Man on the Moon

Thursday, July 16th, 2009 @ 11:20am

Earthrise40 years ago, July 20th, one of the most amazing feats mankind has ever accomplished was done so by the Apollo 11 mission; man landing on the moon. I only wish I could have been around at the time to see this amazing feat live, but even 40 years later I am amazed and fascinated that this was accomplished using only 60s technology. Space exploration has made some leaps and bounds with the Shuttle project, and the international space station, but I feel empty considering we’ve all but abandoned missions to the moon. Thankfully, NASA plans to return to the moon by 2020, and I’m excited to see even higher quality footage and photos from those upcoming missions.

BootprintMore recently regarding the 1969 Apollo missions, NASA has found the original tapes and has been undergoing a project to restore and update these videos to their original quality. In addition, I highly recommend you check out the Project Apollo Image Gallery providing high quality images from Apollo 11 in addition to all of the other Apollo missions.

If you consider all the factors going into the Apollo 11 mission, it’s quite an amazing feat that I feel will be unchallenged for quite some time. In only a short span of 8 years time from Kennedy’s speech to Congress, to Armstrong’s small step onto the Moon’s surface was the task accomplished. I dare you to find a goal of that magnitude being completed and accomplished successfully in that short time span today. It saddens me that today the world is shrinking and that we’ve almost lost the thrill of exploring the unknown. My hopes is that with the 2020 missions and beyond that ideal will be rekindled again, maybe eventually bringing way to a manned mission to Mars or beyond.

Weird Al: Craigslist

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 @ 12:27am

I’m a big fan of Weird Al, and own several of his albums. It’s been a couple of years since his last album was released (Straight Outta Lynwood), so it’s due time that another one is released soon. This summer, Weird Al will be “leaking” 4 tracks for his upcoming, unnamed, undated album. The first one was released today with the video on YouTube as seen below. Additionally you can purchase the song on iTunes. Check out his Twitter @alyankovic to keep tabs on when his next song is “leaked”.

Stop Motion Post-It

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 @ 11:53am

Pretty cool senior project of a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Apparently this took 3 months to plan, in addition to 4 days of shooting and over 6000 post-it notes.

Job Geography

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 @ 8:41pm

Job GeographyI actually came across this map several days ago, but haven’t really gotten the chance to post it until now. It’s a time line and map representative of job gains and losses since 2004 and beyond. It’s rather interesting to see the way the job market has expanded and fallen over the past 5 years. It’s detailed enough that you can see the effects of the economy in places like New Orleans (Katrina) or Detroit.

It also reminds me of how crappy the job market is in Birmingham. Over the past 5 years, Birmingham has seen little to no net gains in the job market. At the rate things have been going, I get the strong feeling that I’m just in the wrong place for what I want to do…

In the beginning…

Friday, May 8th, 2009 @ 4:27pm

To think today that the internet is where it is today is just amazing and the amount of changes that have happened in the past 20, or even 10 years ago. 10 years ago, can you imagine when companies like Google and Amazon were in their infancy, and sites like Wikipedia, Youtube didn’t exist.

Even more interesting is how I got my start doing web development, and as I stumbled upon some of my older site designs I thought it would be interesting to showcase them, and how I got my start on the internet. It’s kind of scary for me to look back and think that I created that, but it’s here for your entertainment.

I don’t remember exactly how I first got started. I recall my dad popping in an old AOL disk cd when we had a 2400 baud modem, and attempting to access the Cartoon Network channel of AOL. It wasn’t until some time later when we eventually obtained a computer with a 28.8kbps that I got my real start sometime in 1996-1997.

My first website was a result of my infatuation with SimCity, so I wanted to share that interest with others. Through Earthlink, we had a member space available at home.earthlink.net/~charawilson/ (no longer exists) that was the jumpstart for that first site, Simcity 3000 News Central. From that spawned a sister project called SCN (SimCity Network), which was a portal for SimCity sites at the time.

Eventually I outgrew the member space that Earthlink provided, and through the generous offer of a friend moved to simcity.boulderd.com (internet archive). With the move I discovered NewsPro (which eventually became Coranto), a perl script that would allow me to update the site from anywhere and not have to edit html code any time I wanted the site to be updated. This is really where my interest starting growing, as I discovered how one could make a site dynamic, and do cool things with DHTML as well.

Queen on Old Hardware

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 @ 9:14am

I’m a sucker for Queen. But at the same time, it’s pretty amazing the different sounds that can be extracted from old hardware. Some guy had the creative idea to arrange program old hardware to play Bohemian Rhapsody. Enjoy!

Extreme Shepherding

Sunday, April 12th, 2009 @ 2:06pm

A mildly entertaining video I stumbled upon today which shows some creative use of shepherding. Enjoy!

WiiMowing

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 @ 9:14am

There have been so many interesting applications for the Wiimote, and here is a somewhat practical application used to control a lawn mower. Yes, that’s right, you can now mow the lawn using only a Wiimote. Observe:

Best of April Fools

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 @ 12:52pm

Every year, April Fools rolls around and various sites through together pranks, jokes, or otherwise silly nonsense. Here’s a couple of my favorite pranks for this year.

Youtube by far has my favorite prank this year. It’s harmless, and amusing. Visiting any video from the front pages causes everything, included the video, to be flipped. Additionally, you can flip a video that isn’t flipped by adding &flip=1 to the end of the url.

Google’s April Fools jokes tend to usually be pretty good, but the Google Mobile Brain Search was particularly amusing this year.

The Pirate Bay teams up with Warner Brothers… a very unlikely scenerio.

Can You Hear This?

Saturday, March 7th, 2009 @ 1:11pm

I got the idea from Noise Addicts, but I was curious about my range of hearing. I’ve had my fair share of ear infections and surgeries, so it’s likely that my hearing has been affected by such. The typical range for humans is between 20Hz and 20,000Hz. Thankfully, my range is still up there pretty well, as I can faintly detect the 19,000Hz range.

How much can you still hear?