The best Halloween video ever

I don't know how I missed this last year, but it's probably the most ingenius Halloween video I've seen. Everyone knows the Michael Myers Halloween music, these dudes put lyrics to the theme - fantastic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3kLI2oyd6I

It's Soxtober, Twinkies b#tches!!!!

Jim Thome made the Twinkies pay for their premature celebration last Thursday. Hope they have a nice flight back to Minneapolis, sorry to see you go!!!!

Watch out Twins, you've got something coming

The Twins celebrated last Thursday's sweep of the White Sox like they won the World Series only to get bounced 2 of 3 by the Royals. How fitting that the Sox get them at home tomorrow with their records deadlocked. White Sox magic number is 1. There's no rollerdome turf, no weird bounces, no dome, let's see what kind of celebrating goes on tomorrow. The Twins undoubtedly have a good club, but I'm hoping their early festivities come back to haunt them.

White Sox not dead yet

Ok, so the White Sox lost 3 out of 4 to Toronto, lost 3 out of 4 to New York, took 2 from Detroit, lost all three to Minnesota, and took 1 of 3 from Cleveland. If you were to tell me this 3 weeks ago I'd say the White Sox would be 3 games out at least. Instead they're 1/2 game out with a makeup game at home against Detroit. If the Sox win the take on Minnesota for a play-in game on Tuesday for the right to take on Tampa in the playoffs. They're not quite dead yet, they'll have to get by a pretty tough Detroit team with nothing to play for and an ex-Sox pitching against them in Freddy Garcia. Hoping Garcia stinks it up and we get a chance at home to play the Twins to get in, I like our chances, not so much to go anywhere in the playoffs though. We'll take it one step at a time and hope we can wave the Sox flag after Tuesday. Go Sox!

KGjr gets his first White Sox HR

Ken Griffey Jr hit his first home run for the White Sox today in a 15-3 beat down of the Mariners for a 3 game sweep. The White Sox are getting hot bats in combination with absolutely red hot pitching, let's keep it up and keep the Twinkies in 2nd place!

Goodbye, Passwords. You Aren’t a Good Defense

THE best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords — and replace them with other random strings every couple of months.

Then there’s the rest of us, selecting the short, the familiar and the easiest to remember. And holding onto it forever.

I once felt ashamed about failing to follow best practices for password selection — but no more. Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them.


Read the full article here

[NYTimes.com]

Retaining wall finally done

I've got a good sized hill between my driveway and backyard which I always wanted to do something with so I didn't have to push mow it. Finally got done with the retaining wall and subsequent 4 yards of dirt.

15 petabyte network and an atom smasher

Just out of college I worked in business systems over at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, (my pop has been there for 35 or so years) so I've always had an interest in high energy physics. The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a montrous operation, thought this article was pretty amazing.

15 petabyte network and an atom smasher

Enough information to fill multiple CDs every second is flowing across the world on a network 1,000 times faster than home broadband. Terabytes of data are streaming through dedicated fiber-optic links between laboratories and universities globally in preparation for the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, being switched on in August at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG), a super-high-bandwidth network, will channel about 15 petabytes--15 million gigabytes--of data from the LHC to about 5,000 scientists in 500 institutions every year for at least 10 years.

CNET.com

Conan interviews Hunter S. Thompson

Fear and Loathing in upstate New York. Conan O'Brien interviews Hunter S Thompson while the two of them drink hard liquor and shoot tons of guns at inanimate objects.

Milkandcookies.com

Google Gears takes Ruby on Rails offline

The Gears on Rails project by Google Gears enables Ruby on Rails developers to take their applications offline, as some sharp developers put Gears to new and different uses.
Developers are putting Google Gears to some interesting uses, including offline support for Ruby on Rails and building client-side search engines.
Gears for Rails represents another boost to cloud computing in its ability to deliver offline capability and synchronization. Meanwhile, Microsoft is leading its own data synchronization charge with its Live Mesh cloud-based data synchronization system, a test build of which is now open to the public.
However, Google has pushed its way into the cloud-based development world. And the third-party Gears for Rails solution also represents another call for Google to open up its Google App Engine platform to other languages, such as Ruby. Currently, the Google App Engine development platform supports Python only.


eweek LINK

Stop Bernanke From Swiping Your Savings

From MotleyFool -

No, he's not clad in black PJ's and sneaking into bank vaults. If only. Ben Bernanke is engaged in a process that's far more insidious and far more damaging to your financial well-being. He's helping to erode the buying power of your hard-earned, long-saved dollars with easy-money policies.

Hungry yet?The evidence is everywhere, even in the "core" CPI, which pretends that food and energy prices don't matter. Yet those of us who do eat shelled out 5% more in May than we did last year. Get a load of what inflation has done to the following staples:

Final pool pictures

Pool is finally completed, time to clean up the yard and grow some grass

Pool construction close to completed

Steps down from the driveway

Corner shot of the pool

Steps down to the pool deck

Side view of the pool

First part of the concrete pad is in

Second part of the pad will be poured behind the steps into the pool

Pool construction week 3

Liner is in

Liner went in today

Pool construction started

First 3 days of the pool going in. Digging started the afternoon of Thursday 4/17.