Twitter Weekly Digest for 2011-09-11

  • Nem: once upon a time, there was a princess named Lemon Marangue. And she lived in a castle. And she liked to kill people. #
  • @HollyWillNot re GMT time in invitations: all my dad's dinner invites. In case I should confuse time zones whilst arriving by private jet. #
  • Tantalizing debate with Tia over what makes audio cable connectors male-to-male vs. female-to-female. Found the one I searched 1/2 hour for. #

Final NASA shuttle flight ~4 AM MST 2011-06-03

Last Friday we woke the kids up early and drove to a view down the street to watch the final space shuttle flight, which we learned would be visible over the west-northwest horizon.  It was, and I videotaped it.  This video features this and the kids, as well as repeated misuse of the term “rocket” where “shuttle” was meant.  The video player isn’t displaying high-definition popups at full resolution (a longstanding problem I’ve found no solution for, and no acceptable alternative player either), so downloading and playing it from the link will have to do.  Sorry, no medium-resolution version of this.

Children May be Present

A Thunderbird email client search-related dialog box (say that ten times fast!) filled with evidently child-typed gibberish

I am reminded of a horror story I heard where a child pushed a wrong button and deleted an entire blog, of so many dearly beloved and sorely missed posts.

I suppose the timeout to a password-locked screen-saver isn’t soon enough here..

For a Windows login where a child can do absolutely anything on a computer, but it’s all virtualized outside the “real” file system, and perfectly reverted at reboot, this “Clean Slate” tool looks great. Too bad they don’t have an affiliate link sales program or that would be an affiliate link 🙂 and I’m amused by their picture of a computer’s worst enemy.

Trampoline Static (voice recording with Mago)

I think I recorded this last summer.

Jumping on the trampoline, we discovered that if you have a static charge and slowly approach another’s nose with your finger (provided you’re in a dry climate like Utah?), that you’ll hear invisible static bursts jumping rapidly from you to the other person while your finger is still relatively far away – the bursts rapidly increasing until you get close enough to discharge all the static electricity.

The crummy little 16 Mhz recorder I was using doesn’t capture the whole range of the audio, but if you listen closely in this you can hear these increasing static micro-bursts at the lower sound wavelengths it could capture.

[audio:http://home.ussins.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/002_B_001_RAH_SP.wav-Mago-trampoline-static.mp3]

Download MP3 (1.4MB, 1.5 min.) – 002_B_001_RAH_SP.wav-Mago-trampoline-static