The kids were asking to see a train video tonight, so I searched YouTube for ‘train’ and came up with a remarkable video of an incident one week ago in Greer, SC. A woman got lost driving at night and got her car stuck on the track. A policeman gets her out seconds before an Amtrak train turns her car into a fireball. Amazingly, no one was seriously hurt.
Watch the video filmed from the patrol car here.
A study by an Australian scientist shows that laser printers pollute the air with microscopic particles potentially as harmful as cigarette smoke. Lidia Morawska, a Queensland University of Technology professor, made the discovery when studying office air filtration and ventilation systems.
A study led by the physics professor found many laser printers emit clouds of ultra-fine particles that she compared with cigarette smoke and motor vehicle emissions. “They are so small you can’t see them.”
Although her team has yet to analyse their chemistry, she warned that such small particles “can get deep into the lungs”, leading to respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Some particles were potential carcinogens.
Printer manufacturer HP disputes the findings. In the meantime, y’all might want to move that printer away from your desk (after you print out the study, of course).
A few circumstances tonight made me recall a happy scene from my childhood. Kelly and I took the kids to Durant Nature Park’s annual Halloween Trail festivies, which we all loved. The kids were sacked out afterwards, with Travis not even lifting his head off the pillow as I read him his bedtime story. Also, the dishwasher is currently humming along in the kitchen.
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[Warning: extreme geekiness ahead! Non-geeks might want to skip over this post and look at the pretty ponies instead.]
I figured out what was causing my home Linux server to think it was busy. It turns out my server has an automounted nfs share from another server, a server which happened to be down. I’d done a few df commands to check disk space before I downloaded the new Ubuntu release and these commands hung in uninterruptible sleep while they waited for the drive share that would never be found.
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Looks like Raleigh’s downtown is set to be invaded by the undead. The group Scientists Targeting Undead Preservation, Intelligence and Domestication reports that a gaggle of zombies will appear in Moore Square at sunset (6:26 PM) the night of Saturday, October 27th. The brain-eating zombies will make a circuit around downtown, turning willing participants into zombies along the way, then gather to wash their brains down with a tasty malt beverage or two.
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There’s been a change in plans. As much as it kills me to see the wind picking up we’re staying close to home.
The big downside to working from home is the rapid onset of cabin fever. I’ve got the strong desire to be out of the house but my sailing crew has mutinied. Perhaps I can talk everyone into a nice long day in the park as a substitute. Anything but these four walls!
According to the NWS’s awesome graphical wind forecast tomorrow’s shaping up to be great for sailing. We’ve got a few spots left on the boat, so if you’re in the Raleigh area (or better, closer to Lake Gaston) and want to join us, drop me a line tonight.
On my way back from the Ohio Linux Fest, my friend Bill mentioned that iRobot is building a new Roomba-style robot to provide “presence” to remote users. It’s called the ConnectR and provides a remote user (say, a dad traveling on business) the ability to move around, see, and talk to others (say, a family who’s dad is traveling on business).
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Just looked at my home Linux server, which from all appearances is working fine. The top tool, as well as uptime both show the load average to be 16! Yet, the CPU is listed as 96.7 % idle, as show below:
top – 13:16:58 up 61 days, 16:12, 3 users, load average: 16.00, 16.01, 16.00
Tasks: 267 total, 1 running, 264 sleeping, 2 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7% us, 1.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 96.7% id, 0.0% wa, 1.7% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 450988k total, 447500k used, 3488k free, 121676k buffers
Swap: 987988k total, 33216k used, 954772k free, 170976k cached
I’m not sure what is going on with this server. Its actually idle but doesn’t think it is. Very strange.
I wonder how much stress in people’s lives can be directly attributed to the buzzing of an alarm clock.
