Tuesday, October 27, 2009

LHC gets first beams

First proton beams hit a couple of sections of the LHC. Full ring traversal in November.
You go girls!

Monday, October 26, 2009

Upgrading to Windows 7 Hangs.

So I finally decided to go ahead and upgrade my main Vista 64 installation to Windows 7. I would have done it earlier, only I was waiting in hope for A.L Tech to release a firmware upgrade for the media player to see Windows 7 shared drives. That's clearly not going to happen.
Anyway, so I punched in the upgrade, and it went really smoothly right up until it slides gently into a kind of hanging situation. The screen is happily updating alternating between "Please wait..." and "Updating your drivers ...", the drive light flickers occasionally, you can move the mouse cursor, but after four hours of this, you just know it isn't going to go anywhere. So I hit the reset button. Click-click.
Magically, and happily, it automatically recovers and reverted to my Vista install. Whew.
I've tried this twice now, and I see some signs of this happening all across the blogosphere.
That is, unless of course, it really does want to take 11 hours to complete...
It looks like I'll have to do a clean install. And it all worked perfectly in my various VM tests.
Fisking Super.
[Update - it worked after 12 hours!]

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Induction Fan

Now this is cool.
It's a fan without blades that works by induction. OK, there is an impeller in the base that sucks air up, but it blows it out through the edge of the ring. The motion of the air over the airfoil sucks more air from behind to follow it (induction), and as it all blows out, more air follows that air (entrainment). The upshot is 15 times more airflow than the impeller pulls from the base. $300 bucks though, and I'd say the impeller is a bit whiney.


Friday, October 9, 2009

should have, not should of

This one annoys the hell out of me. Writing:
"I should of done that."
NO. No people, it's
"I should have done that."
Yes, when you use the contraction in speech, it sounds right, i.e.
"I should've done that"
But you're not actually saying OF. It's HAVE.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Bridge Crossing

Today was a public holiday, Labour Day or some such (yay for 8 hour working days!) and we decided to go for a walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The kids love it, and well ok, I do too. Here's a couple of shots on the way.

 

We stopped in Argyle Plaza for lunch where some hokey "talent" was playing keyboard. We were worried about getting wet since there's a thunderstorm due this afternoon, so we didn't stick around more than an hour or so in the Rocks, but enjoyed the bite and looking around at the stalls.