Yesterday I ordered the Touchstone charger (for my Pre) from Amazon (it's $20 cheaper than buying it from Sprint.) The UPS tracking info has me worried though.

The shipped date is correct (10/12/09), but the status is showing "Delivered", the delivery location is a porch in Mission, Kansas, and the delivery date is 07/08/08. That's right – somehow this package was delivered a YEAR before I even ordered it!

Anyone think I'll actually end up seeing this package? Ever?

Yep!

In a few days, I'm gonna be playing with my shiny new Palm Pre!

You should all be jealous… unless you have a better phone, in which case, you should feel like a jerk.

Don't ask why, but for some reason I was curious and wanted to know how many days have passed since January 1, Year 1 (AD).

The easiest way to figure it out was to find today's Julian Date, the Julian Date of January 1, 1 and then subtract "Day 1" from today (and then add 1, of course).

For those that don't know: the Julian Date is the number of days since January 1, 4713 BC.

Today's Julian Date is 2455113.5, and January 1, 1's is 1721423.5. Do the subtraction (2455113.5 – 1721423.5) and you get 733690 days since Day 1. Add 1 (to include Day 1 in the number) and you end up with today being Day 733691.

The Navy has a nifty form where you can enter a date and get the Julian Date over at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.php

There's only one thing that could possibly be more terrifying than a zombie invasion… a robotic uprising!

I just found out about a thing called "BrainPort". I think it's for robots to interface directly with computers… after they take over a human host.

That's probably not what it is… but it sounds scary!

I don't understand this.

We've all seen them.. people that have their mouths wide open like they're in shock, and just walk around all day like that. Why? I tried it a bit yesterday, and it's totally more work to hold your mouth open than it is to keep it shut.

For some reason, Whitewater, WI seems to have the highest percentage of these "open mouthers" that I've ever come across. Anywhere.

I tried to come up with valid reasons to give them some sort of benefit of the doubt. Maybe they can't breathe through their nose (you wouldn't need your mouth wide open to compensate for that). Maybe it's more comfortable and they're willing to risk looking like a complete moron (I tried it, it wasn't, and that's not a very good reason for walking around looking like an idiot either.)

It seems that most of these people only close their mouths when they're talking. I've also noticed that it tends to only be when they're walking around – the mouth shuts once they sit down.

This makes absolutely no sense to me!

"Guitar Hero" using an actual guitar… I've looked around and can't find anyone that's released anything close to this – although it looks like there are a few projects started, none of them have any tangible results.

The idea: not so much a "guitar hero" game (although it could eventually be turned into one), but a guitar-hero-esque training program – using a computer program to display notes and chords and using a real guitar as the input device.

This seems like it would make great learning tool for beginners that want to learn guitar (ME!). The idea isn't exactly fully formed, and would need a lot of tweaking, but the display would basically be a few fret-boards displayed horizontally, and a moving indicator rather than notes moving off the screen. This approach allows more time for feedback to be viewed and would be less hectic to a beginning guitarist than "OMG! Here's another chord about to disappear off the screen!"

Hardware: a guitar and a pre-amp (maybe not needed?) to hook the guitar into the microphone input on the computer.

The software would analyze the input for frequency spikes, and determine which notes were played. It'd function much the way that a guitar tuner does… just looking for multiple peaks, rather than just one.

I don't believe it'd be very hard to hack out a quick and dirty proof-of-concept prototype. The real snag is that I've never done any work with audio processing, and that would probably be the most time consuming hurdle in this entire thing.

This is quite possibly my favorite lolcat picture ever… excluding any that I can't remember at the moment which may, in fact, be better.

dis is u wen u drink beer