This is just a brief announcement. I am now semi-officially an alumni of New Mexico State University after much wailing and gnashing of teeth (I made that last bit up). At the very least, it’s been a tremendous relief. Read more…

I was at university today when I realized I had disabled my WinVNC service over the weekend in order to isolate a problem that–as it turns out–was not related to VNC. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to restart the service and was left with no way to remote into my desktop at home. Worse, since I’ve been using Visual Studio a lot, I configured the bootloader to enter Windows by default rather than Gentoo–so no hope of fixing things remotely from there, either. As it turns out, however, the problem wasn’t nearly as difficult as I made it out to be. Read more…

I drive most days to university in Las Cruces, which is about 80 miles one-way. During the trip, I’m usually presented with an amazing variety of unusual goods being transported on America’s highway system. I’ve seen quite literally everything from parts and pieces of wind generators to what seems to be the fuselage section of F-35s. Sometimes, however, the most astounding thing I see is the treatment other drivers have toward truckers.

Long-haul truckers no doubt have to put up with a great amount of abuse; they drive long hours, haul amazingly heavy loads, and are cut off by private vehicles whose drivers are in a hurry. Today, I passed one of the few LOX (liquid oxygen) trucks makes its rounds and witnessed first-hand someone cutting him off. Never mind that this occurred on the highway! Perhaps it’s important that every driver witness this video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjPxDOEdsX8

In this video, you get to see what happens when a charcoal grill is set on fire using liquid oxygen. Not only does it burn (and burn very well), but in the second experiment, the grill melts and some of the iron burns away.

Yes, folks, it’s important to be careful on the road. It’s doubly important to respect long-haul truck drivers whose cargo could incinerate you.