Beijing Olympics Men's 4x100 Relay
If you missed it (like I did), then be sure to watch the incredible footage of the Men's 4x100 relay that occurred yesterday at the Olympics. (Note: requires Microsoft Silverlight install, but it's worth it.) It is quite a race... one that pits the heavily favored French relay team against a United States squad led by Michael Phelps and anchored by Jason Lezak. The announcers took on a somber tone for much of the race, and as Lezak took off from the blocks for the 4th and final leg of the relay... they seemed downright depressed:

"I just don't think he [Lezak] can do it."  (4:43)

"Bernard is pulling away from him [Lezak]."  (4:50)

"The United States is trying to hang on to second; they should get the silver medal."  (4:59)

But then the incredible happens:

<loud>"But Lezak is closing!"<:/loud>  (5:04)

<louder>"He's tightening it [the race] up!"<:/louder>  (5:13)

<screaming>"Here comes Lezak! Unbelievable at the end! He's done it!"</screaming>  (5:19)

After you watch that, then go read about the split times and CNN/SI's story.

(Update Mon Aug 11 09:22:03 PDT 2008 // updated content and URL)

A Walk To Beautiful
Kristy and I just finished watching NOVA's "A Walk To Beautiful" - a documentary about the pervasiveness of obstetric fistula in rural Ethiopia and the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital, which was established in 1974 specifically to treat women suffering from these terrible (and preventable) childbirth injuries. The story of the ruined lives of these women, many of whom are married as young as 12 and 13, is heartbreaking. The NOVA program is available on-line in six chapters or via broadcast (check your local listings). Please watch it... and then donate here. Kristy and I used PayPal to contribute a general donation of $450 - the approximate cost to provide complete treatment for one woman.

There is also a feature-length version of the movie "A Walk To Beautiful" coming soon to DVD.

Car of the Future
I watched NOVA's "Car of the Future" tonight on the TV. It was a pretty fascinating exploration of the technology being researched to make cars much more efficient than those that we drive today. One particularly interesting piece of the show highlighted an all-electric car in production today that, well, looks really really cool: the Tesla Roadster. The Tesla is 100% electric (e.g. 100% torque available at 0 rpm), does 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds, has a range of over 200 miles, and at today's electricity prices it costs less than 2¢ per mile to operate.

Pretty cool.

By comparison, my motorcyle has a 3.5 gallon tank, averages about 45 mpg, and will do 0-60 in just about 6 seconds. Doing the math: my motorcyle has a range of just over 150 miles and at $4.00/gallon costs about 9¢ per mile to operate. The downside of the Tesla? The cost is north of $100k (I paid less than $10k for my motorcycle).

Seam Carving
Watch this video about image resizing using seam carving. Very impressive. Can't wait for this to be rolled into GIMP.

Genoom
This site called Genoom looks interesting (the tour looks cool anyway). At the very least, it looks like a neat way to wrap your GEDCOM file in a nice GUI. Plus, it's free. You can make your tree and invite other family members (cousins, etc) to join and help build it too.

Salt Lake City Tap Water Rated #1
By way of my wife Kristy, it has been (unscientifically) determined that Salt Lake City has the best tap water in the nation.

  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19865855/

Take a sip! America's best tap water
Salt Lake City's is the winner, followed by Boston and Columbia, S.C.


By Mike Celizic
Updated: 8:39 a.m. PT July 20, 2007


Its namesake lake may be saltier than the ocean, but, according to two wine-tasting experts, Salt Lake City's tap water is, in a word, "delicious."

"Viscous, thick and rich," was how professional wine taster David Lynch described the water to TODAY co-hosts Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer.

"Nonflawed, clean and delicious," added his colleague, Joe Bastianich.

[more]

Kristy grew up in San Diego. Ever since we started dating I have been complaining about the poor quality of the tap water at her home. It is absolutely terrible stuff... I won't drink it. The in-laws think I'm a bit "off" with my apparent pre-occupation with drinking water quality (hey... I'm a Civil Engineer by training... what do you expect!) and have probably long since grown tired of me standing on my soapbox and preaching about poor tasting drinking water in SoCal and the brilliant tasting stuff in Salt Lake City (where I grew up). So, this is a small vindication... I think I shall print it out, take it down to San Diego this Thanksgiving, and post it on the Sorenson kitchen refrigerator!

