Originally uploaded by ralphsanchez.Many, many years ago, man dreamed of flying like a bird. Countless people shared the dream.In order to pursue this dream, the Flugtag was invented. An event in which the brightest engineering and scientific minds come together to test their latest attempts at the elusive flying machine in front of a knowledgeable crowd.Yesteday, we had one of said events here in Austin. A bunch of friends and myself headed to the Auditorium Shores park to check out the different flying machines. I must say, none of them flew, but I strongly believe that the advances we saw yesterday put us closer to this ancient dream of finally having a man fly inside a machine of his creation, like a bird.See some photos of the event, courtesy of many people at Flickr.com.I also uploaded a short video with some of the attempts, but Youtube.com didn’t manage it very well, so I’ll reencode and upload again shortly.
So here I am, drawing a portrait of Aarón Kirsch (a.k.a. dad). I’m using photos as reference. I thought it’d be fun to draw (chubby face and really hard hair). I’m almost done sketching with a pencil, so I step back to take a look and to my surprise, it looks just like my brother Moi.
Holy shit. That’s scary.
I’ll keep working at it though. If it comes up ok I will upload a scan. If not, I will pretend it never happened. In the meantime, I uploaded some more sketches from the Life Drawing Programs workshops at AVAA that I’ve made to the Monos section of The MKX® Photo Central.
Like every damn year, we make it to the playoffs only to lose on the next game. It’s like Mexico in the World Cup. And I feel like I was run over by a herd of dewbacks (wow, that reference made me even less appealing to women – better shut up and go to sleep).
My parents were here this weekend (until yesterday). Coincidentally, NI-Week (THE virtual instrumentation conference) opened yesterday.
Since my parents have been asking me for six years what it is that I do, and I have been unsuccessful at explaining it to them, this was a perfect chance to see it firsthand. They signed up and got their keynote and expo-only pass (free!).
I think they enjoyed mostly enjoyed the speeches and the demos, and even understood parts of it. The best thing is that after 6+ years of asking me what it is that I do for a living, they will finally stop asking (and that’s not because they now understand).
Ok, people. Stop voting. Word has come in from the Concrete Jungle informing us that baby Goldman has been officially named “El Mauricio II” (or simply Mauricio, I’m not sure).
Apparently, Filemon (which tied in our poll for first place) is a registered trademark of Corona Beer or something along those lines. So they went with Mauricio.
The A/C repair guy came today. Turns out the thingamajing in the watchamacallit needs to be replaced (for the educated: the 1/4 HP 110 V AC blower motor in the furnace). It’s expensive, but not iPhone-expensive. He’s coming back in the morning and that should be the end of it.In the meantime, the weather, which had been rainy and cloudy and relatively cool for the last two months and up until my A/C broke hit the relatively scorching 35 degrees today. So I stayed away from my house as long as I could. I stayed late at work. I went to Deep Eddy. I ate dinner out. I brought ice cream over to the Correas. Yes, I could sleep elsewhere, but I like it in my house with all my toys, even if I need to sleep naked and uncovered and hugging an electric fan (paparazzi, take note).
My air conditioning broke. This is hell. Brings back memories of summer at the kibbutz, except for the good parts.Will keep you posted as this develops.
Yes, comment spam hits popular blogging systems such as WordPress all the time. But how about little, innocent, low traffic, 100% custom coded websites made by some random little guy? Surely, these websites are not targeted by spammers. It’s not worth the effort.
Wrong.
My two little soccer pool websites FIFA 2006 World Cup Polla and La Polla America were hit by comment spam. Not kidding. In order to post to these forums, someone (a spambot, I’m sure) had to go in there, open an account with a password using fake info and then go back and post. Unbelievable. I deleted the spam, but captured a screenshot to prove it. It’s both flattering and annoying. Click to zoom in.
Next on this series… Jinuj.net, Akismet, and a worthy CAPTCHA.
to be continued…
Originally uploaded by ralphsanchez.Many, many years ago, man dreamed of flying like a bird. Countless people shared the dream.In order to pursue this dream, the Flugtag was invented. An event in which the brightest engineering and scientific minds come together to test their latest attempts at the elusive flying machine in front of a knowledgeable crowd.Yesteday, we had one of said events here in Austin. A bunch of friends and myself headed to the Auditorium Shores park to check out the different flying machines. I must say, none of them flew, but I strongly believe that the advances we saw yesterday put us closer to this ancient dream of finally having a man fly inside a machine of his creation, like a bird.See some photos of the event, courtesy of many people at Flickr.com.I also uploaded a short video with some of the attempts, but Youtube.com didn’t manage it very well, so I’ll reencode and upload again shortly.
