Hi all. Wow seems to have been, um, five years since I've posted. Wow I'll have to watch that. Time gets away. Anyhow I thought I'd jot down a few things and see if anybody still reads. Probably not, but I just discovered this old blog a few days ago and I was amazed to find that I'd totally forgotten about it.

CHUBBY CHAT UPDATE

Unfortunately, Frappr has discontinued the frappr chat feature until further notice. In the meantime, I've found a cool free chat service, that I'll be making a link to on the website (on Friday when it comes live again)

Here's the link if you want to try it. (I'll be hanging out there for a while like a loser)

http://pub31.bravenet.com/chat/show.php?usernum=2605005000&cpv=2

Dave

Sorry if you were wondering, the site is down again, and because of that there will be no show this week. The good news is the site will be back up on Dec 1st (Friday) and even better, it should never go down again because I've found a way to host the files for free. Curious about this? visit ourmedia.org and download the free "spinXpress2" for quick uploading. A bit confusing to get into, but once done the initial setup it's pretty brainless.

If you'd like to test the download speed, try downloading this file (an enhanced version of episode 58 with a built in slide show if you view it in iTunes, a video iPod, or a current version of Quicktime) I get about 55 megawhatsits per second when I download it, and for free, I think that's plenty.

If you're looking for the current show, you'll find the website down due to heavy bandwidth usage. I've still not found a solution to that problem but I'm looking. For this show, Big Jake has kindly offered to host the show on his server temporarily (the site will be back up on the 15th) Click the link below to download:

(Iv'e taken the link down now. Thanks Jake!)

Yes I know. I love Macs so much, but I keep getting the lemons. My new Intel iMac started behaving funny on Friday night. Friday night. Of course Friday night. That's the night when you just want to think about nothing, watch a stupid movie and flake out. But I couldn't because my beautiful new computer was acting funny.

It was frozen; something that just doesn't happen to Macs anymore. Sometimes a program might get into a loop and hang itself, but you can always force quit and everything is fine. This time it was frozen solid. Nothing was happening and I couldnt force out of it. So I restarted, and I could hear the sickening "click....click..." sound of a dying hard disk, and a grey screen.

After about an hour of (actually very funny) conversation with a Mac Support specialist named Sasha, I came to realize I had only one option left, and that was to try to reformat the disk. I thought long and hard before I even attempted this, but finally had to admit my drive was not recoverable. But even when I tried to format it it just clicked and clicked. The drive was dead.

What was most painful was that long after transferring all my files to the newer iMac, I had just begun erasing things from the old computer, feeling pretty confident everything would be fine with the new machine for the time being. What a mistake. So much has been lost now that I don't really want to think about it. Among other things, the working files for the new music website, and for the dink dolls site. I'll likely have to build some of it from scratch, if not all. I'm not sure what I still have on the old (and also malfunctioning) iMac. But I think I'll be able to get something.

So I gave up on recovery, and took the machine in to the Apple store in the big mall a few miles away. Its a cool store, and of course, as I was talking to the chipper "Mac Genius" at the "Genius Bar" the conversation moved to the new Mac Books. It's the new portable machine with Intel chips. Blazing fast, beautiful, and equipped with a built in video camera for chatting, and a remote control for movie or music enjoyment from a distance. And of course, it comes with all that cool Mac software.

I think it was my sense of loss that did it, but yes, I bought the new Mac Book. I needed to retire my old portable anyway, and even though it still functions very well, I'll really love being able to do real work and not be stuck to my desk. The old portable was really only good for surfing and emails. But the new one is good for just about anything. I can even rig this thing to do pocasting and graphics without much trouble, and then I'd have a nice backup for anything that goes wrong in the future. Nothing had better ever go wrong in my whole lifetime of Mac use, by the way.

So the sick computer will have a nice new hard drive come next weekend, all on Apple's dime (I should think so, huh.) and they even tell me they'll likely fix my older iMac for free, because it was a well documented problem they had with power supplies on that model. So that's good. Soon I'll be swimming in Macs again, and that will make me happy.

Happy Halloween.

(this may be the geekiest post I've ever written)

Before I begin this let me say that I have no scientific credentials whatsoever, and you should take this entire entry with a grain of... sugar. But if you know me, you can trust that I've read enough to feel pretty confident with what I'm saying here.

So here's my question: if the universe is so huge and teeming with stars and planets... where are the UFO visitors?

Some would say "they're visiting us right now, what about the UFO sightings?"

