We only use 10% of our brains.

Right Brain: This ain't no fish tank; scuba dive on your desktop. From whom would you buy magnets if not Super Magnet Man. This privnote will self destruct in 5 seconds. Learn how to keep a house plant alive. Feel like you're the pilot of an F-104G Starfighter. The motherlode of sounds: turn up the volume for rimshot, sad trombone, crickets, yodel, bom bom bom bom woooo, whistle, tumbleweed, hiyoooo, and more. Put these on your toolbar and you'll be ready to punctuate anything that happens in a boring meeting. The periodic table of typefaces. Mashable has some suggestions about how companies should tweet. This is the only known portrait of Shakespeare made while he was alive. Not the NFL or the AFL, this is the UFL. I've got to get one of these for my office.

No Brain: Take a short break with this delightful puzzle.

Left Brain: XANSYS is an on-line community for users of ANSYS' engineering software products. Join Red Hat's partner program to ensure your software runs efficiently on their Linux systems. If you'd like to download digitized scans of biomedical parts, sign up for the BEL repository. More exercises for your CFD pleasures - here's a list of CFX-Mesh tutorials. Our friends at Baumgarten provide this suite of 3D Studio models for free. Be a student, write open-source software, get a stipend from Google's Summer of Code. Gazelles is Verne Harnish's company for leadership development. Metacomp Technologies' next user meeting will be 15-17 Sep in Ventura, CA. Ten papers to be read twice for software architects and ten more for software developers. NVIDIA's GPU Venture Program is their way of funding use of their CUDA framework for GPU computing. Three news items from the world of computational visualization. ACUSIM began shipping a custom version of FieldView with their Acusolve CFD software. CEI began shipping EnSight Lite 9. And Tecplot 360 2009 was announced. If you had a valid password, you could browse the QNET CFD knowledge base. You can read a brief presentation about ERCOFTAC's CFD best practices. Aras provides open-source PLM software. SolidWorks' 3 Dudes Gone 3D. The third ANSA international conference will be held 09-11 September in Greece.


Imagine how much better off we'd be if we used the other 60%.

The ability to do only a little...

If you're looking for a CSS framework for your next project, try Blueprint. I think they're related to Google somehow. Got an hour and a half to spare? Try watching this video from ANSYS about boundary layer generation. Pictures only an engineer would love: winners of CEI's calendar contest. Do not be fooled by counterfeits; get your pen refills at the official Montblanc shop. You can make your own avatar, but why? Or should I ask whii? The Denge sound mirrors are strangely fascinating. Hold on to your pants for this blast of on-line charting tools: LovelyCharts, bubbl.us, aMap, life->flow->charts, gliffy, iPlotz, and Flowchart.com.

Creating balloon animals is a lost art. More impressive than 4D rotations is the video about Moebius transformations. Even without reading Russian, this page of test screens is cool. What do you get when two guys from a swanky French restaurant start a Mexican place called Paco & John? Got software to protect? Take a look at Reprise, V.i. Labs, and WIBU. Hungry? Try a McGangBang. And wash it down with the latest from Zio Carlo, a new "Italian brewpub". Free CFD for the unemployed. The 17th annual conference of the CFD Society of Canada will be held on 03-05 May in Ottawa. The official web site of author John le Carre. You can watch the cinematic classic Kung Pow on hulu. Get free icons from iconPot. Not just anti-spyware, it's SUPERAntiSpyware.

...is not an excuse to do nothing.
--John le Carre from A Most Wanted Man

The creation of the ridiculous is almost impossible...

It started innocently enough. I sent an email and it was returned. However, instead of the usual "user unknown" or "email delay, do not resend" messages, this message turned out not to have been returned but rather "rejected". Reading further, apparently our mail server had developed a bad reputation and folks accordingly decided to stop accepting its email. Then another rejection. And a third. It seems these sites all use a rating from SenderBase to reject email. And SenderBase thought we were "poor".

Our SysAdmin did something (specifics omitted) to see if and how email was leaving our premises. He reported good and bad news. The good: he was able to identify unauthorized email was outbound. The bad: it was coming from my computer. Damnation.

A trojan. How did that happen? Regardless, let's stamp this thing out.

First attempt was Kephyr's Bazooka, a tool I had used before to find problems on other computers. It doesn't repair problems, just finds them and shows you how to manually fix them. Unfortunately, Bazooka came up empty. I should've known when the most recent version of their threat database was over 400 days old that maybe it hadn't been kept up to date. I also didn't bother to try their FreeFixer tool which I hadn't used before. No time to experiment - on to the next tool.

