Category: Science & Technology

Prepare To Be Assimilated

Before the Matrix, there were the Borg. The Borg were those half-humaniod, half-machine cyborgs on Star Trek: The Next Generation who went marauding around the universe “assimilating” everything and everyone in their path. Dare to buck a Borg, and you would end up “enhanced” with cybernetic implants and connected together with other Borg drones to function as part of a collective mind controlled by the Borg Queen and a central hub, Unimatrix One. But really, it’s ok because it was all in the name of “improving the quality of life for all species.”

Keep this charming little scenario in mind as you watch this (a hat tip to blogger extraordinaire Bill Gnade over at Contratimes for bringing this to light).… Read the rest

Have You Been Hijacked?

Do you find yourself drumming your fingers as your computer ever so sloooowly grinds and cranks along like a freshly-salted slug on a sunny, Sunday afternoon? When you sit down for an online session, do you hear menacing noises rising forth from the bowels of your desktop? When you have friends over and one of them asks to look up something on the internet, does your web browser, which lately has had a mind of its own, take them, totally unprompted, to www.niceandnakedgirls.com?… Read the rest

A Most Meticulous Use of Space

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Romans 1:20

For many years, physicists and astonomers have speculated that the universe experienced a cataclysmic birth and expanded very rapidly in the first moments of its existence. New data supporting the long held notions of a “Big Bang” and “Inflation Theory” has recently emerged from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Using words such as “stunning,” “spectacular” and “amazing,” astrophysicists have been waxing eloquently about these latest findings which demonstrate that the universe grew from the size of a marble to billions of light years across within a trillionth of a second.… Read the rest

He Takes Purty Pictures Too

My guru, Computer Ed, is pretty handy with a camera too. He has a good post on the sea change that has taken place in the world of photography with the conversion from film to digital media. You camera buffs (and even those who aren’t so buff) will find his thoughts worth reading and some of his suggestions worth emulating.

Other signs of the times:

  • The Dell desktop computer that I recently purchased has a media card reader which can transfer photos, video, data and music from thirteen different types of media cards.
  • I spend my day typing and reading entries in a completely paperless computerized medical record system.
… Read the rest

My Guru Rocks!

My guru, Professor Ed, is holding forth again over at Albedo 0.39 with Part 2 of “Practicing Safe Surfing.” In Part 1, Ed focused on routers and hardware. This time around he’s dishing up some practical information on how your choice of web browsers affects your chances of contracting one of those nasty malware and spyware infections that are going around these days.

Like Ed, I’m using Firefox as my browser of choice since Microsoft IE has more holes than a third-world airport security gate. Now if I can just convince other family members who shall remain nameless (although he is often referred to in this blog as NUMBER TWO SON) to make the switch as well, maybe I could totally avoid the kind of nasty infection that I had a couple of weeks ago.… Read the rest

Meet My Guru

For the past few days, I’ve been battling a virus and bronchitis which has caused me to miss a few days of work and slowed my usual frenetic pace to a near crawl. Last week this time, I was battling a different kind of virus—W32.Spybot.Worm to be specific. That little bugger, along with a few other strains of various and sundry spyware, malware, adware and trojans which infected my laptop January 2nd had slowed it to a near crawl as well. Frankly, I’m not sure which is worse, bronchitis or computer viruses.

Now I do the best that my feeble non-technoweenie mind can manage when it comes to practicing “safe-surfing” on the web.… Read the rest