Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Yesterday (July 1st) on the way home from work, my boss & I saw a huge plume of black smoke rising into the sky along I20 West outside of Vicksburg.  We arrived just as the fire crews and other emergency services arrived, to see them extinguish the flaming 18-wheeler that had burst into flames.  Not sure what was in the cargo, but it was still an impressive sight.

I managed to snag some pics with my iPhone. See them below.

The pictures are also available on Flickr.  The container is labeled “Adaptive One”, which is apparently an automotive brake supplier.

Update: The Vicksburg Post has a short blurb about it here.

Following on the previous announcments, now Billy Mays has passed away.

Confirmed by Tampa Police, it first hit the interwebs as Billy’s son posted on Twitter.. Apparently Billy Mays was on the place that had a “hard landing” earlier this week, so I’m sure they’re considering a DVT or Concussion related problem.

RIP, Mr Ron Popeil of the new generation.

Bits & Pieces » When cars were cool.

“Ed” McMahon, Jr. b. March 6, 1923 d. June 23, 2009	Farrah Fawcett b. February 2, 1947 d. June 25, 2009	Michael Jackson b. August 29, 1958 d. June 25, 2009

Three famous celebrities in as many days.. They say it always happens in threes, and this one’s no different.

This is hilarious..

Over the last few weeks I’ve been torn between half a dozen different solutions of accessing my GMail WebMail on my Macbook.  Each one has it’s own pros and cons, but I’m torn as to which to use.  Here’s the rundown so far:

Web Mail

This one is obvious, isn’t it?  Simply pull up the Web Interface and use it.  In fact, I’ve installed Google Gears in Safari, and enabled Offline mode so I can even use the web interface when I don’t have an internet connection.  This came in particularly handy last week when I was stuck dealing with a particularly flaky wifi connection in San Diego, and it would cache email locally for me to read and reply to.

Mail.app

OSX’s built-in Mail.app is one of the most commonly suggested tools, however I’ve found it particularly lacking.  At work I only have access to the webmail (On a windows machine, and I can’t install any apps) so I use Google’s IMAP interface with Mail.app.  It’s flaky, and sometimes just stops working and requires me to “Force Quit” the application.  It integrates fantastically with everything on the mac, so I’m annoyed that it works so poorly.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird is the mail client from the minds behind FireFox (the Mozilla foundation).  It works pretty well, but it just doesn’t ‘fit in’ with the rest of the OSX experience.  It also doesn’t seem to integrate very well with the other OSX applications.

Postbox

This one came at the recommendation of LifeHacker, as a great email tool that could quickly search and index your mailbox.  I have a few Gig of mail on Google so I’m not sure I really want to download it all, but it’s an interesting solution.  It’s got a smooth and quick interface, and can easily handle by 2 gmail accounts (My main @gmail.com address and my VizWorld accounts).

So I ask this to all of you: What do you use?  My requirements (or requests):

• Offline Access, so I can read my mail without an internet connection & compose messages to be sent later
• Good Search & Sort capability
• Won’t interfere with my WebMail access from work (mainly, leave all the mail on the server).

Ideas?

A few weeks ago, months actually, I posted an article evaluating several online backup solutions.  I started with 3, but was quickly inundated with information from other users and vendors asking me to update it with their products.  The original layout I had just wouldn’t fit the new information.

So I’ve revisited the post and updated it with new information…

So that’s the list as it stands now.. As more folks send me info, I’ll integrate it.

Tonight was the SciDAC 2009 Visualization Night, and I submitted three videos for them to include.  Yes, I know I’m a DoD guy and that’s a DoE conference, but they wanted our submissions and we were happy to oblige.

I submitted:

• 2000lb Class Device in a Bunker
• Projectile Impact on Kevlar Fabric
• and a special “Greatest Hits” compilation of several of the Breaking Waves videos.

Unfortunately, due to technical problems, the 2000lb Device movie didn’t play.  However, I’m ecstatic to report that we won 2 awards for the other two!  We (the DoD DAAC) won 2 of the 10 awards at a DoE conference!  SWEET!

You can see one of the awards to the right, my boss has the other.  Can’t wait to get these back to the lab and show em to the rest of the gang.

Guess I need to find out what an “OASCR” is tho….

Great t-shirt.. If only it was Elmo up there instead of Cookie Monster.

One shot: Sesame Street Fighter, the T-shirt | Offworld.

So last night was the great Facebook Land Rush, as they deployed “vanity URL’s”.  I managed to get facebook.com/randall.hand and Laura got facebook.com/laura.hand .  I tried to get just “randall”, and was online at 0-hour to try but someone beat me to it.

What’ld you get?