The Flying Nerd

If I buy some shares in Goldmark Industries, will I stop receiving the spam?

I’ve never had so many spams on the one subject. And this is the slightly-cleverer-spam, where the message is a graphic (that the spam filters can’t read) rather than text, so quite a lot isn’t getting caught.

Anybody else seeing a huge spam spike at present? What are you doing about it?

Like many technophiles (and even many family snappers), I have a growing library of digital photos that I’d like to be able to share.
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I’m happy to admit to being a huge Star Trek fan. My wife doesn’t get it. She thinks the Horta looks like an animated chenille bedspread.

Anyway, until now, I would have argued strongly that Star Trek represented the pinnacle of William Shatner‘s acting career. Captain Kirk was strong, honest, sophisticated, chivalrous, respectful and very human. An altogether good bloke, really. Shatner’s portrayal was always genuine and warm. I liked it, and so did millions of others (nerds or not).

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Here’s a new topic for the Flying Nerd.

You’ve probably notice that I enjoy writing about technology. Formula 1 sneaks in as it’s probably the sport that uses the highest level of technology.

Well, here’s a change of pace – but it’s an interesting use of a combination of simple technologies.

[Lots of pictures on following page - may load slowly...]
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Here.

Die, CRT, die!

I love a bargain. Who doesn’t?

Well, here’s a bargain that I can’t use… Maybe you can.

Uncle Steve (that’s what he calls himself) at Eastwood Hifi (one of Sydney’s few remaining specialist hifi stores) has some Celestion AVP305 5.1 speaker systems available at the special price of $990 (marked down from $3,199).
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[Update: the referenced video is no longer available on Google Video.]

Nerds (flying or otherwise) love Top Gear. Right Neil?

I stumbled across the fact that the fabulous British TV show about cars has some episodes on Google Video. The Top Gear team, led by the ever-manic Jeremy Clarkson, made a special show with a Winter Oympics theme. You can view it directly on this site, below.

I haven’t had time to view the whole episode yet, so I won’t comment on the MANY silly things that they do with cars and ice. But if you scroll through to about the 50th minute, you can see the Top Gear attempt at sending a Mini Cooper (a real one, not the recent BMW version) over a ski jump. With rockets attached.

Here’s a screen grab.

Enjoy!

As an Engineer (by training if not profession), this tickled me…

An MBA and an Engineer go on a camping trip, set up their tent, and fall asleep.

Some hours later, the Engineer wakes his MBA friend.

“Look at the sky and tell me what you see.”

The MBA replies, “I see millions of stars.”

The Engineer asks, “What does that tell you?”

The MBA ponders for a minute…

“Astronomically speaking, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets.

“Astrologically , it tells me that Saturn is in Leo.

“Time-wise, it appears to be approximately a quarter past three.

“Theologically , it’s evident the Lord is all-powerful and we are too small and insignificant.

“Meteorologically , it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.

“What does it tell YOU?”

The Engineer friend is silent for a moment, and then speaks.

“Practically…it tells me that someone has stolen our tent.”

We LOVE Mythbusters at our house.

Who’d have thought that 11 and 8 year old girls would love to sit down with their Dad and watch a couple of well-paid septic Nerds try to prove or disporove urban myths? Well, they do. And, like me, they especially enjoy blowing things up at the end.

This site contains a collection of out-takes and other unusual happenings during the production of Mythbusters. Well worth a look if you are a Mythbusters fan (and even if you are not). Thanks to Neil for the link.

By the way, Top Gear, which has replaced Mythbusters at 7.30pm on Mondays on SBS is also a lot of fun for rev-heads.

Here‘s a good article containing links to sites that have free or low price stock photos (for use in PowerPoint presentations, for example).

Here’s one for the electro-nerds. Download and watch the video. The whole thing. Gasp in awe and wonder.

Car crash, heavy traffic turn out Christmas light show

Quality evangelical audio content is now being made available at sydneyanglicans.net. If you’ve got an mp3 player, why not drop in and have a look?

I’ll try loading some of these into my player for morning walks. Watch out for some comments on the content, here on the Flying Nerd.

sydneyanglicans.net – Welcome to God-casting

The Nerd has been flying again (OK, in a 747-400 piloted by someone else), and finds himself sitting in Singapore’s Changi airport, staring out at the runway, watching planes and rain.

And thanks to free WLAN connectivity provided (intermittently) by StarHub, I can post to the Flying Nerd site. Fun, eh?
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I am constantly cutting text from one place and pasting it into another. I’m fussy about how my documents appear, so I very frequently use ‘paste special / unformated text’ so that whatever I’m pasting takes on the formatting of the document I’m preparing.

Here’s a super-useful utility (PureText) that allows me to use CTRL-c to copy text and WINDOWS-v to paste unformatted text. It’s a little thing, but it is beaut.

Updated 10 Oct 05: Gravatars are, how shall I put it, INTERMITTENT. Sometimes your lovely Gravatar will show up. Sometimes you will be a grey or black box. The man from gravatar.com is trying to fix things as quickly as possible.

Updated: 30 Sep 05. They’re fixed.

There’s a problem with displaying Gravatars (globally recognised avatars) at present.

Sounds like the folks at gravatar.com have a traffic volume issue with their hosting provider. Until they work it out, I guess we’re stuck with black boxes in the comments section.

See here for details.

Stay tuned.

The Flying Nerd has 100 Gmail invitations to give away. Would you like a Gmail account (webmail with 2.5GB storage)? If so, and I know you, send mail to me and I’ll arrange for you to receive an invitation.

From time to time, I like to buy bits and pieces for my home computer. Hard disc here. Stick of RAM there. You know how it goes.
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