weissblog

Today has been an interesting day. It is my 33^rd birthday. And, as I try to do each year, I’ve spent it with my family. Earlier today we finished watching a mini-series on John Adams. While parts of it were a bit dull it was, overall, a very good show. It’s one of the few times my older two daughters have ever shown an interest in how our great nation came to be. It also got me to thinking about life and death. And, since it’s my birthday I feel it would be as good a day as any to wax on about such topics. Don’t expect any great wisdom here, just a bunch of rambling that may or may not be coherent.
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After a rather long absence, I’m ready to start blogging again. In preparation for this undertaking I’ve been going through my archives and reading my old posts. I was troubled to find that in just about every article where I linked to something, the link no longer worked. I’m not quite sure what to do about it either.

But anyway. Here’s to the revival of a great hobby, blogging. Hope you enjoy the ride.

Prior to NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing in ‘69, NASA sent several several orbiters to photograph the surface of the moon so that they could, among other things, choose a landing site. The data that was transmitted back was recorded on large magnetic tapes, and then transferred to photographic film for analysis. However, because of the limits of the technology available at the time, the images retrieved were of a much lower resolution than the original photos taken by the orbiters. Once NASA was done analyzing the data, all the tapes were Read the rest of this entry »

Just a short post on something I thought was cool. Sometime today Google rolled out themes for their Gmail service. Similar to themes for Windows desktops, it changes the background image and the style of the text (and even the Gmail logo, sometimes). Additionally, some themes change depending on the time of day.  Currently there’s about 30 themes to choose from.

If you have a Gmail account you can activate themes by going to settings and then there will be a tab on the far right side appropriately labeled ‘themes.’

Kudos to the team responsible. But in version 2 could you let users build their own and upload them?

Within a few minutes of Senator McCain’s concession speech last night I was asked a couple of times, “what now?” After thinking on this a bit, I wanted to write up my opinion.

For eight years now people have trashed and bashed President Bush. Right now I want to make it very clear that I will not disrespect President-elect Obama in such a way. At this point he has earned my respect as a great motivator and he now has the chance to earn my respect as Commander-In-Chief. But regardless of what he does or does not do while it office, I will always respect the office that he now holds.

For those who want to throw a fit and pout like a baby Read the rest of this entry »