geekery

Elastic Computing

With my products’ release imminent, I spent last weekend coaxing Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (ECC) into action. The ECC is appealing for a few reasons: It’s someone else’s high-throughput network – product distributions, especially with demo files, are in the hundreds of megabytes. The T1 at work is 1.4Mb/s. Sharing, firewalls, and proxies reduce my

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Traffic patterns

While I was driving around Tucson, I was struck by how differently the traffic lights sequenced.  (Phoenix didn’t seem to have the noticeable differences.)  Consider this intersection of Some Boulevard and No Way: Some Boulevard is the moderately-trafficked arterial going left-right. In this intersection, left turns have to yield to oncoming traffic. The pedestrian crosswalk

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Emissions check

Because my car is the mechanical-equivalent of a teenager, I have to start the biannual emissions check before renewing my license plate tabs. I knew Subarus had a blanket waiver from the dynamometer test because it effs with the all wheel drive, but I expected an exhaust probe while it idled. Instead, the test consisted

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Crayons

While Tivo-surfing for new material, I came across “How It’s Made,” focusing on the mechanical steps involved in producing a particular kind of widget. It’s much lighter than Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs, but still entertaining.  Because the show has been around a while, my Tivo picked up a dozen showings before I told it to

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