YES, Yes, yes, yES! :) Finally, it's official ... the Hobbit films will be made. They will be directed by Guillermo del Toro and co-producted by Peter Jackson. The film is in great hands.

Click here for the news story summary

NASA is going to do an HD broadcast footage of the Earth taken by astronauts about the space shuttle and international space station! Too cool. I can't wait. I'm going to hook NASA TV to my projector so I can watch it in all it's 100" glory!

The NASA press release

What do Dr. Who, E.T., Scotty, and Bill & Ted have in common? They're some of the "Greatest MacGyvers of Science Fiction".

Click Here for the full list.

This sounds like the makings of a great horror movie. "The builders of the world's biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet."

"The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN's headquarters on the French-Swiss border." It will attempt to answer some of the following questions:

• Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong?
• What existed during the very first moment of the universe's existence?
• Why do some particles have mass while others don't?
• What is the nature of dark matter?
• Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven't yet detected?

Of course, those's a completely different set of questions that some people fear might be answered by the LHC (and are the reason for the lawsuit). These include:

• Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom?
• Could quarks recombine into "strangelets" that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

Hopefully this is nothing more than a healthy dose of paranoia by some crazies that like to think about doomsday scenarios. I mean, really - if one of those things were to happen, we wouldn't be around long enough to notice or care :) And in the meantime, it's just sucking time and resources that could be spent answering the first batch of questions.

Read the full article here

I just received a questionnaire at work that I thought would be fun to pass along.

Where were you born?

The Mile High City (Denver, Co).

Where did you go to school & what did you study?

I went to BYU and got my degree in Computer Science.

What is your favorite food?

My wife’s home made salsa. Heaven!

Are you married? Do you have kids? How many kids?

Married with four kids: a genius, a diva, a mermaid, and a cutie pie.

How do you like to spend your free time/favorite hobbies?

I like to read obscure articles on the internet and imagine having friends who are interested in the same things. I also enjoy painting miniatures, stargazing, and snowboarding.

What is your greatest strength?

I am tenacious. \tə-ˈnā-shəs\ - adjective - persistent in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired.

What languages do you speak?

English and techno babble. I’d learn Klingon, but then people might think I’m a geek!

Favorite movie?

I’ll give you a hint. It has little people with furry feet, magic rings, big scary monsters, and a really cool evil eye.

Have you ever bungee-jumped, sky-dived, base-jumped or anything like that???

Are you insane? Once the singularity gets here and I can download my brain into a new body anytime I feel like it, I’ll try something like that :)

What is your favorite place that you’ve traveled to?

A private beach on the Baja peninsula in Mexico. There’s nothing like going out on the beach in the middle of the night with no lights and no people as far as the eye can see and look up at the stars.

In your opinion what is the worst sound?

A crying baby at 3:30 am.

What is one of your pet peeves?

People who drive slower than me in the fast lane.

Tell us something about yourself that no one in the Company knows.

I never watch sports. Ever. Unless my kid is on the field. If it appears that I know something about a current sporting event, it’s because I intentionally researched it the day before so I could talk about it at the water cooler.

Where is your dream vacation?

The presidential suite in a five star resort on the moon.

What is your favorite sport/team?

See above.

Do you have any pets?

I’m a dog person.

What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?

Chocolate, all the way baby!

What was your first job as a teen?

Does mowing the lawn count? If not, then it would be bagging groceries at the local store.

What country are your ancestors from?

England. And I am quite sure there’s royal blood in my veins ... somewhere. Feel free to refer to me as “Your Majesty”.

Well, it's been a really busy week and a half. I finally have a few minutes to breathe and thought i might jot down a few notes about what's been going on in my life.

I've changed jobs. I started my new job on monday. I quit my old job last friday. No gap in paychecks or insurance coverage. Very convenient :) I'm still doing computer programming, but it's in a completely different arena than i was previously involved.

At my previous job (notice how i've never once said where that was in all my blogs, and i'm still not saying it now? lol) and at the job before that and the job before that (going back 10 years), i've done java development (and some html and javascript of course, but mainly java). I love java. It's great. I can code java in my sleep. Anything one might want to do, i know how to do it.

At my new job, it's all c++. In fact they don't like java much. It's too bad really, but there are places where java is appropriate and there are places where c is appropriate. This is definitely a place where c is better. I'll be working on a video player for embedded devices (phones, dvr's, game boxes, etc..), and yes - you want c there. So ... i've been dusting off my c skills lately. I did a lot of c in college and _some_ at my first job, but it's been a LONG time. And i must say - looking at c code and looking at java code is like looking at a beautiful painting in a museum (java) compared to looking at some graffiti on the bathroom stall (c).

But this is not the only adjustment. I've also been given a MacBook Pro laptop as my primary development machine. The only time i've used a mac in the past was at a lab at BYU in college. And it was a nasty experience. Some old icky machine. It's tainted my view of mac ever since. But i must say - the UI is beautiful, it's easy to get around, and i'm figuring out all the little ins and out. Plus, i'm running VMWare Fusion, which means i can run Mac and Windows at the same time on the machine, and it works beautifully. This means i can run all my favorite windows only programs and then use Mac for everything else. And since i can dual boot (thanks to bootcamp), i can install hardcode graphics intensive games for windows and they play nicely on here (in fact they play better on my new laptop than they do on my desktop!).

I've got a lot more so say but this is getting really long. I'll check back in when i get more time.

The Hubble Space Telescope (almost 20 years old!!!) has just detected signs of organic molecules in a planet orbiting another star. NASA will hold a press conference on the findings at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, March 19. You can read the briefing here.

A few months ago, I posed an entry that showed some modern takes on classic art, including a version of the last supper using Star Wars characters.

Well, here's another one - REALLY well done. It shows the cast of Battlestar Galactica posing for the Last Supper. Click the image for the flickr page, and be sure to check out the full-sized image!

I've been rather quiet the last little bit. Things are quite busy for me at the moment, so i haven't had a lot of time to blog, and it doesn't look like i will get much time for the next month or so.

In the meantime, here's a really cool video my wife sent to me. It's about a guy who photographed the changing of the light bulb at the top of the Empire State Building. Link Here

I must admit that i've never actually tried caffeine-free diet pepsi. But i have tried diet pepsi, and it's just awful. I don't doubt that the lack of caffeine makes it even worse. Just how bad is it? Words fail me. This article is almost poetic in its description of the wonderfully horrific taste of the beverage: If you haven't tasted Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi, but would like an idea of what it tastes like, do this - keep a straw in your pocket and wander around outside until you find a pigeon or squirrel that's been dead for, oh, say three months. Stick the straw into the dead animal and suck. Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi tastes like that, except worse. Plus, the taste lingers in your mouth for months. And gradually gets worse until it's like your mouth was invaded by the notoriously rare and deadly Asian Shit Ant. You want to defeat terrorists? Force them to drink Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi. I'm sure it would violate the Geneva Conventions, but they'd immediately tell you anything they knew, then hang themselves. Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi is torture in a 12-oz can. But hey, don't take my word for it, go ahead and find a way to get a free sample of the stuff (if you pay for it, you'll just encourage the folks at Pepsi to make more). You'll quickly see that I speak the truth: Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi is the worst tasting thing on this, and very likely any other, planet.