Red Tivo Remote

I am grateful for my cool friends... We were all hanging out @ ChaoBoy's house when the following conversation took place:

me: "Oh, new Tivo Remote?"
lp: "Why? What color's yours?"
me: "standard charcoal grey/black."
lp: "You can have mine if you want to switch.."
me: =D

Oh, thank God for my friends.... especially my super cool /genius friends! =)

Huggie, huggie!

Eye-Fi

Eye-Fi helps woman catch the thieves who stole her camera

Thu Jun 5, 2008 9:25PM EDT

Some technology is unwittingly making it possible for people to recover their lost or stolen gizmos. Last month, one Apple employee recovered her stolen laptop thanks to some ingenuity, and a program called "Back to My Mac" that used her Mac's built-in web camera to photograph the thieves. This month, a similar story covered by Reuters, illustrates how one very clever memory card helped a family recover their lost digital cameras.

Alison DeLauzon lost two digital cameras full of snapshots and videos of her son. She probably had given up all hope of recovering them, when the unexpected happened: one of the cameras sent pictures of the thieves to her computer.

This was possible thanks to her Eye-Fi memory card, which has wireless capabilities that uploads photos to the Web once it detects a Wi-Fi signal. The thieves were obviously unaware of such technology, so when they passed by an unsecured Wi-Fi network, all the pictures in the camera, including their own, were automatically sent to DeLauzon's account. To make a story short, Ms. DeLauzon recognized the thieves, who worked at a restaurant where she had dined, and was able to recover her camera equipment.

Ahhh, when are thieves going to learn? It's great to hear stories like this one, isn't it?

Daft Finger Song

Hanging out with my friends lp and rg last night, they showed me this interesting hand song thing on YouTube.. quite funny, posted here:

DAFT PUNK LYRICS
"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"

Work It
Make It
Do It
Makes Us
Harder
Better
Faster
Stronger
More Than
Hour
Our
Never
Ever
After
Work is
Over [x2]

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

Sudoku ruins trial!

Sudoku addicts halt drugs trial

Wed Jun 11, 10:20 AM ET

An Australian drugs trial lasting more than three months and costing taxpayers over A$1 million ($947,000) has been aborted after a number of jurors were found to have spent up to half the time playing Sudoku puzzles.

Sydney District Court Judge Peter Zahra cancelled the trial of two men on drugs conspiracy charges after the jury foreperson admitted that four to five jurors had been playing the addictive number sequence game, local media reported. The judge was alerted after some of the jurors were observed writing their notes vertically, rather than horizontally. The game involves completing a grid of numbers in the correct sequence.

One juror said the game helped them to pay more attention by keeping their mind busy.

"Some of the evidence is rather drawn out and I find it difficult to maintain my attention the whole time," the juror was quoted saying by the Australian Associated Press.

A new trial is expected to begin in a few weeks once a new jury has been called.

(Reporting by James Thornhill; Editing by Alex Richardson)

Nova Roma

Today I woke up and decided to look up and learn the roman numerals... no more fumbling with my fingers when I see those elegant dates printed in Nova Roma. I know this is nerdy, but hey, what can I say? That's who I am, better to be intellectually curious than brain dead, right? =) Good morning, everyone!

On Roman Numerals

Handy Roman numeral converter Script courtesy Arik Segal

The Romans were active in trade and commerce, and from the time of learning to write they needed a way to indicate numbers. The system they developed lasted many centuries, and still sees some specialized use today.

Roman numerals traditionally indicate the order of rulers or ships who share the same name (i.e. Queen Elizabeth II). They are also sometimes still used in the publishing industry for copyright dates, and on cornerstones and gravestones when the owner of a building or the family of the deceased wishes to create an impression of classical dignity. The Roman numbering system also lives on in our languages, which still use Latin word roots to express numerical ideas. A few examples: unilateral, duo, quadricep, septuagenarian, decade, milliliter.

The big differences between Roman and Arabic numerals (the ones we use today) are that Romans didn't have a symbol for zero, and that numeral placement within a number can sometimes indicate subtraction rather than addition.

Here are the basics:

I	The easiest way to note down a number is to make that many marks - little I's. Thus I means 1, II means 2, III means 3. However, four strokes seemed like too many....
V	So the Romans moved on to the symbol for 5 - V. Placing I in front of the V — or placing any smaller number in front of any larger number — indicates subtraction. So IV means 4. After V comes a series of additions - VI means 6, VII means 7, VIII means 8.
X	X means 10. But wait — what about 9? Same deal. IX means to subtract I from X, leaving 9. Numbers in the teens, twenties and thirties follow the same form as the first set, only with X's indicating the number of tens. So XXXI is 31, and XXIV is 24.
L	L means 50. Based on what you've learned, I bet you can figure out what 40 is. If you guessed XL, you're right = 10 subtracted from 50. And thus 60, 70, and 80 are LX, LXX and LXXX.
C	C stands for centum, the Latin word for 100. A centurion led 100 men. We still use this in words like "century" and "cent." The subtraction rule means 90 is written as XC. Like the X's and L's, the C's are tacked on to the beginning of numbers to indicate how many hundreds there are: CCCLXIX is 369.
D	D stands for 500. As you can probably guess by this time, CD means 400. So CDXLVIII is 448. (See why we switched systems?)
M	M is 1,000. You see a lot of Ms because Roman numerals are used a lot to indicate dates. For instance, this page was written in the year of Nova Roma's founding, 1998 CE (Common Era; Christians use AD for Anno Domini, "year of our Lord"). That year is written as MCMXCVIII. But wait! Nova Roma counts years from the founding of Rome, ab urbe condita. By that reckoning Nova Roma was founded in 2751 a.u.c. or MMDCCLI.
V	Larger numbers were indicated by putting a horizontal line over them, which meant to multiply the number by 1,000. Hence the V at left has a line over the top, which means 5,000. This usage is no longer current, because the largest numbers usually expressed in the Roman system are dates, as discussed above.

purchasing habits

I want to write an entry about the purchasing behaviours between guys and girls.

Women walk into a clothing store, she browses at the various items there, maybe she picks out 3-4 tops and goes to try it out.. She puts them on and admires each reflection in the mirror for 10 seconds, decides whether it's a 1). No, 2) Yes, and 3) Maybe .. let me think about it a bit.

Men walk into Fry's, or Best Buy, or gets onto Amazon.com, Fatwallet.com, and they browse around as well. Some time it takes them hours to find and compare electronic devices, and doesn't even end up buying them..

so whoever says that girls and guys have different shopping behaviours should reconsider, maybe they are different while shopping for clothing, but it seems to me they exhibit similar patterns when it comes to the subject of their interest.. =)

just my 2 cents.
btw, I finally ordered my new laptop after nearly 2 weeks of exhaustive research on all specs and considering various factors, also got a great $$ deal. =)

Book of Kells

Fascinating illuminated work of art.. Currently stored in Dublin, Ireland, Trinity College Library.

http://historymedren.about.com/od/bookofkell1/p/book_of_kells.htm
Wikipedia info on the book of Kells

Mentos + Diet Coke

haha... I loved that episode of Myth Busters... I like the way they systematically narrowed down the ingredients and factors....

awesome, this is what I call science... controlled experiment, and conclusive results.
just wish that most software bugs can be isolated and tested upon as such. =)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMXPOqovSBs>

<http://gizmodo.com/5015774/science-team-explains-why-mentos-%252B-coke--whoosh>