Naked Mole Rats

NMR Facts:

1. Naked Mole Rats are neither moles nor rats.

2. The queen will use her nose to violently poke the noses of family members.

3. Their teeth are on the outside of their mouths.

4. They have a good reason for rolling around in poop.

5. They have a good reason for eating their food twice.

Want to know why? Here is an entertaining and well written article:

The Naked Truth about Mole-Rats – National Zoo

Now playing: Aja from “Aja” by Steely Dan

Nose Fairy

Claire, then Kathy, then Kelly, now I have all picked up bad colds. This Dilbert asks and answers a question I had never considered.

dilbert2732230041018.gif

(I do know about the pee fairy.)

MySQL Restore Test

Your blogs are safely backed up every day (and now I know for sure.) Finally got around to verifying that the daily backups using AutoMySQLDump can be used to restore the entire database. I ran a mini disaster recovery using the old iMac.

Note to self: Kept trying to use the command “mysqldump” to restore, but that is an output only command. Just using “mysql” and reversing the out character > with the in character < did it:

root# /usr/local/bin/mysql -umxxxxx -pgxxxxx mov_type < /2004-10-17.Sunday.sql

(User and password masked.)

Micro Opera House

Swinburne-micro-photonic.jpgSYDNEY, Australia — Swinburne University of Technology’s center for micro-photonics have constructed a model of the Sydney Opera House, see photo above, that is about half the diameter of a human hair. It is more than a million times smaller than the real Sydney structure. The model was built from a hybrid material of glass and polymer by firing intense laser light into the matter in a liquid state to create what to the human eye appears as an almost imperceptible dot, but under an electron microscope it contains the detail and the beauty of the iconic Sydney harbour side structure. (07/23/04 AP-Swinburne University)