Have I not been paying attention, or what? The X-37B unmanned space plane landed early this morning (see this article) after more than seven months in space, and I didn't even realize it was up there. For those of you, like me, who hadn't read much about it: it's pretty much a smaller version of the Space Shuttle, but unmanned, and with the solar ( Read more... )

My name is pronounced in an uncommon way. I get that. Most people mispronounce it on first introduction, I correct them, and we move on. What bugs me is when they try to correct me, or when they simply ignore my correction ( Read more... )

Just heard this story on WINS (though the link is to Fox News) about concerns over the new hybrid cars. Specifically, the National Federation of the Blind is warning that the new hybrids are too quiet, taking away a warning cue from the visually impaired and possibly endangering blind pedestrians who won't know to not cross the street. Discussions ( Read more... )

Does anyone out there use bing.com as a search engine (or "decision engine", as Microsoft's incredibly expensive advertising campaign dubbed it)? I don't. Never felt the need (other than once, just to see if it was anything different than the now-ubiquitous Google, or my old favorite Altavista ( Read more... )

Oy, what a day! Massive computer trouble today really killed my planned schedule. First I thought there was a trojan virus running around in here that the anti-virus software could grab. It kept telling me there was a virus it couldn't fix, delete, or quarantine. Eventually, on another computer, I got to the anti-virus program's site, and figured ( Read more... )

"Google Seduces With Utility" by David Carr: Google is succeeding through being useful, insinuating itself into more and more aspects of the web, entwining itself everywhere, so that soon it will be inescapable. George Orwell's Big Brother may have finally arrived, but in the form of a company, rather than a government.

I've had a vague, uneasy feeling about MP3 players, iPods, you know, getting a little electronic music player to replace my music collection. One of the reasons I haven't bothered is because I always seem to have music playing in the back of my brain somewhere (at the moment, it's "Love Song" by Sarah Bareilles and "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry [ ( Read more... )

I probably would have posted more if I hadn't been at Lunacon all weekend and thus taken all my usual lj time just catching up on everyone else's posts ( Read more... )

I went to a memorial service this weekend (actually, I went to two-Janet Kagan's and Robert Legault's-it wasn't a good weekend). On Saturday, at Janet's home, several people brought old photographs of her. They were great pictures, a nice way to remember her. It was a social, communal way of remembering, as we passed the pictures around, and those ( Read more... )

Here's an interesting piece of technology: this MSNBC article calls it a ray gun or a laser, but from the description, it's something else, closer to a microwave gun, I think. It sounds interesting, though the focus of the article is on how the military commanders in the field want it, but the top levels fear the public perception of using such a ( Read more... )