I was trolling Digg tonight and ran across this article about finding rare songs on YouTube. I hadn't really thought about it but I had found some great Pink Floyd videos on there a while back. I've had a song (not Pink Floyd) knocking around in my brain for a while that I was never able to identify; all I could remember was "suckerpunch". So I typed "suckerpunch song" into the search on YouTube and bang, there it was. Actually, after hearing this again (besides realizing it was from around 1993) was how much this sounded like Nine Inch Nails, March of the Pigs (released around the same time). OK, it doesn't quite match up as well as it did in my head (or as well as this), but whatever. It's got the same sort of feel.

That got me thinking about when I saw Pink Floyd at the Pontiac Silverdome; I was trying to figure out what year I went. This, of course, got me thinking about the first concert I ever saw: Iron Maiden at Joe Louis Arena. That led me back to YouTube. And Guitar Hero.

The internets is cool. And a huge waste of time. But mostly cool.

Links:

http://digg.com
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10125016-52.html?part=rss
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_bvT-DGcWw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plBna98XZNQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2LwEQFK3qc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xNQZHuAQJ8
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PFArchives/tourdate.htm
http://www.maidenfans.com/imc/index.php?url=tour06_sit/dates06_sit&link=tours&lang=deu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUOpUqni0_g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e39D8VBQ4sw

Bonus Track (just because this is a great song):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5JkHBC5lDs

How much money is here?

No cheating! Scroll down when you're ready to guess.

If you:

1. Looked at the pile of money for about 15 seconds then said to yourself, "I don't know, maybe $10,000 - $15,000".

Then you're probably not a geek.

If you:

1. Opened the picture up in a paint program so you could zoom in and see the denominations (or used one of the various magnifying glass apps).
2. Then counted the number of piles.
3. Tried to estimate how thick each pile of money was based off of some other aspect of the picture.
4. Then did a Google search to figure out how thick a dollar bill is (or went old school and grabbed a micrometer and did some tests).
5. Finally calculated the total.

Then you're a geek.

If you're still not sure whether you're a geek or not...

If you're annoyed that I haven't told you how much money is there, or you just don't care, then you're not a geek.

If you're annoyed that I haven't told you how much money is there because you want to know whether you're estimate was right or wrong, or if you just don't care because you've already answered the question, then you're a geek.

I'm going to buy one of these just to freak out the neighbors.

Links:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

How much memory is "enough"? I've got 4 GB (imagine telling someone 5 years ago you had 4 Gigabytes of memory!) in my machine right now and I'm really wishing I had more. Enough so that I've got (4) 2GB memory sticks in my shopping cart at NewEgg. I'd get 16 GB, but it's just too expensive right now. It would seem like 4 GB would be enough, but when I upgraded my machine a while back to Vista (64-bit) I took a VMWare snapshot of my XP machine before the upgrade. I'm still using that machine since I've got a few apps. that need to run and I haven't really wanted to spend the money upgrade to the new versions. I like to allocate approx. 1.5 GB of memory to that machine. I also maintain a VMWare image of Visual Studio that gets 2 GB of memory. Between the both of them I can't really run them at the same time with any reasonable performance.

How much memory do most developers now run? I'm guessing 2 GB is now "entry level". I can use up 1 GB of memory just with Visual Studio. If I don't close FireFox down regularly it'll keep taking up memory (I've seen it as high as 300-400 MB of memory). Outlook grabs around 130 MB. Add a few other apps. to that and suddenly that doesn't leave much room for the OS.

8 GB should give me a bit of breathing room, at least for a bit. How many years until I'm saying something like, "I've got 4 TB of memory and it's not quite enough..."

