It was a blast in Glacier. We spent the first night at Cut Bank and then went to Mokowanis Lake area. The picture above is from Bear Mountain. I broke a nalgene while trying to hit a flower, forgot my camera for the final destination, and got a bad blisters on the backs of my feet. Nobody broke a leg.

Pictures

Glacier National Park has lost half its Glaciers in my lifetime.

Roller Coaster Tycoon is now an abandoned amusement park. It reminds me of a fake Onion headline from the 1950′s about suburban America: “Ant like conformity now available to the masses.” We are ushered down a single path to have the same user experience. Frustration is removed to create a blissful world that will always safely reset our Valium-filled character to the last safe checkpoint. Guitar Hero/Rock Band teach us to mash buttons in the proper order for hours on end. These games prepare us for future employment in a McDonalds inside a Walmart. Failure is not an option, nor is entertainment in my view with today’s games.

The other day I stumbled across a partial printout of my penultimate city from SimCity days. A criss cross of roads and rail lines through a dense urban Utopia broken by cleverly arranged parks where Howard Roark would be proud to live. What is the alternative today? How is there no company willing to make a game in a category that was so popular just a decade ago?

These things are too evil – a flying hypodermic needle that silents lands on your skin to drink blood and communicate disease. Yesterday I got to thinking about how scary mosquitoes would seem to somebody not normally exposed if everybody on earth wasn’t at some point in the year. Always squish them from tangentially angles to your body to prevent squeezing other peoples’ blood into your body. Never kill Dragonflies, they kill mosquitoes at all stages of mosquito development.

We need mosquito laser fences TODAY!

First Image of Planet in Other Solar System

Why Americans dislike soccer: one break, no hands, low points, and the falling down thing mentioned above. Practically, we don’t have good players available because suburban kids play soccer and quit when the go to high school, college, or get a real job. Inner cities don’t have soccer fields. Natural athletic talents play real sports (football, baseball, hockey, basketball, golf, car racing). The point totals are so low that games often feel stolen because of discreteness problems – removing our notion of fairness. We do well at women’s soccer. Perhaps since title 9 doesn’t work both ways (it does not) a female sport like soccer is often limited to women.

The US just lost to a country we could easily invade at a sport we will again not care about for a decade.

This is how a sewing machine fundamentally works. I didn’t know, but fixed a sewing machine and learned a thing or two in the process. I have done three sewing projects in a gradual progression towards making something I can use long term. My goal is to make a nice water-proof bag for my new laptop (ASUS UL30VT-A1). As an engineer a key lesson is that you don’t make it perfect the first time. Sewing machines are such an awesome invention. The ruler in the pictures is 18″.

13″ Laptop Sleeve – cotton fabric with triple layer of padding. Black exterior with blue floral inside and green floral accent on one side that helped hide a seem. I made it from spare materials at my grandma’s farm with my name stitched on one side to hold padding in place (the green floral fabric hold it on the other side. Time: <3 hours.

Tool Bag – Untreated #12 Cotton duck (canvas) with 1″ webbing and 4″ blue nylon ribbing. Two buckles and some snaps hold it shut with stretchy pockets inside. It has room for a variety of small hand-tools that I find useful to have in one place (pliers, screwdrivers, multi-tools, bottle opener). It is low quality, but does the job. Time: <2 hours.

Netbook/book Bag - Roll-top water-proofish bag made of Waterproof 500 denier White Widow  Spectra carbon fiber ripstop Nylon exterior, Nylon/Polyester Silkara water-resistant removable internal liner with a double layer of foam padding, 2″ seat belt strap with adjustable cam, and 3/4″ nylon webbing with orange whistle buckle. This fits my netbook, two books, and the power supply with expandable area on top (the roll-top) and should withstand rain. Time: <4 hours.

For my final design I am going to make a roll-top with a large flap made out of the Minnesotan flag. For supplies I use seattlefabrics.com and rockywoods.com.

Obama told us after the oil spill to keep trusting BP.

Dropbox is an amazing service that runs on your computers to securely backup and sync up to 2 GB of files for free. You can also share files between people, host simple websites, and access all of this through their website – even if you delete or update the file!

The coolest thing is creating a custom home page for yourself. My custom homepage features a NOAA weather graph and a custom Google search. The weather graph is linked to the image that NOAA maintains you can get by: going to http://www.noaa.gov/, search for your zip-code in the forecast box in the left column, scroll to the bottom on that page and look for “hourly weather graph” in the table on the bottom right, customize, and copy link. The custom Google search is obtainable here for free. My HTML code is here.

Option 1 —  Straw and Baggie — Stick a suction tube twenty feet above the pipe, put a multi-layer kevlar (high tensile strength) bag around the pipe that has a hole to the suction pipe that will suck up the oil. It may seem crazy, but just shoving assorted scientifically-specified debris sounds no better.

Option 2 – Schwarzenegger – Use chemicals to make the area ice cold and freeze the water, oil, and those damn robots. This will take a ton of chemicals and may snap the pipe through thermal strain, but could give time to work on the device.

Option 3 — Operation ‘merica — Blow up the ground underneath. Hopefully when the sediment settles (what it does best) it will plug the hole.

Option 4 — Hot Potato — Plug the hole with the Irish, super-heated Irish. A modest proposal.

Option 5 — Ira_ — Invade the pipe under false pretenses to obtain oil.

Option 6 — Pray — God made the pipeline do that and clearly wants to punish us for thinking about regulating the industry. Just let it be.

Option 7 — Power Negotiate — Plug the hole with the children of BP executives until it gets fixed. They genetically have no souls anyway.

Option 8 — Ivory Tower — Get more professors on the problem because everybody knows they are great at solving real world problems under time constraints.

Option 9 — Beck — Get Glenn Beck to reason through on a blackboard that is really a matter of the ocean retreating from American values and not the oil gushing out that is the problem.

Option 10 — Dispersant — Trust the oil companies to not just use hazardous dispersant to make the surface spills go away so it doesn’t look as bad that they were using unsafe practices against the advise employees to squeeze every penny out of the Earth. This thing is going to be the great Hinckley Fire of this century. The fire burned several towns to the ground in 1894, killed the man who shot John Wilkes Booth (read crazy wikipedia article), and lead to the expansion of regulation.