Never hold discussions with the monkey...

Do you like Sheldon's shirts on Big Bang Theory? Now they can be yours. The Bacon Salt people have done it again: Baconnaise. All my Tangerine Dream is locked in vinyl. For the true beer geek: Arrogant Bastard bottles turned into drinking glasses. More sounds at your fingertips: Instant Chan.

Except for the headache and nausea I enjoyed Cloverfield, especially the creature. They say a sequel is in the works. Or maybe a prequel. Take a ride in the CarterCopter. Learn some conditional formatting in Excel. Google is now the second most valuable brand in the world. Guess who's number one.

Codeorgan lets you hear your web site. A lifetime membership in the International Banana Club is only $10. Do not click on this NSFW link. While not nearly as NSFW, Booty Pop Panties are equally stupid. Rabbits make up to 500 pellets a day and other not-so-interesting facts about poop. Crackerpacks is an online museum of firecracker packages. Or if you prefer, try this online museum of vintage calculators.

I don't recommend viewing this web site during air travel. Stress free computing: download NaDa today. When scientists search the web using Scirus they call it research. The definitive guide to styling web links. Design your own web page tiled backgrounds. And a list of 15 sites for web designers to use.

CAE News:

• Cad Cam News from the UK
• Develop3D is a blog for the product lifecycle.
• CFDesign helps steel plant meet EPA rules.
• How to import troublesome geometry into SolidWorks.
• FloEFD helps solve drill bit erosion.
• ATA Engineering opens Huntsville office.
• Tech Soft 3D will hold their first customer meeting at COFES.
• T-Rex is fast, accurate boundary layer meshing.
• CEI released EnSight CFD 2.0.
• The ODA World Conference 2010 will be held in Orlando on 04-05 May.
• ANSYS' annual revenues up 6.1% and they are optimistic: "all of the factors driving simulation remain in full force as companies strive to compete with next generation products"
• Flow Science's 2010 FLOW-3D World Users Conference will be held 23-24 September in Montreal.
  

What do second graders think about their moms? (Why did God make mothers? Mostly to clean the house.) A NASA research study concluded that houseplants can clean our indoor air and of these 15 recommended plants I like English Ivy best for my office. Geometry Gym is a blog about structure design using Rhino3D.

Curling. Curling. Curling.

• The Curling Canada blog
• U.S. Curling Association (bid in their auction for an autographed stone)
• Curling Rink blog
• Women of curling nude calendar
• Curling hotties
  
• The DFW Curling Club
  

Khasmin is a CFD plug-in for Google SketchUp. The safest neighborhood in Fort Worth is Haslet where the odds of being a crime victim are 1 in 357. How'd your city do? Sitetuners is a blog about web site landing page optimization. A majority of bloggers spend 3 hours or less per week blogging and other facts about the blogosphere.

How to go from newbie to ninja with Twitter. Structured Information's blog provides this template for writing a technical white paper. This short film by Nate Bloch is simply funny. The five profitable positions in any marketplace. Which one are you?


...while the organ grinder is in the room. --Winston Churchill

When choosing between two evils...

Enjoy the paradoxical bacon wrapped tofu and 17 other bacon shrouded delicacies. CEOs are 3 times more likely than the general public to prefer the color magenta. Improviz is a cool visual comparison of the jazz improvisational styles of Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. Math + Art = Bathsheba Sculpture.

If Google can drop support for IE6 (Internet Explorer 6), so can the rest of us. Listmatic shows you how to style lists using CSS and Floatutorial helps you understand floats. VariCAD is design software for mechanical engineering. Animated GIFs are all the rage again; make your own online with Make a Gif. Or just customize your own Batman comic.

The Hoodie Footie is now on sale for $99.95! Terry Wohlers blogs about CAE, additive manufacturing, and other engineering topics. DLR has a cool R&D conceptual orbital vehicle called the REX Free Flyer. Here's a blog about the open-source CFD code, Code Saturne. Hooray! USA wins Americas Cup. Get your gourmet salt, like the Turkish black pyramid sea salt or Kauai guava smoked salt, from At The Meadow.

You know what's coming when you see the bullets, right?

• RBF Morph 1.2 was released.
• FloTHERM was used in the design of this integrated circuit packaging.
• ANSYS is the only engineering software firm named to this year's Oliver Wyman Shareholder Performance Index

Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet? Scalable vector graphics (SVG) is an XML language for graphics on the web. Be the envy of your friends; apply the secret Royale Noir theme to your Windows XP. (I have it on my netbook and it's quite sleek.) Posterous lets you blog by email (and other stuff I haven't figured out yet). ZDnet writes about how the Mac is coming back to engineering.

As I write this, King Crimson's Level 5 is playing. Therefore, enjoy this blast of KC-related sites: King Crimson, DGM Live, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn, and Pat Mastelotto. After several years, someone finally identified the plant in my office as a croton. HubSpot has created a VAR program and services exchange site for the marketing industry.

