Jesus paid for our sins...

Today's soundtrack is 10 hours of Darth Vader breathing. Or maybe you'd prefer The Wine of Silence, orchestral arrangements of Robert Fripp's soundscapes.

When is a $20 bill worth several hundred thousand dollars? When it's a Series 1963A note that flew to the moon and back on Apollo 14.

Anne Appleby, Oaks, 2012

Writing tips. They're out there. You wish I'd find some. Here are six writing tips from John Steinbeck, two of which are worth noting here. #6 "If you are using dialogue - say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech." Too few authors heed this advice. (You'll roll your eyes, but Faulkner was a master of dialogue.) #3 "Forget your generalized audience... In writing, your audience is one single reader." This bit of advice can be applied to software development in that features written for everyone usually suck while I feature written for one specific person usually is nice and tight and applicable to a whole bunch of people.

In The Hyperdimensional Tar Pit Poul-Henning Kamp takes on the issue of the time required to deliver a software product. He starts with the old adage that you make an estimate and then double the number and then increment to the next largest unit of time, turning a 2 day task into a 4 week task. (Among those deserving blame for this time bloat are "random acts of management.") He eventually defers to Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man-Month in which delivering a programming systems product is said to take about an order of magnitude longer than simply writing a program.

I swear I posted this before but maybe not. Here's a video of a shuttle launch from the viewpoint of one of the solid rocket boosters, from ignition through separation to splashdown. The folks at Skywalker Sound did the mixing and enhancing. 

An amateur recording of the Space Shuttle Challenger launch and ultimate destruction has been found. Shot on Super 8, it may be the only amateur film recording of the event.

Convair's losing design for a U-2 replacement, Kingfish, lost in 1959 to Lockheed's A-12 (which led eventually to the SR-71).  Read about how less than a year later the concept was revived as the basis for an A-12 replacement - Beyond Kingfish.

Look at your PC. Now look at your calendar. Now look again at your PC and plan to say goodbye to it by 2014 because that's when your life will switch from PC-centric to cloud-centric.

Giada has an app. Repeating: Giada has an app. Forgive me while I pause right now to install Giada's Daily Bite.

What's more scrumptious than a big pot of... WTF? Do you think Giada has a recipe for this? source

Where bacon comes from: two and a half minute video shows a professional butcher playing "find the bacon." Damn, those must be sharp knives.

Where bacon goes to: Bacon Smores. I don't know what's more wonderful - this recipe or just the little pig-shaped cookies.

I was not Googling for "blue balls" when I found Sphero, a ball you control with Bluetooth via your iPad or iPhone.

The article about asshole detection that I was going to post didn't make the cut, partially because it might not be what you think it is. Software for identifying the chocolate starfish in photos. Such things exist. The images were just too much for my dear gentle readers.

We (meaning "I") tend to think of fossils as staid tableaus of dinosaurs in the sweet repose of death. Through some quirk of fate and timing, here's a pterosaur (27 inch wingspan) caught in the jaws of the predatory fish Aspidorhynchus. 

If you prefer living critters, here's the Penguin Cam at SeaWorld San Diego.

How has the Great Recession changed the employment landscape? Internet-related jobs up 24.6%, newspapers down 28.4% (I read the newspaper daily with breakfast and can't imagine doing the same on a computer. For one thing, the newspaper makes a much better place mat than a tablet.

Must watch video: see the effects of a tornado up-close and personal from a family's security camera.

Maybe for today's soundtrack I should've shared some Steve Roden. Steve is a painter and musician who created the sound for the Modern Art Notes podcast. Steve has a blog called airform archives and a website, in be tween noise.

...so let's get out there and get our money's worth.