We just got a fairly nice consumer-grade (i.e. cheap) digital camera--a Panasonic DMC-LZ3 (Silver). Click the picture of Sassy below to see what it can do at full resolution (warning: 2.4MiB download):

I'm in the process of doing the paperwork for my graduation from San Jose State University and recently had the need to head out to Mission College to fix up some of my records. While I was there, I had chats with two of my former instructors. The first was a fairly pedestrian "how things are going"-kind of affair, while the second ended up being much more provocative. His thesis, by the time we were done, was that I should not look back to my relatively casual experience at Mission, but engage my current instructors more heavily and explicitly seek to get the most out of where I am today. It was a rather odd cross between "spread your wings and fly" and a somewhat romanticized notion of scholarship.

For our Jewish roommate. This year it's vegetarian (roasted beet) and has 100% less soy sauce!

So I was coerced by my instructor to write a 4-5 page paper for my Computer Ethics class. The cop-out topics are things like Data Mining and File Sharing and junk like that. Waaaaay too boring, so I turned the topic on its ear:

If technology has needs, wants, and desires, what are our ethical responsibilities to it?

Clicky

OK. Recipe time!

I've been making a lot of muffins lately. For killer (not too sweet, with some body) banana-nut muffins, click "Read More" below:

Our (Jewish) roommate recently had a birthday. For fun, I decided that my birthday gift to her would be something handmade and kind-of weird. Enter the LED Star of David hat.

Construction consisted of the following steps:

• Get a hat. $9 at Walmart.
• Get something reasonably sturdy, preferably conductive and insulation coated to form the legs of the two equilateral triangles. Enter straightened-out pink insulated paperclips.
• LEDs. Halted Electronics took care of that.
• Load resistance. 75 Ohms. Halted again.
• Battery. Ditto.

Most people's barley intake in the US is in beer form (barley is a main ingredient in beer). Taken on its own, however, it's got more character than rice and isn't as hard to stomach as oats can be. And barley is really good for you (except perhaps in beer form).

Click "read more" to see three barley recipes.

Have you taken a look at the bizarro prose on my MySpace yet?

That was the subject line in a spam message I just received. Nice.

From CNN comes a story about the Mooninites causing panic on the east coast. Apparently one of the ad agencies doing promos for Aqua Teen Hunger Force got the bright idea to put an battery-run LED rendering of a Mooninite in strategic places throughout cities on the east coast. The sign looked like this:

...and law enforcement freaked out.