When in San Antonio have a Macho Cheddar Cheesy burger at Chris Madrid's. We all have clients from hell and this site has brought them all together. (My favorite: "I’ll pay in advance once the job is completed!") Click Here and other web usability crimes. Cheating isn't a crime so here are web developer cheat sheets from Six Revisions.

T-Rex needs love too. The ultimate productivity blog. "I don't like being told what to do" and other statements to test whether you should be an entrepreneur. And if the answer is "yes", consider the sentiment in this blog post: "Corporations are not — and cannot be — moral beings. They do what they have to do, which is make money for their shareholders. Period." 3D-Tool lets you visualize, analyze, and convert 3D CAD models.

...I always like to try the one I've never tried before. --Mae West

Music is the arithmetic of sounds...

Without a doubt, the biggest news in my little world this week was the record setting snowfall here in Fort Worth: 12.5 inches (24 hour record) and 11.2 inches (single day record). It's supposed to be 54 and sunny this afternoon.

When in doubt, ask Capt. Pike. Here's a blog for your computer systems administrator. Next summer's great beach read is bound to be the Encyclopedia of Polyhedra. Consult the International Center for Bathroom Etiquette for advice on all manner of situations. But without looking, I am certain that they would advise against installing a Dropcam.

Nothing more needs to be written about Google Buzz.

Noupe presents CSS techniques they wish they new when they started creating web sites. Mashable interviewed NFL players Matthew Stafford (QB, Lions) and Darrelle Revis (CB, Jets) about the impact of social media on NFL players like themselves. Stafford comes across as clueless while Revis seemed much more in tune. Simulate More is MSC's blog.

Somehow it seems appropriate for me to be buried in a giant screw.

The weekly CAE news dump:

• Renewable Energy Options Multiply with CFD Solutions, from Desktop Engineering
• SolidWorks has a flow simulation blog.
• CadFaster claims to be the fastest 3D CAD viewer.
• CAD Exchanger helps with 3D data conversion.
• T-Splines has a blog.
• CEI released EnSight 9.1.
• The Univ. of Maryland is now a CUDA Center of Excellence.
• Lattice released updated their XVL converters for the latest CAD formats.
• MSC launched a new business unit for simulation data management.
• The 10th FLOW-3D European Users Conference will be held 19 May 2010 in Reims, France.
• SGI announced Cyclone, on-demand, large-scale cloud computing service.
  

Next time you have to give a presentation, consider the assertion-evidence style. SculptCAD claims to be the leader in design and reverse engineering. Japanese style hot dogs? What do buyers want to see on your web site? Service description, industries served, and case studies are at the top of the survey results compiled by RainToday.

...as optics is the geometry of light. --Claude Debussy

Great is the person...

Proof #792 that innovation is not dead: Heinz's new dip and squeeze ketchup packet. Boeing has a special web site, newairplane.com, for their new aircraft include the 787 Dreamliner. If you prefer to fly solo, perhaps NASA's personal flying suit is more your style. OpenSG is open-source scenegraph software. More open source: MeshLab is software for processing and editing 3D triangular meshes (and they have a blog). Bricscad is the number one DWG CAD alternative.

EnSight CFD has a blog and so does Time Compression magazine (about rapid prototyping aka additive manufacturing). Using SolidWorks? Need to draw an airfoil? Then this guide is for you. Or instead of drawing them yourself, use this database of airfoil coordinates from UIUC. The Instigator blog offers their top 10 insight's from reading Inbound Marketing. Want to start over with mathematics?

Your weekly dose of CAE news:

• Intelligent Light added DesignSpokes to their distributor network.
• Parabon was awarded a NASA SBIR to run modeling and simulation codes from a web browser.
• SpaceClaim announced a year-to-year sales increase of 235%.
• Win an iPod touch in Flow Science's simulation contest.
• PADT is offering Fluent UDF services.
  

Here's one man's scenario for how a global thermonuclear war would play out beginning in 1988. Learn to pick locks like a pro. Advanced Dynamics is a CFD consultancy. ARC3D is an interesting web service; you upload digital images and they return a 3D reconstruction of the scene in the photographs. Certify your virginity. The CADCAM blog from Australia's CADIT.

I need to get a Sobakawa cloud pillow for use with my Dreamie. You have a Dreamie too, right? Of course Google has their own programming language and it's called Go (and they think it'd be cool to call their debugger Ogle). Tyler Green blogs about contemporary and modern art. intrinSIM offers embeddable technologies for engineering applications.

Twitter has 75,000,000 accounts but only 15,000,000 (20%) actively and regularly post: more interesting social media stats here. If you enjoy militaria and are in Fort Worth plan a visit to the Military Museum of Fort Worth. Imagine reducing the impact of a 28 mph car crash to 5 mph; that's the promise of metal foam.

Express your pain and frustration the Star Wars way with Instant No. 38% of people use the internet several times a day and other interesting stats about the state of the internet.

Today's blog post brought to you by Motrin, Claritin, Sudafed, NyQuil, and Tylenol Cold, the syrupy slew sluggishly coursing through my veins.


...who has not lost their childlike heart. -- Meng-Tse