Geeks Make Great Husbands
Via slashdot today:

"SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the volunteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project... that is until today! One of the volunteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, 'I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.'"

Scrubs Musical
Kristy called me from the gym tonight... "Turn on Scrubs! Turn on Scrubs! It's a musical!" I tuned in just in time for Guy Love Between Two Guys. Hilarious stuff. (I watched "30 Rock" afterward just to see why Alec Baldwin won his "Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series" Golden Globe... it's a fun show.) When Kristy returned home later, she raved about Everything Comes Down to Poo ("Everything comes down to poo / Please won't you pinch us off a big fat clue?!").

Fletcher Capstan Tables
An associate sent me a link to these amazing tables. Before I share the link, read to the description:

All Capstan Tables are exclusively designed and built, and each one numbered. [...] Please understand that this is an extremely special piece of furniture, of exceptional quality and design - it is not for everyone by a very very long way and can only be afforded by the lucky few of us with exceptional wealth.

Here is the link. There are three Quicktime videos, but you can get the idea by watching just the first one. It would be really cool to have one of these in our new attic as a game table; but the tone of the description infers somewhat ominously that such a table could cost well above our entire budget for the home renovation project! Nonetheless, it is a pretty amazing piece of furniture.

Free Hugs
Maybe you have seen this video on the grassroots Free Hugs Campaign, or maybe you haven't. It's worth watching.

Evolution of Beauty
Is your perception of beauty distorted? Watch this and find out.

More here.

Ad: FotoPrix
This was sent to me by a friend in the Advertising biz. The ad is for a photo development company in Spain and is not recently authored (i.e. you may have seen this elsewhere), but it is the first time I have seen it.

perfect pictures for an imperfect world

The Pilot G2 Mont Blanc Pen
My brother Bryan (How's that blog coming along btw?!) sent me this link yesterday:

World's Best Writing Pen

Today I went to Office Depot and bought the Pilot G2 and some Mont Blanc refills. It makes a nice pen.

Channel Swim Redux
My friend Dave is attempting another channel cross in August. Here is a news story about some of the training he is doing leading up to the event. I was talking to Dave about his regimen. It is not uncommon for him to swim 5+ miles on a workout day during a 2+ hour workout. By contrast, my longest swim workouts clock in around half an hour. I swim about a mile (at most). I'm in awe of his commitment.

Criss Angel
A friend of mine sent me a link to a video by illusionist Criss Angel. It wasn't particulary impressive, but it made me curious enough to google up a few other short videos. Among the several that I found, I thought this was a pretty cool illusion. I guess this guy has a TV series on A&E. If I had expanded cable, I'd definitely make time to watch it.

The Mpemba Effect
I have been scratching my head trying to figure out why my recently manufactured home-made ice cream freezes so hard (making it near impossible to scoop without leaving it out for a few minutes). While researching this topic using various search methods, I stumbled onto this very interesting natural phenomenon where it has been observed, under certain conditions, that hot water freezes faster than cold water - known as the Mpemba Effect. I wasted the better part of the last couple of hours reading a few articles (such as this one) about this topic. Fascinating stuff.

Google Da Vinci Game
I started playing this today. I got up to speed in no time at all; the puzzles are trivial to solve... at least right now they are. The grand prize looks nice, so I'm sure the puzzles will get harder.

(Update Sat Apr 29 14:29:29 PDT 2006 // changed categories)

Desktop Earth
I downloaded and installed Desktop Earth 2.0 on my XP laptop (and moved Berkeley to my Win2k laptop). Desktop Earth 2.0 is designed for a dual-head display, but it still looks great on a single screen.