Another oldie but goodie is Trend Micro's Hijack This. This tool is not for the faint of heart. It produces a list of stuff that you can peruse to identify bad things or you can post the list to a forum where experts will identify the problems for you. Nothing stood out in the list and the explanations for some items would essentially say "this could be malicious or it could be perfectly normal." I'm not that bright. I move on.

A trusty tool is Lavasoft's AdAware which I've used on our home PC. Unfortunately, while AdAware did find and repair several issues, it didn't find the trojan and the flow of emails kept on going.

Fourth in the arsenal was Safer Networking's Spybot, another tool with which I have experience. But just like AdAware, Spybot found and fixed yet more problems but not the trojan.

I don't recall whether it was AdAware or Spybot, but I scanned using one of them after booting my computer in safe mode. Needless to say, this was a failure with respect to the trojan - no problems found. Also, you should be advised that "safe" mode is somewhat of a misnomer because after rebooting my computer, something had decided to change my Display settings and I had to reset them all manually. Some of the artifacts of that change persist to this day; I can't get rid of them.

Next up was AVG. Unfortunately, it wouldn't even install. This is probably the result of also having AdAware and Spybot installed, but disappointing nonetheless. So, AVG never got tried.

Having exhausted my prior experiences, I turned to Microsoft. It seems they have a Malicious Software Removal Tool. Download. Scan for 3 hours. Nothing. I stare. At. The. Screen.

PC World magazine's web site has always been a reliable place to turn for software recommendations of all kinds, so I go to their Security Center. Sure enough, I find recommendations for several tools and the first I try is Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. Runs for hours. Finds and removes bad stuff. But the trojan persists.

Another PC World recommendation is SUPERAntiSpyware. This looks promising. It's not just your regular spyware removal tool it's "super". And it's not just "super" it's SUPER in all uppercase. Download. Install. Run. A-ha! It finds a trojan that it identifies by name. It removes it and says I have to reboot because it'll delete more files on startup. Reboot. Oops. Windows fails to start. Is this good or bad? I try again and up she comes. And there's no more bad email. Der trojan ist kerput.

This is good, because I have only one thing left in my bag of tricks. STOPzilla has worked for a friend in a similar situation.

Lessons learned:

1. Have your sys admin regularly monitor your email score at SenderBase.
2. Use a malware tool on a regular basis. I will not say which one I've chosen.
3. If you find yourself with malware, try SUPERAntiSpyware first.
   

...because of the competition it receives from reality. -- Robert A. Baker

Everyone dreams of changing the world...

Where do CEOs go for professional development? Vistage. Or you could just read what's offered by 800 CEO Read.com. You can get stock icons for your web or software applications from IconDock. Help your gamer keep clean with Digital Soaps. Are you mad like me that you don't already have a flying car? Revisit future dreams of the past with this collection of space age illustrations. On the other hand, you could have an Antonov AN-225, the world's heaviest jet. What can you do with rare-earth magnets? Apparently, quite a bit: introducing the NeoCube. The folks at Fort Worthology present this slideshow of The Avenue of Light, a new public art work being installed on Lancaster. If you're a mystery buff, take a look at this list of bizarre disappearances. While we're on lists, here's the top 11 weirdest burgers.

What could be better than a new barbeque restaurant in town? Who wouldn't enjoy trying a new take on brisket, ribs, and sausage, especially one with a award-laden track record? Well, that was the promise when Cowboys Barbeque & Rib Co. opened in the former Railhead location in Colleyville. However, a recent Saturday night dinner resulted in the least pleasant dining experience in memory. First, the layout of the restaurant is awful. Over half the tables are in the bar and those in the main dining area are hapharzardly arranged. In fact, some tables were so close together that it would impossible to have people sitting back to back. There was absolutely zero atmosphere in this place. On the topic of the wait staff, to call our waitress' service perfunctory would have been an exaggeration of grand scale. On the other hand, we did get to hear another waiter repeat his stale, faux-friendly banter at each of his tables - because you can easily hear every conversation at every other table. Regarding the food itself, if your idea of good brisket is a little meat infused with copious gelatinous globules of fat then this place is for you. Even the chicken in the fajitas didn't taste like chicken. And when they hand you your plate and caution you because it's hot, don't worry - the plate and food were barely lukewarm. If they're not out of business in 3 months, the city should just close them as a public service.