Okay here's where the grain of sugar comes in, and with it, my answer: Whatever they are they're not from another planet. They are something else, maybe. But not from another planet. No way.

Here is why I think so. It's not anything new, but I defy you to brush it off.

If you go to http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/ you'll find a really interesting calculator. It lets you pretend to scale down the solar system... like if you wanted to pretend the sun was the diameter of a mandarine orange, let's say. (about three inches). The program scales the rest of the planet sizes, distances, etc. and also scales down the speed of light, and the distances to all the other nearby stars, including the closest one, which is Alpha Centauri.

In real life, this star (actually a group of three stars orbiting each other, the closest of which is actually called Prima Centauri) is about four and a half light years away.

That's really hard to picture in your head. I can't even convert it to miles without that annoyng +E thingy on the calculator. (I never did understand what that +E thingy is supposed to mean.) After some web searching I found the answer in real numbers. It's approximately 24,792,710,570,269,624 miles away. Yes that's almost twenty five quadrillion miles.

But try to picture that.

You can't. So keep reading.

The sun in real life is 862,400 miles across, or about 2.7 million miles around if you wanted to drive your melting car around it. So that's the sun.

The earth is 7901 miles in diameter. Or about 24,901 miles in circumference. It'd be some kind of cool, James Bond boat car.

The Sun and Earth are at least 91 million miles from each other. (This distance increases during the year, but who cares.)

Okay, so got that pictured in your head? Of course you don't. I don't either. So let's use the calculator...

If I made a model of the solar sytem and used a mandarine orange as the sun, the earth would be very teeny. Half a millimeter. Maybe the size of a grain of sugar. Then the distance from us to the sun would be 26 feet. That's easier to picture. An orange, a grain of sugar, and the length of your house. (pluto, by the way, would be 1062 feet away from the orange, and would be practically invisible to the naked eye, that's if it were still a planet. Poor Pluto.)

Okay, got that? I do. Next we want to figure out how far away the nearest star would be. Perhaps there's a chance this star has planets, maybe one with life. Not likely, since there are a hundred billion other, vastly more distant stars in our galaxy alone. (A galaxy, by the way, is one of those disk things that looks like a hurricane cloud. We live in one called the Milky Way. Galaxies look fuzzy like smoke. The fuzzy smokey stuff is stars. There are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the rest of space that we can detect; the universe.)

Got that? Ok. A very large disk thing (the Milky way, about 12 million miles across even at this scale, where in a teeny corner there exists...), an orange (the sun), and a grain of sugar (our planet Earth) circling it about 26 feet away.

Now just take a moment and try to imagine spotting this grain of sugar even from a few feet away. Maybe pretend you're planet hunting. Okay, now let's move on.

So one would think that given the huge number of stars in our disk thing (galaxy) we would be bumping into stars all the time... or at least running into UFO's from all the jillions of planets that must be out there. But here's the thing:

I was talking earlier about that closest star from us (actually 3 orbiting each other) Alpha Centauri, and how far away it is, right? The closest star. The one that you'd try first if you were flying around looking for more sugar planets.

It's really far away. Remember? Twenty five quadrillion miles. But how far away is it when you scale things down?

Much closer. If the Earth were the size of a grain of sugar, the nearest star would be only 1374.1 miles away. Piece of cake. Like from Toronto to Miami. (actually Toronto to Miami is 1237 miles, but close enough) I can imagine doing that trip in a few days in the car.

So here's the rub. Now we have to consider how fast you can fly. What's the fastest possible speed according to physics? It's the speed of light. That's not a rumour, it's a fact. (actually a theory, but a theory isn't merely a guess like most people commonly use the word in everyday English. Not when it comes to science. Not even close. The speed of light as a universal speed limit is part of the General Theory of Relativity, which has been tested and proved correct by experiments, and in fact GPS locators count on this theory or you'd never find your way to Miami)

The Speed of light. That's it. Nothing can travel faster than that. (Well you could in a sense, but let's put it this way, if you travelled that fast, time outside the space ship would speed (or put another way, time inside the ship would slow down) up to such a point that you would greet infinity and probably witness the end of the universe. Not only that, your ship would become as flat as a CD, though you and it would still function perfectly. Einstein understood it, I don't really, but go read about it if you like. It's amazing and strains the edges of your brain. And that's without the math, which I understand none of, as you probably believe when you think about me and calculators.) So you can't fly that fast without disappearing into the ends of time and turning into a pancake. Nothing can.

But even if you could...

