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The wind speed numbers for the Sacramento/Elk Grove Area via the National Weather Service state that our highest sustained wind speed was 36 MPH (gusting up to 48 MPH) and our highest gusts were 52 MPH (when the wind was sustaining at 33 MPH.)  It seems like the evening news said something about 60+ MPH winds or gusts but to me that’s purely rumor.  The winds here exceeded 20 MPH for twelve hours straight.

Thomas Edison was a little insane about the Dangers of Alternating Current (the kind of electricity we get out of the wall) and thought everyone should use Direct Current (the kind of electricity we get out of a battery.) It should also be noted that Edison had a vested business interest in it’s adoption and widespread use. One other fun fact is that the last building in NYC (power there is supplied by Con-Edison btw) was converted from DC to AC just this last year.

www.boingboing.net/2008/01/03/edison-electrocuted.html

Nikola Tesla invented Alternating Current and this car company is named after him:

www.teslamotors.com

So to recap, Edison loved DC, hated AC, and the power company he founded only uses AC now. Tesla invented AC and the car company named after him sells battery (DC) powered electric sports cars. The elephant died for no reason at all.

I laugh, except, because of the elephant, I cries.

Bug Labs gets a couple things from this, Popular Science has a huge readership so Bug Labs and the BUG platform just became more well known. Also, the killer application that launches the BUG platform in a big way may arrive from this. Every technology platform needs a killer app to become stratospherically great. Sometimes the platform itself is the killer app but in this case I think the trick come from the software side.

I have idea’s but writing JAVA code isn’t my thing. Who knows I might give it a shot anyway.

Oh, and the terms and conditions stipulate that your entry be released GPL v3. Yes, it’s a controversial license but at least it’s an Open Source license.

Bunnie’s stated reason for these contests is to foster an interest in reverse engineering and hardware in general. I think that’s pretty cool. A lot of people, myself included, began the road to their technical skill set by looking at what those who came before us had done. I can’t help but imagine there’s some person out there just starting down that path and that fun, interesting challenges such as this will help them gain the passion and enthusiasm they’ll need to make truly great contributions. To me this is exactly the kind of thing that helps build expertise in an industry.

All this is very awkward. Not only am I here printing my first correction/retraction but also I’ve been calling him ‘Ben’ in our conversations as he stands around on my desk watching me work. “Ben, do you think we need a unsigned int 10 for this table or an unsigned int 11?” or “Ben, I really just don’t like the way ‘do{’ looks in my editor when implementing a do-while loop so I tend to avoid them, what are your thoughts?” To be fair he never corrected my mistake, but how do you handle the conversation immediately after you’ve been enlightened about your error over someone’s name? Do you confess and apologize? Just switch names like nothing was ever amiss? Tell an inappropriate joke?

I’m sure John Paul and I will work it out, I doubt our friendship is on the rocks. Also, this probably explains why my dog has been giving me funny ‘what the hell are you doing?’ looks whenever I talk to John Paul.

All seriousness aside, candymachines.com clued me in to my faux pas with the following image:

Which is exactly the display that caught my eye initially at Fry’s.

Oh and as one last aside, a 250 count of Santos Figurines Vending Capsules goes for $48.00 plus shipping and handling of $12.75 which works out to $60.75. That comes to $0.24 per figurine. Before whatever other costs (fuel, person to keep the machine stocked) come into play, they made 26 cents. I imagine the big earner in this whole scenario is the person who owns the factory in China that makes these things.

I may have never really outgrown that bauble machine addiction because I have always glanced these machines over in passing out of idle curiosity. I have noticed that inflation has taken a heavy toll on this market, rarely do I see a machine that costs less that 50 cents anymore.

On my way out of the neihborhood Fry’s Electronics today I glanced at the impressive array of bauble machines pleading for one last minor impulse buy and took immediate notice of one proclaiming ‘Santos.’ Upon closer inspection this machine, at 50 cents, contained a variety of Catholic saints. Additionally I think I saw a Jesus and what might have been other Biblical figures. I’m not well versed enough of Catholic saints to know which biblical figures are and aren’t covered by that term.

This was just surreal enough that my resolve weakened, curiosity won over (it does that a lot to my inevitable chagrin) and I dropped 50 cents and turned the crank.

Behold, (Update: Woops) Pope Benedict XVI John Paul, and quite a bargain at $0.50. He was made in China:

Please forgive the image quality. My poor camera may never have been cut out for macro photography. It probably doesn’t help that I can only be called a photographer because I know which end of the camera to point away from my head. To be completely fair this camera has been nothing but satisfying to use until today, the problem here is most likely pilot error.

Articles like this open up a whole world of possibilities in my mind. How many other monastic orders, artistic enclaves, or other small groups of people organized around some principal or goal are producing unique things for consumption? Also, is it entirely possible that these monks have always sold their beer this way and that it has just become anachronistic to my sensibilities because of cultural or temporal divide? I wonder if at one time beer sold this way was just the way things were done and it only looks strange and cool to me because of my perspective.

Bunnie Huang is giving away a Chumby, all you have to do is accomplish the next to impossible (for me anyway) task of identifying his piece of mystery hardware.. and be the first one to do so.

Bunnie is a cool entrepreneurial hardware guy. He came to my attention from all the fanfare around his company’s device the Chumby. I subscribed to his blog when he started running a very informative and enlightening series about sourcing manufacturing in China and all the requisite steps it has taken to bring the Chumby to market.

I’ve always been fascinated with the hardware side of computing and electronics but have next to no experience with it. I imagine that the complete lack of depth about hardware development I feel reading Bunnie’s blog or the Flylogic Blog must be what non-technical people feel when I babble on about writing software, tuning and optimizing MySQL, or scaling web delivery architectures.