News Flash! NSA in League with Target!

We're doomed.

The Boss Hoss Without Me

I'm not quite sure about this. I mean, I like the sound. This particular song has some crude bits, but  it is at least embeddable (is that even a real word?), unlike most of The Boss Hoss tunes on YouTube.      What we have here is a German band, singing covers of American popular music, in English, but with a Country-Western flavor. Given the number of live concert videos posted on YouTube, they must be some kind of phenomena in Germany. It's just weird, man.

Motorola, er, Freescale 68HC11 Microcontroller Timer Diagram

Once upon a time I spent some time comparing Intel & Motorola microcontrollers. The little ones were fairly simple, but the bigger ones got pretty complicated. The 68HC11 has a whole slew of options involving timers, so I made up this drawing to try and illustrate the relationships between all the various parts that were connected to the timer. I originally drew it by hand and colored it with highlighters. I got this image by scanning an old black & white Xerox that I found sitting in a notebook on my bookshelf. Back in the early 1980's we didn't have color copiers.

Russian Submarine

Never mind the old tramp steamer in the background. Do mind the guy standing at the base of the fin.

X-56A: Breaking the Flutter Barrier

This is not an especially great video, but it has some interesting points, and it's only four and a half minutes long. Flutter in an airplane is kind of like speed wobbles on a motorcycle. Some vital part of your vehicle starts oscillating in an uncontrolled manner and if something isn't done quickly, there will be serious consequences. The start of the video shows some bad things happening, like the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapsing during a wind storm. This unmanned aircraft, the Mutt, uses a couple of itty bitty jet engines, similar to what Jet Man uses to make himself fly.

Brooks Goes to Guatemala

My wife, the teacher, sent me a link to a story about an Oregon kid working with an orphanage in Guatemala. I'm reading the story and I'm thinking, good, someone is trying to make things better. Then I see the name Brooks Baumgartner and I realize I know this kid. Well, I knew him 15 years ago when he and his family lived nearby. His pop was a high school baseball coach. Haven't seen them in forever, and here's Brooks charging off to Central America.

Self Defense

My wife spotted the story in the paper this morning about the school teacher in San Diego who was fired because her ex-husband is some kind of whack job. I can understand everyone's position in this mess, well, except for Mr. Wacko. From the way the story is told in the paper he sounds like he is seriously obsessed with his ex-wife. Of course we haven't heard his side of story. If you believe in Hollywood-esque conspiracy theories, he could be the very ideal of the perfect gentlemen and it's his ex-wife who is the psychotic, scheming nutcase.
    This really sounds like a case for a super-hero, someone who doesn't let little things like the law bother them. They will just step up and dispense the necessary justice. If the evil one simply vanished, there wouldn't be anything for reporters to write about, we wouldn't have a conundrum to puzzle over, and the legal profession wouldn't be tying itself in knots over who gets the blame. If anyone should get the blame it should be the partner who failed to shoot their attacker dead the first time it happened. Then it would have been a simple case of self defense, and they probably would have gotten eight years for manslaughter. But it would have been the end of that problem. We wouldn't still be worrying about this particular crazy 20 years later.