The speed of light isn't really all that fast when you scale things down. If the Sun were the size of an orange, a beam of light would radiate outward from it at only 1/2 an inch per second. Do that with your finger. Try flying from one end of your computer keyboard to the other end at 1/2 an inch per second. On my little laptop keyboard it took about 23 seconds. (try counting one one thousand... two one thousand... as your finger crosses about an inch) Now how far is it from the Sun to the Earth at this scale again? Oh yeah, about 26 feet. The length of your house. Do you have to patience to try that? I don't but I know how long it would take you. It would take you the same amount of time it takes in real life for light to reach us from the sun. It's about 8 minutes. Try it with the finger test, I dare you. Remember your finger is travelling at the speed of light. Which isn't possible. You have an amazing finger. (and if you think that's odd, how about the fact that when you look at the sun you're seeing 8 minutes into the past)

Okay. So the next thing is this: How far away is the nearest star? How far would you have to drag your finger to get there? Oh yeah... I remember. Miami. You'd have to drag your finger to miami at 1/2 inch per second.

It would take you 4.2 years.

That's If you could travel at the speed of light, which you can't, without a bunch of weird Einstein stuff happening. End of the universe and all that.

But even if we pulled it off...

we would be looking for grains of sugar. In the dark. Without a map or GPS. And when you found a grain of sugar there would be no life there, so you'd move on to the next star which is...

in Hawaii. Or Australia...

And those are the close ones. There aren't very many. Most are hundreds or thousands or millions of times farther away. So that's the thing. A lot of work to find another Orange and maybe a grain of sugar.

So if you are a betting person, the best chance is that are our little blue grain of sugar will remain unnoticed, circling our little yellow orange for the rest of its days, until, finally, one day, billions of years from now, it will expand to the size of a house, and swallow us up, and you can call me Sunny D.

Sweet.

Okay Gary. I'm writing something. I loved the way you put it about how long it's been since I've blogged. Blogged. Think about that word for a minute. Okay now stop thinking about it. Never think about it again.

It's been so long I had to really think to remember my blogger username and password. Want to know what it is? Maybe you can blog for me.

Anyway after leaving work today I took a detour to the nasty little pawn shop next to my local grocery store. I really hate this place, but they do have great deals sometimes, and I had a specific thing I wanted to buy as a gift for somebody. They didn't have what I wanted, but they did have... dum da dum.... LBM.

LBM is the owner, or at least he presents himself that way. He's a Loud Balding Man (not that there's anything wrong with that) with a very loud voice. I understand him completely. More than he understands himself, I think. Not because I'm like him, but because it's so obvious. First and foremost I think he's probably gay, but in denial of it. (not that there's anything wrong with that) He speaks with a much louder voice than is necessary. I'll give you an example:

Camera does a slow pan of a shabby pawn shop. The camera stops on a Loud Balding Man with a permanent smirk fused to his face. A customer walks past, and, after unavoidably locking eyes with the Loud Balding Man lets out a less than enthusiastic greeting.

---Customer---

Hello.

---Loud Balding Man---

: HIIIIIII THEEEEEERE!!!!

The Customer does a double take, and keeps walking. Fade to white.

Do you see? He just doesn't need to talk that loudly. I think it's to cover up his homosexual nature and inflict a more manly image of himself on the world. I also think he's afraid of people. This is another reason he speaks so loudly and gets his face directly in front of yours as he says whatever he's going to say... too loudly.

I purchased a very cheap little camera that I knew had an incredibly close "macro" setting at aobut 1/3 its actual value. As he was putting it in the box for me I asked about a very nice watch in the glass case. I asked how much it was. It was a Jag. LBM replied, "TWELVE!!!!"

The thoughts in my head went something like, 'Twelve? Twelve what? Twelve shillings? Twelve dead babies? Twelve o'clock according to the watch? Twelve little numbers and a minute hand? Twelve what?'

Presently it became clear (by the ginger way he was handling it and the absurd price sticker) that he meant Twelve hundred dollars. Yeah. Right.

No Thanks, I said. Nice watch though, I said. It was. But it was used. Used means I don't want to pay twelve.

He continued to wrap up my camera and decided to become preoccupied by the teenagers looking around the shop. These teenagers had hoods and this didn't please LBM. He wanted them to remove their hoods and told me so. He also told me they'd be photographed both on the way IN and on the way OUT. Teenagers didn't please LBM. I was wondering if it was because he wanted to fondle their privates. Who knows, and who am I to judge.

Anyway, I'll be ending this now. Just wanted to say hello and tell you that I'll be back writing some more, soon.

In about Twelve.