Pinging Europa

Well i am very excited about the news out of NASA this past week. they have decided to send a probe on a 9 year mission to the jovian moons. sticking mostly to Ganymede and Europa. the really exciting part is if you are unaware of the characteristics of those moons, they are believed to have vast underground oceans that would be perfect for harboring life. one would assume since the planets are so far from the sun that they would be frozen solid, but due to the immense gravity from its parent planet Jupiter, tidal forces cause a great amount of stress on all the moons. causing friction to heat them. it is an interesting display of exotic situations life could exist in. most assume life would be contained to thermal vents that spew nutrients into those vast oceans much like the ones on the earths seas floor. entire ecosystems built around volcanic mounds. one can not help but to think about 2010: Space Odyssey and how Arthur C. Clarke so elegantly explained how life could and probably does exist on in these places. one exciting aspect is that this will be a joint venture between NASA and the European space agency. these are the easily the best places to look for life in our solar system, and i am super thrilled we will be going there in a decade.

So Ping is pretty useless right now. kind of sad that it is among apples biggest failures. i have a concept for how it could be used for its full potential. what i would like to see is a collaboration with facebook, that allows for a seem less and instant viewing of anything a person is listening to. so lets say i am in the car with my iPhone listening to Angels & Airwaves, right now the only really good way of letting people know about that is by tweeting that song with an app. which gets posted to my wall and people can read it but that is all. the user experience stops there. imagine ping being built into the iPod app itself, a simple toggle on and off and what it does is it "pings" what song i am listening to and instantly updates a status independent of my wall on my facebook profile page. at anytime someone wants to know more about that song they can click on the track name and instantly be linked to the iTunes web store/iTunes store. one can also comment and like any song i am currently listening to, which would then place it on my wall as a mentioned item. this feature could be turned on for any device i am using. if i am at home listening to iTunes, or at my parents house using pandora with my iPad, or roller blading in the park with my iPhone. it would instantly update a "listening to" status on my facebook page allowing people to experience the music i am experiencing.

Wiki Page of the Day (WPotD)

Kingdom Hearts (キングダム ハーツ Kingudamu Hātsu^?) is an action role-playing game developed and published by Square (nowSquare Enix) in 2002 for the PlayStation 2 video game console.^[2] The first game in the Kingdom Hearts series, it is the result of a collaboration between Square Enix and The Walt Disney Company. The game combines characters and settings from Disney animated features with those from Square's Final Fantasy series. The story follows a young boy, Sora, as he is thrown into an epic battle against the forces of darkness. He is joined by Donald Duck, Goofy, and other classic Disney characters who help him on his quest.

92

Update on Wakemate:
so i recently said that what would make this product even better would be to have a bar graph with the information displayed on it. well it is a good thing i do not blog for a living because this very feature exists. the other night i apparently had an astonishing night of sleep i scored a 92 out of 100. 0.0 i do not know how or why. but anyway the bar graph representation is very cool, i wish i could put a link in this post to show the site, but i need to be logged in to view it so a screenshot will have to do.

Found a very cool application today, it is a companion app for minecraft called MCMap Lite. it allows me to view the map in pretty much anyway i want. i can scan downwards segment by segment. i can search for certain kind of blocks, and i can take screenshots at anytime. it is very cool and i am very excited about it. this is a screenshot of the server as of now.

It does a fantastic job of belittling our work as a whole. but you can clearly make out the pyramid, north east of that is Joe's house, and west of all that is Steve's building. gives one a good scale of things.


Wiki Page of the Day (WPotD)

Erie (pronounced /ˈɪəri/) is an industrial city on the shore of Lake Erie and the regional hub of northwestern Pennsylvania, United States. Named for the lake and the Native American tribe that resided along its southern shore, Erie is the state's fourth largestcity (after Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Allentown), with a population of 104,000.^[2] Erie's Metropolitan Area consists of approximately 280,000 residents and an Urbanized Area population of approximately 195,000. The city is the seat of governmentfor Erie County.

Google Relieves the Revolt

Have not posted in a few days. been busy procrastinating. the revolt in Egypt is all over right now so i will just briefly touch on the part i have an opinion about. looting and vandalism is rampant and one thing in the country that is probably the most valuable is the museum that houses the entire history of the region. at first the military was guarding it but apparently after a while they started to move out or become inefficient or something. anyway there was a small case of vandalism there but nothing important was damaged. then i read that groups of people from all classes were barricading themselves in front of the museums to keep them safe. this as far as i am concerned shows that we are evolving as a species. if this had happened when they burned the library of Alexandria the world would be a sharp contrast to how it is now. the fact that random people were willing to risk their own lives for the sake of the preservation of knowledge and history really makes me happy and hopeful. because without our history, and without our knowledge we are lost.
a follow up to a recent post i made about them cutting off the Internet and cell signals in that country. truly amazing thing happened. google created a service were one could tweet via a phone recording. which is amazing because it shows that no matter how hard a government tries to cut its people off from the global Internet, we will find a way to give a voice to those people. we will find a way for those people to express themselves to the rest of us, to show what is truly going on there.

Google unveiled a new "app" that i think really sums up what google is here for. it allows one to experience art from other places in the world in amazing detail. google should be here to catalog and store our global information, and allow it viewable to everyone. the 21st century is going to be about instant access to everything, and google is slowly making that possible.

Yesterday the storm of the year hit. or as everyone is calling it the snowacolypse. i was supposed to go to work but i would have had to drive home at 11:45 in a foot of snow driving a firebird.....um no thank you. so i called off, which should not be a big deal since i have only called off one other time since i was hired there and it was because i had severe food poisoning.
Crystal and Larry came over to hang out here during the night of the storm. about halfway through the night we decided we needed some cut and bake cookies. so we ventured out into the blizzard. it was nuts, the wind had to be 40 MPH and it was not snow, it was sleet/ice. which was fun.

Steve finished the outside of the building and now has nothing to do but the inside furnishings and such. kind of exciting however this means once he has finished we both will be stuck with no ideas on what to do next.



Wiki Page of the Day (WPotD)

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure originally described by Freeman Dyson. Such a "sphere" would be a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture most or all of its energy output.