+1 BLURRY +1 FLASHY ANTENNAE —————————————— 2, FTW

I’d like to post the details of my latest one-on-one with my Arduino…but, I’m not going to. Suffice to say, it was sweet. Anything (non work related) involving multiple command lines is plus one awesome.

Let’s talk gambing, yes? I may or may not be the worst gambler west of the Rio Grande. Or is that North of the Rio Grande? Both maybe. Quite likely both, due to my track record. Cards are not my bag, baby. Odds are odds. I find myself thinking about math when I play, and that is that. You can pick one of the two to be good at…or rather one must suspend belief in one or the other when gambling. I guess I’m all math. Good news for you gamblers, though. Times have changed…move over smokey, blue-hair filled, lounge singer, watered-down whiskey havin’ casinos. Your run at the top was impressive, but now the good casinos are online. Think about it for a bit. If you can play the same games online as you can at a traditional casino, without keeping the lights on a big, bright, loud building, why wouldn’t you do so. It is all about the overhead. Better payouts online, since it takes far, far less to maintain something virtual. You don’t even have to go through the trouble of putting on pants…gamble in your boxer shorts. Easy easy chicken greasy. Either way, you will not catch me plugging those machines any time soon. The one-armed bandit and I are foes. Three arms of unadulterated hatred for one another. He wins…he always does.

Index of refraction. End of story? You wish…I’m going to pontificate for a while. Where did I set that soapbox… I dig optics. The coolest class I took was my graduate level optics class at the old alma mater, Montana State. I missed my calling as a physicist. Or rather, I missed my calling as someone who gets paid to play with lasers in a laboratory. Lasers lasing all over the place. Plenty of fiber optic cables around the lab, you can be sure of that, Jack. Spools and spools of fiber optical cable is a pipe dream, though. That stuff isn’t exactly free, due to the nature of the beast. As pictured above, fiber optic cable is multi layered, and as I mentioned, is all made possible due to refraction. Index of refraction, to be more specific. See the above picture…the layer around the core is of a different index, keeping the photons bouncing towards the finish line (in a huge nutshell.) The reason these things work so well is that the core (usually a glass of some nature) deals with photons instead of electrons. Massless and charge-free, photons are not crushed and or distorted by elecromagnetic noise. They can be setup to carry tons of data…aka very high bandwidth…thustly making fiber optic cables a perfect choice for high quality, large connections. Jack. Hit one of those links to see some sweet home uses. Hit wikipedia to see the physics behind the scenes. The main reason to push signal through fiber instead of copper is reliability. You really can’t wear out glass.

I knuckled up on my heavy bag again last night… Pretty sure I need to procure some bag gloves.

My usual 8 hour Pandora session at work was replaced today with an 8 plus hour NPR session. Yep, even NPR has an app for Android. Move the eff over iPhone…this sucker is gunning for you.

Many moons ago, I heard through the grapevine that slow sites are penalized by search engines. Being the owner of a fast-as-lightning-bro-you-better-get-your-Nikes-bro site, I didn’t care. After plugging into the world of php, jquery, css, html, and a boat load of 3rd party crap on ol’ swantron.com, I have a slow site. Waah. (Hint: that ampersand in front up there ^ means Twitter) Looking into the cause of my crappy speed numbers, the first culprit was my stupid “poll” plugin that I have been using. Nobody cares about the polls on a site, unless they have exhausted every other iota of content on said site. Not the case here. Not the case by a long shot. I do have some content that is popping in the search engines, however. Tons of impressions, in fact. I am lacking the placement, even on swantron-specific terms. Maybe my lean-and-mean approach will win me SEO gold, readership silver, and living off of saying dumb shit bronze. Maybe. Polls are officially off line until the jury has deliberated.

Them shits is off the blazin meter… Yep. Big fan.

I am now an official Android fanboi. It would be impossible to hide that fact. Granted, I have yet to root my Droid 2, but I am at least ninety something out of a possible one hundred ‘big into’ this OS. Pretty pumped I waited for Snapdragon…pretty pumped I feigned the urge to get a first generation device…pretty pumped that Apple and or AT&T are not around my neck of the woods…you name it. I’m in a good place, cellularly. +1 use of the word ‘cellularly’ Regardless, I am left with the problem of what to do with all of my passé phones. +1 tilde I have a stack of Verizon phones sitting around, with very little use. Zero use, in fact, unless you can count ’looking at and laughing about how ridiculously horrid technology was two years ago’ a use, which in fact I do not. Good thing I found a site that will give you money for your mobile phone. Not just a bit, either. That is, of course, unless you are still rocking the Zach Morris phone: Damn right A.C. is going to sit backwards in his chair, Preppy. You know what is cool about SellMyMobile? Not only will they give you money for your cell, but they are saving the environment as well. My old Blackberry may not be as worth as much as the big hitters (iPhone, iPad, Nokia N8, etc.) but it will at very least stay out of a landfill. There are some toxins in that sucker…gold too, but also toxins. Hit that bump up there to see what I’m talking about. Worth a shot, especially if you have a sweet phone that you are looking to monetize. Reduce, Reuse, Monetize. I think.