Happy 21^st Birthday, oneeyedcat !

---

Birthday Stars

Tell the Birthday Stars computer when you were born, and it will look for a star that is your age in light years away from Earth. This means that the light we’re seeing from that star today actually left the star around when you were born, and has taken your entire life to reach Earth.

Your birthday star is in the constellation Virgo. It has the name β (Beta) Virginis in Johann Bayer’s Uranometria star catalog. It is also called 5 Virginis in the Historia Cœlestis Britannica of John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley. It is called NS 1150+0145 in the NStars database.

It has visual magnitude 3.6 meaning that you could see this star with the naked eye in good viewing conditions. It is marked in the center of this star chart, at celestial coordinates (J2000 equinox):

Right ascension 11:50:41.7
Declination 1:45:53

This star is 35.5 light years away, which means that the light we see from it today set off on its journey at about the same time that you were born. Come back in a month or two and your birthday star may change, as the light from more distant stars reaches Earth.

---

It’s getting warmer and a bit more humid these days. Soon, I’ll be living in the thick, steamy Florida humidity once again. Thank goodness for A/C and breezes from the ocean! I’m glad the rain comes to drop the temperature, and squeeze dozens of feet of moist air into more free-moving gusts, with the water wrung out onto the ground.

I wonder how long it’ll be before the ice cream man comes back to the neighborhood? Summer Vacation for the kiddies starts in a week or two. I Don’t chase the trucks, but there’s something sort of comforting about hearing bad music box tunes blasted through blown speakers in the summertime. If I did see one stopped, I’d certainly get in the lineup for a little something. You can get 2-point smart ones “nutty buddy” equivalents at my nearby Publix, but that’s just cheatin’. Not to say that I don’t indulge here and there… though I prefer Skinny cow’s Ice Cream Sammiches. Mmm, Mint!

---

Revised a lot of the company site to pure php… mostly rote work, but a few solid tweaks to speed up processing and data access via MySQL. Only slightly related, Mike Cohen points me to an Objective-C syntax and runtime for Perl. That’s pretty amazing. Bad News, he also points out that php-nuke still has some bad security holes in it, and they’re pretty well-known. I hope that when my fave site returns from its long hiatus, it’ll be safe from harm. *happy thoughts of replacement pinwheels*

---

Lovely Slow day on call… just some recoveries. The Cleveland Police seem as nicey-nice as Reno.

---

I wonder if a lot of my surgery dream are echoed, dope-fogged memories of being under the knife. I do seem to be face down.

---

Nice side effect of Gmail… Yahoo boosts free e-mail storage to 100MB That’s a good thing, since I rely more on yahoo mail than my gmail account. (Y!Messenger and alerts dovetail nicely with my online planning.)

Web portal Yahoo will begin offering “virtually unlimited storage” for its paid e-mail customers and will upgrade free users to 100MB, an executive said Thursday.

The upgrade is part of an overall enhancement for Yahoo Mail that will launch this summer. Besides additional storage, the service will get a face-lift and tie in more Yahoo-branded services, such as Photos and Messenger.

The announcement comes a month after search rival Google said it would launch a free e-mail service called Gmail that offers 1GB of storage, considerably more space than free versions of Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail. Yahoo currently offers 4MB of storage to free users of its e-mail service.

The company’s decision to boost its e-mail storage is not surprising. A day before Gmail details were unveiled, Yahoo sent e-mails to some customers in hopes of gauging their interest in receiving 100MB of storage.

The company said the e-mail was just a typical consumer survey for its “loyal consumer base” and denied that it had any relation to the news of Gmail.

Gmail has sparked considerable controversy, because Google plans to scan people’s e-mails to serve ads based on message text. The plans have drawn fire from privacy advocates and industry leaders alike.

Details of Yahoo’s storage upgrade were revealed by Jim Brock, the company’s senior vice president of communication and consumer services, during Yahoo’s presentation to Wall Street analysts.

“The objective here is to make storage quotas irrelevant to users,” Brock said.

The competition between Yahoo and Google continues to heighten. In February, Yahoo dropped Google as its algorithmic search provider and instead launched its own technology. The companies also compete over distribution deals, as evidenced in Yahoo replacing Google search on CNN.com this week.

---

Played more CoH with Whims… she and Sammy are leveling much more swiftly than I am, but fortunately, the sidekick feature is able to reel me up to at least a fair par. Speaking of which… FFXI has Half A million users, now.. some interesting stats here. I still have trouble seeing the appeal.

---

Gumball Insert Cards. These would make for some lovely LJ icons, I think. Click ’em to make ’em bigger.

---

Now that his bandwidth has eased up again, I don’t mind linking to this guy with nothing better to do dug a big ol’ hole in his back yard. It eventually became a nifty bunker, complete with wireless access. Two years went by, and a rising water table has made it a pool.

Not quite a hobbit-hole, mind you. I don’t dig that he was using it to hunt, but wouldn’t mind having something like that on my land, just because.

---

Things on amazon that make me smile, but I have no need or interest in buying for myself –

• Pork Chocs^TM – Sugar Free Milk Chocolate Dipped Pork Rinds
• Solid Gold S.E.P. (Stop Eating Poop) (3.5-oz container)
• Owl Puke (Ok.. this one, I might get into playing forensics with.)
• Ladybugs: 9000 Count
• Rejuvenique RJV10KIT Facial Toning Mask Kit – You too can be a Westworld Robot / Dr. Who Villain / Perform Electrical torture on people’s faces!

---

First Wireless Test video broadcast to my server (Newt Wagging his tail, while we watch Cartoon Network. Audio is Moltar and Carl scoping out booty at a cocktail party.) Quicktime MOV format, 209k. 10 sec long. tiny screen size for test.