A Moment of Wisdom

Over at Slashdot,

They mentioned that The Register reported on Richard Egan killing himself (a.k.a. committing suicide) with a shotgun blast to the head.  First off, this was mentioned at Slashdot because Mr. Egan was quite a techie who worked on the guidance computer system for the Apollo operations and went on to co-found the company EMC which was a leader in electronic data storage.  Quite an impressive sounding individual … so why did he kill himself?

Well, back  in May of 2009 Egan was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and he was already suffering from a list of health issues.  So, on August 30th, 2009, Dick Egan decided to end his life on his own terms instead of letting the cancer slowly take his life away.

This story begs of talking about health care reform in the United States and what we can do on issues such as what Richard Egan was facing and his options on dealing with the matter.  Given such grim circumstances and his personal view on life I can understand the choice that he made but there should be much more civil or humane options available for an individual.  In a time when technology in the information world is screaming into the future our ways of dealing with policies and true ethical matters we appear to be stuck in medieval times.

I saw this over at SlashGeo:

Basically, a guy walks into a green screen room and is rendered on the fly as polygons with textures and then placed into whatever 3-dimensional environment desired.  Ok, that’s cool.  Then they go on to show that this not-too-shabby rendering of a person can interact with with this virtual environment by kicking over some vases and beating up a clone of himself.  Now that’s pretty darn cool.  I wouldn’t say amazing yet but still a rather neat accomplishment.

I would say that amazing would be when the virtual world can start to interact back with the real world.  For instance, if I could enter the virtual world with that other guy and pick up one of those vases and throw it at him … and he would feel it hit him.  Now that would be awesome!

September 11-13 marks the 27th Anniversary of Hampton Bay Days this year with special musical act Bruce Hornsby Grammy Award winning musical artist and local Williamsburg native. Come and join this local festival in downtown Hampton full of special activities for the kids, funnel cake, fried fish, burgers, music and rides, fun for the whole family.

I will be playing in a sand quads volleyball tournament today down in Va Beach. I have never been to the East Coast Surfing Championships before so it should prove to be a fun experience all around. Wish me luck!

If you like Piña COLLADA,

Then you should be rather happy because the next release of SketchUp will provide much better support for the COLLADA format. According to the SketchUp blog:

In our next release, we’re going to make COLLADA an official first-class format for all modelers. You’ll be able to import and export COLLADA models, as well as COLLADA models wrapped up in the KMZ format for Google Earth, with any version of SketchUp.

Sounds like good news to me as an open standard is being support more fully by a great free tool like SketchUp.

via Coming Soon in Google SketchUp….

I heard Mark Schultz on KLove last night sing this song live and it was absolutely amazing.  Personally, I don’t know how someone can make it through a song like this without welling up.  Mark definitely has a knack with his lyrics and vocals and they pack quite a punch with a moving message.

Clever Lifehacker,

What a good idea!  Instead of buying new replacement boards for your deck why not check out the flip side first? The boards are probably just as good looking on the other side as when they were first purchased … and with a little effort (ok, maybe a bit of effort) you could turn that frown upside down by putting the good side right side up!

via Flip Your Old Deck Boards Before Shelling Out for a New Deck

Update: I heard from a source that this might not be the best idea after all. The thought is that you should lay the boards with the curve of the grain pointing up because over time the boards may cup and hold water when it rains.

What do you think?

From the nice folks at Lifehacker,

If you ever needed to rebuild a machine or for whatever reason needed to remember the license keys to your software … well, most likely you forgot to save this valuable tidbit of information and don’t know how to easily get it back.  Wouldn’t you know that some friendly computer geek out there has already solved this problem and made it freely available!  Have you hugged your geek today?

LicenseCrawler Retrieves License Keys for Backup

Via Lifehacker,

If you like cooking and sharing recipes among your friends then you may want to check out Kitchen Monki.  This site allows you to hook right in with your Facebook account and start exploring their repository of food creations.  I’m not sure how much I will honestly use the service but hope it may spark some creative ideas in my wife’s future dinner plans

Kitchen Monki Makes Planning Your Grocery Shopping Easier.

According to Slashgeo,  a company named OnTerra is offering a free service to Bing Maps as WMS.  So far none of the big commercial map providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. ) have offered their services out as an open standard like OGC WMS.  I my development efforts I have used OpenLayers a bit and they make additional efforts to support these proprietary services … it would be nice for them to embrace the OGC standards too.

via Bing Maps WMS Service.