On Email Chains

I'm often astounded by how uninformed people are on the information superhighway. It seems like they'll give an email account to just anybody these days... wait a minute....

I got a chain email today urging me to sign a petition to the FCC because somebody else had gotten together a petition with 287,000 names on it to shut down all religious broadcasting. Honestly? In engineering, we have what we call a sanity check. Sometimes, you can get so bogged down in calculations that by the time you get an answer, you've forgotten what it means in real world terms. So you do a sanity check. Does the answer you've come up with actually make sense? If you were designing a bath tub for an elephant and determined that the dimensions should be 2' x 3' x 1', then no, you did something wrong. It is likewise absurd that an agency of the US government would (officially) consider shutting down all religious broadcasting.

However, for the sake of the conspiracy theorists out there, let us don our tin foil hats and research the issue. Amazingly, the same internet that facilitates the transfer of nonsense also allows you to check on the truth of said nonsense. Snopes.com is a great source for determining the truth about urban legends and email chains. I like to go to Google.com, though, because I prefer to go straight to the source - in this case, the FCC. Here in all its glory is the official FCC denial of the supposed attempt to deny us the pleasure of televangelists.

I like to get the official word on things because I can then send the link back to the sender of the email as well as everybody on the distribution list. I find that a small amount of shame does wonders for de-cluttering my inbox.

Another thing that irritates me about chain emails is the blatant diregard for the eyesight of the recipient. Amongst all the the email addresses of the last 5000 people to forward the message on, it is next to impossible to figure out if it is Microsoft or AOL sponsoring the email beta test. I've come up with a solution for this, though. Do you know how much spammers pay for confirmed email adresses? As long as I have to be inconvenieced, I might as well be making a profit.

Train Your Jedi Young

You never know when a Sith might be waiting around the corner so it's a good idea to brush up on your lightsaber dueling skills. It's also important to protect your loved ones by teaching them how to wield a lightsaber. As you can see, it is never too early to start. As long as you pretend it is only 'play,' they'll never know you are preparing them for real danger. A word to the wise, though: wait until they are a bit older before teaching them back flips.

In this training video we learn striking, blocking, evasion, and the all important control of the high ground.



Note: Dropping your lightsaber is not a good way to control the high ground. Also, while it is appropriate in practice to return a blade to a fallen foe, never give a Sith his lightsaber back - it is a good way to get your head chopped off.

Adventures in Lunch-Making

I happen to be very detail oriented at times. Not about everything, but certain things have to be done in a certain way. For example, there is an accepted orientation of my wallet in my pocket. If my wallet is rotated or flipped, it just doesn't feel right.

When I was going to school, my wife refused to touch my backpack. The binders and books each had their own correct places and orientations, the pens and pencils and calculator too. I had earphones, a bottle of lotion, a water bottle, snacks, stapler, and an eraser - and every one needed to be in its proper spot. My wife would ask to borrow something and I would tell her the exact spot she could find it. She would never try to put it back, though, because she'd been offended too many times by me taking it back out and putting it in the right place or facing the right direction.

Lunch is sometimes also difficult. Some foods can just be thrown in Tupperware and re-heated at your leisure. Other foods are a bit more difficult - meals that are designed to be assembled at the time of eating. Take fajitas for example. If you made a fajita the night before and put it in Tupperware, the tortilla would get all soggy. Cheese gets a bit gross when it stays wet for a while and you also want to make sure that things like sour cream don't get put in the microwave. This usually means that you would need to take several containers to segregate each component. Unfortunately, my computer bag is organized too, and there is only so much space allotted for lunch dishes. So how do I take fajitas for lunch? Like this:


Yes, there are indeed separate little packs for sour cream, guacamole, and tomatoes - gotta keep that cheese dry.

Another challenge is cupcakes. It is such a waste of frosting for it all to come off on the baggie. And a Tupperware large enough to not get frosting on it too wouldn't fit in my computer bag. What's a nerd to do? You can't just leave that cupcake home - not with kids around. This is the answer:

Yes, those are toothpicks sticking out of the top of the cupcake to keep the bag away. Aside from looking like pinhead from the Hellraiser movies, this worked really well. What I was particularly impressed by, though, was that when I started putting toothpicks in my cupcake my wife didn't roll her eyes or ask me what I was doing.

She said, "I wondered if you would think of toothpicks."

I've never been more proud.

The Magnet is Mightier than the DVD Case

First, a disclaimer: I did not in this post do anything illegal or even un-ethical. If you plan on using the information contained in this post to do anything illegal or un-ethical, shame on you - I hope you get caught. "Pirates, ye be warned."

I love the library. I like to read and I like to do it for free. I also like to watch movies. When I was a kid, the library had a video section, but it was full of old black and white movies that didn't appeal to people under the age of 40. (though they did have some Marx Brothers movies that entertained on occasion...) Nowadays, libraries stock up on the movies that people actually want to watch - a revolutionary idea, to be sure - and I delight in checking them out. But getting good movies from the library is an art unto itself. If you just waltz in and browse the shelves, you still aren't going to get anything better than "The Ten Commandments." The trick is to use the library's website to reserve the movies.

