This is just a brief announcement. I am now semi-officially an alumni of New Mexico State University after much wailing and gnashing of teeth (I made that last bit up). At the very least, it’s been a tremendous relief. Read the rest of this entry »

I drive most days to university in Las Cruces, which is about 80 miles one-way. During the trip, I’m usually presented with an amazing variety of unusual goods being transported on America’s highway system. I’ve seen quite literally everything from parts and pieces of wind generators to what seems to be the fuselage section of F-35s. Sometimes, however, the most astounding thing I see is the treatment other drivers have toward truckers.

Long-haul truckers no doubt have to put up with a great amount of abuse; they drive long hours, haul amazingly heavy loads, and are cut off by private vehicles whose drivers are in a hurry. Today, I passed one of the few LOX (liquid oxygen) trucks makes its rounds and witnessed first-hand someone cutting him off. Never mind that this occurred on the highway! Perhaps it’s important that every driver witness this video:

In this video, you get to see what happens when a charcoal grill is set on fire using liquid oxygen. Not only does it burn (and burn very well), but in the second experiment, the grill melts and some of the iron burns away.

Yes, folks, it’s important to be careful on the road. It’s doubly important to respect long-haul truck drivers whose cargo could incinerate you.

For some reason, I found this video to be insanely funny. There’s just something hilarious about a huge bulldozer sliding down an icy slope as if it’s a ballet dancer of sorts.

Oh, and there’s a few minor updates to my OpenOffice.org 3 commentary.

After having downloaded OOo v3.0 sometime Monday evening (I honestly don’t remember when), I finally decided to give it a go today. Surprise, surprise, it actually handles OOXML now! Read the rest of this entry »

All right, most of my content has been moved over to WordPress, including my poetry. Gallery links and a few other loose ends will be included in the coming days. Stay tuned!

Like many other personal sites, I’ve decided to move things over to WordPress. While I have another content system in the works, personal life (speicfically university) has been keeping me busy enough to limit the time I can spend working on it. Thus, I’ve decided I may divert my efforts instead to improving Cited.

I’m intending to update part of Cited’s back-end and remove the PHP dependencies by using either mod_python or mod_wsgi. I suspect I’ll settle on the latter since the chat software really does require a fairly minimal amount of overhead. Plus, the cool thing is that I can use it to interface with the daemon that’s already running. At the very least, this will consolidate many of my efforts.

Sandstorm is probably going to continue under limited development for now, depending on how much time my classes are going to consume. So far, I’ve been spending most of my time on my history class—not that there’s anything wrong with history—but the demands of that class also take away from efforts I’d rather put into my .NET course. Admittedly, the latter is fairly easy (for me), but sometimes I’d like to spend a few days on a programming assignment just because I can and because I like to create a finished product that actually looks nice.

So, stay tuned. I’ll be moving my previous content over to Wordpress in the coming days. On the plus side, this will allow me some outlet to blabber about a few things that happen to cross my mind.