It took a miraculous half-court buzzer-beater shot to lift the U.S. Olympic basketball team to an 80-77 exhibition-game win over Germany. Germany’s team is essentially a one-man team of Dirk Nowitzki, who scored 32 points in the game. The team failed to even qualify for the Athens games.

Some people are wondering if this U.S. team will be the first to lose at the Olympics. Looks to me like they’re on track to do just that.

I don’t know if shows how well other countries have adopted basketball or just how sucky the NBA has become. I’m guessing its the NBA.

Now that I’ve got the cool QEMU emulator running on my Linux box, I’ve been in the mood to experiment with different OSs. One of the first was Windows 95, which runs just fine inside QEMU.

I created a ~200MB disk image file for the Win95 install. After I confirmed it ran, I wanted to figure out how to reduce the size of that disk image. It was then that I remembered this very cool page telling how to whittle down Windows 95 to under 10 MB. I’ve followed the instructions to create a Windows 95 image just over 7 MB in size! Granted, it won’t run MFC apps nor do networking, but those pieces can be added in as needed.

One interesting hack I’ll try is copying my Win95 image over to my USB keychain drive. The combination of my USB drive and QEMU is like carrying a whole computer on my USB drive. I can take it to any host computer with QEMU installed (Windows, OS X, Linux) and boot it like it was its own machine.

I also discovered a Zaurus port of QEMU last night, but haven’t tried that yet. I can only imagine how glacial Windows would be running inside an i386 emulator on a PDA!

(Incidentally, if you wish to create your own “Micro95” disk image, you’ll need to ensure the msdos.sys file gets copied from the host installation to the micro installation. The creation script missed this file and my Micro 95 wouldn’t boot without it.)

The Italian national basketball team crushed the American team in a pre-Olympic exhibition game, 95-78. The Italians, using the foreign concept of “defense,” thoroughly stunned our team of NBA players.

No word on whether defense will be outlawed at the Summer Games to give the American team a fighting chance. However, Olympic committee officials are considering awarding a seperate medal for SportsCenter-worthy dunks.

My phone is ringing a LOT more often these days. Most of my new work is dealing with Asterisk and VoIP, with some UNIX sysadmin stuff thrown in. It’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to add staff. Maybe the economy is picking up after all!

To my geek friends still looking for work, drop me a line. I may have some for ya.

Interesting article about how some Republicans are switching sides because of their dissatisfaction with Bush. The NC Veterans for Kerry group has a number of Republicans who are saying the same things, and choosing Kerry.

Bush is his own worst enemy.

Interesting research shows that ground squirrels emit ultrasonic warnings when threatened. The chirps the squirrels make are in the 50-kHz range, far above the typical 20-kHz height of human hearing. The researchers speculate that this may apply to all squirrels, as well as birds and other species previously not considered to use ultrasound.

There could be practical uses for this research. For instance, with the availability of DSP chips, it is easy to build a gadget which could be a highly effective squirrel repellent. Unlike the usual scent-based methods, a good squirrel scream could be reproduced artifically with ease. Put a motion detector on it and you’re in business! My only question is whether the PCM coding of the waveform would be accurate enough to fool them, since even we dumb humans aren’t fooled into thinking that music from a CD is live.

On a different note, researchers have made progress on a useful shark repellant. This only makes me wonder … would a shark scream scatter squirrels?

Michael Moore seems to like attracting controversy. My buddy Scott has already pointed out how Moore plays fast and loose with the truth. Now Moore is in trouble again by doctoring a newspaper headline in his Fahrenheit 9/11 movie.
He’s being sued by the paper for $1 in damages.
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The last post inspired me to name my station something better than Radio Windsor Forest. It will now be known as Imaginary Radio!

An update on my home radio station. The transmitter is being ordered tomorrow and should be here soon.

Also, after working over the weekend to build an RPM for UBS, I found that UBS would act bizarrely whenever I tried to play music. Turns out that the pathnames my package was giving it were not being applied to the source code in all the proper places. When I ran it with its default (and ugly) /usr/local location, things seemed to work. Or better, at least. It still didn’t play music. But I’m closer. (Maybe I don’t need to play music. The station jingle could say: “Radio Windsor Forest: Your Sounds of Silence!”)

What I’m looking for is a ready-out-of-the-box station application. If I can get UBS straightened up enough to build a package, it might play that role. We’ll see.