Every couple of months or so I will go onto some movie rental website like Redbox or DVDPlay and browse their latest movies. I will make a list of all of the movies that I want to see, then go to the library's web page and reserve them all. Sure, there are some long waits for the good movies. The key is to reserve movies regularly, so that you get a steady stream of them coming in - even if you have to wait a few months for some. Apart from being free, the library has some key benefits over video rental kiosks. For one thing, the library here lets you keep movies for three weeks. For another thing, if you do happen to be in the mood for some Charlton Heston - the library's got you covered. My geek lesson for today involves another classic, though not as old as Heston: Disney's "The Three Musketeers." ("Come, D'Artagnan! We're saving the king!")

Many libraries (and every video rental store) use Clear-Vu locking DVD cases to prevent the theft of their DVDs. These cases are characterized by the yellow locking bar that promises to damage the DVD if the case is forced open. My library uses these cases, but the locking bars have all been removed so that patrons can use the self-checkout kiosks instead of waiting in line for a librarian to unlock our movies. For some reason, the locking bar in my copy of "The Three Musketeers" had been left in - a fact I discovered last night when I went to watch the movie. Well, no little yellow bar was going to keep me from some swashbuckling action, so I googled my problem. I came across this tutorial. Apparently the technology works by using the tabs (see picture below) to lock the bar in place. The tabs have to be pulled to the center of the bar in order for it to slide free.

The tabs have a metal core. The 'magical' un-lockers are actually just magnets that pull the tabs in from the opposite side of the bar so that it can be slid out. Now, not just any magnet will do. The magnets have to be pretty strong. You could build a pretty honkin' electro magnet if you had an iron core and lots of wire, or you could take apart a spare hard drive and use the head seeker motor magnets, or if your dad is a nerd too and he happened to have given you some super-strong neodymium magnets, you could use those too. (thanks, dad!)

The rest is just proper positioning of the magnets so that they pull the pins in and presto! Now you can watch your legitimately acquired DVD and you can feel like you beat the system without having actually done anything wrong.

PS You'd think that accomplishing the above mentioned rare feat would get you some serious kudos from your wife. Maybe if I hadn't tried to explain it, she would have been more impressed...

Derby Doughnuts

My kids were playing with their toy cars this morning, so I got mine out too. My derby car has always been good at left turns but when one of the propellers flew off, it became downright gifted at them.

Get Yer Derby On!

My Elders Quorum had a pinewood derby race Friday night - modified class only. About half of the men are engineers, so there was a little excitement about what might be produced - sadly, no rail-guns. The "no fire" rule kind-of killed the rocket motor crowd, but there were still plenty of clever designs. I went with a propeller (two other guys did too). There were a couple CO2 cars, but they kept having problems setting off the cartridges - one wasn't centered and went spinning off the track the amusement of all. There was a rubber band propelled car, a few that were just much heavier than standard rules allow (one was cast out of metal), and one that had the works of a pull-back car attached to the back wheel.

I was a little proud of my car, 'Driving Miss Daisy,' mainly because I made my own propeller out of a plastic water bottle and a paper clip.

Here is my first test vehicle once I got the propeller mounted.

The three propeller cars made it to the top of the standings. My semi-final race was against a car called "Vote 'Yes' for Proposition 102," (pictured below) named for the Arizona 'One Man, One Woman' marriage ammendment on the November ballot. I felt a little bad when I beat it.

The championship race pitted me against a car made using an RC airplane motor and propeller. When the gate came down, my opponent hit the throttle on his remote control and smoked me. Ah well. It was a good run. My only regret is that I forgot to try to race somebody back up the track.

You got extra points if your car was really good at making left turns - mine was.

Hmm, what else you got under the dirt?

Yesterday, we went to the Titan Missle Museum. There used to be 54 Titan II missile installations clustered in 3 locations in the South of the US. 18 of them were centered around Tucson, AZ. At the end of their operational life, 53 of the silos had their blast doors blown open, their missiles removed and de-activated, and were backfilled with tons and tons of dirt to make them completely un-usable. One was converted into a museum. Its top blast door was locked in the half open position (the missile can only fire if the door is completely open) the nuclear tipped Titan II missile was removed and a disabled training missile was laid on its side next to the silo. This was to give the Soviet satellites clear evidence that the installation was inoperable. Then the missile was placed in the seven story launch tube and tours began.

It's hard to get a good picture to demonstrate the size of these beasts (they are in an underground silo, by the way) so we'll let this amazed face convey the awe you should be feeling. In case you were wondering, the missile is 102 ft tall and 10 ft in diameter. That warhead on the top (not a real one, of course)? 9 megatons. Yup, that's the equivalent of 9 million tons of TNT. Thats almost 500 times more powerful than the bombs used to end WWII.

This face is a bit more of what I was feeling looking around this place. Awesome!

By the way. If you wanted to buy your own Titan I missile complex (much larger than the Titan II) there is one available.