Think before you register a domain name!

From my friend Adam …

ACTUAL “ONLINE” NAMES:

All of these are legitimate companies that didn’t spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear …. and be misread.

These are not made up. Check them out yourself!

1. Who Represents is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is

www.whorepresents.com

2 . Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at

www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at

www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at

www.therapistfinder.com

5. There’s the Italian Power Generator company

www.powergenitalia.com

6. And don’t forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales

www.molestationnursery.com

7. If you’re looking for IP computer software, there’s always

www.ipanywhere.com

8. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site

www.speedofart.com

Website Traffic

So I was checking my webalizer today and marveling at who has been looking at my website and what they were searching for to find it in the first place. Sure my site gets hit regularly by friends & family, coworkers from Apple and Intel, a friendly ex, an emotionally unstable psycho ex, and a host of other people from my past who I’ve lost touch with and wish I hadn’t. The more exotic hits are really what amaze me though. I actually have web traffic from Iran! I mean.. WTH? Are the mullahs, imams and mujahedeen trying to make sure my conservative rants are not offensive to Allah? Besides that strange visit, I also have browsers from every European country, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Cyprus (probably my old roommate Socrates) and Japan (probably my buddy Ben). So far over 100k hits and counting. Pretty cool for a small site that I don’t update that much!

Here are some of the phrases that random people are searching for when they found my site:

1 4 19.05% closet
2 2 9.52% statement of purpose for master in system on chip
3 2 9.52% when are baby shubunkin fish born
4 1 4.76% computer my experience software statement sop
5 1 4.76% firmware engineer earn
6 1 4.76% hawk in the winter
7 1 4.76% hawk in winter
8 1 4.76% hawk winter
9 1 4.76% japanese koi pond photos
10 1 4.76% japanese maple waterfall photo
11 1 4.76% large koi pond photos
12 1 4.76% peela how to access plesk
13 1 4.76% scott hauk computer
14 1 4.76% statement of purpose for electrical engineering and shipping
15 1 4.76% the hawk of winter
16 1 4.76% what is recoaro italy like in the winter

1 3 15.79% titan missile silos in washington state
2 1 5.26% celtic redheads
3 1 5.26% computer automation statement of purpose
4 1 5.26% cryosleep music
5 1 5.26% gazebo pond backyard
6 1 5.26% hawk winter
7 1 5.26% japanese garden cal poly wedding
8 1 5.26% japanese tea houses structure patio
9 1 5.26% japanese weeping cedar photos
10 1 5.26% ken egaro
11 1 5.26% koi lantern
12 1 5.26% old pond landscape
13 1 5.26% redesigning a concrete patio
14 1 5.26% statement of purpose graduate nano
15 1 5.26% terracrawler
16 1 5.26% the morros near san luis obispo
17 1 5.26% winter hawk

1 2 22.22% closet
2 1 11.11% brick planter as koi pond
3 1 11.11% guadalupe cantua
4 1 11.11% how to build a pond venturi
5 1 11.11% landscaping pictures path patio
6 1 11.11% montalban manor
7 1 11.11% picture of mondo grass as ground cover in stepping stones
8 1 11.11% winter hawk

1 1 33.33% bishop peak san luis obispo ca
2 1 33.33% koi in winter
3 1 33.33% koi ponds with gazebos pictures

Crazy! Huh? Especially closet??? huh?

Solidworks

LCD solid modelAs an EE I don’t get much exposure to ME CAD software. Most of my time at Cal Poly was spent learning board design and layout/trace routing tools like OrCad. Recently I’ve been tinkering with SolidWorks and I’m totally impressed! SolidWorks, like its name implies, is a solid modeling CAD package. Check out this LCD display that I just modeled.

PolySat Bites the Dust

While studying at Cal Poly, I was a member of the PolySat picosatellite team. We worked on designing and building a small 10cm^3 satellite which would perform remote sensing in space and relay information back to earth via HAM radio bands. While I was only briefly associated with the project, I did the early design work for the command and data handling subsystem which would eventually tie the microcontrollers with the payload sensors and communication subsystem.

