Five bars is a beautiful thing, baby.
Five bars on the AT&T 3G MicroCell
Yesterday I happened to stop by the AT&T store near my house, and they had just received a shipment of these bad boys. After a couple of minor setup hiccups, I now have five full bars of signal strength even in the farthest edges of the house (even the basement, which was a “No Service” dead zone until this morning), and all it costs me is a negligible hit on my Verizon FiOS 25/25 broadband connection.
AT&T must be absolutely petrified at the thought of losing customers to other mobile carriers. Remember those 3G MicroCells that started popping up recently (MSRP $149.99)? Engadget reported yesterday that AT&T has started sending out letters to their “most valuable customers”, good for one free AT&T 3G MicroCell.
Guess who’s a valuable AT&T customer?!
I am now the proud owner of a piece of paper redeemable for one AT&T 3G MicroCell
Yup, that’s right, I am now the proud owner of a sheet of paper, redeemable for one range-boosting femtocell device. I almost threw out the letter without even opening it—the envelope looks like 99.7% of the rest of the junk mail that clogs my snailbox these days.
Here’s the funny thing, though… Read the rest of this entry »
Jun 20
Hi everyone… just letting you know that (a) I’m not dead and (b) yes, I suck! I just got back from a much-needed vacation and am now neck-deep catching up with work at my day job, but don’t worry; I haven’t abandoned this project! It’s just #3 or 4 down the list of Absolutely Must To-Do’s. Thanks for your patience…
Mar 26
And now for something completely different. (I don’t just sit in front of my workstation making pretty Star Trek pick-shurs all day long, you know.)
After years of waiting for the right camera (a digital SLR that shoots 1080p / 24 fps video) at the right price (under $1,000), the photography gods heard my prayers and bestowed upon me the Canon EOS Digital Rebel T2i (known mostly outside the United States as the Canon EOS 550D):
Hello, beautiful
I’ll be posting an in-depth review, sample video and stills the coming months, but that’s not what this post is about. Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 1
Excitement in da hood! Cops have blocked off all the streets leading into my neighborhood, looking for a burglary suspect on the loose! This po-po is stationed at the entrance to our subdivision right across the street from my front door.
Loudoun County's Finest
Here’s an animatic test of the phaser fire effect I whipped up for Decker’s attack on the planet killer.
And you thought I wasn’t working on this project. Tsk tsk tsk.
Decker's Revenge
Feb 2
It seems only fitting on the day that President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget officially killed NASA’s Constellation program to return to the Moon that I post a link to a website I discovered today:
Beyond Apollo—Plans for the Exploration of Space from the Age of Apollo, 1959-1979
I’d always considered myself to be something of a space buff in general and NASA fanboy in particular—my best friend is a former mid-level executive at NASA and I myself used to work for a NASA subcontractor years ago—but I just finished the better part of this evening reading article after fascinating article at David Portree’s website on missions and space vehicles that I had never even heard rumors of before. (Did you know that at one point there were plans to soft-land spent Saturn S-IVB stages on the lunar surface for use as shelters instead of smacking them into the Moon? Or that as late as 1967 NASA was planning manned flyby missions of Venus and Mars after the Moon landings as a logical next step towards a manned Mars landing mission in the early 1980s?)
David Portree’s blog is a must-bookmark site for diehard space geeks and promises endless hours of fascinating (and depressing) reading, and interestingly enough, has helped me put Obama’s NASA budget cuts into stark perspective. When you step back for a second and consider the scope of audacious proposals like the NERVA Electric Mars Ship (see below) and compare those big-thinking plans to the relatively puny ambitions of the anemically underfunded Constellation program, it really makes you stop and realize something: we didn’t lose the Moon today. We lost it over forty years ago.
NERVA Electric Mars Probe (1966)
How did we get to this point? How did our dreams become so small and timid?
I’m sure everyone visiting this blog has seen this image before, but it’s new to me and in my considered opinion you can never have too many images of the Enterprise lying around.
Starship Enterprise 1960s studio model at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
Read the rest of this entry »
