Saturday, May 30, 2009

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion...


One of the finest fast-food sandwiches in the history of the world is the "gourmet" Romanburger from Mr. Hero. Do yourself a favor. Next time you're in Ohio, get yourself one. I know I will. In praise of dullness. Mind boggling brews from around the world are documented in cheers for beers. Might these 11 useful Twitter tools be called twools? The most succinct guide for marketing with Twitter. Forty ways to download music legally. Find art on the internet using Artcyclopedia (try searching for Callum Innes).

NASA provides an online grid spacing calculator, otherwise how would you know what clustering to use? Things you should know about CSS float theory. Aero engineering consultants, DARcorp. I have absolutely no idea what Widgetbox is good for. Apparently ANSYS supports Tcl/Tk (they steal all our good ideas). DTIC is the largest central resource for government-funded technical information. NKK Switches now has their CAD library online. Metacomp Technologies' User Group Meeting will be held 15-17 September in Ventura, CA. Wildcat is open-source CAD, but there doesn't seem to have been any activity since the end of 2008. Concepts NREC is holding their UGM on 07 June in Orlando.

DAMN RIGHT! Read this if you're over 25 (and even if you're not). Inside each of us is a crabby old fart. As though we needed a pea-sized seahorse. Free, online college courses and lectures are available from Open Culture. Get your Trek on with this 360 deg. panoramic photo of the new Enterprise's bridge. Why does my body do that? Every possible joke has probably already been made, so I'll just link to the demise of Butt Hole Road. Web font imbedding is coming. Sleeves tells you everything you need to know about the weather. What to do with all your old SGI boxes. (For the record I have these SGI boxes yearning to be repurposed: a PI, two Indigos, an Indy, an Origin 200, and a Fuel. Soon I'll have an O2.) Tonight we try Rita's ice custard at their first Texas location.


...so that later when a stranger looks it moves again. -- William Faulkner

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Who kept the faith and fought the fight;


Are there more reports of earthquakes in the news these days or am I just more sensitive now that I survived one? Yes, there was a magnitude 3.3 earthquake here in North Texas last Saturday. Here's coverage from the local ABC station WFAA and the details from the USGS. After hours of detailed study (not really), we got a 26 inch Vizio HD LCD 720P TV. COPS has never looked better. BTW, the sound is terrible which is the one thing I didn't pay too much attention to in the store. I don't recall why I bookmarked the official web site of French progressive rockers Iris.

Texas A&M's TurboLab is holding the 38th Turbomachinery Symposium on 14-17 September 2009 in Houston and the 26th Pump Users Symposium on 15-18 March 2010. While we're traveling, how about a trip to Budapest for the Conference on Modelling Fluid Flow on 09-12 September 2009. Crikey! Let's go to Melbourne for CSIRO's 7th International CFD Conference on 09-11 December 2009.

The Southwest Classic between the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Texas A&M Aggies (aka Bacon and Ags) will be played 03 October 2009 at Jerry World in Arlington. Get your specialty advertising and promo items from Trophy Arts. Here's an interseting blog post from an AutoCAD 3D Modeling blog about creasing a mesh. I'd love to get this t-shirt, but I never get any bacon when I push the button. Here's a video introduction to EnSight CFD. Terminate yourself. Create your own patterns with Repper. If I write "Backstreet Boys" I can imagine the collective "ugh", but try the BB-Snow Patrol mashup from DMF - it's simply and nicely done. The BeltzBib is proof that eating in the the car is just plain wrong. Breakthrough or hype? Ida, the missing link. If you gotta have dental work, Paul Davis is your man. I think this eye tracking study for web sites is bogus; I only look at the pictures. Speaking of pictures, Photos that Changed the World is interesting but so NSFW that I'm going to make you find the URL yourself.

This Canadian gentleman wants to be your Style Advisor. Our friends at Digitalsoaps now offer Space Invaders soap. More for you gamers; make yourself a Super Mario Desktop. I'll admit that I'm linking to the official web site of guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen both because of his virtuosity and because of his unique name.


...The glory theirs, the duty ours. -- Wallace Bruce

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Good is...