Cal Poly’s two picosatellites, along with 9 others from universities around the world were launched toward space today by a Russian Dnepr rocket in Kazakhstan. These cold-war era ICBMs were retooled to serve as launch vehicles, providing a low-cost alternative for launching payloads into orbit. I suppose the old saying, “You get what you pay for”, rings true once again. Our satellites never reached orbit since the rocket’s engine failed shortly after launch. All that work for nothing….. Chinese-built Russian garbage for the lose.

Actually this makes me wonder how great the Russian threat was during the cold war. I suppose it doesn’t matter since the likely scenario that all the Russian ICBMs failed to launch would have been irrelevant since nuclear winter would have quickly ensued following a U.S. Titan II salvo. 9-megaton warheads can really kick up some dirt.

PolySat Latest News Page: http://polysat.calpoly.edu/latestNews.php

Website Down

So I let my domain registration expire… Didn’t mean to. It just… happened. Perhaps it was because I had to move and was distracted by relocating to another state. While that makes a great excuse – its still an excuse… I was just lazy and should have renewed months ago. I recently re-registered my domain with Yahoo but they don’t accept domain transfers! This means that I can only re-delegate from my French registrar, gandi.net.

To summarize the above paragraph: My website and my email addresses associated with that website will be unreachable until I can find out how to fix them and bring everything back online.

Probably not going to happen any time soon considering I’ve been super busy and spend 99.9% of my free time with my GF. I’ll be stuck in the lab until late tonight, trying to decipher logic analyzer traces. Yes, I’m using a logic analyzer to probe 18-30 seconds worth of asynchronous serial data! That basically means I’ll be reconstructing data words by hand…. fun fun :)

In quiet contemplation…

…let us now mourn the death of my cell phone

My LG VX6000 finally died the other day. Its been a good phone and lasted longer then my contract with Verizon. The timing was perfect since I recently switched to Cingular and picked up a SLVR. CDMA coverage sucks in Washington and the international compatibility of GSM makes Cingular very appealing. Oh yeah, and I HaXx0R3d my phone on the first day!

Besides that news, Im flying up to WA again tomorrow to look for apartments. Last time T flew down to Cali, Southwest lost her bag and it was a direct flight. I tracked the bag and found out it went to Houston instead and was later routed to Chicago. She finally got her bag back after it was sent to San Jose. (This several days after she returned home to Washington). So Im hoping the same wont happen to me since I’m also flying Southwest. Budget airlines for the win. Hopefully they pay their engine maintenance technicians more than their baggage handlers!

Lossless Audio Codec!

50% of the original file size with no losses due to compression. This is very very cool. http://www.monkeysaudio.com

Here is the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey’s_Audio

Apple Remote and Front Row

One of the projects I worked on at Apple has finally been announced so I can talk about it openly. I think this is the most significant project that I worked on since I wrote all of the firmware and worked on the circuit board. Apple will be making millions of these and shipping them all over the world. Its called the ‘Apple Remote’ and you can see it here http://www.apple.com/imac

An Apple Remote will ship with each iMac and can be magnetically attached to iMac when not in use (check out the picture on the bottom). It has a very simple design with only 6 buttons but only 6 buttons are necessary since the UI is designed so well. In fact Steve Jobs compared it to a 40+ button Microsoft remote and pointed out that it exemplified the Apple design philosophy of simplicity without sacrificing function.

If you have time, I highly recommend you view the keynote where Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac and Apple Remote. He starts off by introducing 3 new features and the remote is covered in feature ..3 so you can skip ahead to that part if you don’t care about the rest of the iMac. You can download the keynote here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/specialeventoct05/

The keynote also introduces the new white ipod which supports photos, album art, and video (like music videos, home movies, etc) so its definitely worth a look.

New iPod Nano!!

New iPod + iTunes!!! check it out at www.apple.com