Thanks to the power of my silly sig, I've been getting a lot of biology questions lately. Most of these are fun to answer, but occasionally they pop up in totally inappropriate threads just out of the blue. Since Slashdot supports commenting on journal posts, it seemed like the best thing to do would be to make one and encourage people to ask here instead. So do that!

And I really will phrase things as car and computer analogies when possible. Although computer analogies are way more common.

For clarification, I've taken physiology and genetics courses, and can answer most geeky things about the human body and fundamental biology. I don't know much about pharmacology or ecology (because it is very, very, dry), and I am not a doctor. But I'll try to answer those questions, too.

New JonesBlog update. STS-135 Landing photos and my visit to Kennedy Space Center

A Photographic Study of The Fly with anatomical details and discussion of potential applications in unmanned aerial vehicles here.

New JonesBlog update. Lockheed Martin C-5M Super Galaxy

New JonesBlog update. Louisville, Kentucky

We are starting out on a new collaboration on retinal research. Fun stuff.

Jonesblog has finally made the transition to modern underpinnings. It is now running on Wordpress... Huzzah.

8 Cores at 3.2Ghz...
12 G's of Memory...
1 G dedicated to GPU Nvidia card

Can't wait to unleash the beast...

Crysis, watch out

New JonesBlog update. Experiments
 

I had checked out... The environment was so complete that for a discrete moment I had completely forgotten that we were still in the continental United States. Perhaps it was the smell of kebabs cooking or the sound of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan playing from the electronics shop that also sold pirated Western DVDs or the afternoon call to prayer coming from the tops of the minarets in the local mosque. It could have been the women selling bread, fruits or flowers by the side of the road or the Arabic men playing backgammon in the cafe with shisha pipes. Toyota trucks or bicycles being repaired in the roadside repair shops under Iraqi flags added to the realism along with a tangle of wires on poles carrying telephone and electricity around town with satellite dishes for television on rooftops were added elements. But the thing that completed it was the sound of Baghdadi Arabic from a gentleman greeting us as we drove through town.

Read all about it here. Medina Wasl with the 3rd Special Forces Group

New JonesBlog update. Sundance New Frontier 2010 and a Banksy sighting

I ran up to Park City for the Sundance Festival and to photograph an art installation, the Cloud Mirror by Eric Gradman. The point of the Cloud Mirror is to search out information on the Internet about visitors and merge that information with a real time image of the person on an LCD screen in front of them using computer vision to augment reality. You see yourself reflected back live, in person on the LCD screen in front of you with a thought bubble out of a comic book superimposed next to your head displaying all sorts of information that can be dug up through the Internet. The Cloud Mirror searches Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, IMDB, sex offenders databases and displays activities, relationship status, your favorite movies, books, music, any status updates you post etc...etc...etc... along with snarky comments.

I flew down to Las Vegas to do some work that I'll talk about here later. But while I was in town, I took two days to document Media Day and Shot Show 2010 for a number of sources including Wired, The Firearm Blog and other resources. There was some interesting new technology including a new pistol from Armatix that uses RF signals to disable the sidearm if it is too far from the wristwatch the accompanies it. Also new ballistics computers that are mounted on rifles are discussed.

New JonesBlog update(s). Shot Show 2010 Media Day

Shot Show 2010. The Actual Shot Show

and a little after party. AAC Big Bang Party

As everyone in IT knows, the bulk of the workload is not actually doing operations, but rather fixing things or getting them to function properly. This makes it more of an annoying job, specifically when you can't figure it out for a while.