Is Twitter-related stuff getting out of hand, or do Twibes make sense? Verne Harnish, the business growth guy, recommends Topgrading's approach to hiring. VCollab provides visualization solutions for CAD and CAE. An aerodynamicist's dream - you don't need an engine, just the wing albeit a Propulsive Wing. If you're like me and couldn't figure out where they moved the design template stuff to in PowerPoint 2007, this article about slide masters will help. Know your humans. The SGI name will live on. That's good, right? I just bought The Song Remains the Same so of course I have to link to the official site of Led Zeppelin. Delve into the Art & Science of Barbecue. (Now if I only owned a grill.) If you like the band Genesis, their web site is having a clearance sale on many $5 items. Get your CAD shareware from CADdepot. The official web site of the band Liquid Tension Experiment. Fort Worth's Cousin's BBQ was named a finalist in a Good Morning America contest. I wish I had learned how to take care of a baby about 19 years ago. R.Tech is a French engineering consultancy specializing in CFD. Official web site of the Meshing technical committee of the AIAA.

...the enemy of great.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Believe none of what you hear...


Try this self-test for swine flu at DoIHaveSwineFlu.org. The 4Es of marketing, and again. Pandora internet radio is much less work than Blip.fm. How much sugar is in that? Create photos in the tilt-shift style. Blue Origin is going to outer space. Wolfram|Alpha promises a leap forward in natural language queries and knowledge synthesis. How to make a booger ball. Read about Alamofire and their new iPhone virtual souvenir app, Gowalla. Do your charting online with Chartle. Share data with others at verifiable.com and Many Eyes and Swivel, iCharts, Trendrr, widgenie, Track-n-Graph, Timetric.

Zeus Numerix offers galleries featuring their full aircraft simulations. Aviso Wind is extensible software for visualization of simulation data.The CAE Linux portal has all sorts of tutorials for learning CFD and Salome. Prof. Sankar at Georgia Tech provides a Fortran program for generating O-grids. The University of Manchester's CFD group has a wiki including tutorials for Code_Saturne. Njouba helped me find a lot of PDF documents about Star-CCM. Six years ago, Ben Kirk at U.T. Austin gave a presentation on Tools for Computational Grids, including Gridgen. Machine Design dispells CFD myths. Austrian company CAE Software Solutions offers their Spider meshing software and a few case studies.

Generate your own image mosaics. ACUSIM joined Altair's Hyperworks Community. How to surf the web anonymously is one of the 64 things every geek should know. They were invented in 1881 and 9 other things you didn't know about emoticons. More social media from Yammer. I played contrabass clarinet in high school because it was there.

...and only half of what you see.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

When she's dancing next to me...



I think they are taking hand soap a bit too literally. Start using your PC in seconds using Presto. Or simply reduce the time it takes to start using StartUpLite. Edit images in your web browser using Aviary. Take online micro expression training and you might be able to figure out what I'm thinking (if you could see me). Social media is getting so out of hand that you need a tool like Digsby to manage it all. Here's another example: Ping.fm updates all your social media at once. And then there's TweetDeck. Or if you're tired of Facebook and LinkedIn, make your own social network using Ning. Add ftp to Firefox using FireFTP. Topgrading helps you find the best people. You too can own a word at the Big Word Project. Let's all tip our glasses to Bacon Vodka. Or if you don't like meat in your booze, make a business card out of it. On the opposite end of the spectrum are these food flops. (I've actually tried Orbitz before and those little gelatin balls were freaky.)

Hang on to yer gray matter cuz here comes the science. Here's a brief tutorial for using snappyHexMesh. Get your CFD info at ComputationalFluids.com. All about Code_Saturne, EDF's open source CFD software: main page, a general overview, and their QA benchmarks. ANSYS 12 gots some new features. Discretizer is a free meshing program for CFD. CEI released EnSight CFD, specifically designed for the CFD user. The nice people at CAD Schroer are giving away their design software, MEDUSA4 Personal, for free.

Some of you are going to have to get off the interwebs so I can continue my most important work. Here's some of the world's smallest stuff. Dickens suggests that I change this blog's URL to http://dickensurl.com/8e1b/We_must_scrunch_or_be_scrunched. Birds plus signs equals Type Nesting. If you think this blog is a waste of time, check out Sporcle. Two places to eat, one with beer one with Deano: The Covey and Saucy Bistro. As far as I can tell, Breathing Earth says the world has bad breath. Dang! We missed National Grilled Cheese Month. newsmap is back. Sprites aren't just a character in WoW anymore.

Blip.fm, besides being yet another internet time sink, demonstrates that I only know the names of albums, not the individual songs. If you didn't get enough clocks last week, here are some more (these with alarms): Kuku Klok, Anvoy, and onlineclock. If you prefer clocks you can take with you in meat-space, here are some extraordinary watches.

...I can hear machinery. --???