Center Edition
Jeff is a remarkable talent making cool records
Fr. Jeff is experiencing rejection and betrayal from Fr. Steve; he is left out.
Jeff is the Primary Colorer at Coloring Outside the Lines.
Jeff is weak against fire!
Jeff is a contributing editor to MSDN Magazine, where he writes feature articles about Microsoft

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San Francisco

For those that don’t know, I spent all of last week out in San Francisco (okay, Burlingame, actually) on a business trip. Aside from the work I was there to do, I actually did manage to see some of the town. The visit has brought a lot of thoughts to my mind, but I’m only going to add a few right now.

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Amazing Machines

After my rant yesterday, I got curious and found a website (archived copy on archive.org) that has some basic information on the SSMEs, or space shuttle main engines.

These things really are fascinating. Be sure to click on the “SSME Incredible Facts” link down at the bottom. You know you’re talking about a big engine when its fuel pump produces over 70 thousand HP. They make the comparison that this is the equivalent power of 28 locomotives. Each engine produces the thrust equivalent (in vacuum) of just over 12 million HP, and the shuttle has three of them. If I ran the calculations correctly, each solid rocket booster produces the equivalent of over 75 million HP.

Geof, I just looked up the thrust numbers for the F-1. It looks like though the total thrust produced by all 5 of them used on Saturn V stage I is greater than the the total thrust of the two SRBs, the SRB appears to win hands-down on per-engine thrust. Is the SRB perhaps the most powerful single engine ever constructed?

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Shut Up and Take the Next Call

You know, I’m not sure why I bother, but for some reason I just can’t help myself. When I’m in the truck and the local NPR affiliate is playing something I’m not interested in, I’ll sometimes flip over to a talk/sports radio station out of Birmingham. Inevitably, I end up turning the radio off in disgust (if not full out anger) within about 15 minutes. The people I hear on the air on this station represent possibly the most consistent collection of what I call “determined ignorance” that I know of. On the way out to lunch today I flipped over there, and this one was so bad I decided I had to post about it when I got back.

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Is Your Property Too Attractive?

This is truly frightening. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today (link defunct) that a city can seize private property for private economic development.

From the article:

Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community, justices said.

Wow. Five justices really believe that? That, in effect, says not “They can take the land in this narrow instance,” but “We don’t want to touch this issue. Don’t bother us again.” That truly surprises me. I’ve been hearing about cases like this for a couple of years now. I always assumed that if a case was heard by the Supreme Court, they would side with the property owners. I guess I was wrong.

Side note… I admit that I have not studied the rulings of the 9 justices in detail, but I have the distinct impression that I’m siding with the ones that I would normally disagree with on this one. O’Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas shared the dissenting opinion.

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Critter Invasion (again)

Ah, the joys of home ownership. Late this morning (early this afternoon?), Amy and I were lounging on the couch, and she kept finding ants on her. When I took a closer look, the little critters had started a full scale invasion of the living room. A large portion of the rest of the day has been dedicated to trying to take care of them. I think I found the right mound and got them, but (as always) it will take a day or two to know for sure.

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Guilty Pleasure

Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl video has become a new guilty pleasure for me, I think. The lyrics are truly inane, but I can’t help but watch. 🙂 The funny thing is that I don’t normally find her all that attractive. Actually, I think it’s all the high school band imagery and sound that do it for me. I could be wrong, but it looks like they wrangled members from a real band (or bands) to help with the video. It’s a very Tusk-esque song in that way (yes, I know Fleetwood Mac didn’t use a high school band… just go with it).

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Robot Chicken Meets Voltron Meets Jeff

It’s either really cool or really lame that I recognized the Voltron toy used in one of the episodes of Robot Chicken (the sketch where Voltron “got served”). It’s the exact one I had as a kid (and still have in one of my keepsake boxes). I used to LOVE that show.
EDIT YET AGAIN:
And Cartoon Network and the YouTube posters play cat and mouse. The video works (for now), but unfortunately no lyrics any more.
Have fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcV0bK1UwCg

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Musical Baton

As prompted by Amy’s post, here are my answers (below the break).