Among our friends, my roommates and I are known as pranksters, constantly pulling random jokes on each other and other people that we love.

Over the holidays, our landlord posted an interesting sign in the lobby and elevators of our apartment building. It basically said that the building could not accept 12″ x 12″ x 12″ boxes over the holidays. Included with this announcement was a helpful drawing of a 12″ x 12″ x 12″ box, just in case someone didn’t know what a square looks like.

These signs had been posted for over two weeks. One evening, when my roommates and I were taking the elevator up to our apartment, we thought of a potentially funny idea (at least to us!). We thought it would be funny to have the sign say the exact same thing, except that the drawing would be a rectangle with 12″ x 12″ x 12″ dimensions. Below that would be a message that claimed the drawing was not to scale.

A quick trip to Kinko’s resulted in the following:

We set about posting these around the building one evening. Happy with our work, we went to bed. Upon awaking the next morning and setting off for work, we found that someone had scrawled in angry block letter on one of our signs, “YEAH, NO KIDDING!!!!” with a giant arrow pointing to the “Drawing not to scale” message! Hah. Pretty funny.

By the time we returned home at the end of the day, all the signs had been replaced with correct ones. Ah well. I wonder if our landlord at least laughed?

Us science geeks can have a pretty esoteric sense of humor at times.

I still cannot believe how many people haven’t seen the “Here Comes Another Bubble” music video by The Richter Scales. It perfectly sums up the Web 2.0 culture and living in the Bay Area. 😉

Anandtech posted an article today that reveals some information about the processor being used in Apple’s new laptop, the MacBook Air. It’s definitely a technical read, but for those curious, check it out.

Turns out, they are using a customized 65nm Merom based processor. This is interesting, especially since Intel was releasing over a dozen different types of their new 45nm Penryn based processors in the first quarter of 2008. The key advantage of these processors is that they use less energy and run significantly cooler than the older processors.

My MacBook Pro gets HOT when I use it. I’m willing to bet that the MacBook Air is going to be quite hot as well. The case of the laptop is so small that heat dissipation is going to be a big issue. And if a MacBook Air has a regular old hard drive within, that’s going to produce even more heat. (Not to mention that hard drives themselves really dislike heat)

It will be interesting to see how well the MacBook Air sells over the next year. As I’ve said before, $1800 is pretty steep for what you get.

So the rumors turned out to be true after all! Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced the release of the MacBook Air, a new ultra portable laptop that Apple has allegedly spent the past two years developing. It’s a small little laptop that’s sexy only in the way that Apple can make a product.

The specs:
-13.3 inch LED display
-All aluminum case
-802.11n and Bluetooth
-built-in iSight
-multitouch trackpad
-1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
-2GB of RAM
-80GB 1.8-inch hard drive (64 gig solid state drive available as an option)
-1 USB 2.0 port

And all this can be yours for $1799.

There is no doubt in my mind though. It looks absolutely phenomenal and I can’t wait to see it in person. However, I’m still left with some reservations about it. $1799 for a rather sub-par laptop in terms of performance and features? We still need to see benchmarks on the mystery CPU that powers the device. The lack of an optical drive seems like an interesting trade off as well. I get the feeling that this laptop seems aimed squarely at business types and those who travel a lot. Yet there is no user replaceable battery! If you lose your charge (i.e., on an airplane) you’re out of luck until you can get back to a power outlet.

It will be interesting to see if / when some of the features on this make it into the rest of Apple’s lineup. The possibility of a multitouch trackpad excites me. In anycase, this laptop looks fabulous and if it was quite a bit cheaper, I’d probably pick it up in a heartbeat, regardless of my reservations.

The annual MacWorld Expo is back in San Francisco this week. The Apple Rumor / Product Cycle is in full force. Based on the banners currently hanging up in Moscone Center that read, “There’s something in the air,” websites, blogs and forums have been alive with speculation about the latest Apple product that Steve Jobs will unveil in a few hours.

The current consensus seems to be a new, ultra-thin, ultra-portable laptop. I’m not sure how much that news excites me though. Then again, exactly one year ago at this time, I wasn’t too excited about the rumored iPhone announcement. And now? I wouldn’t be able to live without mine.

Anyway, let’s hope the rumors about iTunes rentals and a revamped AppleTV prove true! The AppleTV sitting in our living has so much more potential.

The thing I am most excited about though? The unveiling of the iPhone SDK that will allow developers to start writing custom third party apps. Currently, the only way to do this is to hack your iPhone (and potentially void your warranty). However, the things developers are doing right now without an official SDK are amazing. I can’t wait to see what an official SDK will bring.

Let’s go Apple!

Word went out on Friday that storm conditions in the Pacific Ocean were going to create monstrous waves this weekend down at Pillar Point (a half hour south of San Francisco). And so, the annual Maverick’s Surf contest was organized on 24 hours notice. The winner of the contest took on waves that were 40 feet high at the end of the day. Insane!

Not to be outdone by Maverick’s, a few friends and I got together and we headed northward to Bolinas Beach to catch some waves (granted, these waves were 1/10 the size of Maverick’s). It was a perfect January day in the Bay Area. Photos were taken of course.

Read on to see more…

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Being employed in the environmental remediation industry tends to make one more interested in news items and current events about that industry. This article in the Tri-City Herald is about a remediation project that is about to begin near Hanford, Washington (which doesn’t exist anymore according to Wikipedia) that will clean up a burial ground for nuclear waste.

From the article:

Hanford workers are preparing to start next week digging up radioactive and chemical waste that could spontaneously catch fire when exposed to air.

[…]

Workers will be bringing up the barrels one at a time from behind blast shields and wearing full radiation protection gear and supplied air respirators. They’ll also expose no more than four drums at a time during the excavation to limit any potential fire.

Reading that definitely makes me appreciate my job more. The worst we usually have to deal with is particulate matter containing arsenic or lead. Radiation? No thanks!

Wired Magazine has a fantastic article on the history and development of the iPhone. I’m nothing short of amazed with mine and think it’s a fantastic piece of technology. I was hooked the moment I went to an Apple Store and picked it up.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

(Image is my previously hacked iPhone with original firmware v.1.0.2)

[Via Wired Magazine]

Doing some house cleaning, figured I’d post some photos from the Angie Mattson show at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco on December 13th.

Check out some of her music on MySpace or iTunes.

More pictures posted below…

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Last month, I wrote a small and fun little article breaking down the cost of a Sony Playstation 3. You can read the article here.

A small excerpt:

If you go to a movie theater to see the latest and greatest action movie, let’s say you pay ~$15 for a 90 minutes movie. So that breaks down to about $0.17 per minute for your enjoyment.

That’s a good baseline to use to begin comparing things.

At this point, I think I’m finally below $0.20/min. 😉