Better three hours too soon...

Seems everyone has a blog these days, even Death. From the one week late department, make your plans for next year's GrapeFest, the largest wine festival in the southwest. Convert a document from PDF to Word. Here's a list of infographics resources for all your data visualization needs. Adobe provides these samples of 3D PDF files: a PDF file with embedded 3D geometric data you can spin and zoom.

How to use bacon to make your life incredible. (My favorite is the Sun Tzu-like "If defeated in war, use bacon to feign death.") How to make Facebook your company newsroom (as long as your company wants everyone to know what Walton's Family character it's most like). OpenFVM is an open source, general purpose CFD solver. pdnmesh is an automatic mesh solver for finite element applications. Geompack++ is a comprehensive object-oriented C++ software package for finite element mesh generation (triangular, quadrilateral, surface, tetrahedral, hexahedral-dominant).

Intelligent Light released FieldView 12.2 for CFD postprocessing. SGI unveiled the Octane III supercomputer. See what Kanye has to say about your web site using Kanyelicio.us. Symscape released their Windows patch for OpenFOAM v1.6. Rhino's Paneling Tools plug-in (i.e. quad surface meshing) was updated. A bidding war for MSC.Software? ANSYS was included in the top 100 of the Software 500 list.

Shove 8 game consoles into your R2D2 (that's not a euphemism). Generate CSS grids using the aptly named grid system generator. Mint is a web site analytics program. The CFD labs at University West Virginia and UVic. 100 tools and tips for marketing on Facebook. Choose and use color palettes that account for color blindness. PPC Airfoils makes turbine blades and other stuff.

I misplaced two music CDs a couple weeks ago and searching for them is driving me nuts. At least China was able to find a missing section of the Great Wall. 10x10 presents 100 words and pictures that describe now. Google announced the release of SketchUp 7.1. A lot of Aggies are going to be using SolidWorks.

Stewart Dickinson's site, MathArt, represents his pioneering work in visualizing mathematical objects. Any word with two umlauts has to be cool (but too cool for me to figure out how to reproduce them here), and the Gomboc definitely is. If only I could find an STL or VRML file of one. Enjoy the Oops Design Award winners for 2009.

A collection of bottle caps. Carl wants your CFD solutions for research into the correlation between mesh quality and solution accuracy. The Dirt Doctor provides organic gardening tips.

...than one minute late. -- William Shakespeare

He is the happiest...

Do you know how many people are in space right now? Closer to home, do you know the world's 50 best foods and the best place to eat them? Google's Fast Flip is going to cause some news junkies to o.d. DARPA has funded development of a robot that can jump over walls, but Speed Racer's Mach 5 had that capability40 years ago (button A, auto jack).

With our weather the way it's been for the past couple of weeks, it seems only natural to make music using raindrops. Need a patent? Maybe this guy can help. Kitware maintains a wiki for all their software products. ISAAC is another open source CFD code. ParaView is open source scientific visualization software. Read about Adobe's 3D OEM platform. NPOWER Software provides 3D NURBS modeling software.

Kliban said to never give a gun to ducks, but apparently it's OK to give lightsabers to animals.

...who finds peace in his home. -- J.W. Goethe

The quality of mercy is not strained...

"A man doesn't grow a beard, a beard grows a man" and other pearls from The Beardley. NEi Software is celebrating 15 years of supporting Femap, finite element pre- and post-processing software. Finally, science is put to good use to quantity the negative olfactory sensations caused by flatulence.

The bacon dress is truly high fashion, but I recommend against wearing it outdoors on sunny days. The newest way to waste time on the internet is Assembler, a physics-based game about stacking stuff. Tired of having every tweet update your Facebook status? Try Selective Twitter. Stuff about speeches from American Rhetoric.

101 uses for bacon (I'm certain there are more - many, many more.) Read all about the Center for CFD Research at Japan's National Maritime Research Institute. Build sales through referrals with help from the No More Cold Calling blog. Not too far from here, Armadillo Aerospace is trying to win the 2009 X-Prize Lunar Lander Challenge.

The United Steaks of America. From the man who brought you How to Dance Properly, zefrank presents craymachine. Talking to an attractive woman can make a man lose his mind. (Duh.) Ever wonder what's in a TETIN file? SimCosm is a CAE software consultancy. Somebody send this to Brendan.

National Bacon Day was 05 September. (Sorry for the lack of advance notice.) Do not click here. TotalSim is a CFD consultancy. CentaurSoft provides CFD meshing software. See how CFD provides design guidance in this article from Desktop Engineering. The latest pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope are awesome. Speaking of space, these negative space illustrations are kinda interesting too.

For your calendar:

• ECCOMAS CFD 2010, 14-17 June 2010, Lisbon

FreeFOAM is a fork of OpenFOAM that provides portability to other operating systems. I'm not sure how if at all it's related to CentFOAM. Desktop Engineering provides this analysis of the partnership between ANSYS and SpaceClaim. This video is a cool way to look at Beethoven's 5th. Eight things your dreams may be telling you.


...it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. --William Shakespeare

Nature abhors a vacuum...

The dullest blog in the world. (No comparisons, please.) Daat Research released Coolit v.9. In Mexico? Try Cavendish CFD. In Russia? Try Grid CFD. Learn more about ANSYS Workbench or read ANSYS Advantage magazine. ANSYS announced a new immersed boundary capability. The folks at Moceon claim to have made the first all-hex mesh with 52 million cells for a Formula-1 car using their cheetahSTC technology.

Odes to cured pork: Bacon Haikus. Taitech is developing the Dragon Grid software. Donald Hawken has some grid pictures on his site. The Ocean Modeling Group at Rutgers develops a lot of software including gridpak for orthogonal structured grids. Why shouldn't engineers learn to program in C? Five places to see things blown up real good.

The bacon explosion just sounds delicious. (I mean it sounds like it would taste delicious. I'm sure it just sounds like sizzling meat.) The official web site of marketing guru David Meerman Scott. Cartoon Modern is Amid Amidi's blog about animation in the 50s. Find out what your friends (and enemies) are up to on the interwebs using Spokeo. The official blog of Duarte Design. Interesting speakers often visit Google, now they can visit you too on YouTube's Talks@Google channel.

Will there be bacon in the future? Yes! Panda's Cloud Antivirus is free and uses the cloud for its work so your computer hardly knows it's running. Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a really fast, building block approach to fluid dynamics called Modular Bases.

Ever wonder what a molecule looks like up close? Do not read this. CFD for aircraft. CGAL is a computational geometry algorithm library. Can't remember exactly what Followerlap does with Twitter accounts. Hopefully, none of your pictures have been posted to Awkward Family Photos.

Get your next super computer from PSSC Labs. The folks at Social Media Today claim to be the best thinkers on social media. From their Best Practices for Corporate Twittering, "Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message." With a name like HootSuite, can they really still claim to be the professional Twitter client? The Antikythera mechanism and other unexplained artifacts.

The State Fair of Texas brings us fried butter. Either Stuff White People Like is totally wrong or I am not white because I do not like any of their recent topics (camping, Where The Wild Things Are, Vespa Scooters, Bob Marley, hating people who wear Ed Hardy, Mad Men, moleskin notebooks, and funny tattoos). However, I will give SWPL props for turning me on to doga.

...but we should avoid the temptation to fill the voids with crap.