Masons and Mormons

I thought that this was an interesting article preemptively responding to Dan Brown's upcoming book. While it's unknown if the LDS Church will even be featured in a prominent fashion (or at all) in the book, it's interesting that due to Brown's previous controversial look at Catholics, some LDS faithful are going on the early offense. On the political side, it'll be interesting to see if this plays into the Republican primary and Mitt Romney's chances.

http://www.ldsmag.com/books/070326masons.html

For more comments on The Solomon Key, check out Wikipedia.

A few blog posts

First for the American Idol fans out there...

http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/03/22/who-is-idols-crying-girl-and-where-did-she-come-from/

Jennifer and I were some of those wondering about the crying girl. It was interesting how much time they spent on her and that they gave her tickets to the live show because she cried in the dress rehearsal. I wonder if this will inspire a host of "copy cats" in hopes of getting on TV.

This other post is completely unrelated. It's a system similar to Screen Crayons that was developed by Trent Taufer and Dr. Olsen in the lab where I worked as a graduate student at BYU. This only works on websites through FireFox but seems to be interesting technology. The total experience is less rich and complete than Screen Crayons (at least from the video) but the marking technology could be used to complement some of the ideas included in Screen Crayons.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/03/22/make-a-note-on-any-website-with-firedoodle/

2007 Football Schedule

The 2007 Football schedule is here!

http://truecougars.com/2007/03/2007-football-schedule.html

True Cougars

For the few of you that read this blog, I just wanted to mention a couple of things about the right hand column.

First is the "blogroll". This is a list of other blogs, including a couple others that I've been writing. One is "True Cougars" which is my blog on BYU Sports, primarily BYU Football. Another is my "Unofficial Footnote Blog" which is my blog on content that I've found on the footnote.com site. This is my place to put links to interesting documents and story pages that I find. The other blogs are those of friends along with the Official Footnote Blog.

Second is "links" which are other sites that are interesting. Next is a list of the most recent Web Galleries that I've posted to. My footnote profile is next which shows the annotations that I've made on the site.

The last one that I want to talk about is the Shared Blog Items. This is a feed from Google Reader. One of the features of Google Reader is to mark items as "shared" and create and RSS feed which that can then be fed into Blogger. This is a pretty cool feature as it allows me to share some of the blog posts that I've found without having to email them to people or create my own blog entries about them. I hope that some of them are useful or interesting to some of you.

Bad News for Aradyme

Well, as more news comes out, it looks like it was a good thing that I got let go from Aradyme when I did. It probably would have been better to have been let go in the first round last June, but better when I did then still be there... at least so far.

http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/070319/0227964.html

Unfortunately this is bad news for me.

"White Box is not assuming any of these liabilities or obligations. Aradyme will either apply proceeds from payments anticipated from White Box toward paying these obligations or will attempt to seek compromises or other resolutions with its creditors."

This appears to mean that I probably won't ever get my backpay, and if I do it will be at some future point, way out in the future. :( This is the proverbial nail in the coffin in terms of the last hope that I had for Aradyme. Hopefully "White Box" can take the technology and make it work.

It is Done Part 2

Well, now I would say that it is done, done, done! I have submitted all the forms I need to submit, made all the copies that I need to make, get all the signatures that I need to get and paid all the fees I need to pay. After way longer than it ever should have been, I am finally done with my thesis and will officially graduate in April!

Gigapixel Project

I've known about this project for a while. Basically this team has put together a Gigapixel camera... yes, GIGA, meaning over 1000 megapixels. They go around the world taking cool photos of cool and ordinarily ordinary things and super resolution.

MSR (Microsoft Research) has put together a "Gigapixel Viewer" that allows you to view and zoom in on Gigapixel photos of their own (they aren't related to the other project). It uses ActiveX so it only works in IE. It's like Google Earth for photos!

http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView/HDGigapixel.htm

For instance, here is a link to a climber on the Squamish Wall photo.
Here is a link to an airplane in the Kerry Park photo.

Here is a link to the Gigapxl project and other photos, although not in as cool of a viewer. They zoom in on interesting parts of the photos.

http://www.gigapxl.org/

Parking lot of the future... today

Check out this cool video from Popular Mechanics on an automated "parking garage" in NYC. Watch out for one of these in your neighborhood soon!

http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/06/robotic-parking-garage-in-action/

Rolling, rolling, rolling

Alex has now figured out how to consistently roll from his back to his front. He's still not terribly mobile (he doesn't really try to scoot around on his tummy) but he's now just mobile enough that we need to watch him closer when he's on the bed or changing table...

New Photos

I've added some new photos. January and February are done and I've started March. I've included a link to February below.

February 2007