Snow in UCD and Other Tails…
Posted by donal on February 18th, 2009 filed in Entertainment, Fitness, Funny Photos, Funny Pictures, Hiking, Marathon, News, UCD, computers
First of all, it was snowing here! In Ireland! It’s didn’t sit or anything, but the country still fell apart. Here’s a picture of the snow in U.C.D., taken by Lar Judge.
UCD’s egg lightly dusted in snow – February 2009
Anyway, onto some trivia. According to Wikipedia, and a few other sites, National Geographic included, cats have a non-fatal terminal velocity. Thanks to their body shapes, cats, once they’ve righted themselves, fall at approximately 60km/h, at which speed it is possible to survive impact with the ground. Highly flexible spines and their padded paws help in dissipating the forces involved. To give a point of reference, a human reaches around 240km/h. Now, I’m not going to cite references on this, because, for one, I don’t want to, and two, you know how to use fucking Google, eh?
I think this is a pretty cool fact. It’d be very cool, except that guys have used it as a rationale in order to dump cats out the back of Cessnas at a couple hundred metres, and from the higher floors of US skyscrapers. It’s still a nice-to-know, and it’d fantastic if we lowly humans had the same property, although a bipedal creature with a terminal velocity of 60km/h would probably look retarded. Ah well. You can’t win ‘em all.
Onto other news. I haven’t updated this blog in a long time. I could make excuses, but I won’t. I’m in my final year in University, working on a large enough project, which you can look at TheAdmirableAdmiral.com. I set up a very simple webpage in December, BackToTheThemeTune.com. I’m still trying to work out what to put on it. Maybe I’ll write a Web 2.9 site. It’s like Web 2.0 social networking, except I decide who your friends are. Maybe a Michael J. Fox themed porn site. Who knows?
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Unsolicited real-Mail
Posted by donal on May 30th, 2008 filed in Rants, computers
The world of computing has a lot of flaws, from software and hardware problems like this Fedora installation, which thinks it hasn’t been booted in 47814 days, or just under 140 years, if you ignore the 29th of February during leap years.
Ignoring leap years, this pc hasn’t been booted in 140 years!
However, I’ve recently started to experience a new annoyance: spam. Not the “enlarge your penis” e-mails that Gmail is so adept at filtering, or the processed food I have thankfully never had to rely on, but real-world, in-through-the-Goddamned-letterbox unsolicited mail. For God’s sake, it’s even in an envelope.
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Deux Ex Non-Mortuus
Posted by donal on May 30th, 2008 filed in Movies, Rants
I’m a fairly harsh critic of films: I get bored easily, I get annoyed with unrealistic happenings and I have a near non-existent tolerance for cartoon violence in live-action films. There are certain things which really annoy me, such as characters hiding from automatic gunfire behind a plywood wall. I can assure you that two and a half inches of plaster and wood will not stop a five five six bullet that left the barrel at a kilometer a second.
Scenes like this could be avoided with a little bit of forethought…
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Sprained Relations
Posted by donal on May 26th, 2008 filed in Fitness
Tuesday last, I ran, eh… hobbled, maybe, is a better term, the Dublin Docklands Fun Run. As the name suggests, it’s around the Dublin Docklands. 8km in total, not too far. I hadn’t been doing too much running lately, with pre-exam stress (yeah, I know – a cop-out), exam stress, post-exam stress (ahem… hangover) and then some general lazing. That said, 8km isn’t far, and I was hoping for 36 mins, which I figured was reasonable – 4.5 minutes a kilometer. Of course, to qoute Robert Burns, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.
It’s prettier in person. How it happened is after the break…
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A New Definition of F.P.S….
Posted by donal on May 26th, 2008 filed in Technology, computers
Whilst many of my friends (or should I say CS friends) would give either First Person Shooter or Frames Per Second as the words behind the abbreviation F.P.S., I have found the true meaning. A joyous event has occured. My I.S.P. has recently upgraded my service to 12Mb/s, and it’s actually twelve megabits per second.
I used to get more, up to 24Mb/s, which was four times the rated service, but as more cable subscribers in my area opted for broadband, the average speeds came down (I’m guessing that’s what happened anyway, maybe they started throttling their bandwidth). At this time, though, after a doubling of my bandwidth and a threefold increase in my data bandwidth, to 120GB pre month, I’m sitting pretty. I’m am now getting download speeds of just over 1F.P.S..
A 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive – Confused? Explained after the break.
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On The Run
Posted by donal on March 22nd, 2008 filed in Fitness
Despite becoming extremely fit towards the end of last year, as least in comparison to myself this time last year, I’ve been pretty lazy lately. Over indulgance and avoidance of running has really left me losing my fitness fast. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve made half hearted efforts to get back into it, but now, thanks to a kick up the arse from an impending fitness test, I’m beginning again to run regularly.
Dun Laoghaire’s one-mile-long West Pier, perfect for jogging .
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