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.

The proof is in the pudding (or in the froyo?) on this guy. Droid 2, hands down. Sorry Nexus fans. I ran a benchmark test on my Droid 2 running Froyo. Here are the results, in slick, colorful, sideways bar graph form. Sorry for the awful picture quality…I had to log into my dual boot, in order to use Dell Webcam Central (garbage) to snap a picture of my phone. Turns out, my phone is also my camera, and I have yet to grab a screenshot app. Whatever. I’ll summarize the results. Droid 2 with Froyo —— 1384 units Nexus One 2.2 ——————— fewer unit than 1384 Others Played ——————– far fewer units than even 1384 Not sure what these units are, really, but the Droid 2 is clearly superior. I used an app called Quadrant, which is alleged to be quite legit. It surprised me that the Droid X is lagging behind 2.2+ that much…it was supposed to be hotter than Hades. The Samsung Galaxy S is making a solid case for itself, sitting well above the Nexus One and HTC Desire. As for those on the Moto Droid…hang in there. Hopefully you can manage to break your phone under warranty and get something with the Snapdragon under the hood. ****Bonus Bloggage…after I snapped the above picture and put together this post, I knuckled up on the Widowmaker pictured in the background. My knuckles indicate that I once again lost.****

Guess what back to school means to me…a longer commute to and from work. Dodging coeds isn’t as fun as it sounds. Well, maybe cutting extremely close to bikers is fun. Actually, that is very fun. The only real bonus to this time of year is for the barn-burner sales that pop up for technology aimed at students. If there is any chance that a college bound dude or dudette will be shopping for a tech item of some sort, chances are high that that item will be super cheap, somewhere. Case in point…how about some discounts at HP

(say what you will…I still want one of those damned HPs with the flip around screen…badly) I was poking around Savings.com, and noticed that they have all sorts of deals that are aimed at students. Free shipping and all sorts of discounts on HP notebooks, ink, you name it. They also had some deals from Verizon regarding Droid phones and $50 off. I’m somewhat upset that I bought my Droid 2 without checking out the back to school deals. Anyhow, hit that link to see what I’m talking about. I’ll be playing with my phone, and wishing I was playing with a picture of my phone on my swivelly HP netbook.

This is not a chipper tale of how-to boastery. Far from it. I cartoonified the shit out of the following pics, in order to further convey the surreal darkness that was involved in this seemingly trivial task. Buckle up…it is not likely to be pleasant blog-reading. The mission objective was simple enough: hang a heavy bag. The mission-turns-out-to-be-a-little-cooler-and-a-little-more-involved moment came when I realized there was approximately one punching bag length between the ceiling in my garage and the spot where I wanted the top of said bag. I’ll let the pictures tell the story, for the most part. My knuckles are all sorts of funked up, which is an indication of the title’s eventual success. Or aptness. Or giant fail…I’m still very confused. Enough rambling…first thing I know, I’m standing on my Honda Trail 90, wondering how I ended up with a heavy bag (and Honda Trail 90) before I managed to end up with a goddamned ladder. When in Rome…snap a pic. It’s pretty much all about the photo-documentation at this point. “Uh” is incredibly right. That sucker was bouncing around looking down…not so stable when my arm and or both arms were above my head. Good thing I’m limber. Huh? My grand idea involved two threaded rings. Innocent enough looking… …fucking wrong. Far from innocent, when said threaded ring is dropped into spider-central… Well, I managed to knock most of those webs out of place with my trusty framing hammer. Unfortunately, I knocked them right on that stupid shiny thing I was attemping to arm-fish out of the hole between the particle board, studs, spider poop, drywall, and darkest hell. I got the stupid thing, did the weird shudder thing with my shoulders/neck for a half-minute, and got back into gear. Survival mode at this point. Darkest-hell-been-and-back-survival mode. Either my creeped out spider dance brought me luck, or my engineering was sound. Or both…but it worked out, against most odds. It works, and there is a box of delicious OML in the frame. So I guess I’ll count that as a win???