Jay’s Life

Staysea and I leave on our trip across Canada tomorrow. We’ll hopefully be able to keep in touch here and post pictures along the way. There are some extended stops scheduled in Calgary and Vancouver where we’ll be visiting family and friends. On the plus side it’s a one way drive, since we are delivering the vehicle we’re taking, and flying back. I don’t know if I could handle the 4,288 kM trip twice. I’m still really excited about it, and tomorrow it all begins.

Maps and Route where created using Microsoft® MapPoint®

I don’t know if this applies to the Canadian market or not, probably not, the CRTC seems bent on making a number of things difficult. But I thought it was pretty cool.

Remember when you had a Zip Drive and carrying around 100 MB was a big deal? Heck, I can put that much in my Palm device now. Well, a company called Optware, has demonstrated a device that can store between 200GB and 300GB on one 12 cm disk. That’s the size of a standard CD. The technology that makes it possible is called “polarized collinear holography”. The recording version won’t be available till 2005 and it’s going to be for commercial use only, but expect read only devices to be available for consumer use by 2006.
Personally I have around 450 GB of storage spread out at home, and that’s all full up, it would be amazing to be able to backup all that information to one disk.

More Here and here

Lots of cool stuff to play with for Apple users today, iTunes 4.5, Palm Desktop 4.2.1, Quicktime 6.5.1 and an iPod update, that even supports my first generation iPod.

I’ve been working on ripping a bunch of movies to take with me on my upcoming trip, so I have something to watch and I came across this nice application for encoding DVDs to smaller files that you can store on your laptop. Just pop in the DVD, choose audio language, and the end size you want the file to be, and it does the rest. The quality is quite good, I reduced a 2 hour movie to just 400 Megs (from 4 Gigs). Plus, this way I don’t have to worry about forgetting my movie somewhere thousands of kilometers from my home.

HandBrake: Review — Download

This is way too cool, a company called Microvision has developed a technology that allows a laser to draw an image directly onto the retina. The result is an overlaid image of what you would regularly see. The article goes on to talk about how Honda is already using this technology for their mechanics. They have a special monocle that houses the laser and a Wi-Fi (wireless network) module that links back to the technical database for the Honda fleet. The end result is a mechanic who, while looking at the part of the car that he is fixing, can see what steps to take to resolve the current mechanical problem. Way cool. Read the article…

If you are one of those people who likes to rebuild their system on a regular basis, then you’ll probably want to check Slipstreaming. Basically, you can roll in all the latest patches into your copy of XP so that when you’re done installing, everything is all patched up. This really works well if you’re hyper-paranoid about those pesky security holes being breached while you’re sitting on Windows Update waiting for everything to download.

Read the Microsoft Article

The move into the new house for half of it’s occupants, started yesterday and finished up today while I was at work. It’s a very nice house. There is a closet for the server room and a fireplace next to the XBox’s new home. That’s all that is really important. I’ll post pictures of the closet and the fireplace later

Clearly, the evolution of the beer fridge is wandering the halls of the University of Florida’s Machine Intelligence Lab. Just send a message to the Koolio and it wirelessly finds where to go, and delivers you a nice cool drink.

Here is a DeLorean, complete with Flux Capacitor up for sale on E-Bay, incase any one out there in my family suddenly came across a bundle of cash and wants to spend it on me Hurry, time’s running out, but it won’t if I had a cool time machine!
eBay item 2475019485 (Ends Apr-30-04 20:08:19 PDT) – DeLorean : Gullwing