Need more bacon? Try bacon stuffed waffles and more. More Mac than you can handle: Macworld, Mac|Life, MacTech. E.gg Timer might be useful. IntegrityWare will be incorporating VBSpline's NURBs library into their products (not to be confused with T-Splines). If you know what a penumbral lunar eclipse is, you'll like these pictures. Engrish is funny in a guilty kinda way. But their English is still better than my Japanese. Do not click here.

...yet no one thinks of changing themselves. -- Leo Tolstoy

Freedom is nothing else...

Here's another blog about startups and related topics: A Smart Bear. This flickr set is about letter monsters, a fun alphabet designed to help a child learn his ABCs. Web site for the upcoming book, Foundations of Applied Mathematics. CSPD, the Center for Student Professional Development, is where to go to hire students from Rice. You can download the models used in the book Level of Detail for 3D Graphics. You can buy furniture at Weir's. ProgRock Records is where to go to get your favorite progressive rock.

The movie The Fifth Element makes me smile every time I watch it. The story is fresh (I love the Mondoshawans), the acting is good (Gary Oldman is great), there's a lot of humor (You want some more?), the pace is vigorous, but what ties it all together for me is the soundtrack which is so wonderfully integrated into the film it is absolutely seamless.

Drink your beer from a glass and a bottle with Hopside Down. A little too late for Valentine's Day, but you can still enjoy making a word heart. Zen Habits is a blog about setting and achieving goals. And yet another blog about personal productivity, this one by David Seah. When in Syracuse, have yourself a burger and a beer at Zebb's. Or just have the beer by checking out Syracuse Beer Week. Sycode just released some software that lets you convert a polygonal mesh to a solid model. Everything you ever wanted to know about Pac-Man is in his dossier.

...but a chance to be better.

Love looks not with the eye, but with the mind...

Donald Norman, Geoffrey Moore, and others will be speaking at the Business of Software 2009 in San Francisco on 09-11 November. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and Making it all Work, is the personal productivity guru. His GTD philosophy is incredibly useful and popular, as evidenced by these web sites (and many more like them): GTDtimes, GTD, and this list of the top 10 GTD sites. Official web site of the Florida-based band Shinedown. KNTU 88.1 FM is the Jazz radio station of the University of North Texas. Online home of artist Etherbrian. Peter Cohan's Great Demo! blog. Traveling abroad on business? Consider these business culture guides from Executive Planet. There's a fan club for everything: the Pancake Appreciation Society. If you're an entrepreneur, check our Darmesh Shah's blog, On Startups. All you knitters might be interested in the Museum of Odd Socks.

Yet another way to decorate your web site: Ninjafy. Git yer groove on with these mashup sites: Mashup Industries, Ziggy Stardust remixed, and Mysplice III. Can't decide if this is for knitters or bacon fan boys: knitting bacon. What is it with odd collections and museums this week? Visit the Banana Museum. The School of Visual Arts in NYC offers this reading list for interaction design. (I've read 4 of the 21 books. So little time.) Get your art history online from smarthistory. CD-adapco has created an online resource center for vehicle simulation (registration required). This is why I'm fat. Is Wolfram's MathWorld really the web's most extensive math resource? You too can crochet this nintendo comforter. If you're not satisfied with the fast food in this country, you can try fast food of the world. Or maybe this is why I'm fat: bacaroni with cheese.

...and therefore is winged cupid painted blind.

The future is not a destination to be found...

If you need any electrical work done, give TLC Electrical a call. The burgers at Freddy's Frozen Custard are better than the ones at Steak n Shake. I was in the last class at my high school that had to learn how to use a slide rule, but not these nuclear slide rules. Put a Swift Wind Turbine on your roof. HydroSed2D is an open-source, two-dimensional numerical model for hydrodynamics and sediment transport on unstructured mesh. The folks at Juice Analytics are experts in the analysis and presentation of business information and share their ideas on their blog. Here's an old but still relevant blog post from Joel on Software about how to demo software.

Can't read or write Cyrillic? Fake it. When you have to know for sure, use this guide to How To Spot a Canadian. Convert text to music. D-Pad Hero is Guitar Hero for the NES. The Scat Jazz Lounge is the place for live jazz in Fort Worth. Add unicorns and rainbows to any web site with Cornify. Find the #1 song on any date using flashback charts. (On my birthday it was Johnny Angel by Shelley Fabares. Coincidence? I think not.) Ever wonder what the 20 worst foods are? Wouldn't reading all 100 of these productivity blogs be counter-productive? The Business of Software conference will be held 09-11 November 2009 in San Francisco.

...but rather a path to be created.