Eric M.’s Blog

So I’m sure everybody has of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), but I just came across this video. It’s a nice, easy to follow explanation of how it works. I love the bit about things getting more massive as they get closer to c - by the time they collide, the protons have 7,000 times more mass then when they are at rest. Also here is a link to a comic by a person who went on a tour of the facility (amusing comic normally, but this series is more informative)

Ok, just a few random items.

The launch of Atlantis has been pushed back to October 10th at the earliest due to delays from Hanna. Sara and I have LTT tickets to see the launch and we are working out if we are going, and if so, how we are getting down there.

Things have been hectic at work. The semester started on Tuesday, which is always the busiest time of year, and now the parking lots are always full. Suck.

Finally a wonderful clip from the Daily Show:

So I run my own server to host my sites as well as a few others. I haven’t had a lot of time to maintain it, and it’s running a horribly out of date OS and services. Last week a friend of mine who is a client needed PHP 5 installed, so I decided to just hand compile a version (which I had been doing for work anyways). Went pretty much without problem, except it broke SquirrelMail, so I had to update that too (it came built in with the OS, so needed to configure a stand alone version). Now I’ve also compiled Apache 2, I just have to make the config files for all the vhosts and switch over.

But anyways, back to Google. The email system on the server is the one area that I don’t have a ton of knowledge on. The spam filter worked for a while, then stopped. I fixed it once, but it only worked til the next reboot… I would prefer to get email off the server and just concentrate on the webserver side. To that end I decided to look at Google. My work (Oakland University) is in the middle of a switch to Google for email services. Right now all students are on the system, and the employees move in a few days.

The school has arranged full support and no ads, something they usually charge $50/user/year for, for free - the school is paying absolutely nothing… And we are talking tens of thousands of email accounts. I swear, Google is just doing it’s best to take over the world, one email account at a time, it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

Well, for people on a slightly smaller scale and not in the EDU market, they still offer free domain email hosting. You see the normal text ads that are in gmail, and you don’t get support or transition tools, and look to be limited to 100 accounts per domain, but otherwise it’s the whole shebang. So now all my deadendsw.com, ericmblog.com, and ericmphotography.com email is hosted on Google servers. If it works out well, I might press the people using my server for email to move also.

[from Today's BIG Thing]

Discovery channel usually has a longer ‘indirect’ ad, and they do a new one every now and then. Their last one, Let’s All Discover, I really liked, and I just saw their new one, Boom de y ada. Maybe it’s just me, being a super-dork and all, but I love them. Here are those two, plus a thrid short ad that I just find funny.

So the wind became very calm, and Sara and I went out to find a place to fly my plane. Most of the good fields had too many children on or around them.

We settled on a field by a mega-church in the area. There was enough room, but the field way very rough and patchy.

I did maybe 10 or so landings. Overall they went fine. Some of them were good and gentle, some were a bit.. hard… The grass being rough caused the plane to tip onto its nose pretty much every landing, and occasionally it flipped over.

Luckily the the only damage was a small chunk out of the tip of the wing, nothing that effects the performance.

Ill post a few pics when I get them from Sara.

So a long time ago (middle or high-school) I had purchased a RC place kit from some random guy. I had that kit for a long time and did some work on it, but I never had the money to come close to completing it. Eventually I sold it, but RC planes and helicopters have always interested me.

So this weekend we were bumming around and we stopped by Rider’s Hobby in Livonia. Sara let me order a plane to start flying. After talking to people and looking online, I settled on the HobbyZone Super Cub. It’s a 3-channel electric plane with a wingspan of 4ft. It’s known for being very forgiving and easy to fly. It’s also supposed to be easy to repair when you crash it…

They didn’t have any in stock, so we ordered it, and it came in yesterday. Sara stopped by and picked it up for me on the way home from work. It’s a Ready-To-Fly (RTF) plane, so everything was in the box, and it only took around 30minutes to assemble.

I wanted to take it out today during lunch, but it’s just been to breezy today. While it could fly in these winds, it’s not probably the best idea for my first flight. This evening and tomorrow are supposed to be calmer, so it should be long before I can take it out. Pic below.