It’s nearly impossible to find a good printer that does 8×12 photo prints from digital files! After a relatively lengthy search I discovered printroom.com. The site is more refined-looking than your average snapfish and I was convinced by their range of print sizes and paper choices that they cater more to pro and semi-pro photographers. To me this meant the print quality is subject to a higher standard, so I placed an order for several enlargements. Their prices are great too! You can track the order progress online, and they shipped the following day. Prints arrived very quickly, wrapped and packaged appropriately and best of all - I’m very satisfied with the results!

This seems like the next greatest Internet thing. I just installed the StumbleUpon toolbar today, and I don’t think it came packaged with any spyware or adware that I can tell. I ran Ad-Aware directly afterward and it turned up nothing, so that’s positive.

Who knew this has been around for a few years?

So what’s it good for… Well, when you sign up you select topics you are interested in exploring on the net, pick a screen name, then continue on your merry surfing way. You can then instantly rate any site you visit with ‘thumbs up, I like it’ or ‘thumbs down, Not-for-me’. You can also immediately chat about the site page’s content on a dedicated reviews page. All this is done from a toolbar in your browser, so it’s convenient. In essence it adds a whole new community plugin to the entire internet.

Other stuff you can do: Add friends, add favorites and click a button to ‘StumbleUpon’ random sites categorized in accordance with your topical choices. Not too shabby!

The only complication I see is (lack of?) flexibility of the system for categorizing site content. For instance the category ‘Travel’ is so broad. Somehow over time and from further use I’m sure the directory structure will make more sense.

Check it out!

You’ll notice a new button on the top of this page called ‘Radio’. That’s what it is, people! Now and then I’ll be switching up the playlist when the mood strikes me.

Today I decided to select Wartime Ditties for Frustrated Folks, to reflect some of my own thoughts about what’s going on in the world at the moment. Please be warned this selection of songs is laced with profanity, so if you’re sensitive to such things you might want to avoid the page for now.

You’ll notice volume fluctuation between tracks. It’s not that bad, but I think indicative of the age variance of the CDs I ripped the music from. Otherwise, enjoy!

That’s 646 pound of catfish right there. Grizzly Bear-Size, says National Geographic.

* * *

A cancelled wedding in Everett, Washington turns out OK. The non-bride and her parents decide to invite homeless people to their already-paid-for reception!

* * *

Fauja Singh is 94 years young. He started running marathons at age 81, and has done 7 to date.

* * *

Bill Cosby (who has been accused of drugging and fondling women) plays the role of a bitter, strict and loveless dad to the entire African-American population - again.

* * *

Surprise surprise. The Washington Post documents an audit revealing how “TSA Lost Control of Over $300 Million Spent by Contractor to Hire Airport Screeners After 9/11″. Improper budget spending includes these line-items:

· $1,540 to rent 14 extension cords at $5 each per day for three weeks at the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, Colo.

· $8,100 for elevator operators at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.

* * *

And last but not least, that’s one cute, laid-back puppy dog:

If you have a blog, go help a guy with his PhD research!

So how do you like it? The new blog design, that is.

There’s a whole lotta changes going on behind the scenes, and some functionality isn’t up to snuff yet. Life in Ithaca is now powered by Wordpress, a switch that should have happened a long time ago.

On the surface migrating from Movable Type to Wordpress seems kind of easy, but lots can go wrong. The only real trouble I’m having now is ironing out the RSS2 and Atom feeds. If anyone out there knows how to modify the feeds to publish an entire entry instead of just an excerpt, I’d appreciate you sharing your secret mojo with me. I’d think it should be simple but I can’t locate proper documentation to guide the way to reaching feed bliss. I know you want it :O)

Also, a few of the wonders of this blog are still missing. Photo albums and other goodies are on the way very shortly.

Some Ithaca blogs have been basking in a blaze of notoriety today. A few of us were interviewed by Cassandra Karpinski for her story in (Ithaca College newspaper) The Ithacan; Bloggers reach world from Ithaca.

I have an enthusiastic shout-out to the others interviewed for the story:

Zeke - I hope your new (but active!) forum becomes a hot venue for productive debate!

Shane - May the LGBT Democratic Club you are organizing have success meeting your challenging goals!

Elliott - Enjoy your summer internship in Seattle - one step closer to changing the world!

Today also happens to be our Ithaca Bloggers Meetup day, when we make a feeble attempt to gather for an evening chit-chat. It could be our best turnout ever! If you happen to live in Ithaca and maintain a blog, leave a comment if you are interested in joining in sometime.

As everybody (hopefully) knows, the world wide web was invented at CERN, a European particle physics lab. As you might expect physicsists were “early adopters” of the new tech, many of the earliest websites had to do with physics. For example, the first US website was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, there’s some history here. Probably the most revolutionary “early web” physics contribution was the arXiv, which collects pre-prints of physics papers. This was started in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg (now at Cornell), and has been active ever since. It’s now the primary method that physicists use to get their papers (I check it every day). The effects of this on physics, and science publish in general, are still being debated, but everybody agrees they’ve been huge.

Lately, however, physics on the web was a little more stagnent. So it’s nice to be able to link to a couple of general interest sites. The first is interactions, which has particle physics news. As well, they’re running a bunch of blogs called Quantum Diaries. These are nice becuase you can get a bit of a feel for what day-to-day physics life is like (you’ll be suprised to learn it’s not all glamour and big money). The also have a nice image bank where you can see some particle physics imagery.

The second site is Symmetry Magazine which is a monthly newsmagazine (it’s a combined effort from a couple of older physics magazines). This one has more in depth articles, mostly concerned with particle physics.

So everybody go read about the fizzix! There will be a quiz next week…

Buttress on north wall of Fall Creek, near electric railway bridge. The erosion of the gorge wall is partly controlled by joints.

This image came from an online library of public domain images from US Geological Survey’s Digital Data Series 21. I located only two images from this area using ‘Tompkins’ as a search term. ‘Ithaca’ produced no results.

There are also plenty of Canadian images in the database.

You can download higher-res png files too, print them and furnish your home with 1886 earthquake pictures!

Have a little fun with Google’s word algorithms! Inspired by Boing Boing’s Adwords (Sponsored Links) results from the search word ‘dead’ I wanted to see what I would come up with. The results were nothing short of miraculous considering you can, apparently, pick up a new set of bowels on ebay - at a discount!

Say you aren’t in the mood for physical improvement and instead have a desire to take a turn for the worse… perhaps then you might be interested in purchasing a disease!

More fun ‘Sponsored Links’ screenshots (and my tasteless humour) follow:
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