(Hat tip // e)

(Update Fri Mar 24 15:53:42 PST 2006 // fixed the URL to Berkeley's desktop image)

Open Source Web Design
If you are thinking about putting a blog together, or if you already have a blog and are fumbling around looking for a decent idea for a blog design (or if you just changed the color scheme of your brother's blog and called it good), then perhaps some of the free web design downloads at Open Source Web Design will strike your fancy. I'm just saying.

Water's Edge Guesthouse on Pine Lake
While looking for hotels in the area last weekend (on the presumption that we would be re-refinishing our floors), I solicited feedback from a group of friends about possibilities for our family. One of my acquaintances suggested a small Bed and Breakfast that is located right on the shore of Pine Lake:

Water's Edge Guesthouse

It is only 2 miles away from our home. But there are no kids allowed. However, I'll keep this in mind the next time we have both sets of grandparents come visit or any other time when out-of-town guests congregate to our home (like perhaps at the next Berrett baby blessing).

(Update Tue Mar 14 07:57:18 PST 2006 // short -> shore... oops)

Root Beer Ratings: Anthony's Root Beer Barrel
This root beer review site has more than 300 reviews... nice!

Anthony's Root Beer Barrel

Based on Anthony's rankings I located and tried several of those that were highly rated including Boylan's Natural Root Beer, Boylan's Creamy Red Birch Beer, Boylan's Original Birch Beer, and Jackson Hole Soda Company Buckin' Root Beer. All exceptional.

I may have to devise a root beer rating system of my own.

(Update Fri Mar 17 00:07:16 PST 2006 // fixed title)

Blogroll: Yatyk's Musings by Mark Berrett
I am the oldest of four boys. In order of birth, there is myself, then Brent (2 years younger), Mark (3½ years younger), and Bryan (7 years 4 months younger). Once upon a time all four of us lived under the same roof at 3201 East 3925 South in Salt Lake City, UT. Here is an old-school Berrett Family photo circa 1978:

That's me in the middle standing with the glasses. Brent is on the far left. Mark is on the far right. Bryan, the baby (and he still is a baby!), is in the middle.

So, my brother Mark is an old man now... married, 4 kids, a home, a dog, the works. He might even be older than me now. Not sure. In any case, Mark has a blog up and running entitled Yatyk's Musings (more background on the blog title can be found here). Since Mark is my brother, I'm obligated to put his blog on my blogroll. Mark recently noted that you can pick your friends, but did he know that you cannot pick your brothers! I'm stuck with these clowns! Sheesh.

But no, really, it's not like that at all. I could not have picked better brothers. They are all quite literally, my keeper. We are fiercely loyal to one another - I dunno why, maybe all brothers are that way. Perhaps it is because we spent so much time together during my formative years (well, more so with Brent and Mark... Bryan was just too young to keep up in many cases). We engaged ourselves in all kinds of activities... hide-n-seek, tree climbing, pretend role playing (pirates, cowboys/indians, etc), 3-person football (2 on offense, 1 on defense), home run hit (our house was on a 1/3-acre lot), basketball games (horse, around the world, etc), water fights, snowball fights, bottle rocket fights (with shoulder mounted PVC-pipe launchers), and just about anything else you would expect that young boys with active imaginations might dream up together.

We had some great times. We still have great times, even with Bryan - now that Bryan is a big boy (Bryan is married, with a kid, a home, a cat, the works... Bryan may also be older than me now too. Not sure.) But I'm up here in Seattle, and my brothers are down in Utah... so our opportunities to make new memories together, as brothers, are limited. Therefore, I'm glad that my brother Mark has started his blog, because I need to keep up on him and his life and be sure he doesn't stray from the straight and narrow.

After all, I'm his biggest keeper.

(Update Mon Jan 16 13:50:38 PST 2006 // formatting changes)

The Unofficial Blosxom v2.0 Plugin Registry
In preparation for some blog entries I'm authoring to document all of the changes I've made to blosxom and several blosxom plugins, I've been trying to download original source files in order to build contextual patches. As some (many?) of the links on the Official Blosxom Plugin Registry have become outdated, I did a bit of searching on google and found a nice mirror site that has quite a variety of Blosxom plugins archived:

The Unofficial Blosxom v2.0 Plugin Registry

This little exercise of documenting my changes is probably only of interest to other blosxom bloggers (like Khan for example), but when I'm done I'll feel good knowing that I've taken some pieces of open source, made them better (from my own perspective at least... ymmv), and given back to the blosxom blogging community at large.

