Nico's Journal

I finally have a new PC, all black and silver! It took so long because Greg held out for a new model that's just been released. It took much of the weekend to set up with my old files and a lot of the stuff I use, but I'll have to buy a new version of Photoshop Elements if I want that, and I still need to reinstall a few things like Artrage. We now have a scanner and printer again (because they're attached to my computer) and my graphics tablet works; yay!

I really like the new keyboard too, and I hadn't realised just how bad my mouse's scroll wheel had become. Windows 7 and Office 2010 have a lot of nice features too. I'm fairly impressed.

Anyway, some links!

First up, some wonderful SF NASA posters in the styles of Star Trek (with added Space Station), Reservoir Dogs, The Matrix, the Ocean films, superhero comics (vrooom!), Indiana Jones, Star Trek (2009), Harry Potter, and more, even Snoopy. Seriously cool!

This one's for Sherlock fans: karadin made a Sherlock birthday cake complete with edible John and Sherlock!

This is very cool, and someone's taken it further in comments on the first page. :-)

It's also Pi Day (if you use illogically ordered American dates ;-) ), so Happy Pi Day to you all, too.



Any excuse for a pie! I'm making an apple and sultana crumble one tonight, and since "pai" in Maori means "good", I'll be having a pai pi pie! And some fractal food in the form of romanesco broccoli as part of the main course. :-D

And while we're at it, here are a couple of icons if anyone wants a geeky pie one. :-)

I'm working at a polling place on election day (8 November) and last night I went to a paid training session.

Here everyone gets two votes: one for a candidate in their electorate, and the other for a party. The winning candidates get seats in parliament, and parties get extra seats (if they get enough votes) to make up the distribution in the party vote.

Anyway, for vote count training, we used fictional candidates, and parties too, like the Fabian and Transubstantiation Parties. What we do is pass the votes round a table, keeping only the ones each person is counting. For party votes, I was assigned... the Free Trade Party (Jenna!) and, yes, the Freedom Party. Free Trade got three votes last night, but the Freedom Party got none. Sorry, Blake. Must be because all your supporters were gunned down at their rally.

And since we're on the subject of elections, here are two promotional vids for the feline candidate, Ginger, done by those guy who made An Engineer's Guide to Cats.

An Engineer's Guide to Voting (Ginger Cat for President)
An Engineer's Guide to Voting T-shirts

Ever since our inkjet printer died a while back, we've been without one at home--till a couple of days ago when Greg said he was bringing a surprise home. It was a free printer which came with a laptop his company bought for a new employee, so now we have a B&W laser printer. Yay, I can now actually print out stories at home to proofread.

And the wheelie bin? Two pictures under the cut will explain.

( A geek's wheelie bin )

Happy birthday to Sputnik, 50 years old today (well, yesterday for me). Google's also showing an orbiting sputnik today. :-D

For physics geeks, quantum cat macros, found by andrastewhite. Note that quarks are a basic constituent of all matter, and yes, they have a flavour, six in fact: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top. There's also a photon kitten in the set.

This one everyone will get though: take that, Schroedinger.