Yesterday some of us at work were walking back from lunch and I mentioned there were rumors of a new iPod. It was going to be as thin as a nano, but the size of a squat 5G. Already people were saying how ugly it was and part of that is because it isn’t a golden rectangle where the ratio of the long side to the short side is 1.618:1.
New Web Host
I am still the webmaster for the employees’ association at work. Currently their website is hosted by hostway.com. They charge $13.95 per month for hosting the website and $19 per year for registering the domain name. In reading up on the subject some people say that you should not have the same company host the site and register the domain. I found an inexpensive and well regarded registrar called namecheap.com (GoDaddy is a more famous one; like most of these companies they also host websites) that charges $8.88 per year. I also found a well regarded web hosting company called A Small Orange that charges only $25 per year for their smallest web hosting package (75 MB of storage space 3 GB per month of traffic). It turns out that ASO’s servers are located in Atlanta, so that’s even better.
Plasma
Recently I borrowed The Prestige from Netflix. While I wasn’t crazy about the movie (B), one of the side characters was Nikola Tesla. I knew he was an important guy in the history of electricity, but his story really is interesting (not as interesting as the movie would have you believe). He is famous for Tesla coils which create huge lightning bolts in science fiction movies. On a practical side he was a proponent of AC electricity for home use despite Thomas Edison having everyone convinced that DC was the way to go. There is a monument to Tesla at Niagara Falls since his work turned their otherwise useless waterfall into a money-making electricity machine (see a NOVA episode dedicated to him).
Anyway, there were some really neat Tesla coils in the movie and it reminded me that I was interested in getting one of those plasma lamps. Since I had recently won a $25 gift certificate for using transit to get to work, I thought that the time had come. So the lamp is pictured below:
Bridge Collapse
A couple of people on the bulletin board asked me what I thought about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and what caused it. I wrote the following, which provides very little insight, but I haven’t posted anything on the blog in a while. We were kidding on vacation that I would need to get back to help fix the bridge, but I was at least able to scan the documents I mentioned below which were requested by the investigators. Every bridge collapse causes engineers to change how we do our work, and this won’t be any different even though it isn’t known what caused the problem yet.
Here’s what I wrote about why the bridge fell:
Pig in a Poke
At work we discussing a project that we would design and then turn it over to another owner. My boss said that wouldn’t work because the other owner wouldn’t want a project that we had designed. That would be like buying a pig in a poke, he said.
I knew what he meant, but wondered what a “poke” was and what that referred to. According to Wikipedia and a few other sources, a poke is a bag. At markets people would sell a young (live) pig and put it in a burlap bag for the customer to carry home. But shady vendors would substitute some other, cheaper animal instead of a valuable baby pig. One animal they might use would be a cat. That way the buyer would know something was alive, but then end up with nothing of value.
So that’s kind of funny that you actually want a pig in a poke and would get stuck with a cat. But the other neat part is that if you investigated the contents before handing over your money, then you “let the cat out of the bag” and realized the vendor was trying to cheat you.
I guess it was so widespread that it spawned two different phrases that are still in use hundreds of years later. Some scam!