Blogroll: One Monkey, Ten Minutes by Norm Jones
I just added a new link to my blogroll, that of Norm Jones' blog, One Monkey, Ten Minutes.

Long ago (1991) in a galaxy far far away (BYU), I was a very young civil engineering undergraduate student (with a steady girlfriend... one Kristine Sorenson). During that fall semester I was enrolled in Dr. Norm Jones' Computer Methods class (which was called CE210 back then and students learned programming methods in the C programming language - now the class has been renamed to CE270 and has degenerated into a Visual Basic / Excel spreadsheet course). I still remember my very first class of CE210, i.e. the first time I became acquainted with Dr. Jones (it was also the first time he taught the course). He introduced himself (and the course) to the class and began the first lecture by placing a transparency of a desktop computer on the overhead proejctor:

"This is a computer. Learn to recognize it at a glance."

lol.

The rest of that semester I learned C from Dr. Jones (my previous programming experience had been pascal back in high school). I thoroughly enjoyed the class lectures and programming projects and I aced all of the tests (see the Fall 1991 CE210 tests here, here, and here). It was an easy A - for me at least (Dr. Jones likes to tell the story of that particular CE210 class... for which he apparently received the worst student reviews of his entire tenure at BYU).

At the end of that semester and on the last lecture day, Dr. Jones announced that he was hiring student programming assistants to work for the Engineering Computer Graphics Laboratory (ECGL, now renamed to EMRL). The openings were to work on the then brand-new-pre-1.0 Groundwater Modeling System or GMS. I applied for the job and got it. I began working for ECGL, specifically under the direction of Dr. Jones, in January of 1992 (at roughly the same time as Jeff Davis was hired at ECGL). Wow... it really seems like that was just yesterday. Time flies.

Now in 1991 (iirc), the fastest PC was a 486 (running Windows 3.1) and the fastest Apple computer was the Macintosh Quadra (running OS v7). But that is just to provide some context. At the time, ECGL did all of its development in the unix world... there were ports of the GMS software for HPUX, AIX, DecOS, SunOS, Solaris, and IRIX. I had to learn to work on all of these systems. Up to that time in my life, I had been strictly exposed to PCs and Apple computers. So it was quite an adjustment and I struggled at first (especially with vi! ... heh), but ECGL provided plenty of help and patient training. Eventually, I actually was able to become a contributing member of the team!

I could go on and on about how ECGL provided a environment where I learned pretty much all of the skills that I currently use every day to make a living. But long story short, I can pretty much trace the professional fortunes and opportunities that I have been blessed with back to that first CE210 class and my subsequent employment at ECGL. Everything flows from the fateful decision my Dr. Jones to hire a young civil engineering undergraduate as a part-time student programmer. Thank you Dr. Jones, hopefully I have been able to give something back.

Check this out... a trip down memory lane (circa 1995):

Clyde Building Room 300

(Wed Dec 7 10:19:17 PST 2005 // added trip down memory lane)
(Wed Dec 7 17:13:39 PST 2005 // fixed a spelling mistake)
(Tue Dec 13 20:12:53 PST 2005 // Dr. Jones changed his blog title)

SwiMP3
This mp3 player specifically designed for siwmming, SwiMP3, looks interesting:

Standard players rely on the transmission of sound through air or water causing the swimmer to perceive only muffled noise. The SwiMP3 uses bone conduction - the direct transfer of sound vibrations from the cheek bone to the inner ear - to provide the swimmer with exceptional sound clarity. The SwiMP3 is fully waterproof and can be used with all the competitive swim strokes.

Here is a recent review. I may have to add this to my gift list. Hat tip: my brother-in-law Scott.