I admit it - the above comic could be about me. I can be easily distracted by shiny things, so I sometimes have to fight off the urge to spend way too much time playing around with some cool bit of technology, code, or idea. If you're like me, these links may be your downfall. Lot's of things to sidetrack you with. The site I snagged the above comic from is just one of them.

http://www.xkcd.com

MIX is a web development conference put on by Microsoft. They've made all (well, at least I think it's all of them) of the conference topics available online. Very cool - there are bunch of really good sessions available here. Silverlight is looking interesting.

http://visitmix.com/

The TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference is a four day conference with one "track" of speakers that each get 18 minutes to there thing. From what I've gathered, it's mostly an "invite only" type of event of around 1000 people (and even if it wasn't, the $6000 membership fee would probably keep the number of people attending under control). At any rate, they've made something like 200 of the talks available for free, so there are a ton of interesting videos to watch here. Since they're all under 18 minutes, it's easy to fit a video or two in a sitting. Then you can waste another few hours Googling some of the things they talk about.

http://www.ted.com

Google Earth - An "oldie" but a goodie. I can waste a ton of time with this one. Something about the interactivity of it really appeals to me. I can't say I was ever really a map-person until apps. like this and GPS became readily availble. And if you get bored, there are a bunch of neat 3D buildings and map overlays to download. Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out...

http://earth.google.com/

Photosynth - If Google Earth appeals to you, you'll probably also love this one. It's basically a Microsoft research project (well, Microsoft owns it now) that takes pictures of some scene and projects it (or builds it, I'm not exactly sure) onto a 3d framework of the original location. Check out the Collections they've got - I swear I wasted a good 45 minutes rotating and zooming into the images. Even if you've seen this in the past, visit it again: they've added a few new collections that are pretty cool.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

The above should keep you busy for a while. I had planned on "featuring" a timewaster once a week or so, but at my current blogging pace it'd probably be closer to once a month, so I decided to just group a bunch of the more general ones together into one post. Have fun.

I'm happy to say my winter cleaning give away was a success. Almost all of the books that were available have new owners (although they may still be waiting for them, since they were shipped at the book rate which can take forever), and my huge pile of computer equipment is also gone. I had a taker for the computer equipment within a day of posting it on my local Freecycle site. I thought he'd pick through the rubble, but he ended up taking the whole pile (including my Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, and Windows 2000 Resource Kits - those alone took up a full bookshelf).

There are a few books still available, if anyone is interested.

Links:

http://www.rcs-solutions.com/blog/2007/12/13/WinterCleaning.aspx
http://www.freecycle.org

I've been spending a lot of time lately doing some winter cleaning. We're trying to free up some space in the basement for a play area for Brendan. It's amazing how much stuff you can collect. We've thrown away a LOT of stuff - I'm pretty sure the garbage guys hate us by now. Jenn mentioned that one of them didn't look too pleased when he tried to lift one of the bags we put out. We've been donating anything with think might still be useful, and we have people who drive through our subdivision on garbage days looking for interesting finds. More power to them, I say; I'd rather someone finds some use for this stuff instead of throwing it out. Besides, who's got the patience for a garage sale? And who really wants to deal with people trying to get half price for an item marked $1 that originally cost $50.

Since I've been involved with computers for quite some time (and not all of it as a developer), I've managed to collect quite a collection of old computers. Old Pentiums, 486's, a few 386's, motherboards, cases, power supplies, an unbelievable amount of cables, network cards, video cards, etc. I'm planning on posting that stuff on our local freecycle site to see if anyone might be interested in it before tossing it. One of my regrets with a lot of this is that I didn't give it away sooner, while it still may have been of more use to someone. I guess that may have been why I kept it.

A big part of this collection is a ton of books and magazines. I've whittled the magazines down to something manageable, but I still have way too many books. I'm sure I'll add more to the list as soon as I can convince myself that I really don't need them anymore, and once I have time to go through the ones still hiding in the basement (and hopefully before some of them aren't useful anymore). Here's a list of what's on the chopping block (you might be surprised; there are some good books here):

