Month: February 2008

World’s biggest ferris wheels

ferris-wheel-800_clip2.jpg

Honestly, sometimes I even surprise myself with the subjects that I find interesting.  Quite randomly, I recently found this very short, but very cool article on work around the world (well, at least a couple of locations) to build the world’s largest ferris wheel.  A ride that had fallen out of favor some years ago, the ferris wheel seems to be suffering, you might say, a resurgence in interest since the London Eye opened a few years ago.

The larger these monstrous rides become, the greater their capacity and potential profit—and the more seriously builders take them. To start, they don’t call them Ferris wheels. “We categorize them as ‘observational wheels’ because of the capsules,” says Alexander Pieper, spokesman for the Great Wheel Corporation, which developed the Singapore, Dubai and Beijing wheels.

My bad.  The world’s largest observational wheel.  It’s hardly an article, being no more than sidebar length for any magazine publication, but I found the accompanying illustration (captured in part above) to be chock full of useless cool knowledge. For instance, the original ferris wheel, the Eagle 16 noted in the illustration, made a revolution in a mere 12 seconds.  Now, it’s around half an hour start to finish on the giants.  To borrow a phrase from Keanu Reeves – Whoa.

[tags]Ferris Wheel, Observational wheels, Singapore Flyer, London Eye, Beijing Great Wheel, Extreme Engineering[/tags]

Happy Valentine’s day

Celebrate the oddity of love’s expression that is Valentine’s Day with Yahoo! Movie’s look at the 10 most mismatched movie couples.

Dan Aykroyd & Rosie O’Donnell
Exit to Eden – 1994
“Exit to Eden” was a dark, romantic novel by “Interview With a Vampire” author Anne Rice about bondage and S&M. Who better, then, to turn it into a movie than the creator of “Mork and Mindy?” An even better question: what movie executive thought that the formula for box office gold was putting Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell in skimpy studded leather outfits? As the comic relief they are painfully unfunny, and not even the kind of painful that a dominatrix would enjoy.

Also making the list are painful pairs like Hayden Christiansen and Natalie Portman (I adore her, but he is Gore-like in his woodenness), and the laughably bad Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck coupling in Gigli.  A couple of the movie couples feel almost like “We can’t come up with couple 9 and 10 – throw some forgettable pair in.”  Otherwise, it’s dirty-laundry comforting to see where others agree with your feelings.

[tags]Yahoo!, Movies, Mismatched couples, Valentine’s day[/tags]

KDE for Windows

I hadn’t even heard of this before, but for all you Linux-lovers out there, work is being done to get KDE running on Microsoft Windows. If I get a bit of time to work on this, I’m going to try it on one of my systems and see how it goes. I suspect it will make it easier for me to get the family ported to Linux based systems at home.

So how did I learn about this? Why would I care? Well, MrCopilot has a good, moderate length write-up on his experience with installing and using KDE for Windows. This is a port that has been in-process for quite a while, because, let’s face it, porting a full development library set like KDE and supporting libs is a big undertaking. But after showing a few screens of the install, he gets right to the meat of the experience. What works?

Quite a lot actually. See below for Screenshots of included apps that work. Almost all the apps shipped “work”. Two are all but useless due to bugs. The rest seem to function perfectly as long as you don’t need to refer to Help. Fortunately most apps have an online help while this bug gets ironed out.

And he shows a lot of what does work, what standard KDE tools and apps are included, and so on. But first, he has to answer the opposing question – what doesn’t work?

Sound, at least on my setup there was no sound, any application that tried to make a peep instead produced this error message. Most Apps let you disable sound.

. . .

Konqueror – KDE’s Swiss Army Knife, Web Browser, File Manager, FTP Client, Embedded File Viewer, Etc … Unfortunately on my Windows box it is reduced to a Web Browser (without Flash support) and a Menu Explorer (without being able to launch anything.)

And a few other things that would probably be minor to most folks.  I always like the concept of changing my Windows interface, but the fact that it doesn’t follow me to other machines really hinders my enjoyment of that idea.  This is why I don’t use Stardock’s GUI re-skinner or desktop customizer tools, as much as I like the company, the concept, and the cost.   Of course, that means there’s a good chance I would try this and not stick with it.  But again, the concept is appealing, and the more universal desktop experience this could enable at home when I move between Windows and Linux is very appealing to me.

And I’m hopeful that developments like this will push content creators (read “developers”) to put out more portable, cross-platform software.  Once the support libraries are more globally available, it should make it easier for more globally portable software, right?  I mean, I know it’s not a case of “Well, the libraries are there, so *POOF* our software now works on 12 different operating systems.”  But as middleware and support libraries become more portable, I would think that applications would naturally follow to become multi-platform entities.  So I will be watching KDE for Windows as it is worked on to see if this does anything to improve computing for the masses.  I’m hopeful, but I realize what an uphill battle that change will be.

What dancing is all about

This is all the reason I need to suggest more people buy poles to put up in their garage.  Probably NSFW.

Her comments from the YouTube page:

sorry i’m tired of answering the same questions over n over.
took me 3 months to get to this level of dancing 6-8 hours a day for 3 months. i do not do this amout of hours now though.
i do not have any dance background, no ballet, gymnastics ect
song: fergalisous – fergie
i am using a 50mm chrome x-pole from xpole.co.uk
and for those who wanna leave nasty comments… dont bother cause i now aprove them, you gain nothing

Seems more pervs on the intarw3bbs like me have seen the video and tried to leave naughty comments. Shame on you pervs. Be more like me and look but don’t let them know you are looking.

[tags]Pole, Pole dancing, Fergie, Fergaliscous, Mmmmm, Pervs, YouTube, video[/tags]

Yahoo! working on AOL merger talks again?

Because allowing Microsoft to buy Yahoo! *and* AOL next year would apparently be so much better than just letting the company consume Yahoo! this year, there is talk of Yahoo! seeking another shot at merging with AOL.

It said Yahoo and AOL had previously tried to join forces, but were unable to agree on the price of a deal.

I’m guessing both companies appeared stronger at previous talks than this time around.   But I’m not sure how a generally successful company like Yahoo! merging with a downward trending company like AOL will save Yahoo!, but I guess that’s why I’m not a multi-billionaire industry executive (NOTE: I also called the iPhone’s popularity wrong – further proof that I should remain a tech peon).

[tags]AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Merger[/tags]

Stolen paintings

Thieves pull off a brazen heist of $163 million worth of art-work in Zurich.

ZURICH, Switzerland – Three armed men in ski masks stole four paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth $163.2 million from a Zurich museum in one of Europe’s largest ever art heists, police said Monday.

. . .

The three masked men wearing dark clothing entered the museum a half-hour before closing Sunday, police said. While one of the men used a pistol to force museum personnel to the floor, the two others went into the exhibition hall and collected the four paintings.

Now I always wonder WTF is going on when I hear about something like this.  As the full article explains briefly, selling this artwork is very difficult, what with the publicity and police investigations going on.  On the other hand, there are over 30,000 stolen art pieces sought by law enforcement internationally.  Some shady rich guy will end up buying this art, and likely little of it will ever been seen again by public eyes.

[tags]Art theft, Monet, Degas, van Gogh, Cezanne, $163 million, Zurich, Switzerland[/tags]