Steel White Table

My girlfriend, Jenny, and I just got back from a driving range where we whacked a bucket of 60 balls each as hard as we could. Neither of us have a clue how to hit a golf ball, and it didn’t take much to realize it isn’t easy. About 10 of my golf balls bounced [...]

I have a problem with my laptop: it doesn’t provide sufficient warning when the battery is about to die. Yes, there is a tiny indicator icon in the systems tray, but who the hell’s going to notice something this small in the corner of the screen when they’re busy working? Inevitably a low-battery warning [...]

I just read this story at CBC.ca:

NASA managers decided to ground their shuttle fleet on Wednesday after a piece of insulating foam fell off Discovery during lift-off.
“Until we fix this, we’re not going to fly again,” shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said.

Bummer.

Technorati lists the biggest blogs in the blogosphere, as measured by links, meaning the blogs that have other blogs linking to them. The top 10:

Boing Boing
Instapundit
Daily Kos
Gizmodo
FARK
Engadget
Talking Points Memo
Davenetics
Eschaton
dooce

I only recognize a couple of them, and I don’t read any of [...]

I was Googling myself again, and found a page that contains 174 Whole Wheat Radio ‘podcasts.’ Nice to see them all on one page. I’m listening to episode 91 described as:

I’m in “programmer head,” but Esther is in “squirrel head.” Phillip Cairns isn’t awake. I read a nice email from Peter Jaros. Doug Geeting takes [...]

Seven words you can’t say in kindergarten, a short, instructive video.
(via DiVERSiONZ)

I saw Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine last night, a documentary about the 1997 chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue. Kasparov lost and then claimed IBM cheated. IBM’s behaviour was indeed suspicious. They had something like 30 grand masters as ‘consultants,’ but you have wonder if some of these guys were [...]

I just read that the U.S. wants to extend daylight savings time:
It would mean people would turn their clocks forward one hour on the first weekend of March [instead of April] and “fall back” on the final weekend in November [instead of October].
It’s supposed to save energy, but really it’s the answer to the question [...]

I enjoyed every aspect of Paul Auster’s novel, The Book of Illusions. It has tragedy, humour, romance, mystery, and a fantastic ending. It’s about a guy who deals with a personal tragedy by obsessively researching the films of an obscure silent-movie actor, and then writes a book about it. Which may not sound exciting, but [...]

For the next day or two, those subscribing to any of our RRS feeds might notice several small updates to Steel White Table and wonder what’s going on. Some apostrophes, quotation marks and other symbols were converted to questions marks during the recent WordPress upgrade, and we’re in the process of manually fixing these errors.

The novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, is being made into a movie:
Director Gus Van Sant told SCI FI Wire that his next movie, a big-screen adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s best-seller, The Time Traveler’s Wife, will focus on the central relationship. “Telling the story is very hard, too, but it’s the chemistry with [...]

I just stumbled across Emmylou Harris’s website where there’s a link to John Prine’s song She is My Everything (RealAudio), from what I assume is his latest album, Fair and Square. An unexpected find. And not a bad song.

One of the many exciting things about riding a motorcycle for the first time is experiencing things you’ve only heard or read about. It’s fun talking to fellow motorcycle riders about them because everyone has a different story.
Some of my recent firsts:

Having a bee smash into my visor at 100 km/hr, feeling like a [...]

Jill Barber’s latest cd Oh Heart became a favourite in our house the first day we heard it. “[S]teeped in old jazz rhythms mixed with a touch of bluegrass twang and gentle folk melody,” her music plays well with Jolie Holland and Gillian Welch’s Soul Journey. Oh Heart, like Soul Journey, is a collection [...]

This is very cool. I’m watching NASA TV on my laptop as I write this. The cameras are inside the space shuttle. I can see the astronauts. Not much going on right now, but things should get interesting once the shuttle takes off in a couple hours.

With a 12-day mission that includes three spacewalks, NASA [...]

Tags: nasa