Apparently I wasn't as skilled with Legos as I once thought

I just found this on Digg... Basically it is a bunch of Legos that build tiny Lego cars.  Yes, that is correct, they are building, one for every man woman and child in Zion.  Now that sounds like a robots thinking to me.

Eureka would be more entertaining if I was a business major

I need to give credit to Alex for saying something along these lines before I did, but I couldn't help but blog this.

We were watching the new episode of Eureka that just aired today in my dorm room, and we were analyzing the episode where space junk is falling from the sky.  This was the episode that aired right before the new episode.  Simply put, the science in this episode is just crazy.

First off, you can't really repel metal using a magnet, it has a tendency to attract.  This totally negates the final resolution of the plot.  Also, the sudden realization that helped some of the main characters solve the problem with generating enough power was the difference between parallel and series circuits.  There is also a mention of PV cells (photo voltaic) and they are definitely indoors where there isn't very much sunlight.

Back to my main point, Eureka is still a great show, but their science has slipped a little bit.  The engineering classes I've taken just make some of the things they say just comical.  They have nothing to do with the science.  Not to bash business majors, but as a geek, if I took fewer physics classes I'd probably enjoy the show a bit more.

Windows Vista Ultimate

I just finished upgrading from Windows Vista Business to Windows Vista Ultimate on my tablet.  I purchased the very affordable, $8 copy from the IT store today.  It is specifically for Speed School students and is at a reduced price because of our technology fee.

The install took about 2 hours.  It was an upgrade, I'm certain a fresh install would not have taken as long to install the OS but in the long run, I didn't want to reinstall all of my applications again.  After the upgrade I was getting several very scary error messages and driver problems.  Slowly things started to repair themselves and after installing all of the windows updates, things seem to be in good shape.

I haven't had time yet to play with the exclusive Ultimate features, but I'll get around to it.  I'm most excited about the media features that are typically in Home Premium but missing from Business.  Specifically, the media center for Vista may prove to be quite useful.

Lately a large amount of my friends have been installing Vista.  I'm seeing a big move towards the new OS.  It might be because of the fact it is almost free, but none the less, it is still worth using.  Although it has some problems, as a whole, it is as reliable and useful as Windows XP when it was first released.

Egyptian Ratscrew

A while back I programmed the game of War.  It was a simple problem to solve.  My goal was mainly to see the distribution for number of rounds it took to win a game.

Having mastered that problem (but never really published my results, I'll do that sometime) I moved on to a new challenge.  The name of the game is Egyptian Ratscrew.  While there are many different variants of this game, I'm focusing on the one I'm familiar with.

The problem with ERS as opposed to war is the choice involved.  While War involves no decisions by the player, ERS adds the component of "slapping" the deck.  I'll attempt to overcome these difficulties by applying different approaches to the game.

Although I currently have a working prototype of the game, it is not worth publishing anything yet as it is still in the early stages of development.

Skype Outage

Today I was having trouble logging onto Skype on my desktop and though nothing of the problem.  Then, when I turned on my laptop and found it to not be working there as well I became suspicious.

My first though was that there was some problem with my ISP but I was able to browse the Internet normally so that was not proving to be the problem.  After browsing Skype.com I was able to track down the problem to a major outage that will last from 12-24 hours.  This is very out of character for Skype as in my previous experiences I was able to connect to Skype even when the most limited Internet access was available.

The Skype post about the problem indicates it is a software problem and they are working quickly to resolve it.

Apparently they work faster than I can blog because now Skype is now logged in.  Hopefully it lasts.