So I get pulled aside to help set up a server for someone at work. Somehow, as the junior guy, I have the most experience with IIS and web sites. Given there are only 3 other IT workers in the company, and each of them kind of have their expertise, its not TOO surprising. Anyways, so he's trying to browse to a virtual directory he set up or some such, and its giving him a 404. So I get called over. He says I can sit down if I want, call him when I get it figured out. Great, so I have no idea what he has done to set it up so far, and any troubleshooting he might have tried. Check the paths - they all look good. Okay so its pointing to a default.aspx - it exists and is in the right spot. Won't open in Internet explorer for some reason. That alone seemed curious enough. I tried pointing it to a test.html file. Worked like a charm. So ASP.NET isn't going for some reason. I'm told Its a fresh install of Server 2003. Maybe it doesn't have the latest .NET framework, its a long shot, but I go grab it from windows update. Still doesn't work.

Thank God for Google, I was getting a little frustrated at this point. Turns out someone had this problem (99% of the time Google will have someone complaining about the same problem). And it turns out they found the solution. Windows Server 2003 doesn't allow ASP extensions by default. This absolutely baffles me. the .NET framework practically -IS- microsoft, and they have it prohibited by default on their servers. What benefit does this serve?

So as of late I've found myself taking up more and more side projects to expand my computer related skills. I took the first year of a computer science Degree and then switched over to Software Development when I discovered how much I loved programming things. However, I found that in the work place I'm generally not the one making the decisions on what to program, and thus I was left maintaining other peoples problems and I didn't enjoy it very much. This is of course to be expected at a Junior level, I've learned that now, all things past and gone.

So I currently work as an IT Technician, which basically involves me taking in requests and solving the problem. Anything from Printer toner to Network issues to software problems, you name it. If something with the computer is NOT working - it's my job to simply get it working. So I learned a lot of the hardware aspect of computing while on the job. Learning about cabling and replacing computer parts really isn't that difficult, I'm sure many of the people on /. here can attest to that. I have, on rare occaison, been prompted with the option of writing a piece of software to help the IT Department, and I was more than happy to it.

However I felt that it wasn't enough, and decided I needed a programming hobby. So a buddy of mine and I set off to build a Flash game. I had completed a couple Flash games before in high school, and I thought it'd be fun to get back into it now that I have an incredible amount of knowledge on programming. Everything was going well, until things came up, life got busy, and we couldn't meet up to work on the game. Slowly but surely over time its reached a halt in production, no work is really getting done on it. I partly blame my friend, as he is going to University and doesn't exactly have the spare time after class like I do after work.

Also now, as a way to create some extra income - I have started a sort of unofficial Repair shop. Co-workers can bring me their home PC's, Friends and family too, all for a relatively cheap price. A friend from highschool who I occaisonally talk to (She has a kid now so she doesn't get out as much) asked me the other day about websites. She has a photography business she's trying to get up off the ground. She has had maybe 20 customers or so thus far, and she figures a website will help bolster her marketing. I know a bunch about websites, did a whole semester on Web Apps and Web Hosting and Web This'n'That. So I agreed to build her a website for a remarkably cheap hourly rate (minimum wage) and I guided her on what to look for and where to look for web hosting.

Now here's where things are starting to get complicated. I plan on taking some vacation time next month, but I've essentially used all my vacation time already. My boss says I can work those days in lieu, so I've got every other Saturday scheduled for work.

So - here's where I stand:
1) A flash game trying to re-pick up
2) Constantly requested to repair a PC
3) A website under construction
4) Working weekends
5) Vacation coming up

What should I do? Should I make a weekly schedule and stick to it? Should I drop one of these projects entirely to allow more room for the others? Should I dump my girlfriend?

New JonesBlog update. Bionic implants

The device seen in these images is called the Utah Electrode Array (WARNING: potentially graphic image after the jump of an implant in a human brain). The Utah Electrode Array is a brain implant technology developed here at the University of Utah by Richard Normann. The purpose of this device, built by currently built for us by Blackrock Microsystems is to transduce signals from external devices to deliver to the brain for interpretation. Alternatively, the device can record impulses generated in the brain for delivery of neural signals to external devices. Our potential interests in this approach are manifold, but real use and implementation of these devices is some years away still.

New JonesBlog update. Bonneville Speed Week 2009