• Apple II Plus/IIe Troubleshooting & Repair Guide, Robert C. Brenner. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-22353-8
• DNS and BIND 3rd Edition, Paul Albitz & Cricket Liu. O'Reilly. ISBN: 1-56592-512-2
• XML Extensible Markup Language (w/CD), Elliotte Rusty Harold. IDG Books. ISBN: 0-7645-3199-9
• The Unified Modeling Language User Guide, Booch, Rumbaugh, Jacobson. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0-201-57168-4
• The Visual FoxPro 3 Codebook (CD is missing), Yair Aan Griver. Sybex. ISBN: 0-7821-1648-5
• Object Orientation in Visual Foxpro, Savannah Brentnall. Addison-Wesley. ISBN: 0-201-47943-5
• Object Models: Strategies, Patterns, & Applications (Second Edition), Coad, North, Mayfield. Yourdon Press. ISBN: 0-13-840117-9
• Visual Basic 6 Business Objects, Rockford Lhotka. Wrox. ISBN: 1-861001-07-X
• ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed, Stephen Walther. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-32823-2
• Hacker's Guide to Visual FoxPro 6.0, Granor, Roche. Hentzenwerke Publishing. ISBN: 0-96550-936-2
• The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, Alan Cooper. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-31649-8
• About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, Alan Cooper. IDG Books. ISBN: 1-56884-322-4
• The Improvement Guide, Langley, Nolan, Nolan, Normal, Provost. Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 0-7879-0257-8
• HTML: The Complete Reference (Second Edition), Thomas A. Powell. Osborne. ISBN: 0-07-211977-2
• Effective Techniques for Application Development w/VFP 6.0, Booth, Sawyer. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 0-96550-937-0
• What's New in Visual FoxPro 8.0, Granor, Hennig. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 1-930919-40-9
• CrysDev: A Developer's Guide to Integrating Crystal Reports, Craig Berntson. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 1-930919-38-7
• Advanced Object Oriented Programming w/VFP 6, Egger.  Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 0-96550-938-9
• Client/Server Applications w/VFP & SQL Server, Urwiler, DeWitt, Ley, Koorhan. Hentzenwerke. ISBN: 1-930919-01-8
• C# Unleashed, Joseph Mayo. Sams. ISBN: 0-672-321-22-X
• Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, Robert D. Austin. Dorset House. ISBN: 0-932633-36-6
• Windows 2000 Server Resource Kit (No CD), 8 books total
   

If anyone might be interested in this stuff (books or computer techno-rubble), drop me a line (I can take a pic. of the computer stuff). All of it free as long as you pick up the shipping cost. I hope I don't regret giving away some of this, these books have served me well <g>

Links:

http://www.freecycle.org

I was forwarded this video described as, "The First Computer User and Tech Support". I'm sure it's hosted somewhere else, but I have no idea where it came from so I've uploaded it here. Hopefully the bandwith doesn't kill me <g>

Links

http://www.rcs-solutions.com/Misc/IT_Pro.wmv

Updated - Use this link instead (thanks for the link Rick):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE

I ran across this in the comments section over at Coding Horror:

"I'm bitter, angry and I hate you all. Isn't that proof that I've worked in the software development industry for a long time?"

Links

http://www.codinghorror.com

Do you remember the show "Connections" with James Burke? It used to be on TLC at some point (according to the linked Wikipedia article, 1997). It was a show about seemingly unrelated things that were all connected. For example, how a Polish dirt farmer in 1743 stubbed his toe on a sharp rock, which led to a nasty infection, which led to someone creating the Pierogi, which led to the German's bombing Pearl Harbor*, which led to the Ironman Triathlon. Or something like that. Anyway, I really thought it was a cool show and it seems software development (and I.T. in general) follow the same sorts of patterns.

Take this blog for example. A set of seemingly disconnected events** led me to it. People have been blogging for years now. I'm a Johnny-come-lately to the game. Why? And why now? For me, it started with e-mail sites like Hotmail being blocked at work...

(for those that don't get the historical set of connections example, take web surfing as another example. How many times have you started searching for some Javascript code only to find yourself 3 hours later at some Japanese midget porn site. That happens atleast once a week for me).

* Yes, I know the German's didn't bomb Pearl Harbor. Everyone knows it was the Swedes.

** I reserve the right to jump around a lot. And I'll try to eventually get around to tying everything together. Either that or get bored with the whole thing and stop. Definitely one or the other.